THE HOUSEBOAT


I walk daily to the houseboat,
where lace-cuffed waters
gurgle harbourside;

when evening sun’s a
dental mirror in milky mouth of sky
and the late-day haze hovers gauzily,
curtaining my mind.

Beached aloft on its concrete base
it shares a weedy pebbled sandbar
with several two-tone-honking geese
and many tiny scooting plovers,
moving like one misted breath,
low and close as single-thought,
like an embroiderer’s needle darting
in and out of liquid light as if it was their loom.

I climb onto its storm-ravaged deck,
mounted on blackened barnacled legs,
and sit awhile to meditate
the wind, the waves, the ways in which
the bobbing boats at anchor know always
which way to turn, facing head to wind.

As yet, the shuttered houseboat remains
silently unclaimed and I will come here still –
until the time that someone says
that this is not my home.