In the Woods Hole Harbor
Staples, Catherine
In the Woods Hole Harbor You can't see them from Shuckers', or even the Captain Kidd, not for the sea of masts rocking at anchor, Lasers and Snipes needling in on changeable wind. You have to cross...
...Father talked reaches, runs, heading high and low-then with one deft tug, reeled her in snug to the rocking red buoy...
...There in the bilge and muck, eight to ten spent rowboats and a tipped bluewhale of a dory- bleached, peeling, someone else's summers disappearing in weeds...
...But once, just there, in the oil trap by the dory's stern, two boys vied for turns at the tiller...
...Channel markers tossed, rang their deep water tidings...
...You have to cross the drawbridge where the whole road lifts to allow the passing of a single sail, wander downhill past missing pickets and gray shingled disrepair to the harbor's backdoor...
...Catherine Staples...
...Their sister trailed a branch in the rilled wake, felt the light thrum of resistance...
...No more remarkable than a neighbor's sheets idling in wind...
...Their mother looked leeward-blue kerchief bellying wind like a tight jib-she daydreamed and napped behind her dark glasses...
...And the sister looked up in time to see an island becoming itself-sandy spit and lighthouse, slender white lighthouse with a catwalk above and someone there-a man, no-a boy on the jetty, centerboard humming, a lone skate rising out from the sand and little more than an arm's length away-a dark-eyed boysleek as a seal with seaweed and water, hair spun loose in an arc of gleaming flicks, the unruined wild of his eyes-still as a hare in the lamp of her gaze...
Vol. 129 • March 2002 • No. 5
