The Rowboat On the Marsh

I don't need mawkish photographs to see the drowning rowboat tethered to the dock, a withered seahorse clinging to debris as umber water seeps through feeble caulk. The cord grass will have grown up through the planks to marry splinters teeming on the pier, putrescent pillars tilted by the banks; a pallid corpse beside the marsh's bier. Those summers when we sailed through brackish mist have long since gone the way of floating sculls that languish in the asters to be kissed by empty oarlocks perched atop their hulls. Your August ghost still flounders on the fen then sinks beneath in nightmares now as then.