Buzzard’s Bay, 2009

by M. R. Brown

The old man sits at his bench, displaced in time and age

He is thirty-nine, adrift in Nantucket Sound

It is his first time at sea

Braced and white-haired, hunched over his meal

His wife has left him and alone he sits

It is 1855, and his eyes raise from the worn oak wheel

An empty parking lot of gravel lays before him

The wind passes through his now thinned hair

Swaying to and fro

His hand shakes at the fury that bellows through the sheets

and the waves that press against his hull

He pauses his search through his food

Docking in Newport, seven years passed

His wife waits ashore in a white-lace dress

Her body is the crest of a wave

He breathes a heavy sigh, wasted and destroyed

He weeps, quietly

-2009