The Innisfree Poetry Journal

www.innisfreepoetry.org

by Robert Joe Stout

Eight-Year-Old on a Speedboat

Through hot white glare

heard his best friend's father laugh

— syllables like gun bursts

from his stance behind the wheel —

saw his best friend's face

absorb the shrapnel

of rough and tumble compliments

so different from his father's

abstract murmurings,

his mother's

fragile health.

The laugh again,

a burst of speed,

horizons swerved and disappeared,

the hurtling past

of spray and clouds

his best friend's mother's

thrust back gasp,

best friend's sister

clinging to her cap,

coral cliffs

pounding so hard 

he couldn't breathe

all by himself in spacelessness

then tilting deck,

rainbows of wet,

his best friend's glance