Nancy: Like so many other coastal villages it rises uphill above the bay. Only the water sets it apart. The Narrows, a race of tidal change, always in motion as Cobscook Bay fills and empties.
Village 04652
The tides surge through the narrows.
Hill shingled with buildings, canneries
smokehouse, shops
salt scoured, storm gapped
– steeple
Every six hours the tides turn.
Hill crowned with steeple
pickets and green
rising through, rising past
driftwood and fog
Seals follow the water, the fish.
Lunch on the landing
draggers swing on their moorings
fog shreds and re-forms
conquers shingle and steeple and gull
One seal pauses, stares at me, dives.
The tides surge through the narrows.
Alan: Some days the northwest wind churns the bay and the ducks huddle along the lea shore or, on our side, in the calm backwaters at the saltmarsh edge.
Buffleheads
Ducks lift
from gray water
spooked
by my approach
except one, near,
turned, facing the
oncoming chop.
Wounded?, I think.
It is the season.
Swimming here,
blown almost on shore,
watching the flock
disappear against
the distant trees,
watching me.
I turn to go,
embarrassed
to add stress
to her stress,
then see
fluttering this way
the black and white
of the male
above the waves.
He drops beside her,
settles, turns
upwind: two now
moving as one,
maintaining
a discrete distance
from each other,
from the shore,
from me.
Wounded?
or just tame
with the aplomb
of her kind?
And what brought him,
anyway? Would we
call it, in ourselves,
"concern," even "worry,”
even "love"?
