Three Poems

by Ruth Towne


Nor’easter
Twenty seasons of pressure pair
with twenty seasons of ease--
but this night, the trees neither laugh nor dance.
From inside the kitchen, we observe
the way they purpose themselves
against wet crystal and cast their boughs like stones
into the north-east wind. The squall pauses--
they collect themselves, gather the rubble
of their branches again. But the sleet coerces
them. So you pluck your coat
from where it grows dry next to the front door
and sow yourself where the wind rends,
where your birch trees labor.
Perhaps you still may heal the piths,
perhaps revive the spring and summer wood, perhaps
arouse the cracked cambium, perhaps--
Inside again, hours later, you conclude
your vigil. Since the branches and bark travailed
before, Why, you ask, why do they break
after living for so long? So I wonder
the weight of snow and the burden of each season.


Perkins Cove Port, Ogunquit
Tonight, the sky is a galleon,
a woman as she pulls billows of sailors
across the soggy hem of her skirt,
an admiral as he rolls his dirge
to the tide of seagulls. The gulls cargo
the notes that wave from under his tongue
across the restless harbor.

Tomorrow, tomorrow, you said over.
Beside you, seagulls constructed an altar
of sturgeon fins and oyster bellies, danced
around their shrine, and parsed their feathers
as if they flayed their own flesh.
You said, maybe soon rain will come.

Tonight, the sea weeps
like a mountain that climbs to heaven, reaches
toward the outstretched hands of the late dead.
And the sea, now a granite precipice, sculpts
between tectonic plates the relief
of those who once birthed their songs
in shallow bays of breeze.
​
Tomorrow, we will drift
a shadow’s length from today
and think we have voyaged
anew. We forget that we orbit
our anchor. Perhaps, gulls never venture
beyond where the harbor surveys either.
The storm soon forgets the way footbridges
and peers offer empty platitudes,
their planks and joists lighter
than trinkets and as idle.
And the dry space gulls lap
with their wings dissipates
as rapidly as we do.

 
The Red Paint Grave
A man filters his throat-heavy song
through handfuls of silt. His neighbors, a reef
of Etchimin with their arms flared
open toward their sea, anchor their thoughts
on their sister. Prostrate, she undulates
between the shallow walls of the embankment.
But when the brackish sand swells
beside her, she will not tide
to meet the damp rise.
 
An after-feast of split oysters, each a half-carin,
mark that the living retain
of the dead only what they internalize--
her black hair after rain as it pearled
mothlight but never again the beads
where the heavy ends waded; never
his Etchimin, never again.
 
Soon, the man will pigment
his dark melody with ochre. Soon,
he will reconcile his refrain—he will saturate
the silence, embellish the space above
her, between them, pour paint
into her black basin. And soon,
he will address his land as a different man.
In the expanse, he will seek
her in corners where land breaks
from slack water and crests
against blue ice and frozen sky.
 
He will pace the soft cirques
where floe striates the mountain flanks,
but he will distrust the barren rocks
and boulder clay since it rushes
too quickly into the gravel deltas
where the surf banquets
the sand. And though the sea allots the land
no monument, he quarries
what he can of his Etchimin in veins of oysters,
in blank water, in bright strokes of russet earth.