Extinction \ Crash Course

Nancy:  Boom and bust and the fisheries diminish and disappear – even here.  Surprise and disbelief and blame, and keep on doing the same things.

Extinction

I have eaten the tommycod

and the true cod

and the haddock and the roe

of the haddock and the tuna

and the swordfish and flatfishes

of the western shore and the

eastern shore.  I have never

eaten the monkfish.  When

the monkfish (about which

we know so little) disappears –

when they go to the fishing grounds

and find no monkfish – when

they drag the bottom and find

no monkfish – when baited hooks

bring up no monkfish – when

the boats go back and forth

pinging and pinging

and the green glow of the CRT

is flat and empty of monkfish

and finally fishermen say

bad year for monkfish

(about which we know almost

nothing) I will say of course

it’s shocking, where did they go?

I have never eaten the monkfish.

Alan:  This poem dates to 1973, when humanity needed a major attitude adjustment about its place in the world, something even truer now.  I look at it as an Earth Day offering from a sardonic satyr.

Crash Course

The twisted oaks of Ocracoke

dance like sinners on the sly;

Kansas sand and Samarkand

cohabit in Cohasset’s sky.

The captured heat of meat and wheat,

the famished quern of egg and sperm,

sing Sunday psalms reply.

Leonardo’s lordly breath

rolled atoms reeling round the earth;

his musty molecules at death

make elementary a birth.

This phthisic physic of the flesh

must mill the oaks, the wheat, much mirth.

What ardent alchemists of yore

could turn the fertile soil to stones?

We divvy up the spoils of war

and sell at interest what are loans.

The mixture’s more than metaphor:

this mobbed, mad meal of grins and groans:

we breakfast on the dinosaur

and supper on our children’s bones.

“Extinction” first appeared in Fencing Wildness (Slow Dancer Press, 1999)

My Sister Planted Tansy By The Kitchen Door \ Broccoli Plants In July

Nancy:  They're still there,  lilacs rooted in tumbledown cellar holes,  roses scrambling over piles of stones.

My Sister Planted Tansy By The Kitchen Door

Tansy by the kitchen door,

when there was a door, when there was

a kitchen, tansy on the west side

of the cellar hole.

Roses on the south side, the wind blew

from the south often; when the wind blew

from the south, it filled the house with a sweet smell

of roses.

Lilacs by the road; there was something permanent

about lilacs, settled, formal.  Even after

the house went, and the road,

lilacs remembered.

Men left their names: a man’s bay,

a man’s cove, a man’s town.

They have a glassy permanence: black

and white and flat and still.

But my sister planted tansy by the kitchen door,

my sister, my sisters, sitting with me now

in a south wind heavy with roses, sitting here

where lilacs remember the road.

Alan:  Lamentation, or at least a generalized grumbling, is a gardener’s default mode – along with the conviction that somewhere else lies Eden.

Broccoli Plants In July

When the lettuce and spinach don’t show

and the peas curl up in hot, dry June,

our hopes for green food tighten on broccolis –

little umbrellas out in the rain,

dreaming their heads-up, big-leafed bumbershoot dreams.

But this morning you tell me

six more have snapped in the gusty night –

so many gone!  the tatters of a row –

and you say you have witnessed their dreams

pulling loose, tumbling and sailing away downwind,

seeking some kinder ground

off east in Nova Scotia.

“My Sister Planted Tansy By The Kitchen Door” first appeared in East of the Light (Stone Man Press and Slow Dancer Press, 1984)

One Woman/Three Deer On Timber Cove Road \ Seal Music

Nancy:  For years I rarely missed a ballet troupe, Boston's gift to my memories.

One Woman/Three Deer On Timber Cove Road

There was a pause

   as though they didn't believe in me

   saw nothing of a predator

what held them I don't know.

When they turned

   finally, without fear, arcing away

their bounds were quicker than thought.

So, not thought then –

   some memory

   an image.

Swan Lake, or Giselle

   the white flicker of their tails

fans, handkerchiefs, feathers

   ghosts, dancing away

   through dark trunks of trees.

Alan:  I love listening to the harbor seals, like heavy-set city folk letting themselves go on a day at the beach.  Uncouth but folksy, they seem a world away from The Song of the Seals – or is that just to my effete, earth-bound ears?

Seal Music

In high summer they truck up the bays,

graalching and belching their love songs.

Who can discern the music in this glub,

fancy these zaftigs as husbands or wives?

lords?  mermaids?  One

whose days are a laying on of oars,

a lonely hauling of lines and nets;

or a saint-like vigil at the harbor’s mouth;

whose veins run more to whisky and longing

or to the endless names of God than simple salt.

The land-lover, the sober lubber,

sees and hears only the plain, indelicate seals.

Let me but catch the amour in these eructions

and I will join you in a splash, no matter how frigid the tide;

then we will belly our days together,

pressing sleek bodies into thick, eclectic staves,

sweetly and flagrantly blubbering each to each.

Sometimes In The Summer \ Nearing Blue Hill

Nancy:  I loved my thimble and my stork scissors, mastered embroidery, learned cutwork and failed lace.  But the times were changing.  In 1951, in Juarez, street peddlers offered me tablecloths, "genuine nylon made by the Indians."

Sometimes In The Summer

Sometimes in the summer

     dusk, dark

   all the hidden, sought, found

   children quiet

   screen doors

   slapped

   closed

   cicadas

my grandmother said come

and we carried the linen

   cutwork

   roses, fine rolled hems

   stitched, laid by in chests

   used, darned

into the garden,

where for years linens were spread

to whiten

   in dew

   in moonlight

   we laid them on the grass

   the paths

   between pale shapes

   of nightblooming flowers

sometimes

my grandmother smiled

on her knees

her rough hands smoothing

   linens

   breathing the flowers

Alan:  Sometimes a poem, or a conversation, seems to fall out of the air like a strange seed blown in from a distant place.

Nearing Blue Hill

You say:

Each afternoon

cloud piled the mountain,

crashed as rain.

Women

in their gardens

or chatting by the roadside

tore off banana leaves,

held them overhead,

scampered home,

laughing.

Men,

emerging from offices

in skirts and coats and ties,

hoisted identical

black umbrellas.

I say:

The Dharma

falls equally on all,

nourishing

each according to need.

You say:

On the dry side,

in the cane fields,

water buffalo stood,

lifting moist muzzles

to the distant thunder,

wondering.

“Sometimes In The Summer” first appeared in Chester H. Jones Foundation National Poetry Competition Winners (1983).