POEMS & EXCERPTS
I Was A Shipwreck Scholar
from Nectar rising
The meadow’s buried and reaching heart,
the siphon and pump of change,
will swell roots with tissue and pith
and pressure their interlacing span to absorb,
will inspirit liquid up into narrow spaces,
nectar up stamen,
water up stalks and stems
that want to be structures of wood.
The field’s vascular schema,
its ducts and vessels,
its capillaries of intent
at last delivering its meaning in lasting stands and copses,
where change is lastingly slight.
from I hear my father in the meadow now
I hear my father in the meadow now
pleading with the milkweed
to ready for the monarch
that no longer arrives.
He is grumbling I told you so
about the unsowed seed,
the fade of the meadowlark,
and the dying in the hives.
Bats dazzling blackly
That long time ago
just after nightfall
standing in the wind
in the bygone sheep pasture
anchoring my feet
in the shallow grass
at the shelf of the bay
by the shoal of the town
looking over at the old white farmhouse
one naked spotlight burning on the outside peak
inking a geometry of shadows where it does not reach
throwing into relief where it does
the rounded green gleam of the ’49 Chevy
the slightly swinging tracery of the rope hammock
the billowing sag of the crab net left leaning
watching the bats dazzling blackly
through the drapery of light
hearing the oars and oarlocks
of a rowboat going back and forth
down in Cedar Cove
and the carefree voices carrying themselves up to me
all beaconed dimly
but enough
through the dappled sorrow of all the years that followed
from Whale fall
Down it should have sunk in a graceful spiral,
deflated and long songless,
now just a dirge singing itself into the abyss
through fathoms of descending verses,
delivering itself as bounty to the very bottom,
where the sixgills and hagfish, eelpouts and brittle stars,
worms and snails and shrimp
in their rolling and forever feast
would turn it into lipids and sulphides,
nutrients and minerals
from which new reefs would rise
and give breath to the sea.
from The seal rib candelabra
We reimagined the church of you.
Your skull’s empty pulpit,
the unbraced pews of your forelimbs,
the fallen steeple of your spine.
From the broken communion of your vertebrae
we made a mobile of their wafered disks.
When they are received on the tongues of the westerly wind,
they chime and remind us of you.
From the arches and buttresses of your ribs
we assembled a 15-armed candelabra
and sanctified you with tall, white candles.
from Saving eelgrass
Blind and chairbound is my aged mother
when I visit her with wounds freshly stitched.
She softly skims their braille with fine fingers
and makes her maternal inferences,
her sight line into my depths and shallows.
Deep under dark water is a meadow,
unseen acres of willowy green unsung –
no fluorescence of reefs in red and blue,
no eerie charisma of mangrove swamps.
Just a nursery for the progeny
of the sea…
POEMS & EXCERPTS
Hope Is A Small Barn
Hope is a small barn
Triolet
Hope is a small barn you have raised,
the roof half open to the sky.
The rain poured in; in the sun blazed.
Hope is a small barn you have raised,
with a chance to stand or be razed.
Where I stand it’s wet or warm. My
hope is a small barn. You have raised
the roof half open to the sky.
from 206
What I can guarantee
is that when all of me that is soft
has fallen away in peels,
shingled off in flakes,
and shrunk into curls of gristle
on their way to oblivion,
a hard substance
in a precise number will remain
as my final will and testament.
Disarticulate me into 206 parts
so that I can say what I mean,
become what I meant.
Scatter my bones
in bars and basements,
ball fields and bilges
where they will absorb the damp
of the spilled drinks, the bluegrass and clay,
the pooled seawater
and ignite the spontaneous rearrangement
of their crystalline matrix.
Let the collagen speak for me
in its fibrous tongue and calcium alphabet,
its protein rune.
from I was so ten
I was so ten then
bicycled, ram handle-barred, ten-speeded
summering my way towards a not-far town.
My very setting out
startled all the world’s spheres into motion,
so great was my journey.
I wheeled my hill-conquering route
under a twisting ribbon of starlings
blue angeling,
under seagulls bannering my name,
under wished-for weather
that mothered the salt pond and river.
from The magic lantern
When you sensed that it could be a state of being
in which you are suspended,
serous fluid in an amnion,
your journey angled towards its purpose.
You then divined that it is a place,
perhaps a splendid hotel
like one of those you frequented in Provence
in the halcyon days.
Everything there is composed but animate,
even the air with its lavender hint.
The flowers at reception are always fresh.
Sun rays flute into the clear-watered vases
and disperse themselves in a spectrum
that papers the walls.
The décor tailors itself to the light,
accents with shadows,
and the setting is your state of mind.
Guests are hosts; hosts are guests.
Everyone is related by blood or something thicker.
The space is designed to incite love or its repair.
Intimacy concertinas in the arbor and by the pool.
All your needs are met before you know you have them.
You, too, are a meeter of needs.
Your presence completes the tableau.
Sadness is there, too, cooing from a cage
in the lobby near all those vases
and pecking at millets of solace.
And death, a permanent visitor with a routine,
walks the halls because you did not turn it away,
because you accepted it,
indeed, because you invited it into an accord.
In return, it frees you to be
intensely present on the veranda
where you can see beyond the view,
where you can hear the cogs of the bougainvillea
cycling starch and water in its leaves
and mixing its magenta.
Currency
Let’s place our sand dollars
on the porch railing for a while
until the sun mints them in white.
Let’s string them together
with fine, clear filament,
with fishing line,
so they will hang like coins caught
in the instant of dropping
from some high hand,
so they will imply
that we only spent them
on time.
POEMS & EXCERPTS
Small Gods of Summer
from Small gods of summer
We were minor deities in a small seaside town
that had no major ones.
You may not have heard of Aeolus,
who made the West Wind gentle,
or of Palaemon,
who guarded the harbors,
or of Glaucus,
who grew fins and a tail and rescued fishermen.
But let me assure you:
They were heralded by their locals
and known to each other.
The sun shone narrowly on our square mile
and brightly on us, bleached and bronzed us,
left us vaunted, hollowed us out.
We filled ourselves up with the fleeting
and fantastic.
from At the lake
At the lake,
we are small and skinny and pink.
We ignore our mothers all afternoon
and secretly wait for our fathers to arrive.
Swimming is a struggle
not to touch bottom,
not to brush against the hairy underside of the dock,
not to drift over the shadow of the dock,
not to appear frightened.
Drifting the bay
Rondeau
Past the summer’s end, I drift the bay
away from the surface waters and the day
that plunge and cool below in the season’s flow.
The imperative is chronic, true and slow.
Delicate aster blossoms and salt marsh hay
bend in the ebb, and tentacled flowers sway
to paralyze their drifting and pendent prey;
quahogs bed, eels ribbon towards the Sargasso
past the summer’s end.
Scallops propulsing up the river array
acres of intent. I just float to display
my assent, while the jellyfish flamenco
and dueling blue crabs feint, jab, and know to go.
Distant fathoms pull, but I resign to stay
past the summer’s end.
from Pennies on the rail
At dusk, I filled my pocket with pennies
and walked north out of my neighborhood,
slipping past cavernous Victorians haunted by low-renters
and over dirt lots where my grandmother
once flew her kite in the grass.
I skirted east along the main avenue,
where every third house slowly
sloughed its history onto the yard.
Men carpooled into driveways
past the litter of roof tiles and shingles.
I met a friend on the way,
and we snuck to the river bank
to single file down the tow path tightrope.
The water, palsied by the dam, smelled of metal.
The mill was just emptied of clockpunchers
and tilted at our backs.
Beeswaxing the crib
I will beeswax the spindle crib
in sections
and have a tiny new boxspring made
and a tiny new mattress.
I will use a soft cloth
and spread the wax evenly.
I will think of my grandmother,
aged 17 in 1922,
unmarried, childless (unclouded by having no child, no beau)
staring in the window
of a Martha’s Vineyard antique shop,
looking at this crib,
thinking of my mother thinking of me thinking of you.
When I’m done,
I will put the perfect fitted sheet on
and, bending over,
will think of you there,
curled like a comma, or a question mark.
I will look at you and make reconsiderations.
I will leave one small section unwaxed
so that I can do this again even after you are born,
this looking forward.
from Force majeure
The day my father’s heart shook and stopped,
aftershocks in Haiti convulsed towards Chile and Turkey
down arteries of fire.
Collapse was categorical.
Help descended on the rubble of his house,
where order would not yield.
Dust plumed around his possessions and would not settle,
as the telephone formed a bucket line of words.
Photographs by Sadie LeStage