Poetry by Christopher Laird Dornin
My late father and brother
watch me sail alone
with my eyes closed in light
wind on a burning afternoon.
Ephemeral zephyrs
and ghostly shifts of air
fall and come and rise.
I feel their pulse in the tug
of the tiller, the angle of heel,
the pull of the mainsheet and the gurgle
of my bow and stern waves.
My father’s cemetery is missing
its ancient gates and stones.
He kept its address a secret
the time we sailed the Chesapeake
among the traveling molecules
of my brother, lost at sea
a long way from there.
Christopher Laird Dornin has won a NH Arts Council fellowship and placed runner-up in the Swan Scythe Press chapbook contest, semi-finalist in the Finishing Line Press book contest and semi-finalist in the Wolfson Press chapbook contest. His verse has appeared in The Lake, Oberon, Blue Unicorn, Nimrod and others.
