Homecoming

A Poem by Kelly Garriott Waite

The fisherman grabs
his Thermos and lunchbox,

heads down the hill where sleepy-
eyed men emerge from their trucks

and mumble greetings to one
another and slip, sleek as seals, into

powerboats whose motors,
once pulled and chugged into life,

will take them to the fishing boats
bobbing offshore. Just before

heading for open water, the fisherman
looks once more up the hill to the

kitchen light, something toward which
to align his mind. He knows his wife,

by now, has shaken awake his boys
who stand with her, murmuring a decade of

the rosary while they watch the
departures. He looks for the familiar

green and blue buoys, a design that for decades
has marked his family's traps—his father's,

and, before that, his father's father's. In time
he will present these to his sons, should they

want that kind of unkind life.
The painters who gather here, late summer into

fall, and set up their easels along sidewalks, to
capture the boats glistening in the sun, the romance

of the sea, have all but left town. Down at the school,
the senior class plots its homecoming float,

floated around the high school track before
the football game, paid for by money the locals can

little afford, but give unbegrudgingly,
let the kids have a bit of fun, cut back a little

on this month's groceries. Soon enough
this group of kids will be broken

up. Some will head to trade schools, some to
university. Some to the docks. Some

will join their fathers on the boats, the diesel
fuel, the salt water, the air cutting across the

ruddy face, the bobbing up and down in choppy
waters, the freedom of this life sinks its hooks

into a man and never lets him go despite the
man taken by the sea: men lost in storms, men

hauling traps alone, the betrayal of their own
lines coiling round their legs and dragging

them under. Too many sons have recovered
boats, bodies too, and taken them home to their

mothers who sit in the kitchen and wait. For eight
hours, maybe ten, the fisherman hauls up

his traps, checks the sex and the size of
the lobsters. He rebaits each trap with salted

herring and slips it back to the sea before
heading home at sunset.

Kelly Garriott Waite writes from Oberlin, Ohio. Her work has appeared in Main, an Anthology, the Citron Review, What Rough Beast, Barren Magazine, BioStories, the Hopper, the Fourth River, BrainChild, and elsewhere.