Vincent Poetry Prize Honorable Mention
Judy Kaber
The Tide’s Edge
1
Night is my sister, and how deep in love
I am inside the dream where he tells me he isn’t
dead. Seeing him again, I believe him, the drag
and hunger in my throat pulling me close. I am
one of the unburied dead, still scattered
in the naked sea. My longing for him splinters me,
glues the pieces to memories we tongued together
in our wide bed. Underneath my next breath
the tide recedes. Underneath my next breath, death.
I sell his belongings—wooden ladders, iron grates,
art books. Elements of who he was.
Copper in protein. Calcium in bones. Oxygen
we drew in—ragged, crude, salt-sweet air—
as we panted together, reaching for release.
2
Panting, reaching for release, sand feathers
beneath me. My hands not built for loss.
My hands a bladed song. I should have kept
a notebook of who he was before the current
drew tendrils of him apart. I raise the ax to split
kindling. Each chunk falls with a black thud,
each thud echoing in the empty garage. Once
he leaned over the open maw of the Pontiac,
adjusted the throttle. Every day I am on the edge
of sorrow like a shovel dug into earth to bury
a box. Like a box that drops into rot and horror.
The body of the day. The body of decay. The body
of the stove full of ash. I want to bring him back,
a cast away, sea-drunk, bedraggled, wanting me.
3
A cast away, sea-drunk, bedraggled, wanting me
the way tears want my face even as I remember
the way we rode the braided waves of Penobscot Bay,
sails awash in wind, sheets straining, the tiller firm
in his hand as I climbed to the bow, adjusted the belly
of the jib. Not an easy sailor, I imagined disaster
in currents, calamity in brutal gusts. Once we were
demasted, the shaft falling inches from where I sat.
Once we ran aground off Isle Au Haut, more comical
than dangerous. Death never comes the way you think
it will. Our boat didn’t sink and sits now in the yard,
as rain drips from the white plastic stretched over its bulk.
His death a sudden departure in late fall, a rupture
that chiseled words I carry in the hothouse of my throat.
4
Those chiseled words I carry in the hothouse of my throat,
amid shifting footfalls of the past. For years, we loved
each other, but lived apart, my voice alone the one
that beat about the corners of my house. Some nights
I huddled in bed wanting to reach out and touch the bulk
of him. Others I railed at him, glad to be away
from the leaf-litter of his life, the stones of his inglorious
path. He’d leave his stalwart home and come to me,
ready to petal my body, to burn and blacken and glow
against my nakedness. Both of us slow to thaw, slow
to trust, ready instead to meet each other’s needs,
sparrows returning hungry to the nest. Until a bolt
struck his jaw and arm and head, his heart screaming—
dread, dread. Nothing then but for love to move in.
5
Dread moves out—nothing now—so love moves in.
A tangle of cells in one part of his heart, stagnate, unable
to pump towards providence. But we know nothing of this.
Night whispers to me above the dredge and drag,
the brittle briskness of life, her words dark and gray
like the wash of the sea in my ear. Each Saturday
he leaves for figure drawing, returns with sketches
under his arm, shows me the way he captures a face
with the quick draw of line—the model leaning away,
one hand on hip, sketch of a tattoo on her arm, one
visible eye that sparks of jubilation, lustrous
with vitality, fruition. What do you think? he asks.
A warm, blue thrill uncoils inside me, love so sharp
I feel I need a shield to save me from its piercing.
6
I feel I need a shield to save me from its piercing
song. Song of a heart. Contract. Expand. Propel
the blood through the body. Each contraction cuts
off a moment. A day. Listen to the refrain. A beat.
Pause. A beat. I don’t tally or weigh. Each day
so much the same. Eat breakfast. Read the news.
Put air in the truck tires. Swear at the state of things.
The impossible muddle of the world. Invisible wounds
and weakening. No cuts. No bandages. Quiescent risk.
He tells me the name of the garage where he’s going,
the place he hopes can fix the truck. There’s a chance
all things can be fixed. We consider who will
die first. Laugh. He’s on the road, not there beside me
when his heart gives out in the shadow of birches.
7
When his heart gives out, odd shadows fall across
the boat we will never use to motor on Tildon Pond.
His last project. Last belief. I become a single word:
widow. As in window, as in wisher, as in wounded,
as in wondrous love. To survive, I rise each morning,
rebuild contours. I gather what I need to celebrate his life:
paintings, guitar, blueprints of the house he built for us
by Wescott Stream. I become rind and juice, abandon
regret’s bitter lining. I gather scattered husks and history
of our love, long for sleep in hopes that I will dream of him.
Days become ferns curled on the bank. Sun a silence
I glide through. Outside the mergansers return, males
flashing luminous white. This I shall always remember:
that night is my sister, and how deep in love I was.
____
The line “Night is my sister, and how deep in love” is taken from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Sonnet VII in her book Fatal Interview. The poem title also comes from that sonnet as well as other words/phrases in this poem.
