by Peter F. Murphy

At eleven meters, the river
lingers. Waves laugh to Liszt.
On the pavement, children play tag.

Lovers long for sofas hugged in their youth.
An old woman watches
the train gain speed. Voices rise

in time to tracks secured decades
ago. Not to keep up
is not to care.

by Peter F. Murphy

          Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the
          swift current, I stood yet was hurried . . .
                                                            Walt Whitman
                                                            “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”

How curious you are, bent from the foam
and the waves. Captain of the doubloon isle,
brine–eyed Merman, all night the water combs
you with black insolence.

Beyond the dykes, water–ways run
ribboned and still. Simple ripples drift
eye–level in muscular song.

I love you, O you entirely possess me.

The Father of Waters, slight,
alights

by nighest name,
by clear loud voices,
by the river
approaching and passing.

Your eyes pressed black against the prow,
            view voyages in fresh ruffles of surf. Cutty Sark,
your white sail’d clipper moored to
your first choice in scotch.

Your soul, deep like the rivers,
swims ancient, dusky rivers,
bloody at dawn.

Where twelfth–month seagulls stroke and float.
Where, on a dusty shore, Melville’s weaver–
            god, deafened for life, sings tide–less spells
            to the dice of drowned bones.
Where the thick–stemm’d steamboats leap and converge.
Abandoned in mists of amorous madness,
your sailors, pent–up, sit
upright, astride scallop–edged spars.
The S. S. Ala — Antwerp —

now remember kid, put me out at three. She sails on time.

Your dream or Uncle Untereker’s ?

Suddenly you see standing on the shore
just above the falls an enormous naked
Negro.

You can’t keep your eyes off his huge penis.
Even though the noise of the falls is deafening,
and you are thoroughly frightened,
you keep watching.

Suddenly you realize
that you are naked, too. The boat
is at the very brink of the falls
now, and you feel yourself covered
with shame.

Your own penis is tiny as a baby’s,
and you force yourself to look at it.

Some men take their liquor slow — and count.
Unfettered the sea is cruel.

                                  . . . let the waves rear
like flat lily petals on the sea’s white
throat. This transitional place imagined again.

by David Stankiewicz

I       At twenty–two

all you need’s
an old car
music and books
enough job to pay the rent
a broken heart (optional)
books and music
a little pot
a nascent taste for decent bourbon
endless conversation
outrage
admiration
a notebook full of naïve pages
a good friend
a lonely beach to walk in darkness
to its end

                               interlude:     at the island’s jut
                                                    into violent tides
                                                    where the river pushes and pulls                                                     against immensity

II       Jetsam

You can find almost
anything on the winter beach

driftwood of course
even whole trees

the seal one afternoon

                               interlude:     where another river pushes and pulls

III       Untitled

the sea.

IV       Winter Rental

“If you can’t afford two–fifty each a month
you boys have bigger problems than me”
our soon–to–be–landlord quipped
when asked if he wanted references.
And so it was ours, November to May,
three small rooms perched like a crow’s nest

atop the peeling gray house.
The floors sagged to center, windows leaked heat
but from one of them you could just glimpse
a blue horizon. The whole thing
creaked and swayed like a ship.
The island’s quiet prevailed.

We furnished it with the grimy couch
the evicted tenant left, the gold–orange
armchair salvaged from the curb,
your stereo, CDs in a pile, old mattresses
for the bedrooms, desks in there too.
And your books and my books:

Moby Dick, Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life
Gravity’s Rainbow, War and Peace.
It sure as hell sounds pretentious now
but there was no one to impress
and those winter sea–winds
call for hearty fare.

And so: early evening. The day spent somewhere
beyond the causeway to town. You light
a cigarette at the tiny square table squeezed in
by the stove. I stir the black bean soup.

The mindless tides will heave and fall back,
hours meander like dunes, while we
talk and read and laugh and talk and read.

requisite feathers and shells

the sculpted rhythms of water
receding

less trash than in summer
but more interesting
the true wreckage
of storms and
abandonment

good poets bad poets
sentimental dogs

skeletons offish of seagulls

a few wind–loosed words
blown across the page

oceans of atmosphere
literal and not

a surplus of light

once I discovered an intact porpoise carcass
I mistook for a shark
up close I saw the horizontal tail–fin
and thought of open hands

when I went back to brood on it later
it was gone

then there was the long conversation
we found one night and have been
raveling ever since
                                     following it
from the clustered houses
clambering for a view
down along the shore through
the seven mile refuge
clear to
the island’s wilder end

V      Off the Island

I loved gazing out from
the riverfront downtown.
All that moving water, open air,
our island in the gilded distance.
That small city itself had plenty
to draw us. Have we not
religiously kept our rounds ?
Twenty–two plus thirteen equals
now. By general reckoning
we’re still young, though even then
I was prone to looking back.
So life moves on (and doesn’t).
Nostalgia’s only a symptom.
Living’s the killer, as we
already understood. You
taught me the value of irony:
not only to honor absurdity
but to protect what’s mostly
unsayable. At twenty–two
we knew more than we knew:
an island, ambition, the sea.
No need to heap words here,
to recover it all. The past
lurks in the present, and
whatever I’ve forgotten
remains spoken by waves.

by Nicholas Spengler

When everything has left us
but the long bone
of birch against the blackest sky

When all has gone
but the blood heat of you
in the dark I taste again

And when nothing remains
then for us to do
but drift our distant ways

You across the widest waters
to your own country
and me to mine upriver

Remember to look north
over the frozen bay
past the farthest border

Where that cold but seldom bitter
city with its dirty aurora
lights the sky a little

City of miracles and high collars
where snow erases everything
and everyone walks on water

Where candles lit in alcoves
warm the whispers
to saints and lost loves

When all else fails
we’ll find each other there
north of us

In that far
impossible city —
that island in the dark