cloth
the secret ill-wisher chewing from inside
the heartâs red apple to rot it out.
I cast away my anger like spoiled milk.
Let the salty wind air the house and cleanse
the stain of betrayal from the new year.
This small and intimate place
1 .
The moor land, the dry land ripples
bronzed with blueberry. The precise
small hills sculpted with glittering
kinnikinnick broil under the sharp
tack of the red-tailed hawk cruising
in middle air. A vesper sparrow
gives its repetitive shrill sad cry
and the air shimmers with drought.
The sea is always painting itself
on the sky, which dips low here.
Light floods the eyes tight and dry.
Light scours out the skull
like an old kitchen sink made clean.
We are cured in sunlight like salt cod.
2 .
We are cured in sunlight like salt cod
stiffened and rot repellent and long
lived, long lasting. The year-rounders
are poor. All summer they wait tables
for the tourists, clean the houses
of the summer people, sell them jam, fish,
paintings, build their dwellings, wait
for the land to be clean and still again.
Yet blueberries, black- and elderberries,
beach plum grow where vacation homes
for psychiatrists are not yet built.
We gather oysters, dig clams. We burn
oak, locust, pitch pine and eat much fish
as do the other scavengers, the gulls.
3 .
As do the other scavengers, the gulls,
we suffer, prey on the tidesâ rise and ebb
of plenty and disaster, the slick that chokes
the fisheries, the restaurant sewage
poisoning mussels, the dump leaching
lead into the water table; the lucky winter
storm that tosses up surf clams or squid
in heaps for food, fertilizer, future plenty.
This land is a tablet on which each pair
of heels writes itself, the raw scar
where the dirt bike crossed, the crushed
tern chicks where the ORV roared through,
the dune loosed over trodden grasses.
We are intimate with wind and water here.
4 .
We are intimate with wind. Once
this was a land of windmills flapping
sails like a stationary race of yachts.
We learn the winds on face and shingles,
the warm wind off the Gulf Stream in winter,
the norâeaster piling up snow and wrecks,
the west wind that hustles the rain clouds
over and out to sea, the cold northwest.
We are intimate with water, lapped around,
the sea tearing at the land, castling it up,
damp salty days with grey underworld light
when sneakers mold like Roquefort, paper wilts.
On moors webbed in fog we wander, or wade
in the salt marsh as the wet lands ripple.
How grey, how wet, how cold
They are bits of fog caught in armor.
The outside pretends to the solidity of rocks
and requires force and skill bearing in
to cut the muscle, shatter the illusion.
If you stare at them, your stomach
curls, the grey eyes of Athene
pried out, the texture of heavy phlegm,
chill clots of mortality and come.
They lie on the tongue, distillations
of the sea. Fresh as the morning
wind that tatters the mist.
Sweet as cream but with that bottom
of granite, the taste of deep well
water drawn up on the hottest day,
the vein of slate in true Chablis,
the kiss of acid sharpening the tongue.
They slip down quick as minnows
darting to cover, and the mouth
remembers sex. Both provide
a meeting of the primitive
and worldly, in that we do
little more for oysters than the gull
smashing the shells on the rocks
or the crab wrestling them open,
yet in subtle flavor and the choice
to taste them raw comes a delicacy
not of the brain but of the senses
and the wit to leave perfection bare.
Deer couchant
Seen from the air, when the small plane
veers in and hangs for a moment
suspended like a gull in the wind,
the dune grass breathes,
hue of rabbit fur.
The waves are regular,
overlapping like fish scales.
The Cape in winter viewed
from above is a doe
of the small island race
lying down but not asleep,
the small delicate head
slightly lifted. She rests
from the ravages of the summer
as a deer will
the secret ill-wisher chewing from inside
the heartâs red apple to rot it out.
I cast away my anger like spoiled milk.
Let the salty wind air the house and cleanse
the stain of betrayal from the new year.
This small and intimate place
1 .
The moor land, the dry land ripples
bronzed with blueberry. The precise
small hills sculpted with glittering
kinnikinnick broil under the sharp
tack of the red-tailed hawk cruising
in middle air. A vesper sparrow
gives its repetitive shrill sad cry
and the air shimmers with drought.
The sea is always painting itself
on the sky, which dips low here.
Light floods the eyes tight and dry.
Light scours out the skull
like an old kitchen sink made clean.
We are cured in sunlight like salt cod.
2 .
We are cured in sunlight like salt cod
stiffened and rot repellent and long
lived, long lasting. The year-rounders
are poor. All summer they wait tables
for the tourists, clean the houses
of the summer people, sell them jam, fish,
paintings, build their dwellings, wait
for the land to be clean and still again.
Yet blueberries, black- and elderberries,
beach plum grow where vacation homes
for psychiatrists are not yet built.
We gather oysters, dig clams. We burn
oak, locust, pitch pine and eat much fish
as do the other scavengers, the gulls.
3 .
As do the other scavengers, the gulls,
we suffer, prey on the tidesâ rise and ebb
of plenty and disaster, the slick that chokes
the fisheries, the restaurant sewage
poisoning mussels, the dump leaching
lead into the water table; the lucky winter
storm that tosses up surf clams or squid
in heaps for food, fertilizer, future plenty.
This land is a tablet on which each pair
of heels writes itself, the raw scar
where the dirt bike crossed, the crushed
tern chicks where the ORV roared through,
the dune loosed over trodden grasses.
We are intimate with wind and water here.
4 .
We are intimate with wind. Once
this was a land of windmills flapping
sails like a stationary race of yachts.
We learn the winds on face and shingles,
the warm wind off the Gulf Stream in winter,
the norâeaster piling up snow and wrecks,
the west wind that hustles the rain clouds
over and out to sea, the cold northwest.
We are intimate with water, lapped around,
the sea tearing at the land, castling it up,
damp salty days with grey underworld light
when sneakers mold like Roquefort, paper wilts.
On moors webbed in fog we wander, or wade
in the salt marsh as the wet lands ripple.
How grey, how wet, how cold
They are bits of fog caught in armor.
The outside pretends to the solidity of rocks
and requires force and skill bearing in
to cut the muscle, shatter the illusion.
If you stare at them, your stomach
curls, the grey eyes of Athene
pried out, the texture of heavy phlegm,
chill clots of mortality and come.
They lie on the tongue, distillations
of the sea. Fresh as the morning
wind that tatters the mist.
Sweet as cream but with that bottom
of granite, the taste of deep well
water drawn up on the hottest day,
the vein of slate in true Chablis,
the kiss of acid sharpening the tongue.
They slip down quick as minnows
darting to cover, and the mouth
remembers sex. Both provide
a meeting of the primitive
and worldly, in that we do
little more for oysters than the gull
smashing the shells on the rocks
or the crab wrestling them open,
yet in subtle flavor and the choice
to taste them raw comes a delicacy
not of the brain but of the senses
and the wit to leave perfection bare.
Deer couchant
Seen from the air, when the small plane
veers in and hangs for a moment
suspended like a gull in the wind,
the dune grass breathes,
hue of rabbit fur.
The waves are regular,
overlapping like fish scales.
The Cape in winter viewed
from above is a doe
of the small island race
lying down but not asleep,
the small delicate head
slightly lifted. She rests
from the ravages of the summer
as a deer will
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