Puckerbrush Press

"Patricia Ranzoni is one of the few real voices in late 20th century poetry, in the rightness of the colloquial voices whose speech patterns she gets down for us before they're gone, vanished forever. When a poet can do that, we know the poetry will be read in future; but Ranzoni writes unconscious of this, rather for sense of inheritance and place, and who people are." -- Leo Connellan

Catch of the day
Down in Stonington dawn
can't wait around for the sun.
Men and women work it in
day after day after day.
 
To their trucks and boats they
rise in shell dark which is to say
pitch black, motors
idling and revving at the pier
'til you'd swear this universe
runs by engine. That that's
what you hear, not boats
heading out but light,
that godly fish, gettin' hauled in,
trawled and caught,
(and because of the yells of the gulls)
gettin' msucled up into day by pulleys.
 
And the goodly shouts in it
 
and the rocking talk, brothy
over the harbor.