Sea Drift - John Muro

Something of this place stays with me still

and the dusty cloth of memory will not allow

me to brush it away. It’s pinned beneath a 

world that’s beyond forgetting and smelling 

always of salted brume and rusted metal and 

the nearly sweet scent of diesel fuel and oil 

that would lazily drift upon the surface of the

water in mylar plumes of Prussian blue, iris 

and ornate bronze like eerie, non-ephemeral 

rainbows spooling and dismembering beneath 

the splintered shadows of the docks or along 

the scavenged banks that housed the worn 

implements of nautical toil: ragged tents of 

canvas, cables, traps, anchors and mangled 

tackle; and standing further on, the brighter 

scatter of bundled sails, tall as cypress trees, 

casting tapered shadows that seemed to slip 

across muscled wakes and the crest of waves 

while gulls would wheel and curl above us 

in garbled greetings, their manic staccato 

silenced by the approaching thrum and plush 

rumble of trawlers with limbs outstretched 

like a trapeze artist seeking balance. and, 

on wind-still days, crooked sheds releasing 

their musty odors of decay, and disfigured

cottages, bereft of shingles, adorned with 

flaking, chalk-white shutters and rooflines 

powdered with grains of mica in midday 

light and piers punched deep into the glazed 

lather of rockweed and slime where earth’s 

rich effulgence had been preserved and 

was slowly disgorged while faint clouds of 

sulfur would silently rise and fill our lungs.

First published in Acumen, Issue 104, 2022

Bio: A resident of Connecticut, John Muro has authored two volumes of poems – In the Lilac Hour and Pastoral Suite – in 2020 and 2022, respectively. Both volumes were published by Antrim House, and both are available on Amazon and elsewhere. He is a three-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, a nominee for the Best of the Net and, more recently, a 2023 Grantchester Award recipient. John’s poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Acumen, Barnstorm, Delmarva, Grey Sparrow, New Square, Sky Island and the Valparaiso Review.

Commentary: The strange yet blissful sensation of revisiting an old place, letting in the very influx of memory, and experiencing the partly-explicable moment is aptly conveyed through this piece.