Pemaquid Point And After

Be forewarned, parts of this poem are not kid-friendly.  I struggled with including this poem because of its intimate nature. But if I am going to be true to this project, I realize I have to be true to all of my writings that are important to me.  Now is not the time for censorship.  Hopefully no one will be offended, least of all the (it-should-be-obvious) subject. This poem was written on December 27, 1980.  The previous Summer (I think), Dawn, her mother and I had gone down to Pemaquid
overnight and I had wandered off after dinner to the sea edge. 

In the original poem, I dove off the cliffs into the sea, but I have changed it.  I think it is more telling that the character isn't brave, or foolish, enough to risk his life;  that he pulls back from the temptation of that phenomena and his own desire to submerge himself in it. I also edited out a totally superfluous and cloying stanza that adds nothing to the poem.  I found a copy of the poem with the following notes added in red fountain pen.  The original name was Lights at Sea which was crossed out and replaced with That Night. My additional notes say: "That Night" was at Pemaquid, "the quicksilver sea" an old recurring dream. The afternoon . . . like so many.  I have in mind the glimmer of the night sea/of Impressionism/ of the afternoon/of love.  The 'diving' and the 'rose cave' - stolen conceits!"


The last comment sent me to the basement for my copies of Adrienne Rich. Her book, The Dream of a Common Language, had a profound effect on me as a poet and her influences will show up again and again. "Natural Resources" was the first poem of hers I read, from a magazine article, I think.  The diving conceit might have come from there, or from her poem, 'Diving into the Wreck'.  The 'rose cave'  comes from a line from her poem, (THE FLOATING POEM, UNNUMBERED) from the Dream of a Common Language, Twenty One Love Poems
        . . . your strong tongue and slender fingers
        reaching where I had been waiting years for you
        in my rose-wet cave - whatever happens, this is.

(You might wonder why I am not quoting the whole poem?  Well, these poems are so massively powerful that I would be ashamed to follow it with my own effort.  Rich's poems just make you feel the ache of love between two people that I would kill to be able to even come close to expressing.  Maybe later . . . .)

That night I picked my way out
over storm-worn ledges beyond the
windswept pines to watch the sea.
Below, the phosphorescent water
rose and lifted, misty in the rain;
rose and lifted, flowing over the unseen shore below.
Into that sea I would have plunged
drawn downward by its luminescence
as if by tidal force;
Submerged by current's pull
beneath the moving water's surface.


I remembered that night as we lay
in afternoon's fading luminosity.
Your flesh as warm and bare as
that sea's waves were cold and deep;
our love as mysterious and as fecund.
I moved down across your belly
to drink deeply of your rose cave's
sea-salt nectar on scrub pine's edge;
pressed kisses to your thighs.
I was submerged beneath that 
phosphorescent tide as you rose and lifted,
flowed and plunged over unseen shores
                                                             below.

Down to the Creamery

This poem is about my father.  Or rather it is about my relationship with him; and it is about our history.  It is also a portrait of the Sherman farm in Island Falls where my grandmother grew up. There are still Shermans living on the  farm, which was for a time a commercial dairy, but now the great barn and outbuildings stand empty, as they did when I wrote this poem.  Although I never worked on this farm, nor did my Dad, to my knowledge, the opening description is paradigmatic of my own youth.  Growing up on the farm meant that every weekend belonged to my father and his 'hobby'.  One of the reasons I went to work at 15 was to get off that farm and to exercise some control over my time.  And to this day, I feel uneasy just 'sitting around' on the weekend - reading a book or watching a movie.  My experience as a child and a teenager colored , naturally, my own experience as a father.  In particular, I seldom if ever have asked my children to help me.  They grew up free to do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted.  They never had to know the dread I felt on Saturday mornings, waiting to be called to work. Would we have been closer if they had had to help me fix fences or get in hay?  I'll never know.  I suspect they would have harbored the same resentment I felt, so I think I made the right choice. Even so, of course, by the time I was in college (when this poem was written), I was already nostalgic for rural life. Or was it a nostalgia for all things forgotten and left unattended?

I wish I could tell you where the quote in the final stanza comes from, but I can't find it in my notes. And again with the banging door. . . .

                                                i
Behind my father, I skipped and pranced,
Following his patient, rumpled bulk,
His great-bear, lumbering gait;
Down that narrow way we went - 
                                 Down to the creamery.


Clean winds, keen and swift,
Over rain-washed oat fields rushed
To push the bright grass down.
Into the mud-slick path beside the barn
Our splattered boots pressed
Leaf and stalk into the sodden earth.
Against the grey morning, 
Blustery clouds rolling on across the sky, 
Stood,
               White and fresh,
                                            The creamery.


Inside: white walls, white floor, and stainless
Steel; glistening mechanisms churned and throbbed,
                              Oblivious to our coming.
Empty bottles for milk and,
Smaller, cream, waited to be filled . . . . .


                                         ii
I believe they wait there still,
As cobwebs weave the corners tight.
The abandon separator rusts in silence,
While sunbeams flow in through
Dusty window panes.
Loose doors bang in the breeze now,
Left forgotten an age ago.
"And my child heart is dancing
with a ghost on the narrow path."
Down beside the barn
                        Down to the creamery.
                                  
      

Dusk in the Canadian Rockies, 1898

I strongly identify with my Canadian background.  My grandmother on my mother's side was a Canadian national and our family originally immigrated to Nova Scotia from France in the 18th Century.  Northern Maine, where my family is from, is not very different from New Brunswick to the East and Quebec to the West.  This imagist poem, however, really owes a debt to Robert W. Service and the poem, The Heart of the Sourdough.  I once had an magazine advertisement for Yukon Jack posted above my desk . (I actually found this image from a site that is selling a copy of a poster of the ad - oh how I love the Internet!) To the left of the character in picture where quoted these lines from the Heart of the Sourdough:

"I have clinched and closed with the naked North, I have learned to defy and defend,
Shoulder to shoulder we have fought it out - yet the Wild must win in the end."

I loved that sentiment and tried to give my mental picture of that in this image in this poem.  I think that I was also thinking of Jeremiah Johnson. I wanted to convey the details, and the grandeur, but also the mounting concern of the character that they might lose the fight with nature and get caught out in the cold at night.  I have never been to the Canadian Rockies or mushed a sled dog, but hey, read Service's biography and you will find he wasn't the hard-bitten Klondiker we all imagine him to be either: doesn't detract from the poem. The spacing and punctuation in the poem are by design.

Mountains
    snow bound  purple coolness
Gurgling death-cold streams
  feed stands of naked aspens.
Desolate
                            splendor.


Sledding through this pass
steep  snow-misty mountains
Drink
   this cold and bitter wind that has
 flown across the plains of snow.
It brushes silver spangles into 
          your buffalo robe.


Low  golden sun       half-eaten
  by the western  mountains  casts
Giant candle shows   with the rocky crags
Their silhouettes
                           arch across the pass.
Winter night soon upon us
        and the dogs heave at their traces
 eager to make camp and wolf their
                                                       frozen fish.


Go  Malamute  the frost lurks
                                                at our heels.
And the moon is dark tonight.  

Note With Flowers

This little love poem reflects the influence of reading Rilke.  I was fascinated by the density of his language and tried to reflect that in this poem by using internal rhymes to make it , in my mind, intertwined.  I haven't written many poems that rhyme and even here, I was inconsistent in style. The reference to the rose is also a tip of the pen to him.

The poem was, of course, written for Dawn.  I can't remember the circumstances that required flowers, but I am certain it was some form of apology for my behavior.  During those early years there was lots of 'twisting and bending' as there often is in the first years of a marriage.  Many mistakes were made, but none, fortunately , would be ultimately fatal to the relationship.

The rose blooms; blush red passion's
Delicate heat - so too our love consumes.
We burn, leave ash where from
The new bird springs complete.
Our hope - a dove
With this no other love
                                                Competes.

Mountain Stream near Stonehouse, New Hampshire

This second poem in the collection was written, I think, with a place I went camping as a Boy Scout in mind.  It is one of the group of poems I identified in the selection as 'Imagist'. After I submitted it, I went back at some point and cleaned it up a bit. There are a couple of lines I will remove today, but the biggest change is a gender change.At the time I wrote most of these poems, I was very much under the influence of feminist poets, especially Adrienne Rich.  My previous reading of poetry had been eclectic to say the least, with William Carlos Williams being the second most influential.  However, for some reason, I tended in these poems to identify the poet as female.  Connecting with my anima?  I don't know.  But now it seems contrived.  In the original, then, where it read 'her', I have replaced it with 'his'.  I obviously was referring to myself when I imagined the plunge into the ever-moving stream. Photo found here.

Purling rivelette running downward
Between pools , those icy keeps.
Running downward , swirling over
Stones made smooth and ledges
Softened under your unceasing
Presence.
Snow water synthesizes purity
of form and motion, swirls and
Gurgles over sand and stone,
But always running  day and night
Always headed downward.


Catch morning sunlight glitters,
Drink midnight darkness,
Absorb all the light into 
Your crystalline nature.  Purified
in icy clarity.


You suck the breath
from swimmer's chest - 
Goose flesh shocked;
Lace icy thongs around 
The swimmer's temples,
And bring him  gasping
Through your surface.
The mirrored clouds scatter
From him   skitter on the waves.


Without ceasing, china ribbon, 
You run down from these snow
Mountains and barren forests -
You run downward
To the sea.