Spy Poetry: Work by Sally Bliumis-Dunn

Spy Poetry: Work by Sally Bliumis-Dunn

Editor’s Note: When two people work intimately together over time, their work takes on the quality of a carefully choreographed dance in which both go about their tasks without seeming to take note of the other yet seem to move to the same music. This poem wonderfully captures this relationship in action. I especially love her phrase “in the quiet of the long familiar.”

Work

I could tell they were father and son,
the air between them slack, as though
they hardly noticed one another.

The father sanded the gunwales,
the boy coiled the lines.
And I admired them there, each to his task

in the quiet of the long familiar.
The sawdust coated the father’s arms
like dusk coats grass in a field.

The boy worked next on the oarlocks
polishing the brass until it gleamed
as though he could harness the sun.

Who cares what they were thinking,
lucky in their lives
that the spin of the genetic wheel

slowed twice to a stop
and landed each of them here.

Sally Bliumis-Dunn is a poet, teacher, and associate editor-at-large for Plume. She received her MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and teaches at Manhattanville College and the 92nd Street Y. Her poems have appeared in various publications, including the Paris Review, Plume, and the New York Times. She has published three collections of poetry: Talking Underwater (2007), Second Skin (2009), and Galapagos Poems (2016). “Work” appears in her most recent publication, Echolocation (2018). Posted here with permission of the author.