A game of hold ‘em
Aftermath
Chesapeake
Doll Hospital
Homemade
Hominids
Lit
Motorboat Motorboat
My Kuleana
November, your metal teeth
Rhapsody with Impasse
The House in Illinois
The Meter Reader
The Rules of Boxball
Why I Killed My Canary
Motorboat Motorboat
Keith Dunlap
We cannot see the craft,
but only hear the sizzling drum
of its gas-fired engine
ricocheting off the top of every tree-shagged mountain
that shoulders this ancient glacial pond.
It declaims a music of the older sort:
flat benches strewn with stale cushions
and the rot of algae, dust, and motor oil;
a few desultory teenagers spilled around
its cavity like prisoners ferried
from town to town for unessential punitive tasks;
one letting his fingers scrape the corrugated glass
of the lake; another shouting a story,
which no one else can quite comprehend,
about how once he almost drowned
when his feet got tangled in a towline.
The others do not care that his words are mutilated
in the noisy air. They are content to be barely clothed
inside a motorboat as it bounces along,
like a skipping stone chucked toward its inevitable
who knows where.
Read more »
but only hear the sizzling drum
of its gas-fired engine
ricocheting off the top of every tree-shagged mountain
that shoulders this ancient glacial pond.
It declaims a music of the older sort:
flat benches strewn with stale cushions
and the rot of algae, dust, and motor oil;
a few desultory teenagers spilled around
its cavity like prisoners ferried
from town to town for unessential punitive tasks;
one letting his fingers scrape the corrugated glass
of the lake; another shouting a story,
which no one else can quite comprehend,
about how once he almost drowned
when his feet got tangled in a towline.
The others do not care that his words are mutilated
in the noisy air. They are content to be barely clothed
inside a motorboat as it bounces along,
like a skipping stone chucked toward its inevitable
who knows where.