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    Rounding Ballast Key
    Rounding Ballast Key
    Rounding Ballast Key
    Ebook49 pages23 minutes

    Rounding Ballast Key

    By George Murphy

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    About this ebook

    Previously published in print by Ampersand Press of Roger Williams College in Rhode Island, "Rounding Ballast Key" is a poetry collection featuring the people and places of Key West and South Florida. Author George Murphy is also the editor of the recognized literary anthology "The Key West Reader: The Best of Key West's Writers 1830-1990," among other works he has authored about the Keys' literary heritage and beautiful imagery.

    Many of the poems were first published in literary and academic periodicals. Murphy's poetry has found its new home in a quality ebook edition, properly formatted and presented with care.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherQuid Pro, LLC
    Release dateMar 21, 2014
    ISBN9781610279239
    Rounding Ballast Key

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      Book preview

      Rounding Ballast Key - George Murphy

      Contents

      1

      Rounding Ballast Key

      Reunion

      Emily

      October

      Memory

      Consider the Absurd

      All Good Things

      Plum Harbor

      Stars

      Scrimshaw

      Poem for My Daughter on Her Third Birthday

      Infidelity

      Silence

      Falling

      Mother

      Turning Thirty

      Marsh Wine

      The End of the World

      2

      Some Questions

      Leap year

      No Other Life

      Reticence

      Lust

      Dancing

      Provisional Prayer

      Leaving Vermont

      Self-Knowledge

      Call from Chicago

      Since We Have Failed

      You

      For L.M. and M.L.

      Rounding Ballast Key

      Rounding Ballast Key

      Beyond Man Key, rounding Ballast in the sink-mud,

      when Woman Key loomed, an impossible swim

      from the mangrove bank we could not walk through,

      I stood waist-deep in your wake, sinking,

      our erratic trail erased behind us and ahead,

      a soup-like, sucking bottom of worm holes where spider crabs

      scuttled past my legs, and me in some small panic

      with a camera bag which would not float were we to give in,

      start kicking, and ride the current back

      past the southwest bank toward the shipping channel

      or the thin sandy spit which jutted to the north.

      Knowing we might get back or might not,

      and either Key, this one we were sinking in

      or the other across the channel, was likely to

      keep our gear, suck down our shoes, and humble us:

      we kept walking.

      I’d been stalling my heart

      by studying your back, the muscled twist of shoulder blades

      as you hauled first the left, then right foot,

      porting a sachel on your head and calling back to me,

      Just pull your foot out and take another step.

      As the sun was scorching us doubly

      off the flat rushing water of the channel,

      I stood in your wake, sinking in that mud,

      its surface webbed with turtle grass

      and calcareous algae rising on my calves.

      About us the conchs crawled from green to brighter green,

      the sea turtles lolled the miles across the keys from Tortuga,

      and

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