The River
is the shallow, snaking center of a world whose people know its
moods, and they in turn create a solid centered world around its
pecadilloes. The rugged weathered arms and necks, the scarred
hands and shins, cloaked in paint-stained oil-smudged t-shirts
and shorts from Montgomery Ward are not those of Grown Men in
Shorts.
Age:
The River
Dave
Seling is a contractor.
He drives a dusty half-ton pickup, ocean green,
And sits at the bar a lion couchant, mane prematurely white.
He helped to build the gas pier, and in return
Angus OG sits matronly in a free side slip, rocking slowly,
Seldom moving, "For Sale" sign tucked in her aft porthole
Fading like the russet feather of an old woman's hat.
Dave
pulled her out this year, replaced a couple of planks
In her venerable hull, and gave her a new spring coat
Of soft, bright off-white paint appropriate to her age
And returned her to her slip to sit
In springtime's garb
And supervise the wild ones wandering
In and out her River.
Wedding
Party: The Driftwood Inn
Joe
Simons married off his daughter today.
He shed machinist's garb and spiffed himself in evening clothes:
White ruffled shirt and pink bow-tie belied
His ten months to retirement "Down-a P'int,"
Thirty years of leaning on the bar
With grease ingrained beneath his blackened fingernails.
Cindy,
second mother of the bride, bedecked in ivory,
Glows and grinds and bumps her place behind the microphone
Belting out her bawdy ballads:
"Won't you come home, Joe Simons, won't you come home?"
Joe
Simons, strutting in his finery, is home among the Driftwood,
Sanctuary: to his tales of old times only yesterday —
Korea, and his father's seven sons, and two wives gone
the yellow route of cancers, and ten months to retirement from
the mill ("Jeez, I hate that place, pardon my language."),
the woman that he loves (Joe Simons' women are not "who")
and the woman who's the mother of the bride.
Joe
Simons is a tiny man,
A drinking, driving, working man,
A little man of little place, of large and limited loves.
He married off his daughter today,
Although he's not the father of the bride,
And brought the wedding party home
To join the blind accordion player and rejuvenate his soul
With the solace of a shot and beer,
Driftwood, drifted home.
Gloria
Gloria,
in her shimmery scarlet leotard and slacks,
Longstemmed tattoed rose exposed on her left breast,
Runs smiling behind the bar with feathered earrings
Fluttering in her long red waving hair.
"Hi, how're you? JB and water, right?"
She wears a new two-thousand-dollar diamond dinner ring
And paints signs for grocery story windows
All day long.
©Elizabeth
Dunbar
