Leonard Wallace Robinson
The Gift
"i never promised you a rowboat."
my father actually said that line
three decades ago; he said it on
my tenth birthday when i cried and
sulked thinking he had promised me one.
god alone knows how i came by such an
idea pure wish pa simply didn't
believe in such big gifts none of us
even had a bike though we were far
from poor eleven kids and so i stole
the rowboats of the lobster men as they
lay sleeping in the long hot marshfield
massachusetts afternoons of summer, dreaming
of lobster pots as packed as full
as boiled red lobster claws. i liked
John Greenleaf's boat the best, oars
always in it, lightest out our channel
on the ebb i'd shoot into the calm of
cape cod bay what things i saw a silver
horse in ten clear yards of water the
great rust freckles on a sunken checker
taxi fins were everywhere wise
dolphins circled me and shining baked clay
starfish danced a glazed descending measure
all was weaving waving formal pattern designed
at the antipodes where winds blew ribs
and ripples in shell and sand in
endless art provincetown beckoned it
looked so near i'd want to try it every time
once i did twenty miles away it was dark
before i turned back and dark as hell when i
came up the channel Mr. Greenleaf
was waiting on the muddy shore with folded
arms his rubber boots colossal but what he
said was "steal it a little earlier after this,
if you don't mind, leonard i go out after dark."
Leonard Wallace Robinson, In the Whale, Barnwood Press , 1983.