ANNAPOLIS

Poem for Today - September 13, 2014

CHESAPEAKE

I

Nature most calm is often a crisis.

I remember a bay day,

creaseless, ruffleless,

land out of sight out of mind,

when the aimlessness

of my eyes, hands, dreams, work, art

rose up in my throat and smote me,

and I cried for wind. . . .

Wind high,

bay gray and white,

the avenging angel's

enormous

wings over us:

it rained a spray of

dross cold; sails grew; boat heeled;

lungs filled with danger;

our bodies blessed and bent

to servitude, you a slave

to the tiller, I

slave to your prescience.

Lord, Lord give us clearance.

II

Lost souls haunt rivers.

In a light wind,

by moon,

they can keep you as half-wakeful

as the boat that sways always

on its anchor

back and forth,

and your light dreams

bring you up short on your body;

you rise and cry out,

"Where am I?"

The ghosts recede to shore.

Next morning, old stumps

abandoned by pioneers

are covered by

large silent birds.

This bay is not rhetorical:

Modestly

it receives its rivers,

except at Annapolis

where Severn, South, Magothy

swirl and pull off

a small naval battle.

Otherwise, patiently

receiving all tributes of waters,

it slumbers and waits

for the storms to ride across it-stretches,

for the wind to call out the changes

 that set the nun buoys nodding

and all the bells and gongs

to dire scolding.

A bay is an infold,

a withholding

between prosaic land

and cannibal ocean.

At bay, at bay!

How many a day's journey

across the whims of water

to find headway!

Lighthouse and land ho.

It's moving that counts.

© Gerta Kennedy,
The New Yorker

 Book Of Poems,

pages 116-117

Picture on Top:
"Sunrise on Spa Creek -
Annapolis, Maryland, 1993" -
pages, 118-119,
in Bringing Back The Bay,
The Chesapeake in
 the Photographs
of Marion E. Warren,
and the Voices of
 Its Peoples,
 with Mame Warren

Picture on Bottom,

"Fog on Spa Creek 1992"
page 181 -in Warren Book.