Collaborators
- Collaborators
Walking at night, I read the house numberson those porches lit like vacant stairwells
hung along the mill’s lip, flights of metalsteps any type of weather might fall through,
and this gentle litany tolls the scheduleof departing ferries that take us from
island to city and back again—1210,1245—ferries where the whales bloom
a black and white skirt in our wake, ferrieswe drive our big cars onto because now
we can go anywhere, ferries that tookthe people from the clear shore of their lives
to the internment camps on the mainlandbecause nothing could be more dangerous
than living among each other where voicesunnetted and rising in complaint
are a flock of birds that can make no songbut that one which we sing together. [End Page 76]
Keetje Kuipers is the author of two collections of poetry, both published by BOA Editions. A former Stegner Fellow, her poems have appeared in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. She lives with her family at the edge of the Salish Sea where she is at work on a novel.
