We are talking now of a summer night in Maine
when I would be astonished for the last time
how the voices of my sister, father, and I could fold together
as we sang Row Your Boat on our drive home.
My sister’s cheeks, high and red in the back seat
like those of the dilapidated Santa Claus which sat
on our mantel for such a short time. And like him
she smiles with undiscriminating pleasure at everything.
Then, orange sparks from our father’s cigarette enter
the long pause he commands, where at its edge we would always wait.
His voice from shadow says, “If we speed up
maybe we can glide the last mile home.”
Two mailboxes throw themselves at us
as we accelerate into my father’s howl, and the bleached
cobwebby firs blink off, the engine stops,
and in the rudderless speeding dark, my father makes
quick small jerks to correct his steering because
there are no stars, no moon, no tree line to follow
and the woods shoot out far and return through
the open windows, thousands of crickets scissoring
and scissoring us from the softness that lingered
there, but does not follow from our singing.
Sean Sutherland has had poems published in the literary magazines: the Meadow, Lime Hawk, Gravel, Prick of the Spindle, Blast Furnace, the 30th anniversary anthology; the Writers Studio at 30, and the Maine Review, for which he won honorable mention for their poetry prize in 2015. He was nominated for a Pushcart by the literary magazine Sleet in 2019, and recently had two poems selected in an anthology titled, Poetry for The Actor, A Guide to Deeper Truth.
Sean is a MacDowell Colony Fellow. He self-published a chapbook of short poems and haiku in 2010 entitled, Forever in the City, Forever Arriving, and has had plays of his produced in New York City, Los Angeles, and Maine. He is currently studying with Philip Schultz in his master class at The Writers Studio in New York City, and recently discovered the joys of camping in a tent!
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