Mike Dillon lives in Indianola, Washington, a small town on Puget Sound west of Seattle. He is a previous contributor to The Galway Review. His most recent book is Departures: Poetry and Prose on the Removal of Bainbridge Island’s Japanese Americans After Pearl Harbor, from Unsolicited Press (2019).

Consider

I’m no buttonholer
on the subject
of my beautiful grandson,
six months old.
I only ask you consider

just this once
how a mid-winter sun
on a weekday afternoon
lit a stream flashing
from the woods into the bay.

How little Gus in my arms
turned his head softly
as a down-drifting feather
when he heard the silver
vocables of quick water.

How his blue eyes rested there,
arrested by sunlit water
streaming over stones.
And how I looked down
into the stream twice

as I stepped over.
And carried him down
the corridor of time
towards a world told to us
through words.

While his silence gazed back
over my shoulder
at the world shining
as it must have
the first day.

At Last, the Sea

You ask me what road I took
to arrive at the sea’s steady interrogation.
I tell you almost everything
and leave out anything
about my beloved dead.

When you say the windy blue sea
is magnificent I say nothing.
I rest my eye, instead, on the taut silence
of a yellow dune flower
shivering in the sun.