High Tide, New Moon \ East Of Ellsworth

Nancy: Autumn tides, often with a wind pushing even more water into the bay, can make the lane into a temporary arm of the sea.

High Tide, New Moon

Home lies on the far side

of the whale songs, on the far shore

of the Labrador waters.

This is the road home,

but this is the sea;

we are on the far shore

of the land of bed and teakettle,

and our feet are washed by the herring

of the one sea.

We must wait here, and home is on the far side,

across the mewing of seals,

down the road that sways with the stroke

of great flippers.

We must wait, and when we do go, at last,

through the waters,

we know that our home is an island,

part of the one sea;

that we are washed by the blood of seals,

that the great whales sway with our passing,

and the moon.

When we are home, the door swings inward

on bed, and teakettle,

and outward,

on the one sea.

Alan: Leaving home, heading home: the same road, but never the same.

East Of Ellsworth

The traffic thins with the day.

The road narrows with the light.

Two hours yet to go –

one long slithery slide Downeast –

but I’m content, gas station

coffee warming my gut,

alone, moving through darkness

and increasing rain,

the car like an old horse,

knowing, from here, its own way home.

“High Tide, New Moon” first appeared in East of the Light (Stone Man Press & Slow Dancer Press, 1984)

Waiting For A Break \ Approaching Equinox

Nancy: Poverty bumps up against wealth when summer vacationers take to the roads as NY and MA and beyond get a yen to see Canada.

Waiting For A Break

“I’ll do what I can.”  It’s the best promise

I’ll get, and I hand him the key.  Before I’m

out the door he’s back under the big pickup.

The heavy guy by the hoist half grins and shrugs,

like me, he should have been somewhere else,

not watching his livelihood spread itself in pieces

across the oily garage floor.

In the heat haze outside, half the cars in the lot

look abandoned to death-by-grime, and even the ones

with plates crouch over rainbow puddles and sagging

mufflers.  They remind me that I’m not alone,

I’ve just joined the helpless carless class, worse,

the rural helpless carless class, grateful for any offer

of a ride, running the endless tape loop...

“if it’s not too much trouble...”

I’ve got my ride home, if we can ever get back on the

highway: U.S. Route One, the road north, and half

of Massachusetts is fleeing the heat.  In their motor

homes.  In their motorhomes with their boats on trailers.

In their motorhomes with their Lexus in tow and a boat

on the roof and a pop-up satellite dish and cool drinks

in the refrigerator.

It’s like this in the summer, long minutes waiting for a

break while the visible wealth of Connecticut and New York

and Massachusetts flows north in a stream.  In a hot

summer like this there are weeks when it seems like

the whole county, all of us, are just sitting on the edge,

watching the bucks roll by and waiting for a break.

Alan: Observing this place, year after year, I become attuned to the balance points, always the same, always subtly different.

Approaching Equinox

The shadows grow longer,

morning by lucent morning,

laying cool hands

on fields still green

from August's mowing and no frost.

The marsh busies itself with shorebirds,

chaff-like, swirling, settling,

swirling again.

Black ducks lift with a clatter

from the still green water:

staccato blink of underwings

pale yellow.  Perhaps

a heron kicks upward

with a croak, protesting

the need to find another

fishing place.  Sparrows

work the scrub between

lane and shore;

chickadees sing their two-note

Spring call: do they look forward

or back?  At the edge

of a quick slide into darkness

it seems at this moment

we could balance forever.

“Waiting For A Break” first appeared in Fencing Wildness (Slow Dancer Press, 1999)

Stories Of An Old Poacher \ The Tame Hare

Nancy:  The “kiak” in the poem is not a boat, but a Maritimes name for alewives.

Stories Of An Old Poacher

who lived here, in this house

who remembers Paradise

who names his guns, many guns

who shot the two bears between the eyes with a 22

who shows us the apple tree they were in

who shows us where the eel pots were

who had hidden lobster traps

who dipped kiak out of the stream every Spring

who gives us the three best recipes for cooking kiak

who always got his deer by the corner of the house

who points out which corner and where the deer fell

who smiles remembering roast duck

who smiles remembering his wife scolding, eating duck, scolding

who has maybe killed more geese than we have ever seen

who tells us of the thousands of geese

                                thousands of geese

                                every year, thousands

                                geese in the bay, geese flying over the house

                                geese at the lake

                                geese flying at night up to the lake

                                geese

                                wings

                                rush and wild call

                                and the noise of gunners

who looks at the bay and the sky over the bay

who shakes his head

who knows we can’t imagine

who says, it’s quiet now my dears

it’s quiet now

Alan: If we truly attend, our separate selves fade and what we notice is interrelationship itself.

The Tame Hare

Watching you,

I see how Dürer tamed his hare,

painted just so among the herbs,

forever watching

deft motions of a hand

immortalizing one small, cautious

consciousness.

Dürer talked, I think, as we talk,

around and obliquely to you,

sharing the general vicinity of your afternoon browse

at the crisp and sunny corner of the lawn,

lulling you past fear of stewpot,

dog bolting from sudden gaping door,

flash and heartleap of death.

Our voices are food enough

to draw you almost to our hands.

Or rather, you have drawn us

into your world, precise and spear-green,

making us sit and watch, and wait, and listen,

everything perfect and in place.

“Stories Of An Old Poacher” first appeared in Fencing Wildness (Slow Dancer Press, 1999)

P.S 43 \ The Man Who Never Stopped Painting His House

Nancy:  I was only thrown out of school in disgrace twice in my life.  My Mama was “mortified,” a good word I don’t hear much anymore.

P.S. 43

I was smiling when I handed Miss Hoffman

the rat.  I had carried it as I did my roller

skates, by the tail, the weight of it swinging

beside my leg.  My daddy said there was a 

Book of Knowledge all around me and I was

delighted with the rat, and wanted to know:

why was its tail scaly?  why were its teeth

orange?  And no one stopped me as I carried

the rat up the steps, through the Girls door,

down the hall and into the room.

I smiled.  Miss Hoffman screamed.  I knew at

once.  We were not going to open my Book

of Knowledge.  Not then  Not there.  No, NO,

NO, not in Miss Hoffman’s classroom.

Alan: How many houses do we all pass by, year after year, with no one ever around, a mystery made stranger by whatever thin thread of a story we can give to it?

The Man Who Never Stopped Painting His House

On the way to town lived a man

who never stopped painting his house.

We’d see it summers as we jounced

the six miles in from camp for groceries or gas:

scaffold in place, planks that over humid weeks

rode down, minutely, as the new white covered old,

clapboard by clapboard.

                                                    My mom, hinting some moral

only she could parse, told us each year the story.

He’d had a heart attack – the doctor’d warned him

never to exert.  A little chill rippled

the back seat of our car.

                                                   So he painted his house

endlessly, too poor or clogged with Yankee pride

to hire it done: a saint of perseverance

or a fool.  We never saw him out and yet

the work went on.

                                                   One year it was finished,

down to the dark trim, the ladders gone.

He died before Fall: the realtor’s sign went up

but didn’t linger: an easy sell, so neat and so well kept.