The Boathouse
Rent from DeepDyve- The Boathouse
We turned back from the bay while light still hesitated. You said, “Can’t see how you lived here all this time, and never fished, or swam, or sailed,” but I found the poison-ivied path down to the old stone boathouse with its rotten roof. Watery light shimmered inside the arches boats once glided through. Among rafters the water-glimmer blinked into blackness. From there boats had lowered.
We dodged ivy up to the shadowy road, and I listened: the contentious cats, the garage half-painted, dad’s bad back, how my brother makes you cry, his heartbreaking tenor voice, four long tables of food at the reunion, which I missed, everyone dancing. Hermit or wastrel, alternating months, years, never in the sun, I heard myself promise, promise. I watched us walk on into night, heard the hoist unreel, then catch. [End Page 98]
James Malone Smith has published poems in Agni (online), Atlanta Review, Connecticut Review, Nebraska Review, Passages North, Quarterly West, Shenandoah, and Tar River Poetry. His fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction. He is associate editor of Southern Poetry Review and professor of English at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, Georgia.
