It’s been too long feeling sorry for myself.
It’s been too long with my life up on the shelf.
Sometimes wish that I was Shane—
shoot Jack Palance, and disappear again;
don’t have no one
don’t want no one
don’t miss no one:
living lonely with a saddle and a gun.
Some men just want to walk behind a plow.
Other men find a different way somehow.
Wish that I could be like Shane:
come this way once
and never come this way again;
don’t have no love
don’t want no love
don’t miss no love:
hell below and the stars above.
Shane, come back Shane. Prairies dried up it won’t rain. You’re a technicolor cowboy I know but I sure do hate to see you go.
Sometimes I look back and I wonder why
I can’t touch the ground or reach the sky.
Shane would come but he wouldn’t stay.
He’d empty his pistols and ride away;
don’t have no star
don’t want no star
don’t miss no star:
no destination is too far…
Chorus
It’s not easy living here this way.
I watch the sun come up and go down each day.
Sometimes it helps to ease the pain
to shout ‘Shane, come back Shane.’;
don’t have noone
don’t want noone
don’t miss noone:
not trying to undo what’s been done…
Somewhere north of Bangor
on the run from Tennessee.
Lost in back scrub paper land
in section TR-3.
It’s hit him he’s an outlaw
a Georgia cracker’s son,
who killed a man in Nashville
with his daddies favorite gun.
It’s hit him with the loneliness
of wondering where you are
on a long ago railway
stretched between two stars.
Two weeks shy of nineteen
in 1992
she got tickets with her girlfriends
for that new band coming through.
She got tickets for the show ,
she said—”go on and have a night on town.
I’ll meet you in the morning at
Frannie’s Coffee Ground;”
but she met a backstage roady
from that traveling country band,
and now it’s hard to slow the pain that grows
inside a hurtin’ man.
I took one of Joe’s old Rugers
and the law into my hand.
I borrowed Lance’s Mustang
and a Mobil credit card.
I drove every pot-holed backroad
they’ve got in Arkansas.
By now there was an all points
on a Georgia crackers son
who left on Sunday morning
with his daddies favorite gun.
I heard the church bells ringing, pleading,
pulling on my soul.
I almost turned back—I couldn’t bear to go.
Twenty years of praying
and doing what I was told.
They played three shows in Nashville
and Johnson City for a night.
Two air-brushed old greyhounds
under marquee neon lights.
I followed them to every show
until I found the man
with a tattoo of Geronimo
on the back of his right hand.
I asked him about a gal he met
at Saturday night’s show;
she says that you get kind of rough
and don’t understand no.
I thought that I’d find out myself
just if that be so.
I heard you like to think
you lead your life out on the edge.
You say the way we live our lives
we may as well be dead.
But now that you believe
that you’re the God of your own land
you’ve got to walk a higher road
than any other man.
You’ve got to toe a higher line
and somehow make it real;
you’ve got to learn in disregard
to think hard as you feel.
He pulled his knife,
I took his life—
you’ve got to pay for what you steal.
Now I’m somewhere north of Bangor
on the run from Tennessee.
Lost in back-scrub paper land
in section TR-3.
No more an outlaw
than a Georgia crackers son
you will not play the renegade
trapped or on the run;
and you love the strange wild loneliness
of knowing who you are—you love
the way the patterns lay
stretched between the stars;
you know that when they find you
they won’t know who you are.
Trying to only see
what is in front of me
my eyes are continually drawn
away from this page
and the work left to be done—
my labored words etched
and scratched away
like fleeting mosaics
in dry sand.
I need a windowless cell
to work the alchemy
that shapes the palpable
from the ether of thought.
It is hard to imagine
any poem more important
than the massive bolts of ash
dry and brittled
in an overgrown field
waiting to be split and stacked
into a perfection of form
and preparedness.
I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land…
~Henry David Thoreau, Walden
I’ve always made my way down to the rivers. Even now as I sit on my back porch, I hear the rush of the Assabet a half mile to the north, already filled with an early and surprising winter melt. Any leaf of me could fall and be carried back to the fork of the Sudbury and Concord rivers. My whole life has been a continual returning to these three rivers and my common ground—the water, fields, woods and village of Concord and now, just to the west, the small mill town of Maynard.
More and more I remember less and less, but there are still granite walls that will not change for another thousand years and still a few hills to defy development; still a few farmstands with the same trucks and tractors parked by weathered sheds, and still a few cantankerous old souls hiding their smiles behind seventy or eighty New England winters. I wonder if they remember the kid who worked for them so long ago? I wonder what they remember? I wonder what they wish they’d kept?
This collection is my way of keeping what I remember. Musketaquid is the native name for the Concord River. Someone once told me that it meant “slow moving river.” It seemed like a fine and apt name to me, so much so that it didn’t bother me to discover the actual translation is “grass grown river.” The fields are now all wooded over—a bramble of Hawthorne and Swamp Maple hiding almost every view; but it still a slow moving river—and always will be. Even the Nipmucks would have to agree with that.
These songs, poems and ramblings are what I have to add to the rivers. They are the small streams of my experience becoming a smaller part of the Musketaquid, which, hopefully, flows into some greater sea of understanding and insight. They are the good, the bad, and the ugly drafts of my life scattered in here with the randomness of the winds and tides that have driven me and carried me to so many shores—and have always brought me home.
These are the poems, stories, rambles, and reflections that have been written over a long run of time, usually close to home, but often in far off places, and sometimes simply as conversations with my students, friends, or family, but always within dreamshot of the beautiful, beautiful rivers that ramble through my home.
Thanks, and I hope you enjoy some part of what is here.
I doubt I’d ever have taken this road
had I known how fallen it really was
to disrepair: driving comically,
skirting ruts and high boulders, grimacing
at every bang on the oil pan.
I tell you it’s the old road to Wendell —
that they don’t make them like this anymore.
We’re bound by curious obligations,
and so stop by an old family plot
walled in by piles of jumbled fieldstone,
cornered to the edge of what once was field.
The picket gateway still stands intact,
somebody propped up leaning on a stick,
an anonymous gesture of reverence.
Only nature disrespects: toppling stone,
bursting with suckers and wild raggedness.
A gravestone, schist of worn slate, leans weathered:
Joshua Sawyer Died Here 1860
Another stone, cracked, has fallen over.
I reset the stone, and scrape the caked earth
as if studying some split tortoise shell,
and have keyed in to a distant birth —
His wife Ruth died young; so I picture him
stern with his only daughter, only child —
speaking for a faith which could defy her.
There’d be no passing onto when she died —
twenty-two, more words beside her mother.
Still these stones and fields you kept in order,
long days spent forcing sharp turns on nature,
accepting the loose stone and thin topsoil.
A Wendell neighbor must have buried you
whispering a eulogy which is as lost
as your daughter, your wife, and this farm:
—Joshua Sawyer
I’ve never been down this road before
I would like to speak with you of faith.
