Westport: Point Poems

By Richard Dey

Praise for WESTPORT POINT ? Poems

A sailor, commercial fisherman, and published poet, Richard Dey has inhabited the several worlds of Westport Point. He has found love there and the wrenching absence of love. He has become a witness to its seasons. This remarkable gathering is both Deys tribute to this riverine world and an unforgettable account of his Westport passages.
Llewellyn Howland III, author of No Ordinary Being: W. Starling Burgess and The New Bedford Yacht Club: A History

With experience both as a fisherman and a sailor, Richard Dey represents a unique American voice. For those of us that work and play and identify intimately with small boats, he is our Robert Frost. Dey is the author of clean, powerful, and personal verse about coastal New England life: on the docks, at the tiller, walking the marsh's edge, or gazing in the shed in winter and seeing far more than a boat under a tarp.
Richard J. King, series editor of "Seafaring America" and author of The Devil's Cormorant

Richard Dey is the laureate of southeastern Massachusetts and its shoreline. He writes with a sturdy New England eloquence and makes poetry from what many of us take for granted: this sandy, rocky coast; the changeable offshore waters; the stubborn, deep-souled people who live and work here.
Charles McGrath, former editor of The New York Times Book Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543420685

Richard Dey

RICHARD DEY was graduated from Harvard College where he studied under Robert Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Bishop, and was Poetry Editor of The Harvard Advocate. As a young man he sailed in the schoolship Tabor Boy, out of Marion, Massachusetts. Dey has worked as a yacht skipper and crewman, commercial fisherman, journalist, editor, and as a professor of maritime literature and history along the Atlantic seaboard and Lesser Antilles. He is the author of Selected Bequia Poems, a book set in the West Indies, and Adventures in the Trade Wind, a history of yacht chartering in the West Indies.

Book preview

WESTPORT

POINT star Poems

ALSO BY RICHARD DEY

Poetry

Bequia Poems

Selected Bequia Poems

The Loss of the Schooner Kestrel & Other Poems

Nonfiction

Adventures in the Trade Wind

The Story of Morris Nicholson, Pioneer Charterboat Skipper,

and of Yacht Chartering in the West Indies

in the Half Century after the Second World War

In the Way of Adventure

John Caldwell and Palm Island

(a chapbook)

Editor

The Schooner Pilgrim’s Progress

A Voyage around the World 1932–1934

Donald C. Starr

WESTPORT

POINT 47151.png Poems

RICHARD DEY

SCHOONER.jpg

OFFSHORE PRESS

Boston 2017

Copyright © 2017 by Richard Dey.

First Edition

ISBN:       Softcover                   978-1-5434-2069-2

                eBook                         978-1-5434-2068-5

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

Published by Offshore Press. [e-mail]

Rev. date: 05/19/2017

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OFFSHORE PRESS

Boston

Contents

Houseboat, a Prelude

I FISHING

Outside the Steamer Lanes

WIND AGAINST THE TIDE

Fog

Wind Against the Tide

The Devil’s Pocket Hole

Boulder Heights

China Royal Restaurant

Swordfishing

In the Eye of the Swordfish

Offshore Warbler

The Loss of the Navigator

Andy’s, in Winter

Requiem for a Shrimp Boat

II FRANGIPANI POEMS

The Launching

In an Eddy

At Anchor

Capsized!

In Fog

On Her Mooring

Paddling Home

Hauling Her Out

Taking out the Mooring

In a Shed

III LETTER FROM WESTPORT POINT

IV WHAT IT WAS

Dinghies at a Dock

Swamped

Beetle Cat Race, Labor Day

What It Was

How Like a Painting

Elegy in a Seaside Town

East of the Bell

Lines on a Dinghy

Luck of the Strike

North Wind Blowing

V MOORING SPARS

Sailor at a Sawbuck

To My Son, Fourteen Months Old,     in the Nuclear Age

Mishaum Blues

The Relic

Tonging

Gleam, Vanishing Saltmarsh

The Uninsured

The Broadbills

A Waiting Game

Under Poncho

Elegy Sketched in an Estuary Cove

Arrival, Westport Point

Mooring Spars

Acknowledgements

for my sons and grandchildren

There are those to whom place is unimportant,

But this place, where sea and fresh water meet,

Is important—

  —Theodore Roethke, The Rose

Houseboat, a Prelude

It’s on the one not at a dock or out

on a mooring but moored near

the Harpoon Bar, amongst the cordgrasses

across the channel from the work boats

tied up at the town wharf

                        that I live

You’re most likely to find the Hibiscus Inn

not at high tide when she’s inconspicuous

(or, at least, not an eyesore)

but when the tide’s out and she’s hard aground

her stern high and dry in the marsh mud

and anything not secure is falling—

loss out of the corners like marbles

love like the flag whose halyard comes uncleated

courage off the fiddled table top like a cocktail glass

pride like fresh baked bread awash in the scuppers

It’s then, assuming some foothold,

some grasp amidst the disruption

and despite the chance of a place ashore

that I make my passages in her

and write