This week’s poem has the sound turned way up. You’ll hear it in words like “pondworthier” and “windlore” and in the words and phrases that bump up against each other and make your mouth do extra work. I recommend reading it aloud.
That sound play isn’t just for fun, either. Poetry marries form and function, sound and sense in order to get at something deeper. This poem shows us what the narrator is learning from this “old guy,” about how “to be made.” “Tacks” comes from a book-length series of poems about Booker, an old Maine codger – the series is both a tribute and an elegy to a way of talking about and looking at the world.
Grumbling’s collection, “Booker’s Point,” won the Vassar Miller Prize and was published in 2017. It was also awarded the 2017 Maine Literary Award for Poetry.
Tacks
By Megan Grumbling
On Ell Pond, the mid-1990s
The old guy’s craft was wooden, sure
pondworthier than the sub-snuff
Snark – plastic, Styrofoam – I lurched
out to the middle. Seized or luffed
by my scant windlore, slack knots, lack
of knowhow, how I blundered through,
brown empties midships rolling tack
for tack, head ducked to knees or stooged
each time the cheap aluminum
boom came about. Sure didn’t fool
him, bluffing by in graceless runs
just good enough. The old guy knew
better. He sailed rings round my hack
triangles there and there and back.
I knew his Point before I dared
to know him, knew that tricky gold
of sandbar – treacherous, could tear
hell of the till – and knew the glow
of knowing it, that gleam beneath
belonging, when to switch grips, worn
sheet clenched in teeth to free hands, heave
the daggerboard, then make that turn
hard – slapdash, but in time; at least
near how it’s done. But then in swooped
that wooden boat. The old guy steered
straight for me, close enough to goose
me, grant a wry “Ahoy,” and sure show me
a way yet to be given, to be made.
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is Portland’s poet laureate. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2017 Megan Grumbling. It appears in “Booker’s Point” (UNT Press, 2017) and appears here by permission of the author.
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