santos scribes

august air, earth fat

sunshine and sea salt 

Lake glass blue as Blue,

as Billings,

as Wyassup 

where it hailed that one night

and we stayed to watch the sunrise. 

Plenty of rain, the New England way 

our town

like a puddle,

like a fishbowl,

like that Mellencamp song.

Those same spooling roads still

Stony Brook, Rocky Hollow,

Legend Wood 

and their hills, mounds really

Cossaduck, four hundred and

thirteen feet, Lantern 492,

Chapman 518 

Due south, jelly fish and hot sand

out on Watch Hill, which isn’t a hill

at all, but rather a place to land 

a place of dunes and discarded things

it sits out there between

Little Narragansett Bay

and the Block Island Sound  

the Sea spits back glass, softened-

we called it treasure

kept it in our pockets

like a relic, rather than

a fragment of the wreckage it was.