PEARL HARBOR

Yes, I remember. Charley Merserve and I had come to his house for a weekend off from Fryeburg Academy. Here is a poem published years ago in Galley Sail Review — with a few current changes.

Jackson, New Hampshire: Sun., Dec. 7, 1941

Visiting at Charley's house (hymns from

the radio on the nightstand between

twin beds) as we discussed the diminished

possibility of still being give breakfast

when down the air waves, but not from

Marathon, the runner came and in that

white-painted, sun-drenched room above

a yard brilliant with the fresh snow 

we'd taken a weekend from school

to explore we both were suddenly 

Athenian (or was it Spartans) and

quicker than thought, as our fathers

had taught us, we said we'd come.

We didn't wait for Pheidippides, the

runner to come, to tell us we'd won.

********

And here, after 70 years, we wait again

for the runner's spirit to appear and

tell us, if we've not won, we're done.

MEMORY

What We Hear

As he reads I want to know more  

about him so I imagine a home,

a history, while waiting for the final

words of a long poem that reminds me

of long ago Christmas oranges

in the toe of a stocking. He reaches in,

into the past without looking.

It's as if it were my own story

and he may not recognize himself.

That's my mother bathing me 

as I stand in the wash tub in front of 

the green enamel, chrome trimmed stove. 

I grimace, then giggle, as rinse water 

pours over my head, down  my body. 

She brushes wet hair from my face.

The Homestead

At the auction we withheld a dusty 

framed photograph of The Homestead as it was 

in nineteen thirty. In the picture's lower 

foreground flakes of foam float on waves of grass,

blurry images of Queen Anne's Lace in bloom.

The buildings, burned, in eighteen sixty and

rebuilt, had been repaired, expanded, revised, 

modernized. Dormer windows budded from roofs.

Ell and shed became dining room and kitchen.

In the barn the hayloft became a dance hall.

The picture was taken from this un-mown meadow where, 

age four, I would have played and where, ten years

after the auction, I kneel, age sixty-three, to

photograph where The Homestead had been. Queen Anne's

Lace flowers lie like giant snowflakes in the grass.