The Poem

 MONHEGAN SUMMER  by Paul Falk  Illustrations by June Falk  

  Affectionately for June 1  

 

 Prologue  Quill-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 –  

  2  

 

 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.  

  3  

 

 Dawn  Though 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 –  

  4  

 

 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.  

  5  

 

 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,  

  6  

 

 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.  

  7  

 

 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.  

  8  

 

 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  

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 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  

  10  

 

 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 –  

  11  

 

 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.  

  12  

 

 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.  

  13  

 

 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.  

  14  

 

 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  

  15  

 

 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 –  

  16  

 

 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.  

  17  

 

 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  

  18  

 

 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.  

  19  

 

 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  

  20  

 

 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 -  

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