TIDEWATER MORNING

Searching the windy strait with narrowed frown,
She finds between the wrinkled rise and fall
Of marching seas, a dory, cruising down
The channel’s reach with tubs of running trawl.
His time were better spent, she knows, attending
The careful urging of her common sense:
Breaking the upper field to seed, and mending
The kitchen roof, and bracing flattened fence…

But as he climbs the rutted pasture now,
Hungry from wind and tide, and oar and barrow––
Here heart forgets the sowing and the plow,
Meeting again the strength that never took
Its grace from gardens, and the long clear look
That never learned its blue behind a barrow.