Skills

The melancholy of fulfillment?
Not something he was overly
familiar with though he recalled
that around age eight, after months
of rigorous practice he mastered
three nifty moves on the yo-yo
that briefly made him prince
of the playground but since then:

nada

or rather, decades of a dry spell
so when that second marriage hit a reef
and began to take on water
faster than either cared to bail,
he knew precisely the protocols
(here at last was expertise!)
of undoing the binding  knots
then deftly captained their pirogue
to the bottom of the sky-blue ocean.

The Bench

The sea moves its blue shuttle
coming to shore and then receding
then coming again and each time
it recedes it hoards away more light
as it weaves this winter evening
when he decided to come down
and take the show slowly in:
the egrets, the buffleheads,
the snowy plover ...