November 2018
Ralph Skip Stevens
thismansart@gmail.com
thismansart@gmail.com
Note: I live and write on Little Cranberry Island in Maine, often taking as my subjects the granite, spruce forests and ocean of the Atlantic coast. And dogs, as in the first poem. “Mud Flats” was inspired by the town of Blue Hill, where you really cannot go ashore except at high tide; and by a sight I often saw as a boy and which is still common on the Maine coast, a solitary man digging for clams at low tide. And I first became aware of Firestone’s “village” when an acquaintance sent me a link to one of David Graham’s “Poetic License” essays.
Things Haven’t Been the Same
not since the dog ran off and you
threw your back out
looking for him in the woods.
You were the follower, he
the dog running a crooked line
visible only to his nose, but
that’s the way it is,
the man-and-dog thing.
The crooked runs with the straight,
the rough places are still rough
like cobbles on a beach,
and the valleys have no thought
of exaltation, but are deep and misted
late into morning. Maybe that
is where he is, your lost dog,
on the beach, or lapping water
in some valley brook. Maybe
he’s just lying in the shade
of a big chestnut, waiting,
and your back has healed,
and things really aren’t the same
any more.
Mud Flats
Except for the few hours of high tide
this town has no waterfront, only mud
dotted here and there with rocks,
some large enough to be small islands in the flats.
What sort of people, you ask,
would build a town without more harbor than
this mire where clams and bloodworms
live and no boat can tie up but has to moor
some half mile past that stretch of pointed trees?
At dawn we find one man,
bent over, clam rake rising and falling in the black
muck, bucket slowly filling
and after all who’s to say that mud
isn’t harbor to men whose lives
were always circled by flat circumstance –
a few years of school, marriage to a local girl,
the jobs they learned from their fathers or
at the filling station on the corner.
And mud flats, the stench, the oily sheen,
might be where a man rightly lives,
along with clams and bloodworms,
and the salt water
running in tiny channels
to the sea.
The Third Thing
When the plastic chairs
in the waiting room get hard
and holding hands against
dread of the unbearable
becomes itself
unbearable
find a third thing
holding you together.
It might be nothing more
than scraps of snow
on the north side of gravestones
when you visit after a hard winter,
pond ice breaking loose from the shore
and sinking while you watch
another spring arrive or just
the cypress wainscoting in the kitchen
that you admired together,
that made you buy the house.
not since the dog ran off and you
threw your back out
looking for him in the woods.
You were the follower, he
the dog running a crooked line
visible only to his nose, but
that’s the way it is,
the man-and-dog thing.
The crooked runs with the straight,
the rough places are still rough
like cobbles on a beach,
and the valleys have no thought
of exaltation, but are deep and misted
late into morning. Maybe that
is where he is, your lost dog,
on the beach, or lapping water
in some valley brook. Maybe
he’s just lying in the shade
of a big chestnut, waiting,
and your back has healed,
and things really aren’t the same
any more.
Mud Flats
Except for the few hours of high tide
this town has no waterfront, only mud
dotted here and there with rocks,
some large enough to be small islands in the flats.
What sort of people, you ask,
would build a town without more harbor than
this mire where clams and bloodworms
live and no boat can tie up but has to moor
some half mile past that stretch of pointed trees?
At dawn we find one man,
bent over, clam rake rising and falling in the black
muck, bucket slowly filling
and after all who’s to say that mud
isn’t harbor to men whose lives
were always circled by flat circumstance –
a few years of school, marriage to a local girl,
the jobs they learned from their fathers or
at the filling station on the corner.
And mud flats, the stench, the oily sheen,
might be where a man rightly lives,
along with clams and bloodworms,
and the salt water
running in tiny channels
to the sea.
The Third Thing
When the plastic chairs
in the waiting room get hard
and holding hands against
dread of the unbearable
becomes itself
unbearable
find a third thing
holding you together.
It might be nothing more
than scraps of snow
on the north side of gravestones
when you visit after a hard winter,
pond ice breaking loose from the shore
and sinking while you watch
another spring arrive or just
the cypress wainscoting in the kitchen
that you admired together,
that made you buy the house.
©2018 Ralph Skip Stevens
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