Talking to Myself in This Late Year 
New Harbor, Maine 

Already, the wings of strange birds are starting up 
from the crosshatched mats of marsh grasses. 
Greetings little strangers, and goodbye. 

The sky is white as northern glaciers. 
or sheets in a bleach-filled washer-- 
or it is nothing, an absence. 

Last night I dreamed I was hunting for protection, 
a safe house hidden on a city street. Blood on its door. 

There is no danger in the way the heart guards itself 
from the sweet darkness 

or there is danger in the way the heart guards itself 

or the darkness is never sweet. 

Even in the second week of September, the sea 
enamels itself with a brilliance that comes 
from the start of cold weather. 

Where did youth go? 
Not to mention marriage and motherhood. 

Three white schooners ride the tide, 
even while anchored in the radiating sunlight. 

And two American huskies 
are tethered for a walk, white fur long 
like the thick and delicate fibers of a Greek carpet. 

Yes I am getting old; 
yes, being poor takes too much out of me. 

Here is the safe way station, filled with the seaweed 
scent of salt. The waves emit light 
as if from a thousand windows. 


Happiness 

The old couple sit on the stone ledge to their stucco house, 
laughing, while the bells ring in the village. 

There are stones embedded in the earth, and scant grass. 
The wall of the house behind them is very old, 
storm-stained, time-stained. 

The sheep wander into the dooryard and eat the grass. 
Did I say the house is very old? Yes, 

and the stones embedded in the earth and the sheep 
are old and the flowered house dress of the woman, 
the dusty shoes of the man, the teeth the man is missing---all old. 

This must be Italy, or maybe France, I’ll never know. 
But I know about age and laughter--even about missing teeth. 

The woman’s arm, which is wrinkled like linen, touches the man’s. 
Or his arm touches hers--it’s hard to tell. She wears no ring. 

And the man has one of those flat wool caps the Irish wear. 
Maybe they are Irish and have lived through The Troubles. 
Maybe they remember hunger. 

And because they are old, I know people have died in their lives. 
Friends with hearts that burned out, sons caught 
in a crossfire-- something like that. 

There is history in this story. And the couple is embedded in it. 
They know this, but they don’t think about it. 
The sheep don’t know it, nor the grass. 

Theirs is a young history, since we call 
wherever they are “the old country” 
and the couple is probably dead by now. 
. 
I’ll bet they buried him in his absence of teeth 
with his black horn-rimmed glasses. (stanza break) 


and her next to him under a matching stone 
in her scrubbed-thin dress, her blue socks, her sandals. 
Bet they kept her watch on. 

In Sorrento, widows come with buckets of water 
and scrub brushes to wash the graves. 
In another country, the villagers walk to the cemetery 
after the evening meal to bring the ancestors 
news of the day’s catch. 

I’d like to do something like that for these two. 
I’d bring them bread. I’d ask them 

do you remember the day of the photograph 
or why you were happy? 

I doubt they’d know it-- 
happiness arrives for one moment 
and then flees past the sheep, down the lane, 

toward the village where the bells 
are always ringing for someone.

Walking on Reservoir Road

To walk is to go forward into the landscape where trees billow 
under the wind like waves, you moving beneath their ocean, 

to go where cows lay their acquiescent bodies down in ochre 
and timothy denying the myth that rain will come soon, 

to pour your strength into your heels and out onto Reservoir Road 
or any road, to move breath through your core and lung’s wings, 

release it through half-opened lips into the welcoming air, 
to take in the chill and moisture and tannic smell of the brook 

as it pours over heaped cold bottomstones, the flat, round, 
angular, shining blue/brown/gray stones, 

is to press yourself to the world until you become one 
with its thrusting body. It is to, yes, go forward past white berries 

studding the bare bush branches, the white-faced hornet hive 
hung low from a thin maple limb like a paper lantern, 

green algae’s velvet-thick blanket on the pasture pond, 
while across the valley, shadows lay wide black wings across 

blurred blue mountains, and forward as the everywhere bell-burble 
of downfalling runnels and ripples spills through the woods. 

It is to pass by each white house with its barn, each well, 
each stack of old baskets, the six brown horses on the hill-- 

to leave all behind, to let those two chocolate labs, who dash 
from the last farmhouse barking, run on ahead of you, lead you 

forward into leaf mold’s musty perfume, into the unknowing 
and unknown of the next half mile, to trust faith and the strength 

of your own two fine thighs, to push yourself beyond where 
even the dogs turn back at their master’s homing call.

 

Evidence

When I walked in the forest it was April. 
Deer pellets were mounded here and there 
on fallen leaves and under low cedar branches. 

Twice I saw scat--I couldn’t tell what it signified. 
When I stopped to listen, the wild was silent 
except for the rumble of the logging truck far away. 

The duff was spongy beneath my sneakers. 
I walked carefully, and as far in as I dared 
trying to keep sight of the road and the field. 

But the forest drew me into its vast density. 
I lost the road, the field, and all sense of direction. 
Once I bent to touch two waxy fingers 

reaching up from the forest floor, 
and once to run both palms over a stump 
wholly green and soft with moss. 

Near a marshy place, a wagon wheel leaned 
against a hillock. It had been there so long 
it was the antique green/brown of a Roman relic. 

It began to rain. 
Once I heard hooves snapping fallen branches. 
They were always behind me. 

I turned in a full circle; and turned again, 
I saw nothing 
but I swear I heard some spirit go away 
brushing its sharp antlers against the trees.

 

If Too Much Has Happened

Even the rain speaks in syllables 
that can’t be found in our language 
and so do the crows 
loud on the high slim branches 
as if testing the sky, 
and so do the stones that fall down 
the shale cliffs, rattling their hard tongues. 
Have you ever noticed 
how empty spaces are filled with thought, 
the way for example, everything 
that has ever happened in a house 
fills the rooms of that house. 

In my old house on Deerfield Road, 
the outline of a French Revolutionary captain 
could be seen in the cracks of my bedroom ceiling 
and beside him, a child-- 
no older than I was-- 
also held there in the plaster, 
for who knows how long--- 
her hair falling around her shoulders. 

I’d lie awake for hours 
through the long summer twilights, 
imagining their lives in that house, 
so long before mine, and telling them 
the sadness for which I had no words-- 
and no other listeners. 

Who could say they didn’t answer: 
their response in the tambourine of rain 
on the tin porch roof beyond my window, 
or in the code of car lights moving across the walls. 
When my parents died, 
the aunts pretended nothing had happened. 
What could not be spoken 
was held in the muscles and flesh of my body. 

And you too have your sorrow 
that can find no expression. 
What cannot be expressed hangs 
thinner than dust and as ubiquitous, 
in the shafts of sun that travel silently 
and from a great distance.