Vernacular
There is a photograph of how it was. The thin wooden poles like bones and the dried fish. The tide swept through and shacks were built over water. The stilts. But that isn’t what I mean. I mean further out, the water picketed with lumber and how close the hulls came. In the hold they stared at the dark the way we stare at images moving across glass, the way we fetishize light. The way we believe our dreams mean something. How they moved, what they touched. One arm over the other, the night shuffled and bodied. Half syllabled movement. Smelling like cut grass and dried leaves. The parts of the hull that meant that, not the ones that meant how the ship moved.
A Hurricane Was a Wind that Trapped Light
It used to be that they would paint the houses with ship’s paint so that the storms wouldn’t peel it off. A blow they would call it. A gale. Back then the storms didn’t have names. The people you knew were the ones you could see, not made of light and fireflies. The floors they varnished with deck gloss. The storms rubbed the outside like rigging and in the spring you could see the wear marks as if from a kind of rope. In their basements the tide moved in and out. They cut a channel from the top corner to the bottom and planked it in. A place to hide a box of coins or rings. Anything valuable should be kept underground. The fog was thick but sometimes it cleared and far out in their dories they would hear people talking to them from above. After electricity they called it UFOs or machines. Especially after a storm they could hear the voices as if of those who’d been swept away. But this was before diesel. When the channel was still dredged for sail.
Late Autumn, After Flax and Broom Corn
Each place had a general store where you didn’t need money. A name was enough, or a day in the future you would pay. Anything might happen before that. Storms, a death in the family. At night the men dreamed of the raftered ceilings of the store and the fine woodwork polished with linseed oil and beeswax, which meant they dreamed about money and what they would buy if they had some. In the fall it was as if it were true. The cellars were full, and the jelly cabinets. Then they were like the storekeeper. They didn’t need money. The stars moved clear above. They could travel by them if they had anywhere to go. But winter was near. Then everything would happen by foot. The water held under the brook ice knocking like wind at the storm windows. Sleep was the season before spring.
Meadow Work
I made sure that my shadow never touched water. In autumn the corn was ripe and we laid it in the raftered attic above the summer kitchen. After it was gathered in piles, we laid it flat across the beams and from the frames we tied herbs with twine. Heather and lavender, chamomile and dandelion. The heat, unseen. A place you couldn’t believe in. Someone who had held a blade too often could not enter there. Rats gnawed some of the cobs and dragged them into the walls. Each season had its own hidden spaces. I carried a bell then. The size of a chestnut, sealed, made of silver. The rule was this. Something hidden could summon something invisible. Inside, a shimmer that sounded like water. That was what we believed. Then any room could be entered, any ash tree cut down. Then the harvest would cure. In seven nights the corn was dried. The swamps hadn’t yet filled with rain. Later, the autumn storms. Then the ponds filled. The freeze up sealed each one like the bell. A tarnished surface, scuffed with movement. That winter someone crashed their carriage onto the ice. Dead for love. Hoping they’d never be pulled from the wreckage.
How It Moved
The schooners would come in on a southeast breeze with supplies for the general stores, flour and leather, coffee and lumber. The roads could not be drove even in summer. Just soil then, something held down. Then store meant storehouse, back when places were often built over water. At night, lapping water under floorboards. When the breeze turned northwest they could leave the river. Then the war, and the submarines. You had only a few minutes to get into the dories. Heading for back. Heading for in. You could get to land by where the moon led. No one had walked around on it yet. The metal had not been cut for it, nor the fuel chambers filled with ghosts. The glass had not been blown for their helmets. I was young then. We sawed wood on the islands and waited for the snow to come. After it fell we dragged the trees out with handsleighs, our gardens asleep behind the dull panes. The bedrooms were cold, just a grate to let up heat from the stove. I don’t want you to say anything back. I don’t want to know how it ended. Just a heap of boards where the wharves were. A pile of stones that meant something had happened.