Snug Harbor
In a game of what-ifs the map is spread unevenly. The harbor is given in detail: the depths are shaded rings, blue and calm and quiet, frilled by white clapboard on the high street. There are sailing men, merry with the women who tend them, racks of cod drying, bright beds of stubborn flowers trilling their colors in the wind. We reckon the harbor a snug and decide to stay, hoping to shelter from storms. Sundown glosses our little boat as the evening tide lifts and holds us, lifts and sets us down. And so it continues. Then the season turns and a song begins at night whistled from wild dunes behind the town where the enemies of sailors live, and we find ourselves pulled and bent to listen, each night, all night, roaming the beach as opposites and meeting only by chance. One of us exhausted, the other illumined — this is what games do, what-ifs churning into what-loves, what-leaves. Moon high, you declare our little boat to be gone. I pull out the map to insist we are not lost, have never been, but I hear one tune and you another, and when I turn the map over I see that it tells you nothing about coming ashore, and everything about where to drown.
* * * * *
They roam the bay unloved
The bergs are wobbly-topped on the flats when the tide goes out. Stranded, their ice bellies are grungy with sand. Many are the size of large mammal heads: we are in a vast field of white heads sparkling in the winter sun, laced along the water line and gazing out to sea. The largest is the size of a Ferris wheel. I am told these bergs form when the ground water from the marsh floats on top of the more dense salt water and is exposed to air; thin layers freeze and refreeze, making layers like a lasagna. This all must happen quickly enough to complete an ice life-cycle in one season, for the climate will not give them the love they need to let them travel far.
What we know of variola is that it has a sure affection for us human creatures, though what we may never understand is why it loved so many instantly, and some of us not at all. There are the stories of the doctor who worked the pest house breaking into nary a blister himself; the prostitutes who doled it out generously, remaining immune. Now they all fear this other thing, and once again it is the touch of a human hand that is worth a pirate’s chest of gold.
It is possible to walk the spine of this shoal to find your way to town — that had long been the only way to come, before there was a bridge to span the inlet that nearly breaks us off into an island, and before the railway went across. Today my friend and I took a partial route, the easier one. From the road at the trailhead we made our way through the forest path. It is a short trail on flat ground, winding between birch trees, a cushion of pine needles on shaded cool white sand. Now and then he leaned on the split-wood rail to rest. When the trail breaks out of the trees the dunes and all the bright sky are before you, and though it will exhaust him, he wants to climb.
May I ask a favor? my friend says now. Of course of course, I reply (he can have as many last ones as he likes). At the top of the dune we see the bay, the ice, all the rooftops of the silent houses below.
He wants a Tudor-style Thanksgiving, for the one he missed. So I fashion the cockenthrice by sewing a pig’s top to the turkey’s bottom half, birdy legs dangling behind — those will crisp up nicely, he says, and we share a laugh. I even string it up on a spit outside on the grill, where we’ll spend the next hours turning it. We share a flask of whiskey. Out there in the bay, the tide returns to float the bergs out to sea. It is 1848; it is 1991. The blanket we huddle under together is not one that will need to be burned.
* * * * *
A comet blazed across the sky
Burn well, little house: a thousand regrets are unleashed in the music of your flames. You’re the keeper of blankets, all the books, fading painted buoys and tattered baskets, earth from the corn mound, ropes and plates and buckets for sand. Diana’s thumbed-through check stubs and the robe Freddy wore. Clamshells line the windowsills, cigarette butts tamped within. In the center of the house stands a piano once played at every stroke of midnight, pealing out over the marsh with tunes to tease the sand-walkers, lure anything close to shore. Once it brought in a Spanish galleon, though a regret possibly attaches there now (such silvery excess. And a drowned lot). They say you know the stories of the no-names, then and now; that the piano’s song is the keen of those who went shoeless, carrying quivers, or who roamed alone, rock-ribbed. If you were not here to see the comet, you still know it in your bones. You understand portents. You do not judge. If there are times when all the holding comes to bursting, you will do it blazingly in the night, making them all known in the sky, an offering to be sent on down here again someday when another flash illumines us. Go on and burn now — you have the head start of angels. Never spite, never silence, only love.