A Shark Tale

By Lucinda Sands

We all loved you as Diamond George,
a grounded constant who fed our hangovers
every Sunday afternoon.
You were always loaded with stories,
loaded with cash, always loaded.
Yours was the best clam chowder out west,
and I wanted you to cook for me,
to have that half-cocked smile,
those chef’s hands attending only me.

The last time I saw you outside
that seaside café, with your feet bandaged
and resting on a canvas chair,
you convinced my young sons
that a shark had eaten your toes.
They believed your vivid brown eyes.
They believed your Bogart voice.
They believed the man I once knew.

But none of us could guess
what you knew then.
That you would be gone soon.
That the restless shark, forever hungry,
would take the rest of you
without a sound in your sleep.

How to Let Go of My Youngest Son

By Lucinda Sands

I hold his face in my hands
my palms fully on his cheeks
where his bones are most like mine.
And I see, really see beyond
those extraordinary khaki eyes.
They are still before impatience,
filled with the innocence of twenty-one.

I place a kiss, a blessing, on his cheek,
as if he were Homer’s Odysseus.
This, even though his journey
will take him barely six hours from here,
even though he has not yet learned to sail,
even though he can take a flight home.

I am humbled and proud,
not because he is a master potter
of sorts, but because he is a masterpiece
of humankind, because he has been my teacher
all along, even though this I not always knew,
even though I cannot remember a first lesson.

What I do recall, what I know,
is the scent of his hair, his toddler hands
as together we perused a fresh book.
And that he questioned what he saw
with naïve fingers and the words I read
with uncomplicated reaction.

Now, he questions doctrine, systems, principles.
I give him one more of many hugs,
and a half-smile before he goes,
knowing his return will be different
yet so much the same, knowing the lessons
will continue, knowing he knows
the harbor will remain open.