From The Math Campers

DAN CHIASSON | 93 q&a I owned “East Coker” on cassette. We’re close to Middlebury now, I pause and ask my girlfriend how she likes the line, “In my beginning is my end.” She’s deep inside her mind; a memory of her father, this would have been the farm in Charlotte, highbush blueberry under a canopy of Red Pines. He’s picking blueberries for pies, she rolls in a bed of fragrant needles; she’s nine or ten. Later, by the lake, they eat leftovers with lemon juice. Now the houses rise and fall, I pause— isn’t that beautiful? Are extended, are removed… And now she’s in the backyard of the house on Pearl, Reggae Fest weekend, high: this was the summer the stars could physically be touched, palmed, released like butterflies in the electric heat of the city. poetry From The Math Campers Dan Chiasson 94 | DAN CHIASSON How beautiful it was. How beautiful we were, growing up beside the lake, with the west right over there, back east where we still were, and in between, Juniper Island where we paddled our kayaks, got high, tied up, and slept. Past campfires: little ash­smudge flowers in the sand. Ours is still visible from the pier, the balcony. I swear I was in both places— on the balcony, on the beach— not as a metaphor, I swear, but split, or doubled— that was me and that was me, with Sean and Mike and Dave and the star cattle and Tom whose rat­a­tat­tat was shame, Tom’s brother too, his Adonis turbo boost backhand that rent in twain the Mt. Mansfield first doubles team, the champions. DAN CHIASSON | 95 At least the island wasn’t someone’s failed attempt to halt time. It had that in common with Pinhead and The Decentz and the other bands, whose homegrown new wave was Television plus The Clash divided by Sunday Reggae on RUV. The dread DJ ripped hits on air. 96 | DAN CHIASSON The balcony, the might have been, wasn’t mine. The party on the balcony, not mine, was mine; the when belongs to nobody. Josh True was there, his kids like little animals around his knee, my kids in the phase before the phase when they’re impressionable. I could touch you, though I never touched you, not until this chain­link conundrum made space­time belly flop. That’s me, much farther on in time; you lag behind, in bright blue flashing neon I Love You cornflower shadow on snow. DAN CHIASSON | 97 We made out lazily, for hours— cf. the underwater scenes in “L’Atalante.” It was late, our dreams crossed and we were nine together, walking home. It was getting late, and you could feel the strain of all the things that hadn’t happened yet not happening or getting ready to happen, or the period prior to their happening ending, the lead up to the prize bull’s for­profit climax. 98 | DAN CHIASSON euphrasy & rue He was writing an autumn journal, he wrote, because in autumn everything abundant was dying. The old themes had “proven true.” A source confirms. His own death and the death of everyone he loved confronted him on his long runs at dusk, in the woods. He went into nature, to make a pinprick of his eyesight. He focused on small blossoming things and magenta berries at the end of fall. Lines of poetry came into his mind as he ran: The tangled bine­ stems scored the sky. An artery upon a hill. It may just be my mind, he thought. It may just be my mind. He wrote: “It may just be my mind.” He wrote: “In the branch overhead, the nightjar, The manic neighbor, told dirty jokes. Mothers moved their babies to another tree alarmed to see how far he had fallen.” DAN CHIASSON | 99 that fall, he had been invited to live, for a time, in a famous poet’s apartment, among the books and objects that the poet had left behind when he died. The apartment was on the Sound, on a little V of land with rocky beaches and foggy moors, high up where...