Euxine seagull arcs

FISHING BOATS

The old watercolor over the mantle

in my mother’s house – the twin

gray fishing boats, the brown

warehouse, the whitewashed walls.  Gentle

Gloucester, Massachusetts (Grace

Ravlin pinxit – Grandpa’s

cousin, from Kaneville, Illinois).

Soft clouds, the upright crosspieces

of lank lanyards (still sea-green

harbor, granite walk).

Thinking of another work –

lone lady at Mount Vernon, culling

flowers for George Washington.

And of another Maximus –

not Gloucester’s famous

philosophe, but Maximus, blue unicorn

who sketched with Euxine seagull arcs

on stumps (his amputated

medium) one delicate

& sibylline solution.  Sparks

fly upward from the hearth of Love

– fly outward, penetrate

wolf-packs of gulag-state.

This heart simmers like kiln-hot stove

or croon of turtledove, hidden...

violet in tall field grass,

cricket near an underpass.

Willow by slow river (Magdalen).

7.11.16

Grace Ravlin, Gloucester Harbor (ca. 1928)