Poems

Figure 1.

View in Antigua: Effects Produced upon the House at Clark's Hill by the Hurricane in 1772, by Thomas Hearne, 1775–76.

A tsunamic hurricane

I, Alex. Hamilton, mercantile accounts clerk of St. Croix,relate here the afflictions frothed forth by the Carib sea.

Mine might seem phantasms, vapors of a homesick youth,but to skeptic and doubter I affirm their solemn truth.

Upon this island open to waves, winds do shake homesand ship masts, stir up whitecaps, often topple palms,

but never before nightfall 31 Aug. 1772 had we thoughtwe would witness such terrors as that hurricane wrought.

A bitter storm augmented. Wild winds from all parts wagedclamorous war and collided with the fraught sea's rage.

We deserved the thrashing from heaven and could seeour secret sins laid bare, which crumpled us to our knees.

The rhetorician's funeral

"Eight parts of Speech this Day wear Mourning Gowns."

—Benjamin Tompson, 1708*

Long decades plagued by migraines, heartburn, gout,fixed-term endearments, squabbles over grades,committees earnestly convened to weighthe decency of split infinitives:these griefs now crease the makeup on his brow.His colleagues cluck and snuffle their regrets.Five months ago, his heart caused him to blanchmid-lecture: he held to the whiteboard trayand saw the elms grow leafless in mid-May.The wheezing cardiologist banned his pipeand made him take to champing its cold stem.

He stalked the halls in sweater and soft solesoblivious to student whispers, grins,to all but his erratic breath and pulse.A modest kill fee granted by his presssuspended labor on the rhetoric textthat had consumed him for five years. The wivesof writers learn to do without, he'd saidonce to one mate. She agreed, nailed his handsspread upon the desktop. Abandoned thus,he mustered will to mark out student themesbut felt the blood of his profession ebb.

The lovely hush of sacred scholarshipbecame too much. His Sunday mornings limpedaway on legs of reveries recalledfrom childhood: wheatfields, frog ponds, tails of starsseen mounting upward as they fell. Such toilto see a simple copyright affixed.So long between promotions. Let him lieat peace in parlor state. Afford his spentheart respite from the tedium of leagues and cabinets, commissions, bureaus and boards.Grant him what the university does not.As his apt heir I know whereof I speak.

Ubi sunt

Lost in fog, frothing waves,no sails in sight, only grey gullsmewing and terns whose wings rip

the silken fabric of the air.The mariner is rowing, cold,a long way to go, feeling the loss

of comrades, isolation hurtful to the soul.Petrels mock the cries he mutes,the vowels he gulps before they erupt.

The brevity of life, the heftof mortality, the cosmic loom of loss weavesdoom dark as any wave-drenched cave.

Ubi sunt, the old scholastics calledhis mood. Where did it go?How did everything go so wrong?

Ducks and geese huddle on the seafor comfort. Succor in numbers,the outer birds sentineling,

necks stretched, eyes on the sky.The old mariner craneswhen his oar-boat mounts a froth-top.

Centuries inland

When you come up the trail that leads from the bayand underfoot crush clam or mussel shellsdried to lime, dropped by crows from fir-top,and in a snag overhead you see the osprey nestto which you climb and look for eggs, their shards;

when you come to the stream in the meadow of sedgewhere you hear the trout splash before it slipsfrom the shallows to a cut in the bankas you have stepped from a fieldor from a fennel patch to shade when hikers passed;

when you follow the stream uphill to the poolhollowed from a windfall cedar's rootsand you can guess how tightly its mud will behatched with tracks, how stoneflieswill cling to reeds, how hellebore throng its edge;

when you reach the...