In the Islands

Parents had gone where parents go,
except for Mrs. Pocket, who sat against a log,
engrossed in a paperback, smoking a Lark
and tugging absentmindedly
her swimsuit's oily strap.

Our minor wounds stung by dried salt, we were surprised
how far the kelp had been dragged up,
left like silage from a great combine.
Crows hawked in the Douglas firs,
their inland world dense and inaccessible,

so I and the other children stayed on the open beach,
towheaded, curious, and bored.
Some rocks we could overturn, and there
we subjugated neighborhoods of tiny crabs
who scampered from the light.

Between our playing and the woods
the bones of old trees bleached by the Sound
were heaped as if in the aftermath of battle.
I crawled inside a rack of driftwood,
pretending it was home.

By now, insinuating tides have tugged it apart.
Mrs. Pocket finished her book, and sometime later
died of cancer. Her daughters have grown up,
no longer the crabs' tormentors.
We've all been changed,

drifting into new configurations
and seldom taking time to watch the light.
But we remember boredom,
the pleasure of letting says go nowhere
till something called us home.

--David Mason (1954- ), American poet and librettist, poet laureate of Colorado, 2010.