This week’s poem, Bryan Butler’s “Brackish,” recalls a young son’s invented game in an estuary. I love this poem’s rich description of the game’s vessels and inventions, and also its quiet wisdom about what it means to each of them, father and son.

Butler has worked in various fields, ranging from wildlife biology to web design. He writes that he has no formal training in writing, but that he finds it to be a great escape, exercise and therapy, and is grateful for the opportunity to share this poem with readers.

Brackish
By Bryan Butler

One by one they rode,
Without means or motivation to protest,
Down that cool rippling flow
where the sea stole the river.

The bits of dried reed that I clipped
between my thumb and forefinger had come to life,
stolidly displaying their warm ivory bodies
as they embarked on the journey of a lifetime.

Mine a humble skiff, and my son’s – an amphibious locomotive,
through narrow chutes and whirling eddies
we watched our vessels navigate the treacherous run
with Viking determination.

Not far behind was the sloop, followed by
a rickshaw, a wayward Dragoon, and if memory serves,
a double-decker bus that was soon embarrassed
by none other than the locomotive’s runaway tender.

Past the sand pebbles and oxbows, if they made it that far,
beyond the half-hearted maelstrom where my worries could now be found,
Waited the boy stoic,
his back to the foamy edge of the deep churning blue.

Entering our game one after the next he watched.
With each evolution more fantastic than the last,
it was to the merriment and surety of the boy
that a winner would be found among them.

For him a way to pass the time, was to me a way to preserve it,
as his lion-hearted captains’ only report would be
how the sun on his round face would give way
to the next and the next until the sea was full of reeds.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Brackish,” copyright 2022 by Bryan Butler, appears by permission of the author.