2025 Peter Sears Poetry Prize winner

Guthrie Romas “Spending Time with an Old Man in Bellingham”

 

People felt that Talvi, the old Fin,

ought to be theirs.

He stands,

squinting at the

little lint folds of murre birds

clustered on a shelf above the sea.

Unwrapping greasy wool

cable scarves,

he swims in the ocean every morning,

before anyone wakes up,

gets scolded by neighbors,

for being so old,

and alive.

How foolish of me! He laughs,

scuffing in

from the fog.

He reads National Geographic,

and likes dirty jokes,

keeps coffee cans of rain on his porch.

One cold night over tea

and the Salish sea, he told me

he never married his love Onerva,

whose name meant

grass that grows under the field after

harvest.

She walked off a dock,

and stayed down there.

They were 19.

His latest pleasure—

to lay in the thronging night,

imagining he is the unswayable moon,

pulling the water home

until morning.

We had finished the tea,

mugs adjoined off kilter on the wire table.

He said,

Winter is dying,

has lost its way home.

Then he smiled,

small, sharp,

just a flicker,

something unreadable in it,

a strange dog that lets you scratch its head,

but doesn’t belong to you.

I drove four hours south through the flood-

lit dark, highway under gale and wave,

something always behind me.