Denise
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.
Dealing with Ether
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.
Welcome
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
Joshua Sawyer
Joshua Sawyer
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.
The Enigma
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
Supermoon
Last night the August supermoon
reminded me of the fickleness
of time and how
substance becomes shadow
and memories begin
to etch themselves
immutably
into the hardness
of what is
already lost.
