Walking through a sudden wind of pine
I remembered the scent of
a pinewood cabin we stayed in
one summer in Wellfleet,
on the tip of the Cape
where Mother poured cereal into bowls
as the porch screen door whined shut
announcing Dad’s return. No bass
caught that night, it seemed to say,
the sea has won again.
Pines swayed to a wind music,
hovering over the cabin, cooling it
as light filtered through the trees,
playing its chiaroscuro on walls
of all the cabins down to the sea.
There it opened as before an altar
where once-evasive bass and cod
turned, curved, scattered, as if
signaling all that followed for me
might be just as elusive, just as fickle.
Kathleen Aponick
Kathleen Aponick is a former teacher and textbook editor. Her poetry collections include The
Descendant’s Notebook (Kelsay Books, 2020), Bright Realm (Turning Point, 2013), and two
chapbooks: The Port (Finishing Line Press, 2006), and Near the River’s Edge (Pudding House
Publications, 1995). She also co-edited, with Paul Marion and Jane Brox, Merrimack: A Poetry
Anthology (Loom Press), a collection of poems by poets who lived in towns along the Merrimack
River in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Her poems have appeared in many publications,
including Poetry East, Notre Dame Review, Hollins Critic, and Paterson Literary Review.
Kathleen lives in Andover, Massachusetts, with her husband, Tony.
