Turning The Wind Rose \ Planting Her Beans

Nancy: We live spruce and ledge and tide, with the wind as a constant presence.

Turning The Wind Rose

I stay.  The wind comes to me:

today the wind comes with a sound

like palm trees, from the south,

across water from the south,

with a sound of sand against our stone,

a sound of long-needled pines, not

a harsh sound

like wind from the north: that wind

comes and barks at the cracks, the north

wind is ten men beating on the wall

with cudgels; we turn our backs on

the north wind and it hammers us

with fists

but the south wind strikes us

with wings: muscular, feathered;

its sigh in the firs is a long curl

of sea hissing through sand.

I stay.

I stay, and the long, deep fetch of wind,

the south wind, comes to me.

Alan: If we’re lucky, between the cold wet days of spring and the hot dry days of summer (or vice versa), there’s a time of perfect weather to get a garden in.  

Planting Her Beans

The Master Gardener is planting her beans:

bush beans, pole beans, dry beans, scarlet runner beans.

She bends to plant: the breeze catches her purple muumuu,

billows it out and then back in against her hips.

It is purple like nothing else in the garden:

not even the clematis in full bloom can match it.

As she bends, the sun catches her old straw hat,

burnishing the straw, the crushed brim and salmon band.

The Master Gardener is stamping on the beans,

pressing the soil, wearing low slip-on shoes with no socks.

She wears nothing under the muumuu, nothing at all.

The beans know all this.  Already they are softening,

preparing to reach up toward the sun,

up and around her dark ankles and pale calves.

Back To The Land \ Bobby

Nancy: How many times have these woodlands been cut?  These fields broken? Strangers become friends over plain shared garden talk?  How many hopes and how many dreams hover in the air?

Back To The Land

I’m going to plant potatoes,

as good a way as any to make a framework

around the holy madness I seek.

Potatoes will help me communicate with my neighbors;

we can shake our heads, together,

over the plague of porcupines.  I can

talk about cutting the gnawed spruce.

I can know that the whine of my saw

carries – “Clearing the old field,” they’ll say,

and they’ll come by with hints about stumps

and the virtues of turnips.

Good people.  They’ll see that I earn my crop,

sweating it out of the spruce and sod,

and judge that.

Potatoes will free me.

My back and my hands and my mouth

will be apprenticed to reality;

I’ll talk about rain and manure.

I know that what I search for in silence and fear

may be unspeakable.  I may go too far, lose my way,

or I may come back empty handed.  That’s why

I’m going to plant potatoes, as a hedge against failure

as a poet or a saint.

                                        My neighbors are good people,

they’ll measure my field, and judge that.

Alan: For 30 years, he was a steady presence on my trips into town, an adult child slowly turning gray.  I never knew his last name. One day I realized I hadn’t seen him for awhile.  Now the house is for sale.

Bobby

Bobby sits by himself at the roadside,

coat pulled up and hat pulled down,

watching the cars driving by,

watching me heading to town.

Bobby sits in a chair marked “Bobby.”

That’s how I can tell it is he.

If I wave, his smile hardly wavers.

I don’t think he’s smiling at me.

The kids never play with Bobby.

The grownups don’t stop for a chat.

He just sits and rocks by the roadside

in his overcoat and hat.

“Back To The Land” first appeared in Slow Dancer magazine.

The Planes Out Of Boston \ The Rainbow Completes Itself

Nancy:  Transatlantic flights follow the coastline until reaching the Maine border, then head out over the Atlantic.

The Planes Out Of Boston

I never said it was a wilderness,

just a bay so empty that I could sit

naked where the rocks shelved down

to the water, where I made so little difference

to the marsh hawk that she swept down

the shoreline, across, back, again, again.

It wasn’t wilderness, it was forest

and bobcat and bear and the wildness

of abandonment.

Until the sun set.

After the sun set, Orion ruled.  Orion,

the Swan, Sirius, the Great Bear.  And

that was wilderness.  I could stand

in an opening between black trees and be

in the wilderness of Arcturus.

Now, after the sun sets, I’m in the suburbs

of Boston, or New York, or Chicago.  Here,

where the land shelves off into the North Atlantic,

the planes head east past the pole star,

blinking red toward breakfast in London.

I know, I never said it was a wilderness.

But now I realize it’s just a small, dark woodland;

I am very very far from Arcturus.

Alan: We all know there’s no pot of gold at the end.  Rather, I think, each rainbow seeks its destiny underground.

The Rainbow Completes Itself

in the roots

in the stones

in the graves

the rainbow completes itself

in the ground

the rainbow completes itself

in what we call earth

that is no more earth

than what we call sky

is sky –

in the deep waters

in fissures of granite

in the basalt

in the magma

in the molten core

and in the core of iron

the rainbow completes itself –

though it begins in air

as we do

the rainbow completes itself

in the ground

as we do

The Greening Of The Meadow \ XX

Nancy: How does it happen so suddenly?  The meadow a green I’d almost forgotten, all the weary gray-brown only a memory.

The Greening Of The Meadow

Although this may sound like a line

from a ballad,

you may be expecting me to write

the fa la la

and my lord he came a riding oh

This is not a song, but the true

calendar of Straight Bay.

The greening of the meadow

falls after

the tasseling of the alders,

the going out of the ice,

the furring green and red

of the maples.

Watch and soon you will see the trembling

flowers of the shadblow.

Shadblow

by the waters, leaning

waiting in vain for the shad.

These are the things that

make our calendar.

The day by day returning

of the birds,

the warming and yearning and gliding

of the snakes,

frogs singing, by night

and by day.

And we step into the calendar,

with backs bent,

with the spade and the hoe and the seeds

and the greening then

of the rows.

Perhaps then there is a song

of sun and sweat,

of joy and gratitude as the pages turn

and as we

sit on the shore singing quietly

the calendar of Straight Bay.

Alan:  Absence as a presence that defines the space around it.  The poem itself speaking from farther and farther away – still sending its signal over all the distance of the years.

XX

for Nancy

Twenty years ago,

I came here

to stay a month – or a season.

Love held me,

through all the summer droughts

and winter cold.

Today I gaze

past daffodils, forsythia we planted,

heavy with showers, nodding,

to rough low fields

we never could subdue.

Around me,

books and papers of an

untidy existence,

dishes in the sink,

dust on the shelves.

It is not hard to live alone

and have no standards,

still I long for you now,

to help me wonder

where the time goes

when it slips off down the hill.

They Call It Shadblow, Sugar Pear, Beach Plum \ Families

Nancy:  Like bursts of flowers, the luxury of enough – of more than enough – the reward for all of us for surviving the long hard winter months.

They Call It Shadblow, Sugar Pear, Beach Plum

Foxes fill themselves with the fruits,

birds toss the branches

rising and falling, rising and falling,

gusting from plenty to plenty.

Coyotes

– my own dogs do this –

draw the clusters of fruit through

their teeth and roll the sweetness

on their tongues.

Even the bears

standing in the thickets, bend the

branches, embrace the branches

and rumble pleasure through full jaws,

purple rivulets of juice.

Maybe, here and there, some woman

thinking cobbler or muffins picks

into an old pan.  An old man

asks me, “Did you get beach plums

this year?”

So much fruit it lies crushed

on the lane.  I can pick fruit,

suck on it, spit seeds, remember

the lane white with petals, remember

snow up to my hips.

I never expected to be so lucky,

to live in a place so demanding,

so hard and stony, yes, and yes,

so quick and rich and sweet.

Alan: Frost wrote, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”  But what is the “you” that’s allowed past the door?

Families

We sow what is in us to sow:

          Forget-me-not, Heart’s-ease,

          Love-in-a-mist, Love-lies-bleeding.

Yanking the seeds from our guts,

we spill dusty clouds of them

over wives-kids-fathers-husbands-sisters-mothers-brothers.

Our near and dear: far and away

the stoniest soil in town.

But they have other things in mind

after checking the catalogues:

          forced Amaryllis, black Gladiolus,

          fern that lives on air, hot-house orchid.

What we offer are weeds.

Don’t you see, dear ones, don’t you see,

that we sow what is in us to sow,
that our guts are giving out

with the last, the very last, of the

Forget-me-not, Heart’s-ease, Love-in-a-mist, Love-lies-bleeding?