“Elegy for a Buckeye” and “Seabooted” by J. P. White

Elegy for a Buckeye

I went all the way back to the beginning looking for a buckeye giant

On a quiet street in Ohio but it was gone and so were the spiny,

Gold brown husks containing the glossy nuts with circular eyes.

I always kept a buckeye in my pocket for any luck but bad

And rubbed its smooth finish hoping it would shiver me through

My father’s unhappiness with selling life insurance for Metropolitan.

On the way home from school, I would listen to the husks cracking,

The buckeyes falling for squirrels to lug off in their gaped mouths.

Food for winter? Isn’t that our first and last theme? If I had one

Of those buckeyes, I could look into its varnished mahogany burl

And see my father thumbing a buckeye like a miniature football,

Then launching it for a touchdown, my grandparents in Rye Beach,

Barefoot among the buckeyes for the beach and a last nude swim,

My Blue Angel cousin who crashed his jet must have tendered more

Than one in his hands and used it, like me, to steer by when he was

Grounded, and even the coalman conductor on a tight scream clock

Who I waved to every Friday from my bike might have glimpsed

This beauty before he entered the steel mills in Toledo and Chicago,

And thought for a moment he might lean against it some day

And read a book, everyone I knew in Ohio now seedless and distant

From the trees they planted to define them. My memory of all this

Only as old as September and young when compared to the Shawnee

Who named the tree after its nut flicking in a swale like a buck’s eye.

They are gone along with the Delaware and Miami and every other tribe

That ever lived in Ohio where this tree once lived and laid out

Its simple feast or do I have it wrong and the eye of the giant

I climbed and loved still sees what is happening and holds on?

I looked at my father in his last bed and saw him there seabooted

in the cockpit, holding in his eyes how a hull slips under a wave

without losing its push into weather. He didn’t hear my offerings

from a book he didn’t believe in, so much as the flapping of cloth,

the leaning into it, the splash kick of wake boiling off the transom.

Like any ocean indifferent to suffering, he contained countless wrecks.

On many other nights, I had gone down into his waters to survey

the damage, salvage the proof, imagine some blood payment

I might add to the patina, but on that night, I put aside my vanishing

into the ink of some ancient faded ledger between us and stayed

at the low, wet rail and we made the turn through the eye of the wind

and together found the morning. One of us heard the ocean over the dune.