Blake Leland

Blake Leland has published poetry in Epoch, The New Yorker, Commonweal, Atlanta Review, Indiana Review, Thomas Hardy Review, Canopic Jar, The Art Section, Poetry International (online) et al. He is a pushcart prize nominee. In 2013 he co-authored with colleagues at Georgia Tech a book of occasional poems: On Occasion: Four Poets, One Year.  

Norma’s Cove, Buzzard’s Bay

Mum’s Aunt Polly had a “camp” at the beach,
a tin-clad roof on a wooden frame, its sides
no more than one board thick.   For a week
every summer, we were there—lotioned mothers
set in sand, in seaward light, children about them
at their games.

Once the sun was up (we did have to wait
an hour after breakfast so as not to cramp), we
were everywhere.   Sometimes
when the mothers got hot and dozy we were even
out of sight, past the fir-screened point, where the seafloor
sloped more steeply away under the water

and tall reeds still showed at high-tide,
where someone had tethered a wooden float
lashed to a pair of rusty barrels.   There we were
taking turns (or not) at getting up on that wet wobbling deck
and making room with a shout to draw a deep breath
and jump—

going in over our heads,
into the cool, ill-lit murk.    This is me,
the fat kid hollering “Cannonball!”
Plunged into the sea: the clamoring brightness now
suddenly muffled—pale and sunburnt legs and arms thrashing
bluish in a blur of salt—held breath

pressing already against my throat
as my legs unfold to push off and up and don’t, can’t—what?—
No!—the fat kid’s feet stuck in the muck-silt seabed
where the reeds reach down, where quahogs hide,
where to sob or to cry
changes air into salt, but

caught in uterine mud he wants only that—
to cry out to the turbulent swimmers “Help!” “Help!”
or to the Mother, asleep on the beach, that she might
dive through her dream and find him there
on the reedy bottom, and draw him up again
into the stinging air—and his hands,

tangled in submarine light, pull
and pull at the unraveling sun, his adrenal heart
beats triplefast as something
at the base of his skull is about to shriek
for the first time, for real, but still like a dream, just
as his feet come free:  “YOU WILL DIE.”

*

Evening light shines oblique in shallow water.
Hermit crabs and horseshoe crabs
move in and out with the little waves,
and the seabirds’ shadows fall east-southeast.   In the fir-trees
I hear something other than the sound of noisy children.
I hold my breath.  I tell no one.