The Undefeated
“I’ll be damned if I’ll wait
Any longer,” the old man said,
and went down to his boat,
and rowed out to the deep,
and cast his line beyond the stern.
He wouldn’t wait for Tommy Smythe to come.
He needed no strength of any of us, that man.
Alone on the sea, alone with the scream
of gulls following up the Sound,
that man would row and row.
He knew the ways of the fish, he knew
the slant of their drift. “Under this wave,”
he would say, “I caught the big one.”
He knew where the rivers go
when they leave the land.
“The fish like to keep to their streams,” he said.
Then the wind blew him away for good.
We waited, not speaking of him,
Nor the gulls on the sand.
And every evening Tommy Smythe
Went down to the float to smoke his “fill,”
The waves lifting him up and letting him down.