Daylight lengthens at last,
And, nightly, the wrench and crash
Of plates of ice resumes in the brook.
Those ice sheets shatter and shift;
Cold rivulets gurgle: The drift
Of small streams riverward,
Rivers, seaward, all water hereabouts
Traveling east and south.
The Penobscot opens its mouth
At Searsport, there where the tankers
Haul in the liquid from underground.
Here, kerosene brightens the noisy night,
And there, the snow that fell into
Gordon Brook
Washes in waves against steel hulls.
David Wells Brainerd lives deep in the woods of Howland. His chapbooks of verse include “A Turn of the Wheel,” published in 2003, and “Under the Gold Sun,” published last year.
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