Memories of my father rise like spindrift:
how he swooped like a diving gull under
the swung boom as we ran steady before
the winds failed in early evening. Fearing
the sails' flap and sweet sting in the fathering
gust,I gripped whiteknuckled and leaned
straining while scud and the speed-whipped sea slapped
at my face, my father firm at the rudder keeping
the green fir-fragrant shores to port,
to bright starboard a blue vaulting of shoal-
cold spaces banked with windwall and lowering
cloud. Like a leisured poet I recall
that fugitive harmony, that child's sphere,
half my brain asleep, the other teeming,
almost curled in the salt sail's belly
till the wind died.
__________Lies? I dredge them up
again, again run aground on the steaming sea
coasts of memory . . . or do I invent
those summers of the spume-dreamed Pacific?
Leaning back years, am I still that sea-child,
face rimed with salt, craft rocking at anchor,
in the green sounds and havens of fiction?
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