This article is from the winter 2025 edition of Mobile Baykeeper’s print quarterly, CURRENTS. The magazine is mailed to active members who have given more than $50 in the past year. To get on the magazine’s mailing list, donate here.
By John Miller
My brother and I rig fenders
on what was our father’s boat.
Our mother steps from shade
to sun to remind, to instruct.
A widow once more, she wears
a broad-brimmed hat, dark glasses:
the boat another body of her beloved.
She’s sold it to a young father upriver
whose sons will learn the way to care
for a boat like my brother and I did.
I watch our hands tie half-hitches
and fuse frayed ends as we were taught.
Turned pink by the noon’s high sun,
we drop fenders over his gunwales
a final time — just the right height
to protect his sides. Pallbearers anew
we dress him in his funeral best —
shipshape, ready for the next voyage.
“Vessels” appears in John Miller’s poetry collection, How My Father Became a Boat, published in 2025 by Fernwood Press and is printed by permission. Raised in Mobile, Miller is assistant director of The University of Alabama’s New College.
