22 September 2024

By Philip Kuepper

Blue shimmer off the bay
wove waves
on the faces of the weathered grey
houses. In the yards
played youths with their shirts off,
gleeful in the breeze, pitching a frisbee;
and girls bunched close, like conspirators,
keeping their own counsel,
whether or not to tease,
or ignore the youths?,
who paid no attention to them.
Dinghies sat tethered to docks
the youths used as shuttles
to the village, north of the wave-woven houses,
fast by the river that fanned into the bay,
fanned into the bay like vaulting
found in the ceilings of Gothic churches;
a Gothic river,
one that flowed in a 21st Century
of reconstructed destructionalism
(a thought that jogged my stream of consciousness ask,
how much of the idea of the Gothic dome
was dependent on the igloo?,
the Italian brain channeling the brain of the Inuit,
with neither one even knowing the other existed;
or even on the shallow dome of the frisbee)?
the youths were pitching,
until the wind off the bay lifted it beyond reach,
landing it near the fan-vaulted river’s Gothic mouth.
The air had cooled. The youths pulled on their shirts.
The girls had disintegrated.
The youths boarded a dinghy to retrieve the frisbee
from the river’s mouth before it could swallow it;
Calatrava-age youth engaging the Brunelleschian.
Done, they turned their dinghy north,
toward the post-Colonial village fast by the river.

(24-25 August 2024)