You lie each night on a solitary box, look for solid ground in the morning, live with what is under your feet, watch a ship in the harbor anchored too far from shore to swim to. You stand on damp sand, yet do not hear the ocean coming, smell its salt or seaweed or wash sun from your eyes to see its calm waves rolling to white caps breaching. Instead, you listen for a violin, its scrape as catgut pulls the eye, strangles air, and water splinters silence, stutters your lashes, splashes the blistering surface. It is your story— to be naked the first time in front of someone you love, to forget your umbrella and get soaked walking home, to rise from the ashes of what you burned, learn why the window wonders when. Yet you may find, then sit on a well’s smooth stone lip, feel the cool on your hot cheek as you reach, hear the bucket’s splash at the bottom as muscles begin the work of bringing water.
Bill Schreiber has been a Hyla Brook Poet since 2018. Bill has been published in Aerial Review, Shot Glass Journal, The Poets Touchstone and Metonym Journal. Bill works in the technology field and lives with his wife and son in southern New Hampshire