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Dan Sklar is a professor of creative writing at Endicott College.

(RADIO WAVES
WVCA Gloucester, MA
with Simon Geller, 1978
Dan Sklar)

Dan Sklar

Like a voice at sea at night
in the distance
off the New England coast.
Like a short wave
radio transmission
in and out and static
from space broadcast
a hundred years before
from this planet to
a planet of water
and water and black
and white and back
like a memory radio,
even though it is now.
You can really only take
it for so long, this
ghost radio station
with dead air one man
operation from an island
on an island
in an island
in the above a store apartment
in the Gloucester night.
Marble-mouthed radio announcer,
if salt could talk….
People love and hate and
love and hate and love
the cranky old loner Jewish
guy on the radio
who is not so alone
when the dreams of strangers
hear the music
with radio waves
with wonderful mystical keys
and pods and switches
and knobs and reels
and turn table, vacuum radio
tubes humming,
and red lights and white lights
with dials jumping
in the dark–Geller’s eyes
glow, lit up by radio lights.
The log book open
and filled with numbers
and titles and true stories.
A voice of the Yankee
New England distant
memory salt sound,
independent self-reliant,
won’t sell out to
corporate America
voice of rocky coast
green sea New England.
More like what you imagine
and think it would sound like.
Anyway, radio waves
on a black and white
planet of water and night.

— Dan Sklar

Originally published by WVCA.COM a project of Glouesterwriters.org
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