For Margaret Fuller

 

A windy dream reminded me

to remember your name. Drowned

with husband and child off Long Island,

your carcass devoured by cod

and haddock, you left one book,

Women of the Nineteenth Century—

a sample of your genius to goad

our late and belated era.

 

I forgot your name because age

misfiled a dozen Margarets—

colleagues, athletes, cocktail party

handshakes. No lovers, I’m sure,

but an engraving of your profile

reminds me of Alexandria,

whose murder amid her children

just recently stopped resonating

in a milieu that no longer cares.

 

With his wide-eyed naturalist’s gaze

Thoreau searched for your remains

and found half of Ireland littered

on the beach. The dead reminded him

that everything is better alive,

a lesson he’d apply to white pines,

mast-high and upright in Maine,

by attributing souls to them.

 

I forgot your name so arose

to look it up. What did you write

that wouldn’t infuriate Hawthorne,

who resented “scribbling women”

and rendered you as Zenobia,

a muscular Blithedale irritant?

Sophia, your friend, would avenge

his sexism by scribbling over

his journals after his death.                           

 

Margaret Fuller, you married

Marquis Ossoli, bore his child,

and drowned as deeply as Emerson’s

Nature recommended. Next June,

if I survive this brittle cold,

maybe I’ll find a bone on a beach

and name it after you and other

intellects now hung in the sky

a mile or two out of reach.

Self-Portrait as a Snapping Turtle

Highly desirable, the shell’s
more comfortable than the collar
of a dress shirt. The rumpled jowls 
frame an arched expression bolder
yet more benign than my old one.

The pebble-grain complexion
suits a mood that requires many
years of foraging to effect.
Tiny eyes peer through black-rimmed
glasses I’ve drawn on the photo

to prove to friends it’s really me.
Despite their mineral glaze
these eyes see further and deeper
into pond-murk than I could
with my nearsighted hazel pair.

The hog-nose juts straight ahead
with an arrogance no human
could assert without invoking
the audible laughter of fate.
But the horn-hook of the upper jaw,

the “beak,” as some would call it,
justifies investing my soul
and ego in this sultry portrait.
That jaw can sever a finger
as well as drown a duckling.

It could rip any book to rags
and sneer down any argument.
Its fixed eloquence resists
the subtlest formal critique. 
Snugged in a muff of hide as tough

as jerky, I’m irresistible,
a force rather than a creature,
my fixed gaze and my appetite
prehistoric but slow enough
for friends and foes to avoid.

Cecropia Moths Mating

At midnight the chrysalis splits
and the female moth emerges,
her six-inch wingspan rumpled,
her mouthless segmented torso
limber and curved like a smile.
The male’s there waiting for her.
With a shudder of fragile patterns
they mate, knotting one bowtie.

I watch from only inches away,
pointing a camera to capture
this world-class pornography.
Too gradual, almost motionless,
this sex act defies the logic
of wasting most of a life cocooned. 

Spangled with blue and red knobs,
the rubbery green caterpillar
that last summer crept from leaf
to leaf with gourmet intentions
seemed a bustle of self-propulsion 
compared to these excruciating
creatures locked in a gesture
no human form could emulate
without collapsing into boredom.

Overhead, Canis Major crosses
the sky at a silent gallop.
The Dipper pours thousands of stars.
Whole galaxies snuff as forces
apply urgencies of dark matter
to the space we thought was empty
until physics taught us better.

The moths by pairing have perfected
their pattern of camouflage
and don’t require my guardianship;
so after I’ve snapped my photos
I walk away convinced I’ve seen
nothing my gray old passions
couldn’t have projected in dreams.

Cecropia moths mating

Coast Guard Beach

The crosshatched light has suffered 
all the way from Spain. Wind rattles
the flags at the Coast Guard station.
A few kites brave the gloom. Your footprints
impress little tide pools. Placing
my feet in them, I feel pebbles 
roll like eyeballs in whorls of sand.

A framework spiked from driftwood
huddles against the bluff. Carven
“LOCALS ONLY” warns away
the casual tourist. Charcoal
and a ring of fish-heads and shells
assert that varieties of hunger 
distinguish species from species. 

Despite the presence of your footprints
you’ve never walked this surly beach,
never committed yourself to solving
the presumptions of breaking surf.
Seven hundred miles offshore today,
a tropical storm is rending charts
to detour shipping north and south.
If I followed your footprints 
far enough that storm would impale me. 

Framed by the driftwood structure,
a shadow precisely like yours 
elongates against the grain of light. 
I wonder that you’d impose yourself 
so boldly on such primal matter. 
You gain nothing but worship of stone,
weed and shell—an effort spent
to impress and comfort us both 
on some distant parallel plane.

Spirit Faces

Touring graveyards in Chester,
Grafton, Westminster, I consider
the spirit faces engraved
by eighteenth-century carvers
probably inspired by Indian
petroglyphs at Bellows Falls.

The hot afternoon looks insipid,
cloud-hung but pale and naïve, 
the Great American Holiday
unfolding in thousands of cookouts.
Not a day to regard the dead—
their faces, round and dubious,
rising from the weathered slate
like soap bubbles blown by a child.

Their expressions embody doubts
not only about the afterlife
but about the aesthetics of death.
Even those rimmed with sun-like auras 
maintain at best a tentative gaze
back into the world they’ve left
and forward into the airiest
notion of something better.

Here’s one clearly dropping a tear,
the large but simplified eyes
blank with self-pity. And here
a married couple grimace
in their separate but paired orbits.
And here angel wings levitate
a surly and unwilling old soul. 

And last, in Middletown Graveyard
in Grafton, an inflated face
with pinched little features crowned
by carefully marcelled hairdo
and wearing a heart-brooch centered
under its chin attracts attention
from a pair of branch-bearing doves.
 
The heat dizzies. I slump on the grass
and note that the ranks of headstones
totter not like a mouthful
of unkempt teeth but like bundles
of illegible manuscript left
to fade in some further dimension
where no one has learned to read.

Photographing the Barns

The farm dogs greet and wriggle

like sausage in a pan. We’re friends.

I’ve come to photograph the barns

leaning into the view to the east,

where Fall Mountain bobs above trees

scruff and jagged as my beard.

The barns offer fistfuls of splinters,

rusty implements, buckets, sleds,

a Volkswagen in faded red

with a “Stop the Arms Race” sticker.

Bags of fertilizer and cement

huddle out of reach of weather.

Spiders decorative as doorknobs

waddle across elaborate webs.

The silo exclaims itself

in unpainted planks worn black

by tireless seasons. I point

and shoot and expect the results

to justify ignoring the dogs,

who regret every lost petting,

the chickens wriggling in dust baths,

the honeybees knee-deep in pollen.

The barns pose as formally

as possible. The sunlight inching

across the chipped and faded paint

feels tonic enough to salvage

the saddest of my varied lives,

The dogs, Spud and Jupiter,

nuzzle up. I pack the camera

into my tote bag and drop

to my knees to look more acutely

into their brown ceramic eyes.

Dog-thoughts blossom. The barns

sway in the solar wind. Chickens

ripple like living footballs.

Apple trees flutter, dropping petals,

and the early snow peas ripen.

The entire farm is a muscle

working itself to flatter

the simple demands of the land,

and the dogs and I tremble

as something below responds.