Emerald Rough
Fort Point channel ice
reflects Boston
in imperfect green.
A child’s blue boot
sideways on the surface,
unretrievable.
When winter melts,
it will join the junkyard
we’ve planted under
the rump of South Harbor.
A memory locked in low tide
as I cross to the train home.
To the Pilgrim Monument, Provincetown
O you tower of stone,
you rising one Maine granite
block upon another until the corbels
flare, gargoyled, and capella-crowned.
One hundred and sixteen steps
where parents pant, children flush,
racing to look out over baseball
fields, cemeteries and rib-curved
town between harbor and Atlantic,
the Portuguese baker, sweet dough
rising, strollers beside day-tripping cars
on Commercial who the traffic cop waves
onto MacMillan pier. Ethel Mermaid
on her scooter hawking tonight’s
drag show, men holding hands
walking their beloved schnauzer
past a young Bulgarian woman setting up
plates in The Mayflower Cafe,
the plein air painter on the breakwater,
the crew of the Bad Dog, who already
have dredged and shucked their day scallops,
a newspaper man hopping the catamaran
for a job interview in Boston.
And when a storm clears the streets,
your copper vein rises
into the sky to catch the lightning.
~~~
Jonathan B. Aibel is a poet who spends his days wrestling software to the ground as an engineer specializing in quality and testing. His poems have been published, or will soon appear, in Chautauqua, American Journal of Poetry, Lily Poetry Review, Ocean State Review, Pangyrus, and elsewhere. He has studied with Lucie Brock-Broido, David Ferry and Barbara Helfgott Hyett. Jonathan lives in Concord, MA with his family.
the museum of americana: A LITERARY REVIEW 