In this week’s poem, “Slack Tide,” Matthew Bernier meditates on finding and holding an infinitesimal moment of stillness. I love this poem’s sense of invocation and its elemental imagery of stars and deer, twilight and tides, all briefly suspended in their ever-ongoing motion.

Matthew Bernier lives in Belfast and works as a civil and environmental engineer, restoring sea-run fish including endangered Atlantic salmon to Maine rivers through projects like dam removals. His poetry has been featured in many Maine-based print and online journals, including the anthologies Rivers of Ink: Literary Reflections on the Penobscot and North Woods at Night: Literary Reflections on Maine’s Largest Forest, published by 12 Willows Press. 

Poets, please note that submissions to Deep Water are open now and through the end of the year. Deep Water is especially eager to share poems by Black writers, writers of color, Indigenous writers, LGBTQ+ writers, and other underrepresented voices. Make a submission at mainewriters.org/deep-water

Slack Tide

Let time stop at dusk,
let little brown bats
fly from hibernacula
of falling down barns
and then shut all doors;

I want to hold you
for a solitary minute
that lasts all night,
constellations not
reeling around Polaris
like drunk visions;

dancers paused in

grace like twelve moonlit deer,
sky never darkening,
alpenglow like candlelight
the second it is pinched
between slender fingers;

time with you suspended,
a slack tide of the soul
neither coming nor going,
and on the boundary of
a saltwater farm in Maine
a brook never reaches a sea.

– Matthew Bernier

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. “Slack Tide,” copyright 2025 by Matthew Bernier, appears by permission of the author. Submissions to Deep Water are open now and through the end of the year. For more information, go to mainewriters.org/deep-water.