“All that’s happened was I got a little lippy, Charles,” Dick said. He looked bad.

“You gonna be sick now, Dick?” Charlie asked.

“How would I know?” Dick said. “Funny kind of day I’m having with everything shitting on me.” He got up and hobbled away.

Charlie took his ball bat and tucked it under his arm. He leaned against the wall across from me and gave me his sternest look.

The wind pressed hard now on the Ocarina’s wet front window. The window had patches of frost.

Charlie’s cheek quivered and he said, “In case you haven’t heard, things are going awfully rough for the watermen these days. There’s an injustice to tell about, you and your mother want to write something.”

“I’ll do it, Charlie. I’ll write a septet or a villanelle about fishermen injustice.”

“See it when I believe it,” Charlie said.

The Snow

I DREAMT THAT RAF lay in the next room, gasping and laughing. His laugh was wheezy but agreeable, and sometimes it degenerated into a shallow cough.

That was true to life, that cough.

Dottie kept the inn’s private dining room heated and that’s where she found me this morning. She sat across the table, seeming dazed in the light from the new snow.

“You look familiar,” she said to me.

I sighed, flicked my computer screen clean. I had been typing shakily, working some lines and words around toward a nonce-rhyme poem.

The freckled dog Fredo loped into the room, yawning as he came.

My mom made a loose fist and dangled her hand in front of the dog’s face. “This is the froggy that will hypnotize you,” she chanted. She put her nose to the dog’s nose, stared into its dogface. Fredo’s facial markings gave him an expression of crazed good cheer, as if he found Dottie hilarious, her every action a howl.

I said, “You slept fifteen hours and, having arisen, you smoked dope. Haven’t you heard of the war on drugs?”

“This is the normal me,” she said. “You just need coffee. I’ll make us some, you play with Fredo.”

“Mom, I’m writing and he noses me.”

To Fredo, she said, “Do you hear this? Go nose her. What a bitch!”

Not a gull, but some shifting thing in flight slashed past the window. I watched it kite over the south annex and the layers of outside terraces. The flying thing was a black sheet—a rain poncho, maybe. The wind forced most of it under the house soffit.

I typed some bird names I had memorized because the black shape gave me a chill. “Hooded Merganser. Fulvous Whistling Duck.”

Gradually the sheet whirled itself loose. It went witchlike, spinning in a crosscurrent, up, and wrapped itself around the weathercock on the Dutch barn. It stuck there, speared by the pointing metal of the vane.