South Fork Poetry: ‘Master Dogen Walks on the South Fork’

The eyes of the fox are shells,

Her home is sand, this luminous beach.

She is washed by saltwater, bleached by sun,

Wrapped in the calcium ribbon of shellfish.

Her body is a skeletal map, a lens, a geographic mark.

Did she leave the security of oaks,

Descend the dune of scrub and marl,

Or rise, carried by the waves of the Sound?

Myriad things come forth

To make the map of eyes and bone,

To mark the art of shell and stone.

Water, wind, stone, luminous sand, wind, water . . .

    The above is a new poem by Scott Chaskey, who runs the Peconic Land Trust’s Quail Hill Farm in Amagansett. He will read from his work on Nov. 21 at 7 p.m. at Neoteric Fine Art in that hamlet, joined by L. Lukas Ortiz, a Colombian-born poet who lives in Springs. The event is courtesy of Hunt & Light, an East Hampton publisher of poetry.