Domenic Scopa

Adirondack Chairs
for Jessica

“We drowned in Eden….there’s no hand to take me home now.”
     Robert Lowell

Low tide odor
drifts up the knobby hill
from Portland harbor.

At the top,
they’re there,
two of them
Adirondack chairs in beds of pebbles,
and they rise like wooden thrones to overlook the pier,
their legs rotten & stubborn,
their seats faded.

I would have liked to bring you there
to sit with me again,
to watch the lobster boats
bronzed by sunset motor into port
with stuffed hulls,
and how the sun roughened fishermen
hose down their decks,
watching not to slip on grime.

Remember summer?  Manic raindrops pattered mud,
while we recited Dante.
We almost drowned in paradise,
and foghorns blared their dirge.

Sometimes I touched your hand across the chairs
and our fingers clasped,
but there’s no hand to take me home, now-
except my own.

I would have liked you to remember
that I was, and am, unwell.

in memoriam Robert Lowell

 

Domenic Scopa is a student at Suffolk University and will be graduating in April. He was recently accepted into the number one low residency MFA program in the country, Vermont College of Fine Arts, and will attend there in June to attain an MFA in Poetry and Translation. He has worked closely with a number of accomplished poets including National Book Award Winner David Ferry and Washington Book Prize recipient Fred Marchant. He is currently the assistant poetry editor of Venture Literary Magazine.