Eclipse \ A Kind Of Immortality

Alan: Remembered scenes come back as gifts, turned in the mind until ready to be passed on.  This is from the late years of my family’s many decades of summers spent on Squam Lake, New Hampshire.

Eclipse

                         for Mims at 90

The day after Bob

slugged the coast

breaking trees

from Portland to the border

I drove Rte 25 –

WestbrookGorhamCornishStandish

KezarFallsPorter –

the huge moon

in a washed-clean sky

over my shoulder

like being in a folk song,

the shadows rich and suggestive,

even the broken branches of the pines

along the roadside

rich and suggestive,

until somewhere beside the river

the night darkened

bit by bit, becoming at last

only the night,

and I arrived at camp

to find Doug and Betty and Bud

sitting on the deck

talking quietly

watching a perfect round patch

of old yellowed skin

high above the cove.

We waited, content

in each other’s company,

until at last

the shadow pulled away

leaving the moon

again the moon,

pure and simple as longing,

preening in the

dancing waters

below.

Nothing else happened.

Bud paddled home;

we all went to bed.

I have held that moon all these years

until it is smooth and rounded as beach glass,

and because 9 and 0

are such beautiful round numerals

I give it to you now:

that night

those people

this moon.

Nancy: Columbine, roses, lilac and peony: push through the thickets to the memories, the old gardens, the women who tended them.  Mary and Nancy, Sarah and Jane live on, live in the breeze.

A Kind Of Immortality

farms fail

fire takes the houses

frost takes the cellar holes

fences fall

roads fill

fields go to alders

alders to maple

maple to spruce

graves subside

families disperse

to wanderlust

gold dust

fruitless love

but here

in a kind of immortality

white columbine

from the scree of the cellar holes

from the veins of the ledge

white columbine

on a blue cloth

on a black stove

ours to hold

ours to pass on

now our immortality

when we are gone

Short Ballad Of The Swimmer / In An Old Inkwell

Alan:   Memories change in the remembering, and more in the telling.  Did this happen, all that time ago?  I’d say yes – but now I can’t be sure.

Short Ballad Of The Swimmer

The sea smiled blandly – calm, benign –

As I looked out on him –

Two arms arched flashing, quick and blind:

A ripple – then a skim –

And where he was, he was no more

Although the sea smiled on,

And no one else on sea or shore

Remarked that he was gone.

I listened to the white gull’s cries

And wondered if I’d seen

Someone vanish before my eyes

Or one who’d never been.

I watched until the last light flamed

And stars devoured the day,

Then turned and found one car unclaimed

As others filed away.

I had not thought of this strange sight

For thirty years or more,

But then his eyes met mine last night

A hundred yards from shore.

Nancy: Just a few – and then a few more – until every container is filled, every tabletop.  August is field flowers, garden flowers, all the seeded, self-seeded beauty of the summer calling out to me.

In An Old Inkwell

August, oh August

sweet drunken August

August of burning gold

it's already too late to turn away

more, it whispers, I have more

and you want it

that bliss of too much, but

just a sip, you say

just a sip

what harm could there be

in a few orange/red/gold flowers

in an old inkwell

as if you forget

that August always wins

Wind Shift \ Plowing In August

Alan: Suddenly, sooner or later, everything changes.  At the height of summer’s rule, autumn enters on the wind, singing of impermanence.

Wind Shift

                        for Nancy

There is an ache to August, that for you

walks with the shadow of your first, lost child,

and as for me lives in this wind, grown wild,

that, day by heedless day, slips furtive through

the sun’s lowering gate.  This northern air,

assertive, hints now of fall, when it comes.

The nuthatch snagging seeds, cicadas’ thrums,

goldenrod, speak a language, urgent, spare

as the yellowleg’s cry from the salt marsh

at dawn, and the loon’s distant keen at dusk.

We feel a restlessness, beyond the musk

of spent flowers, ripening fruit; sense the harsh

suchness of impermanency; how Time

steepens.  Come, take my hand.  We’ll share the climb.

Nancy: Out after breakfast for a morning of bug bites, scratched skin and sweat – some mornings I wanted to quit, to say no.  But the reward: squash and beans and corn planted among the stumps; the pride of a hard job well done.

Plowing In August

We cut the spruce in July.

I doubt that this ground has ever been broken:

cut, pastured, abandoned to raspberry and hardhack

and then to a crop of tormented spruce so chewed

and bitten and asymmetrical that in two weeks of cutting

we were lucky to get two poles and a post, and the rest

firewood and poor at that.

Sometimes I worked barefoot, limbing

ahead of the saw, liking the cool slippery feel

of the needles, the liquid way they moved

under my feet.  I should wear boots, everyone

tells me that, but I liked the feel.

July was hot.  What little warmth we had

this summer was in July.  It seemed airless

and buggy in the thickets of spruce; by ten

in the morning I felt grimy and scratched, and yet

the piles of slash smelled of Christmas,

and the work was satisfying.

By August we were ready to plow.  Plowing

is more than steel, it’s shoulder and calf and thigh,

especially plowing like this, biting Vs in to each stump,

skirting the largest roots, tearing the sinewy skin

apart.  I can only offer to pile the largest stones to the side,

to bring a cool drink, not wanting to be inside

while the new ground is turned for the first time, wanting

to remember the cool needles with my bare feet, thinking

that they are there in pools.  But they have slipped

underground, and now I like the feel

of the dusty stony soil and the rough web of roots.

After the plowing, we walk back and forth, back and forth,

seeding buckwheat in the new ground.

By next Spring, I won’t expect to see spruce there; by June

the corn will be high enough to hide the stumps.  I hope

that by July I will have cleared east of the barn, all the way

to the alders.  We ought to be plowing in August,

again, a day just like this, next year.

I Address The Porcupine \ The Yucatecan Hammock

Alan:  A small clearing with a garden, almost surrounded by trees: an Eden for a host of herbivores, vertebrate and invertebrate, including the porcupine, among our least discriminating and most persistent of devourers, with a weakness for slices of salted fruit.

I Address The Porcupine

O Pig-of-the-woods, get back!  Get back!

Do not tread upon my deck at night.

Do not sample my garden.

I cage the eggplants

that you have found and shredded,

and the tomatoes that you broke

getting at the eggplants.

I have fenced the three tubs of petunias

that you grazed to stubs – the great deflowering! –

and have watered and trimmed

the marigolds, zinnias that you stomped

in their boxes.

I have baited the trap, and now

I see you by first light, jailed,

disgruntled, indeed fretful, even

deeply pissed off.

We are taking a ride, O Pig-of-the-woods,

to the wildlife refuge.

I apologize for the jouncing

as I drive down this long dirt road.

At last we are here: a pond,

old spruces, young popple.

Plenty to eat, if boring, and shelter.

I lift the trap door

and before I am done

out you squeeze and hustle into the forest,

leaving behind a few quills, a musty smell,

the sweet taste of watermelon still in your mouth.

Nancy: August – perfect afternoons for drowsing coincide with the sudden rush of growth in the garden.  The vegetables see their chance and take it.

The Yucatecan Hammock

While the woman drowses in the Yucatecan hammock,

the beans are forcing the shingles off the roof of the shed.

She’s dreaming lassitudinous tropical fish dreams, while,

unwatched, the zucchini reveal their destinies

and prepare for deep-water reunions.

She should not sleep.  Witch grass never sleeps.

Beets do not slumber.

                                The woman in the Yucatecan hammock?

The peas are sly; their hooded eyes reveal nothing.

Splay-footed beets close ranks.

                                 Ah yes, the woman.

But it was August – the corn whispers and turns –

she was falling behind.