Here in Maine, we are in the very heart of what I call Dock Days — mornings and afternoons where you simply while away time on the smooth, sun-struck slats of a dock jutting over a lake.
After a brief heat wave, more reasonable weather has come in. The humidity went to Miami for a few days. The heat signed a cease fire, agreeing to be agreeable, to be more “Maine-like” for the time being.
Dock Days inspired a poem once. I dug it out for a reread yesterday. It’s one of those poems written last for a manuscript (which would become Lost Sherpa of Happiness). One that never had a chance to play the markets and look for a home in some poetry journal.
I often like these orphans best. Never accepted anywhere, but never rejected, either. They just “are,” which is the perfect metaphor for whiling away hours on a dock, like you did when you were a kid and time held nothing against you.
From a Dock on a Maine Lake
Ken Craft
Lying here, side of my head resting
on the crook of right arm and gazing
from the grotto of my right eye,
I hear the water and see the creased
dam of my left elbow, the occasional bird
flying through its wild blond grasslands.
The left eye, though. It peers over
the tanned levee, sees the high gold-shot
lake—so high it threatens
to flood and marl the east shore
where clear sky, punctured by treeline,
seeps anemic blue to airy bone.
Shifting to my back I get the sky’s
gas-flame blue scribed by pine and maple
treetops, the firmament a forgotten
language from first-person point of boy.
And my God, the wind! Needles and leaves
nodding like anxious ponies,
wagging like old ladies’ heads
at green gossip. Trees exhaling a ropey
poem of clouds. White thoughts, broken
words, startled birds put to flight. They flock,
elongate, twist and split open like smoky time
seeking its own shore to roost.