Charles Tarlton

In the “Cove” of the Cove

Photo by the author

I was chose a relik chois,
The signe of Jhesu Cristes Crois;
Ther dar no devel abyde.

Anon., The Dispute between Mary and the Cross

On the south shore of North Cove, at the end of a shady path down from the road, I went to sit on a gray, weathered, and splintery bench overlooking a tiny cove-within-the-cove where wavelets played around driftwood and cobbles, scuttling in and out over the shingle.

a pocket notebook
for jotting down ideas
inspired by
the slow thoroughness
of the cove-emptying tide

an osprey couple
circled slowly over the cove
watching for fluke
and shad. The osprey’s
yellow eyes betrayed nothing

Surrounded by rocks and barkless, slow-bleached tree trunks, a round-and-wedged buck of bare wood the size of a hassock, sawed from a fallen tree, lay heavy and dull. The image of a cross has been carved into the faded wood and stained dark mahogany.

Oh, I was pious
as a boy, as only boys
can be pious
and the cross reminds me
of the confessional

I am helpless
to avoid reckoning up
at least my venial
sins. As the tide rises
the cross is set afloat

Each time I visit the bench to brood on poems, I consider wading into the shallows to lay claim to the cruciform block, but the thought of seeing it later installed in my yard, tucked under an overhanging forsythia or inside a border of angled bricks to welcome daffodils every year, makes me hesitate. “Where had he got the temerity,” I hear my neighbors wondering, “to claim something like that for himself?”

they always say
that miracles exhibit
the presence
of God, but this log-cross
says only human to me

maybe it came
from the sunken prow
of a Spanish caravel
washed up here in the time
of the pious Pilgrims

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About the Author

Charles D. Tarlton is a retired professor who lives and writes (now) in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, with his wife, Ann Knickerbocker, an abstract painter.