For people who count,
the BOLD NAMES,
or those aspiring to be,
there is no privacy
and they want it that way.
I lusted after him, she says,
in what passes for a wedding
announcement,
but he was too busy
with his graduate work
in economics,
so I organized my attack.
She tells us as readers
of the New York Times
who she believes
apparently care,
or she wants us to care,
while she goes on to pursue
rabbinical studies as well
as this hunky man,
and writes poetry
which her creative writing
teacher says has become
more blossoming.
They marry; she wins.
He capitulates with joy.
Shall we follow them,
stripped naked for the readers,
to the nuptial sheets?
At least not yet in the
New York Times.
No one made this up.


Rolled over and over, boat and men submerge
as the rogue wave moves implacably on,
ruthless if personified,
but merely a function of wind and water.
Chance has brought it all together,
and a crewman survives what for him
is only a rough ducking,
while the captain breathes
finally no more than water.
Beached in time by the retreating tide,
eyes as hard as round marbles,
egg white and aster blue,
he stares through the sand film
captured in his lined face
at the late summer jogger
who has made the grisly sighting
and will not attend the funeral.
Gulls call to his pale deaf ears
and crows circle as if with road kill
on this benign beach
at Cape Elizabeth, Maine.
Later similar men will take to the sea
from the Kettle Cove launch ramp
as they and he and their fathers
have always done.
The tourist runners will remain
outlanders
whatever poses they assume
or how much their clothes
come from L. L. Bean.


Howard Winn's fiction and poetry has been published recently by such journals as Dalhousie Review, Taj Mahal Review (India), Galway Review (Ireland), Antigonish Review, Southern Humanities Review, Chaffin Review, Thin Air Literary Journal, and Futures Trading Literary Journal. His B. A. is from Vassar College and he has an M.A. in Creative Writing from Stanford University; he has done additional graduate work at the University of California San Francisco, and his doctoral work was done at NYU. Mr. Winn has been a social worker in California, and is currently a faculty member of Dutchess Community College SUNY as Professor of English.