Marilyn McCabe

Duffy Tries to Find a Way to Open Ocean
Through the Longest Ice-in in Ten Years

–Twillingate, Newfoundland

The moans came from his own throat. No,
the boat spoke. Floes nip and grind its wide
arc to slivers, a narrowing vee, and he,
eye wild as the wind across the queasy
unrest of the ice-in, steps away like some lost
Jesus walking this was-water, this hard bay.
My god my god. And as a child again
testing the teeter of brash ice, treads the wreckage
toward what little he can see: gauze
of brown shore through fog, the uneasy
breath of land and the bound sea
under which his cod are on the move,
a crab dies in an unchecked trap,
and what might as well be family sinks berg-deep.

Upstate New York writer Marilyn McCabe‘s poetry has won contests through AROHO, Word Works, Grayson Books, and NYS Council on the Arts. Collections of poems include Perpetual Motion and Glass Factory, and chapbooks Rugged Means of Grace and Being Many Seeds. Videopoems have appeared in festivals and galleries. She blogs about writing at Owrite:marilynonaroll.wordpress.com.