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?

Inside Outside \ Facing Morning

Alan:  April is whiplash weather, an ache for new growth, a depleted woodpile: weariness and wanting.

Inside Outside

Standing at the stove,

waiting for the kettle to boil,

I look out on April dusk,

the day’s snow we’re already sick of,

bird feeders rocking in the wind,

strips of bark torn half off the birches,

twitching,

and suddenly think: I am

only alive in this moment,

which has occurred to us all and

which is worth laughing

or crying about

I suppose.

Nancy:  Slow waking on a summer day – my day cued by the sun – the fishermen by the tides.

Facing Morning

Too dark to see my watch.

Find my moosehide mocs by scuffing

             my feet across the floor.

Check Venus:  I’ve time to put the kettle on,

             make a pot of coffee, drink the first cup

             before sunrise.

A few yips from the woods, a bark from

             my dog.  Scratch of a match.

Last night the big barred owl was hunting,

             now she’s shaking her feathers, settling

             against the trunk of a fir.

Extraordinary morning star.  Mug, cream,

             the first best wonderful bitter mouthful.

Across the bay, across the wooded mass

             of Crows Neck, in the next bay west,

             the stutter of an engine.

Fisherman.  I wonder who woke him, got him on

             the water so early.

I wonder if he has a thermos of coffee.

Maybe he’s standing there, happy to be

             sipping it, one hand on the wheel,

             watching the horizon.

Sun just nipping the window.  Another cup

             in the pot.

“Facing Morning” first appeared in Fencing Wildness (Slow Dancer Press, 1999).

Taking Away The Mountain \ Where I Fished With My Father

Alan:  Another poem for my brother Don.  For a long time, I couldn’t believe he was really gone, or how, or why. 

Taking Away The Mountain

I looked up this morning, and saw that they

had taken away the mountain.

“They” being just an expression: some conspiracy –

persons or forces unknown.

It happened in the night without tumult or dust,

bulldozers, prior notification:

this mountain, there in the long dark range,

backing my days, hardly noticed

over the shoulder, one horizon or another.

Now its absence a rebuke: a gap

visited over and over by the tongue.

Mountain, I looked up and saw that you were gone,

and the place where you were filled me with sadness.

I looked again: all the mountains clouds, it seems,

or even stranger beings – less substantial – all along.

Nancy:  The unplanned shaping of a life.  A time machine as simple as a footprint on a muddy bank, the smell of woodsmoke mixed with mist rising from water.

Where I Fished With My Father

From the banks of the slow streams

           poles buckets walk low chatter

           above my head

           long legs short legs catch up

           my pole my bobber my fish

           everyone laughing

           little girl little fish

           pat it pat it put it back

and cold ponds

           tall quiet man and gangly girl

           opening his childhood

           passing on mists and names

           receiving dawns and silences

           learning kindling

           the ways of a fire

           the taste of fish

and by the Tawasentha

           I’m showing you this

           you can always come here

           you can come alone

           yes

           you’re a big girl now

           leave us a note

           just say gone fishing by the creek

And when I flew home

           back to my own family

           with his tackle box

           his rod case

           his ashes

           there were many waters still

           where it was quiet

           or misty

           and I fished with my father.

Easter Morning \ Journal Entry

Alan:  Mid-April: so much promised, so much withheld.

Easter Morning

I.

Out on the bay flats

a figure in a white wind-breaker

bent double, hacking at the mud

for clams.

The blue sky arches over all

cloudless and cold.

The sun will warm the soil in its beds

enough for turning.

I must prepare a garden.

The clam digger and I

in the same stone church

of necessity and choice.

II.

It is such a weak word, “depression.”

No suggestion of the way dreams claw at one,

the every-morning flail

from the crypt of sleep.

No sense of the craving for extinction,

the lying there with weight on the chest

until finally, out of habit, rising.

Nothing of the loaded shoulders,

the difficulty breathing,

constant awareness of pressure on the breast-bone,

someone pushing hard on one point,

the pain in the heart, or is it the “heart”?

Going through the motions in airless darkness,

the boulder rolled tight against the cave-mouth.

Being inside.

III.

Digging over this ground

I am aware that I am

half-happy.  Like the worm cut by the spade.

Content to be alive,

though knowing

much is lost that may,

given time enough,

grow back.

It is sufficient

to feel my soul hover

somewhere in the weak sun

at about chest height.

A mosquito

newly emerged

drowsily looking for a place

to draw blood.

IV.

Under last year’s debris

the creamy-blue puschkinias,

chalices of purple, yellow, white crocuses –

daffodils thrusting green arms

already budded in prayer.

All this rubbish

begs to be cleared,

stacked in a rick and burnt.

Smoke: the first offering.

Leaving behind ashes

so that we may smear our faces

and wail.

V.

The tide creeps in, covering blue-gray mud.

An emptiness between two shores

that is one shore, followed far enough.

The blue below mirrors the blue above

and is as heartless.  The figure in white

has risen and is gone.

The place needs its demiurge

to be any more than longing.

The dirt is still the dark dirt.

It desiccates fast

under this vaporless bright dome.

Where are the heavenly hosts?  Oh,

there is birdsong.  Somewhere,

if not here, there is birdsong.

Nancy:  Better, I supposed, to take out angry disappointment on the innocent buds than on some equally innocent bystanders.

Journal Entry

The spring buds

the waxy ones that yield to the teeth

and the soft ones, stroking my eyelids,

my upper lip

and the ones that drip sugar.

The ones that are hidden in the bark

and the ones that thrust at my skin

and the candy ones and the bitter

and ones that chewed bring cramp,

convulsions, death.

The spring buds

the red ones, fire on the hillside

and the taut polished ones by the brook

and the quick ones in the farmyard.

The ones bunched in clusters

and the metallic poised ones

and the black shriveled ones by the stone wall

lifeless.

The ones that unfold into fans

and the ones that force out veined winged things.

The spring buds

the ones that stain my hands

and the ones that I crush, acrid.

The ones that I destroy with my nails

and the ones that I crumble

and the ones out of reach, that I curse

and the ones that I tear until they snap

sapless, to die of thirst

because they promise flowers.

Today I can bear no promises, none.

March 21, 1979

Today I noticed the buds.

“Journal Entry” first appeared in Blackberries And Dust (Stone Man Press, 1984).

First Returns \ And The Sailor, Home From The Dream

Alan: One day, nothing.  The next, robins everywhere.  First come the ones a friend calls “meat robins,” russet and robust, but they don’t linger.  Or if they do, they soon turn wan in our chill hungry spring.

First Returns

The robins are flocking north,

the big robins, hungry guppy bellies

hanging from straight stiff planar wings,

the bright early robins, red

from a winter of southern-fried worms,

not like the late-comers,

the pale pinched robins,

the ones that arrive in a few more weeks

to summer by the therapeutic sea.

These are the fly-boy robins,

pausing to refuel,

the fighter pilots, leather-jacketed,

goggled, arrowing in

ahead of the storm.

Nancy: Wind in the spruces, so like surf, and an old house creaking, wind finding a loose rope somewhere – rather than disturbing sleep take the sleeper away voyaging.

And The Sailor, Home From The Dream

Would the morning light lie

and say rafters,

make rafters, make the white roof overhead,

make there a basket, there a bright sash?

Would the morning light lie

me aground, when nightlong

I went with the lashing of wind

and the timbers creaking

and the spruce breaking in shoals,

when nightlong I went with the water pouring

over the bows?

With the light east and the wind west

and the morning breaking,

I lie where I lie, in my own loft,

and the truth is surprising,

for the world is in motion

and this house is made fast to the shore

in the morning light.