The coyotes and fisher cats
seem intent on striking
some new deal
with each other
to toy with our fears
in this gentleman’s wilderness—
patches of dense woods
dotted with overgrown fields,
riven and intersected
by highways, powerlines
and quiet, suburban
neighborhoods.
Last night it was the coyotes
who edged closer
chattering and howling
in the scrub brush
below the power line
reminding me
in staccato yelps
of the precariousness
of evolution.
EJ wanted a banana tree for Christmas
so that early morning
brought a plastic bag,
a few meager roots
and no directions.
I bought some potting soil
and a square cedar box
EJ placed deliberately
by a westward window.
He gently splayed the roots,
pressed the soil,
and smiled and shrugged
with his calm and gentle
equanimity.
For years now
the tree has lived and died
in a cycle of births
and deaths
on meager rays
of a distant sun,
cups of water,
leftover Gatorade, cold tea
and the remaining milk
from bowls of Fruit Loops.
New England is not kind
or welcoming to anything
not from here, practicing
a stoic and mystic
indifference to all of us
transplanted bodisattva’s
who somehow persist
in spite of everything
and our tender shoots
harden into a pithy bark
and we manage to survive
on the mystery within.
There is something about coming home
to this empty house, yesterday’s
heavy downpours scouring
clean the already
weathered deck
where I sit
wishing for,
wanting,
you.
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.
~fitz
Black Pond is not as deep
as it is dark, dammed
some century ago
between ledges of granite
and an outcropping
of leaning fir, huckleberry,
and white pine.
For years I have paddled and trolled;
swam, fished, sailed and sometimes
simply tread water
in the night
trying to pierce
a dark, prickled sky.
Why is is that only now
have I made my way
towards the source,
through the tangles
of bulrush, loosestrife
and sawgrass hummocks,
to this place where
I am utterly lost
and happy
to finally be
as far as I can go?
~Windsor, New Hampshire
