Pris Campbell

Sea Trails

*****I must go down to the sea again…
*****John Masefield

I board the tiny sloop that has carried me
twice to Maine with its deep
silent harbors and moaning buoys.
I’m ensnared, trapped by increasing
longings to ride that magic carpet
into places different from my own
narrow world of nine to five rewind.
Saltwater rises through my body,
is transformed through its heat
into golden mist. I expand
without Alice’s cookies,
become a gull dropping clams
on the rocks to crack them,
a molting lobster, a leaping dolphin,
a man watching the sky from a deserted dock.
The sea is my cradle and it rocks me,
lulling me into new ways of seeing.
My arms unfurl into sails.
I let the wind take me.

Unsafe Harbors

Out of the horseshoe that is Cuttyhunk,
anchor hauled from Vineyard Haven,
where a hopeful fan mistakes me for Joni Mitchell,
past where John Kennedy, Jr. is to later plunge
to his death, we reach Nantucket, cobblestoned home
to the tourists, small boaters and the wealthy.
A distant dot on the chart;
miss it and you’re enroute to England.
It’s my birthday and the clanking halyards,
the ricky-tick shops become my present,
my ‘happy birthday to you’, my respite
from my lover’s glares, his increasing nips at my ankles.
I glow, even in this heartless town where
hand painted rocks go for hundreds of bucks
and no homeless sit on the cobblestone begging for cash.
Its disturbing beauty washes over me,
like the long warm showers at the marina,
so when the winds rise later,
sneaking up through that vulnerable spot
in the anchorage I’m reminded that
there are no safe harbors, no havens.
We run the motor all night, ease the strain
on the groaning anchor rode, watch
skeletons of boats slip past our starboard
and port sides, hope we won’t be hit,
dragged back in this black night along with them.
Daybreak brings scratched, tangled and beached boats.
but our shadow passes, unscathed,
across the morning water.

~~~~~~~~

The poetry of Pris Campbell has appeared in such journals as Chiron Review, Boxcar Poetry Review, Oranges & Sardines, The Dead Mule, and Main Street Rag, along with many other journals and anthologies. She has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize and several times for the Best of the Net anthology. She has five published poetry collections. The most recent is The Nature of Attraction , with Scott Owens, from Main Street Rag Press. In the fall of 2009, Lummox Press published Sea Trails, a book of poems, log notes, chart snippets and photos based in her six month trip down the east coast in 1977 in her 22 foot sailboat. The two poems in this issue come from this book. Previously a Clinical Psychologist and active sailor, she has been sidelined by ME/CFS since 1990. Her current home is the greater West Palm Beach, Florida, where she lives with her husband.