Blue Lash

I liked this poem from Milkweed Editions. I'm signed up for their "e-verse" mailing, for which I get a poem every week. Not a bad thing to have appear in your in-box.

Lutheran Sea

One wave follows another
beneath the heel of the wind;
the spray blows landward,
but lacking salt or iodine
it smells oddly Protestant,
carrying the faintest tang
of wet iron,
well water
sluiced in a bucket
from a cabin you visited once
when you were a boy,
water that numbed the tongue
as if it had dripped
from a seam of ice,
blue and glistening,
in a cave
where nymphs of winter
with red fingers
preened before mirrors of frost,
dead cold sober.

—James Armstrong

"Lutheran Sea" from Blue Lash (Milkweed Editions, 2006). Copyright © 2006 by James Armstrong