Few Yachts Short of a Regatta by Robert Hamilton

Few Yachts Short of a Regatta

Robert Hamilton

Under us on the dining deck the diesel throb
is its own hell, thrumming as if to fork
tibia from fibula & agitate synovial gel
into sympathetic cavitation. I was supine
all through the Perseids. Night birds yelp
while clouds scud by, blunting our affect.
Merely improbable laughter
the probation officer calls troubling.
It all begins with a diatom suspended
at 3500 meters: from this mineral chip
comes sand burning soles, wet rales
of silicosis, Goldengrove unleaving,
spiral stairs, sodium lamps. I hear the rains
putter back in. While you rake leaves
I dig a canal, noting where last years dead hands,
frozen already, claw up from the soil.
Smell of wet oleander, smoldering all night.
We should leave. Got your sea legs under you?
A bow cuts through sloshy sargassum.
The propeller sets the china pinging
while a saint on the quarterdeck
waves his flayed skin above us like a gonfalon.

Robert Hamilton's poetry appears or is forthcoming in journals like Prelude, The Found Poetry Review, Axolotl, and The Curator, and was twice selected for the Poetry in the Arts, Inc. award at Baylor University’s Beall Poetry Festival. Originally from the Pacific Northwest, he lives in Texas and teaches English at Wiley College.

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