#MIDDLEBURY
Pursuit
Elizabeth Bradfield
for Arctic Explorer Donald B. MacMillan
Provincetown, September
All summer, town kids pose at the edge
of the pier named after you
and leap. I’ve just flown home from Baffin,
Mac. A month of spotting polar bears,
lecturing on tundra as raw wind shrugged us off,
then winter chased us down the coast.
But it’s still season here, and so I’m at the gangway
loading a boat to look for whales.
Boys dash between pickups. Girls strut
the edge, do the same. No one throws coins for them,
but I know you jumped for the bright glint
tourists threw, and (I’m sure) for the thrill
of being watched do it. These kids leap
to break the hot September days and because tonight
they might find themselves midair, recorded
by some out-of-towner’s gadget and posted online
for view – count and comment, their currency. Would I
have strutted, have jumped at their age, yours then? I can’t decide.
At high tide, their knees are eye level from my place
on the finger pier. One girl wears a silver bikini.
It shines like ice on the horizon. I can’t help but stare.
Suddenly, I see it is desire
that links us, that galvanizes
the thin substance of our ambitions.
About this poem
“Donald B. MacMillan was born in Provincetown, Mass., in 1874. He ended up dedicating his life to the study of the North (Arctic Canada and Greenland in particular). The first to bring color and motion film to the Arctic, MacMillan traveled in a period of rapid technological change. Because of all this, he fascinates me, and I find myself thinking often of the parallels of our lives and, maybe more importantly, the differences between them – gender and sexuality and historic moment. My investigation is building slowly.” – Elizabeth Bradfield
About Elizabeth Bradfield
Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of “Once Removed” (Persea Books, 2015). She works as a naturalist on expedition ships, teaches at Brandeis University, and lives on Cape Cod.
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day@poets.org.
(c) 2016 Elizabeth Bradfield. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
