Barbara Crooker

The Winter Sea

The ocean’s grey today, like someone’s dingy laundry,
the flop and slosh of sudsy waves agitate on the sand,
and the sky’s the inside of an ashtray at some salty dive.
I don’t care.  When I took my morning walk, the blonde
grasses bowed low in the wind but did not break, and I found
a small flash of happiness in the margins, where a scrabble
of bayberry, goldenrod, pearly everlasting and milkweed
clumped together, their dried leaves and seedpods still
hanging on, no matter how hard the wind tried to knock
them down.  Reduced and diminished, they remained
themselves, in spite of the elements.  The way we
keep on walking each morning, as we throw off
the covers of the night, stride out on the boardwalk,
arms swinging.  Yesterday at sunset, the sun’s last
razzle turned the water to liquid aquamarine, jewels
I wanted to scoop up and wear at my wrists and neck.
Earlier, the sea had been true blue, the color I imagine
blood might be, as it runs in my veins with the tide
of the heart.  Anchor me to this world, God of spindrift,
God of spume and salt spray, God of sand.  Too often,
I have let myself listen to the other voices, the ones
like Iceland gulls that shout can’t can’t can’t. Right now,
fishing trawlers hang on the edge of the horizon, straight
as a clothesline, the edge you might fall over.  But which,
the closer you approach, whether by sailboat, dinghy, or skiff,
is never reachable.  Always, there is more.

Strewn

It’d been a long winter, rags of snow hanging on; then, at the end
of April, an icy nor’easter, powerful as a hurricane.  But now I’ve landed
on the coast of Maine, visiting a friend who lives two blocks from the ocean,
and I can’t believe my luck, out this mild morning, race-walking along the strand.
Every dog within fifty miles is off-leash, running for the sheer dopey joy of it.
No one’s in the water, but walkers and shellers leave their tracks on the hardpack.
The flat sand shines as if varnished in a painting.  Underfoot, strewn, are broken
bits and pieces, deep indigo mussels, whorls of whelk, chips of purple
and white wampum, hinges of quahog, fragments of flat grey sand dollars.
Nothing whole, everything broken, washed up here, stranded.
Light pours down, a rinse of lemon on a cold plate
of oysters. All of us, broken, some way or other. All of us
dazzling in the brilliant slanting light.

Breath

I’m thinking of it now, as these clouds race by,
gray dolphins outlined in white, the reverse
of a child’s drawing.  I draw in a breath,
think of my mother’s life, thinning itself down
to spindrift and salt spray.  Each day, a struggle
to fill up her lungs. I’m tired of the doctors
and their weather of lies. The sky is full
now, a whole pod of porpoises, and the white
light behind them can no longer be seen.
She lingers over dinner, slow to finish her soup,
broth with tiny rafts of celery and onions, golden
carrot suns.  What small coins should I place
in her purse to pay the ferryman?  How many breaths
do we get in this life?  How many puffs of wind
to push a schooner across the sea?

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Barbara Crooker’s work has appeared in magazines as diverse as Yankee, The Christian Science Monitor,  Highlights for Children, and The Journal of American Medicine (JAMA).  She is the recipient of the 2006 Ekphrastic Poetry Award from Rosebud, the 2004 WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the 2003 Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships.  Her books are Radiance, which won the 2005 Word Press First Book competition and was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize;  Line Dance, (Word Press 2008), which won the 2009 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence; and More (C & R Press, 2010).