A five hour road trip and three hours of moving my daughter
back into her dormitory have left me hot and tired, a refugee in 
a downtown Minneapolis hotel.  Nevertheless, I feel obliged to call
an elderly aunt whom I have seen a total of four times over the last
quarter century.  When she answers, her reedy voice quavers with
a peculiar tone of strident urgency, and she asks … no, she insists
that we drive out to visit her and my uncle at their west-side
suburb, really the last thing on my mind this humid, smoldering 
late-summer afternoon with threatening-looking rain-clouds already 
thundering across the plains off to the west. So I regrettably decline 
her frantic request and tell her that such a trip would be nigh on 
impossible, which is something that my aunt does not want to hear 
because she obsessively repeats her wish with her former urgency 
now turned to a tone of sheer desperation.  A captive of exhaustion, 
I do not take the hint, nor can I hear her real message, the one 
vibrating up from her heart like a call from the other world
to which only she knows she will soon go.

	for Winslow Homer, 1836-1910

The sky is again full of black musings
   today—
the sea’s face a turbulent grimace of splash
on shore lent to hope amid seafarers’ plodding
faith day after day for their wives and lovers,
black-clothed heads’ eyes glancing between the ground
and the sea ridge in relief against
the violent crashing waves that sculpt
over time the headlands that loom above.

All eyes look to the sea for fishing smacks
beyond the swells, and when above in their
sea shanties, they look down the gullet of cliff rock
at the sea’s gestures of uncompromising force, 
all the while dreaming of their lovers’ warm,
hard hands entwined with their own like when their
menfolk were on leave from the wrath of the sea
and they walked in springtime among the 
ring of thickets that crown the village above
on that precipice of the unknown, the beacon
calling to the fishing boats to reach shore again.