THE PARSONAGE AT PARKER HEAD
I.
A cold wall of water, green boil
of turtle and crashing sleeves
of yellow opium and soap that strike
the skin like ice
with salts shooting a night storm under
nevertheless blue-black starry sky—
the North Atlantic clears with ledges
of sea pushing the boat again
into similes of turtle. The Indian
who carved this scene in nacre
being flayed alive by cousins,
his screams filling the lake, loons
adjusting their young in sleep, a nudging
not unlike the ocean pushing
even more turtles out beyond Nova Scotia
toward Block Island
and its contradictory gentle breezes...
II. 1874
It is the reluctant winter cancellation of extremes.
In the morning
women, skirts tied in unlikely knots
up under them, squat
digging for mussels on the reeking flats...
These beaches, flat irons banging patterns of
quiet against even quieter sea.
A dog barking up the beach
has found the canvas shirt, its forearm
and shoulder of the Quaker harpooner ropecut
with the ecstatic burn that is for him
just more of a wild fanaticism of rose.
The blue complicit crabs are eating at it
while he is in an empty grave—at Boxford,
Massachusetts—the women diggers bring
his severed limb to the old parsonage—
the Baptist cleaning woman scattering them
with her black calamus broom
out of the mudroom.
It is a happy cancellation of paper stamp, purple
and faded with postage due. Spunk,
medias res...
III. An Indication of the Dance
-for J.T.
It began this morning
with a secret—like brass
monkeys brought from Egypt, the moorings
of the village ships in shaded harbor;
the ocean
struggles for balance
against the rotting feldspar cliffs,
above the also rotting
pine wharf—fishermen
planting conifers in matchwork to the sky.
You lost your father,
I think I did, as well, today
lose mine—in a single image
and its clear bath—suddenly it is
meaningless to continue in manuscript:
squid and gold leaf and blood's iron
of cyrillic little steps in snow—
a sister off the cliff
weighted in her descent
by a green sack of dimes, spruce-gum,
barrettes and a postage stamp
of cherry blossoms
around the fat orange lamp-stead...
it's an old pond of hebetude.
Children know the thunder
spills from the clouds
across the water, it announces
itself as salt and starlight
in the simple abbreviations of a chemistry
saying twice 'onions with the trout?'
Time is inert, redeemable
in a lightning strike
not from a cloud but
from the sunset, blood
down the forehead like a veil
or frown, the little sister
balances a silver dollar on the tip
of her nose, her eyes crossing
focused on the moon beyond
sinking in a river
red with turtles,
red with their stank blood.
IV. Plot
The secret is a melody, calamity
of waters and an orange toy frigate
firing on the Nazi submarine—
it is a cold stormy day, the sub
surfacing off Small Point.
The German obsession is on the Iron Works
at Bath. Fishermen and potato farmers
arc welding in conflict with the pewter stars
dull with snow, the great
lighthouse, its horn
belly-aching through a now smothering fog...
V.
(A one-armed Quaker whaler, amnesiac
digging black potatoes from near frozen ground
walks from the river Penobscot
to a Manitoba winter.
Slings of barley seed
moving him across provinces,
from maritime to mundane—
he talks to the skylark
about each happy new day.
Remembering nothing,
he remembers the pace of the plough oxen
out of one summer's hunger
and into a field of melons, sea snails and disgrace.
The blue complicit crabs eating memory
along the horizon,
his sister, Ada, in the shade of the parsonage
resting on a rake.
VI.
The sister's quilt is folds of paisley rag
with tree gum and hemp.
The breath
of her prayers for her brother forming ice across a window pane.
She delays her tears, thinking there is some mistake...
VII. 1903
She thought she wore the fever's
sudden chill like a wet
bathing costume
thrown off while running up from dunes...
A brother has drowned at sea
and her widower father
engages a Baptist spinster
who owns two steamship companies
and a garnet mine
at the far end of the peninsula's breach.
She'll build an ice cutting
house at Center Pond.
The timothy bales that box the ice
catch fire one dark midnight—
the watchman's lantern dropped
as his heart stopped
even before striking the pine floor. The lantern
blossoming, twice...
An icehouse explodes
much like a burning frigate
stranded in long blue shoals...
VIII.
She thinks it is a kindness
that her brother, Micah, missed all this misery
though a ghost
harvesting potatoes in the cold of the Canadian prairie.
The turtle meat was carried
like large tobacco leaves to a drying shed
of black hickory and cedar-chop.
As a girl she once said at breakfast,
"There is a prune-purple night
knighting us." She giggled
spilling a cup of cocoa. She was
taken to the distant woodbox for punishment:
her older brother striking a heavy branch
against the dark turquoise walls
while she, with theater, screamed
murder, bloody murder
falsely down the hall—
the father over his coffee adjusts a collar.
A pastor pasturing on the high rotting shelf
of the standing pantry where he
was beaten himself by a grandmother
dressed in ornate army belts. The storm
in off the Atlantic
giving her strength though she was slight
and bowed with the specific melancholy
of consumption, Ada said,
"like a stupid trout." Her brother
still smothering his physical laughter
not a dying man with a cruel gout.
IX.
i don't know what to say... today
is the anniversary
of the minister's death
and they are calling for prayers.
they're calling for mesmerists. the sun
is a pendulum,
especially for the children,
the sun is a pocket
watch exploding on the horizon...
X. 1943
Micah's oldest girl
is a middle-aged riveter at the Iron Works.
She is strong with a red braid
coiled on the top of her head,
all of it
buried in a sewn metal hood.
She thinks her aunt jumped
into the sea
because of a lover dead of smallpox.
But it was the father, the
father's father... butchering
more than a hundred turtles
in the suds of the headwaters.
Childhood broken for her
like champagne against the German sub,
the Wolfpack's mother with a run
in her black hose.
Looking at the broken amber glass she shouts
in French, blood on the apron.
Death to all the trout!
XI.
He thought perhaps her family album
of lurid frowning mimes, their lie
alone, would bring her to a precipice
of limestone warehousing fossils
from two distinct
mass extinctions—
a leap into the other arms
of a geology Darwin found
while burying his dead daughter
with a carved clamshell, the amulet
of hopeless pilgrims—Ada felt
she stood at a cliff's edge
looking down at the sunset's berry hedges
streaming toward
the great banking jetty— men,
she said, under her breath:
I hate them!
XII. Popham
When the undertow, heavy
with pepper-dulse, beside the old stone fort,
drags the beach of pebbles back
as if from its very groin, it sounds
like the groaning of the steam carousel
that makes
the County Fair, at night, scary for children—
the heavy-breathing giant, who would eat them,
is back again this autumn.
Micah's oldest daughter there
saying out loud to her girlfriend:
Men. Oh, not them again, Sally?
XIII.
Maurice Fry and his six cousins bent
in yellow canvas coats test the pound net
and its bright cork floats, their two faded
green dories yielding to the weight
of fish, their boats nearly
sipping at the Atlantic—
they look over their shoulders
to the clamflats; Maurice jokes,
breathless, thinking
of his Lord and a boiling sea at Galilee.
The thunderheads laughing back at them.
Comes winter, a sea hunting...
But they are watched by moose on the inlet's scrub,
and they struggle with their backs
knowing death is a watercolorist from Bath
also watching them,
her easel rocking a little in rising wind.
And would they insist that death is a mother of beauty
with her fist,
all of its knuckles scraped and raw with the burn
of frostbite, blisters like ripe peppers
across the fisherman's palm.
XIV. 1899
Ada gathering mine scrap
over by the spirit ponds
for making her father's lobster traps...
Pots with a spiral of paraffin gut:
Morse Mountain beyond
in purple haze, this
is a play of mind
with two baked
Aroostook potatoes still hot
in her coat pockets.
She says to her brother,
"I'm going to open a daybook
remembering our brother Arthur's
stillbirth and how
greedily he took our veiled mother
Martha with him
down to the dunes.
I'm going to open it this moment,
Micah, I swear on caesar's ghost."
XV.
The kerosene fires at Grange Hall,
whole chicken coups
like orange dice lolling down
a hillside—the birds
igniting against falling snow—
the deacon whose cigar
started the shouts and conflagration
now spewing forth
about the Good Book's
genuine love of infernals.
The smoke is a novel second growth of weather,
the propane tanks like a narrowing
line of mercury that blossom
over the frozen marsh
where the Jerusalem mule and bulkhead door
dance grotesquely, a smart wharf rat
stealing bait from the reddening
mousetrap—a sound of branches
snapping under heavy snow
on a very cold and silent night.
XVI. 1954
NOLI ME TANGERE. NOLI ME TANGERE.
XVII. LON. 67 LAT. 42 25 27
-for my daughter
your father's on board the Rebecca and Captain Hastings
thinks the leakage has diminished. they tacked about,
at six, the wind being S.W.: Boston. then good
weather and Hastings' back for England. he passed
the winter banks of Newfoundland. your father
confides he can no longer write: remembers
the squalls off Nantucket, a sea hen, and two gulls.
yesterday, even the poor owl died.
