The Lake Boat

The light was red. I was preoccupied with worries.

In front of me, an SUV with a trailer towing an aluminum four-person outboard motorboat.

I wondered if the boat was being taken in at the end of a long day or if it were being brought home to go out in the morning.

Tomorrow, early, I bet, before dawn. And the people would bring sandwiches and snacks, and try to catch some fish, or just have a getaway.

Someone would hold the tiller steady, reaching back, looking ahead, skimming along the water in the warming morning, indigo and starlight giving way to soft orange illuminating pine trees at the shoreline, the boat buzzing along shaping little wakes across the lake as blue and yellow took over the sky.

And birds, acrobatic and purposeful as they have been forever, replace the day’s concerns with timelessness. Here and there fish splash, white glints lifting and vanishing.

The left lane gets the green arrow and the driver takes the lane and makes the turn, pulling the little boat on a two-wheeled trailer. 

My signal stays red, but I don’t mind. I’m still with the boat.

A July Poem

This has become a default tradition:

my mother and I 

on the third and Fourth of July,

on the patio, in the evening,

complaining about the illegal fireworks,

and the lack of accountability,

as we empathize with the dogs, and cats,

and birds, and lizards, and squirrels,

skunks, raccoons, and even rats and mice, 

and consider all the animals in our midst,

wishing we could give them peace.

Why people like explosions, we don’t understand.

Sometime Sunday in Spring

Once in a while 

on a Sunday in spring

I catch a moment

when the sunlight, the breeze, 

a flower, a bee,

are timelessly present,

not yet named anything.

Stopping by the Park on a Springtime Afternoon

I hadn’t swung on a swing in years,

but today at the park I swang on a swing 

in a kid-sized strappy seat that crimped my hips

a flash of uncertainty, then second nature

 

to make the swing swing:

the lean back, the pull on the chains

legs straight out front showing me my shoe-tops

toes pointing up to the sky

and I saw the mountains go up, down, up

and the treetops rise, drop, rise, drop

beyond the long green lawn

and forward and back

and I was five 

with my dad giving pushes 

and I felt the feel of comforting confidence

as pushes became taps 

and as each touch got lighter, so did I.

Jeanosullivan 5/29/2026

The Old Quaker

 My poem today:

2025 and Nixon rolls over in his grave every night.

He came to a seance to say,

“It was one file cabinet

and a few microphones…”

(Madam Zora knew it was more

but she got the point.)

And he said he wrestled over the injustice

that today the person in his old office

has done so much more and worse

and who now says he doesn’t know whether he is obligated to follow the constitution of the United States

and is getting away with it.

Nixon, having protected himself by vacating the office,

said he had known he was committing crimes

and having had a lot of time to contemplate in his later years in San Clemente,

the ocean lapping on the shore nagging him in quiet moments,

he thought about the oath he took

and how he had flouted it.

“It’s impossible not to know you’re doing something wrong like that.”

His voice echoed

into the ethers

and Madam Zora said no more.

With a quake in the cemetery grounds 

the haunting had begun,

floating eastward his spirit went 

to settle down like a fog on Washington

slipping into the House and Senate Chambers 

to rest upon the shoulders of the culpable

and sully their expensive suits.

Jeanosullivan, May 5, 2025

Plain as Day

Bleak though it seems
like a nightmare we just can’t shake
every morning it’s still there when we wake:
a presence like heavy wooden doors shut so tight
no crack lets in the light.

Avarice advancing like a plague,
Its logic is a racket of arrhythmic drums.
Among the complicit, wrongs compounded bring silence.
Among the aggressors, invasions of liberties invite cheers.

The doors are bolted heavily across the span. 

Bleak though it seems
from inside a darkened chamber
we who love know there is a beautiful world beyond this.
Since together we have knowledge, strength, and leverage,
we lift the bolt and swing it away.

Bright beams of light, almost blinding, give way to clearer vision
to see again the world we knew,
still green, and blue, and ours, and true.

Look to the sky and see the arc of the moral universe which is long, but bends toward justice
plain as day.

Sunlight

Sunlight captures and conditions the color of the air a certain way sometimes 

and a moment I recognize having sensed in my childhood comes forward to meet this one, all the same moment, timeless 

and future retrospect is with me too,

it is a through line of my life

nameless, quiet.

I am not ahead of myself,

I am not catching up

I am not waiting

It is all one moment:

that yesterday 

this now

daydreamed future

when it happens 

just like this—

naturally, reliably

present

familiar, like a place,

comforting, like a friend—

I smoothen like the sunlight

as it sets shadow on a building, or flower, or hillside, or bench.

Always there comes the point 

where my attention is drawn away

dissipating to distraction

until another stay.

Jeanosullivan 08/26/2024