A Poem by Robin Beth Schaer

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Fathom

The dogs understand your heart
and know something of the taste

of salt. We live off incense and coins,
herding coveys of waves, wrenching
down the blues. I begged and pouted
all this cotton, but what use
is stooping to nothing. The sea
refused twenty corroded decades
before ours. Sometimes, the nets
raise a god in a flash of minnows.
Sometimes, matted ferns claim you,
their breath a weapon paused at the eye.
Always, we are capsized by the impossible
child in a thicket of empty books.

Robin Beth Schaer is the author of Shipbreaking (Anhinga, 2015). She worked as a deckhand aboard the Tall Ship Bounty, a hundred-and-eighty-foot full-rigged ship lost in Hurricane Sandy.