MONHEGAN SUMMER

  

by Paul Falk

 

Illustrations by June Falk

 

Affectionately for June

Prologue 

 

Quilt-hatched outstretched wings,

Seagulls like infants squealing

Always within bill's reach of fish

And fishermen, seagulls coasting

On the wind's white shrilling

Roosting where they will, plumed

Safe targets, manikin-lined,

Lazing on gabled rooftops;

Fluffed like flowers, foaming

On the low out-running rocks

That dribble across the bay

To the hermitage of Manana.

 

Granite sloping, earthen jewel –

Pinpoint of interruption –

The detour of waves –

Thorn in the fog –

 

Foaming, hissing like white fire,

Sun-drenched waves thunder

Past your topmost parapets

And race through your gullies,

Yet you are obstinately green,

Cathedral forests and pine

Are firmly gnarled to your pits,

Sheep placidly graze and flowers

Grow in wild exuberance, a delicacy

More appropriate to inland plateaus,

Just one slip from chaos and the

Maelstrom of the infinite –

The center roots us all,

Flower and tree,

Stone-encrusted fortress

Holding back the sea –

Your trails, your slopes

Are both drowsy and rare,

How unreal yet possible

Is the atmosphere.

Drenching love,

We stay a week or two

But not a year.

 

Dawn

Through sun and moon from remote corners

Of the seas balance and shift their harmonies,

Though distillations of light

Fan slanterns like mist upon the night,

Though sun be up and winds be stilled

And seagulls wait the fishermen's till

Shoreward rowing, their boats are filled,

Though the languid pulse be slackest then

And sheep are loosened from their pen,

Though waking to monotones of white

With moonrise melting a memory of night,

Though all the earth be sogging, blankets

Of dew enveloping both grass and cliff,

Though cartwheels of envious color

Have whirled and tossed away its center,

Flagons of borealis cones streaming

A soliloquy in the northern night –

From adagios of sleep we wake,

Sweet feeling hunger anticipates

A drowsy enchantment,

The unhinging of day from night

And the gathering spill

Of morning's variations

Swinging from light to light.

And up is my angler, up,

The limpid elf tones

Of morning to rush

Before all that is rare

To flatness is crushed.

 

                    Morning

At the liquid edges, my angler,

Your pure lines casting

Lute brush in hand

Into the morning's sweet slipping,

With the open distance's

Glare flashing beaded ivy

And stippled silver stalks,

With the sun scooped from wetness

Slinking a voluptuous bather

On the easygoing blue,

With jets of warmth

Descending like miniature suns

Splashing in our footsteps –

Casting, my angler, you drew

Wood shacks bubbling with dew

From rinse running to streak dried,

Grass in green swatches cleaved to cubes,

 

 

Sheep baa-baaing for the closed cast of shade,

Seagulls falling like meteors

On the oozing noduled rocks,

Fish bones and broken glass

Stain combed, pearl dropped

Through fingered foam

Deposits of arabesques,

Hip high in boots the fishermen

Hewing away at their catch,

Seagulls fanning their shoulders

A tug of war playing

In a tangle of wings.

 

At the dock the mail boat brings the news,

Ice hoisting from her bobbing hold

And once around the island

The ferry reconverted goes.

Chickadees through the hedges dart

Chirping cameras record already the slipping past

The urban artists that pepper the woods and crags

The flowers that pose a still life

In a lust of bloom, and too eagerly caught.

 

The chunky seagulls that crowd the lens

As do fishermen, who with twisting blade

Ignore the tourists' wandering inland cruise.

How you raced, my angler,

Morning brushing with your grace

Delicately paring light in haste

Tugging at such ephemeral grace

That shortly leaves a bather's face.

 

                    Midday 

 

In the tryst of such memories

Where wisps of childhood loom

I was accompanist to your fierce desire.

To and fro knapsack on back

For some two weeks now or more

I lazed along with you

From forest to rockbound shore.

 

This was your way my angler with brush:

Perched on a cliff and ecstatic with altitude

How often have you challenged

That whaleback of breakers, Gull Rock,

Sponged to bruised totem heights

Above the piddling sea;

Or from the lowest plaque of rock

Lurching with spray, casting

Pen and brush racing

 

Legs adangle in foam lacing,

Steep diagonal of Gull Rock

Head crushing to sea

Its amorphous spread paws

Sweep falling, webbed toes

Heaving nets of weed,

On the slipping stepping planes

Glass with the sea,

Water traffic working through veins,

Medusa clamped were we

Bare-soled, air sucking the wind's onrush –

Here was beauty in the casting

In the angler's hand

In the puppy tongue waves

Tiptoeing, pirouetting

Exploding curls of retreat –

Here plastic the throbbing

For new shape, for new content.

This was your way, my angler:

In a half daze of enchantment

Viewing all the unequaled rawness

 

Of the island's pitch

You distilled it further

All feeling, all silences

All the immensities

You scarce could touch

But must of your own casting, learn.

 

And amid the deep chambered forest

Where pines rose like armored knights,

Branches lancing through staccato shafts of light,

Where the charged royal floor dryly snapped

And heaved beneath our footsteps,

Into this priestly grey shadowed wood

On fallen tree trunks, on moss covered mounds

Treading goddess like, majestically

You took your stand, yourself a tress

Of ambiguous coloring with nature

Intricately harmonizing, harking

To the rasp shriek of burly fowl,

Smoky scrimmaging through fern in barking reply,

Pen and brush, airily tracing, wand like,

Waterfalls of sun cascading through lancing pines –

                                    The shifting willowing threads of vine –                                    
                                    The buzzing twig-laced nettled wood –

                                     Nature consuming nature,

                                     Essences transforming
                                      
                                     You drew it all in,
                                      
                                      At one with it –
                                       
                                      Above the spindled sounds, music
                                       
                                      Beyond the pitch of human ear.
                                        
                                      Here other unspoken dreams
                                       
                                      For the weaving of your lines,
                                        
                                      Here again the imagination's test
                                        
                                      That in you for all your best

                                      Found lovely and most awed respect.

Evening & Sunset 

 

The gilded mirage of verse I had

Reshaped, raking on my tongue

Is soon dissolved, overwhelmed

To immortality once again, they are

Pages flapping on a windblown rock,

Words and worlds are far, forgotten.

 

The dream dance, the hypnotic windmill

Play of shadows draw themselves back

And merge once again with the dancer

The rocks and the trees, and the sun

Like a pale moon all but forgotten

Girds itself for the never forgotten plunge.

The wind, an unrelenting cadenza

Fills in the subdued retreat of day.

 

Like children spent with play

We trod homeward, a never-ending day,

Eager for the evening that will soon adorn,

The rising of the moon we never saw

In a rendezvous with friends

The galaxies to explore.

Knapsack on back, Indian-wise

Homeward we trod with your prize

Wing pressed, like exotic butterflies

That would for new emboldened joy

Fly again with the page.

And so we leave the whipping shore,

The open glare lash of jut-rock space

And inland loop, from the vaguest of tributaries

Treading moth-eaten paths, steadfast

Through towers of gladed dreams, through

Grey deserted castles of moldering pine,

Through air pockets of stagnating warmth

Into coolnesses stepping in sudden gusts,

Muffle tumbling on knuckled roots.

 

                                               All paths lead back to the open quay,

The wharf, the village, and boats

Tossing in the bay,

To seagulls mewing

Screeching in tapered flight,

To reeking shacks and lobster traps,

To Fish Beach, the chowdered surf,

To the waves spurting overturn

Of pearled fish bones

And ornamental glass,

To home, a point west on a hill

Where on the easygoing blue

Once again, overhanging

And loosely stretched is the sun

A seductiveness at the end of her run.

And then home at last

To the candlelight hall

Where waxen faces nod

Over the pleasant repast,

Where with coffee in hand

We stand enthralled on the hillock 

 

Flushed with dew and gaze

Into the open furnace of the sun,

That last aegis of the elemental day

As she hovers over the beckoning sea

Igniting cloud mountains

That set us on a pin of earth.

Down she slowly drifts

A perfect stoking roundness

Swelling beneath her

The ocean, moist nosing

Delicately up reaching –

Motion liquefied in space,

Space opening and closing

And all things in their place –

Etched on the glow, my angler,

We too are reflected with the universe

Our fingers softly meshing –

 

Fugue of bells, we heard the pealing bells,

Saw the white secret fins of peace

Revealed, reveling, courting

The twilight space –

  

Exquisite the sensitivity

In the meeting and touching of a line,

A perfect harmony and an infinite

Persuasive relaxing of time –

 

Churning white-finned echoing bells

Anchor beams about her

Deftly drawing her under,

We see her yet, open parted lips

On the ocean's crest.

 

Night & Moonrise

 

The foghorn by the minute puffs

Stubby notes, the wind is rough,

The air is wet, the eye falls short,

Flashlight skips ahead of us,

East the moon to lure our prize –

Follow the arc, the skipping probe

Over a wide dirt road that trickles

To a weaving haunted path;

Now over the grizzly torso of the isle

We go, through pungent moistures

Of exuding pine – winding, arc skipping,

Mediating each black snuffed-out step

Light tested in our minds –

Through walled mass wind

Through silhouettes of steep dense murk

  

Kick-tripping on snarls of root,

Springing gnome forms fright

The oscillating arc and mark those eyes

The muted bulging fungus eyes

That watch us from the side.

Siphons the boxed closed air,

A tart breeze quickens,

Footsteps scrape more and more

Rock foundations, in the thinning

The gnome-like eyes recede and the

Individual trees loom as trees –

The skipping arc pales,

Its strike light pitch

Lost on the skittering cliffs –

 

Heights above the strumming tide

Bare yet for the moon

The heavens are thrown wide

As sand dunes, and in a single reference

Water and space is circumscribed.

 

Eyes pendulous in the cigarette hush

Soon adjust to the molecular stage,

The translucent networks

That lay sprawled about us

Confused, precise and various.

 

Throttles the ocean below us –

Curving bolides dream flash

Through deep, blue deep, stain mass –

Winsome with jazz the Milky Way

On the heavenly crossbars, silk lash

Shimmerings of sighing notes;

Telescoped we are the binary stars

Revolving in warm relationship,

Scientist, poet and angler wives,

The human tides of earthly giving –

Contemplating the melting of bolides

That dream flash through deep,

Blue deep, stain mass –

Now, begun. A star-fused elusiveness

It rose under veils of paling cloud.

A screened sorcerer it seemed, flush

Dividing the eastern horizon, ocean

Drumming to shelling spires. On curled

Jingling toes, step exploding kegs

Of exotic powder seed, seep bleeding

Through clouds bellowing, wind picks

It all up, geysers of color erupt,

Moon spectre, pantomime masked,

Jag beveling through saturated glut,

Windblown forms spread, suggest – leap,

Here the lifting of a horn or was it

An eye fan torn in the dancing heat,

Up flares crimson-foamed tapestries

Patterns pulsating a very Tree of Life,

In the wind's long in suck, spinning

Flesh tones spiraling fluid speed, up

Vacuuming lace burning, all diluting

In a sudden sweep, leavening, leveling

A blueness – open window, a door –

 

A more kittenish delight then

We never saw, out stepping

And as surprised as we, gentle

Purring half moon, shy as can be.


      - The End -