Have any of you heard of Martha's Vineyard?
Ever been there anybody?
You've been there?
OK.
Excuse me.
When I was 16 years old my mother
took me to Martha's Vineyard.
We had family down there.
And I grew to love it.
Every summer I'd go down and when I was trying to write
I would go into the woods and lock myself up in a cottage.
I had no radio, no television, no clock or anything.
And I don't advise that because I
was walking out of there on Saturdays
when I thought it was Fridays.
I had no sense of time.
Somebody caught me going to the post office
on a day in which the post office was closed.
It sort of like Robinson Crusoe.
I do not advise that unless you can find your way out of it
and so much for hermitage.
But I managed to get some poems done.
But after a while, I wrote this poem in memory of my mother
and the Heathmans and all their kind.
It's called "The Loss of Little Things."
In those days the island-- oh let me tell you
the background of this.
One of the biggest hurricanes ever
to hit that part of the world hit Martha's Vineyard
that summer that I was there.
It literally cut that island in two.
You'd go down and you see houses that were cut in two.
You see the upstairs and downstairs and what.
You see snakes all over the place and little islands
that had been created.
In fact, there's a place down there
called Menemsha By The Sea.
And a friend of mine who was down there at one point
sent a postcard to somebody about that.
She said, well this was called Menemsha by the Sea
but is now Menemsha In The Sea, which
is what had happened during that hurricane.
In those days the island was as strange as widow's walks.
The sea like lions swallowed up the sand
shrinking beaches to cliffs and mounds
leaving just enough ground to walk or lie upon.
People came from Eastern places, wrung their cars
like clam diggers into the sandy roads
and sat upon the sea or knelt into it
or struck within it with their paper bodies
or gulped it quick--
and gulped it quick with cans of beer or cast fish lines
through it or by it made cuisines of marshmallows
and hot dogs or made love away from it
as though the sea could judge.
And in our wooden house not far from two graveyards
flanking the short road in, my aging aunt and uncle
blessed the table meal and passed
around the plates of hot corned beef and cabbage
sweetened with potatoes, carrots, and onions.
And we peeled away from our plates every edible ounce,
which meant the corned beef and cabbage,
and abandoned the whole vegetable meal for someone else
to cry over.
But my aunt was special.
Eat everything or no dessert.
And with disappointment raging through our seasoned bellies
like snipped snails, we finished the meal
with the whole hope of puddings puffed within our reach.
Then afterwards we, drowsy and excited around the table
while my aunt and uncle told stories of the island
as they knew it 20 years before.
Of the off Islanders who could never qualify as natives though
they had lived there forever because they were not
born Islanders.
Of the only murder the land had ever known.
Of the trembling rooster faced man
who visited too often in his alcoholic grief
and who was once a famous baseball star.
Of the sea and fisherman spawning into the Atlantic
mornings at sunrise.
Of the dead who lived not far away.
Of the corruption of the island by tourists.
Was I one?
And once a hurricane boomed into the bowels of the island
and exploded it to shrouds and shreds.
And my uncle, old and once a carpenter,
harboring deep hostilities against the Portuguese princes,
craftsmen hardier than he, and one his neighbor,
sat jubilantly while the sacrilegious wind
scorched the tin top of the garage next door from its roots
and swung it to shelter his shaggy truck
helpless under a tree.
God is good.
God is good, he shouted, his hands like buoys
crusted with sea salt, a forefinger long sacrifice
for some winged chair soothing a summer estate.
His hands swiveling in the hysterical air.
His feet clapping the rotted wood of the porch
so it shook causing my mother to say an extra prayer because
in the deepest part of the house where
silence was sane she thought the frenzy was the hurricane.
Look how he protects my property with my enemies
and the storm raised and heckled and quieted and ran away.
In the morning a terrible wash of blue flushed into the island
by the storm's torment and grace.
The busy sun anxious to repair the rain's
ruin, bits and pieces of drowned land split under its energy.
Skiffs and trawlers, dinghies and yachts and schooners
beaten in two by the hurricane's hunger
and left floating or run aground like last week's leftovers
and yet the brilliance of the after day crackling
like fresh fire, gentle.
So the end of summer.
The flour fights where one hits his opponent
over the head with the whitest of flours
and before his wits return pastes him in water.
My mother telling of turkeys that die in rain,
swans creaming the pond in swan straight lines.
The boy who raised the bridge for sailboats or anything
high, late on a foggy evening.
The harbor deserted, hollow in his open hands.
Three gulls motionless a few feet apart,
watching derelict winds.
The evening meal and laughter at my uncle's
heavy stories of purity and courage.
The strong listening of my aunt whose arms had once held deer
she had hunted to keep her family from starvation
during the Depression, whose smile now
seemed to remember wrens and lilacs and all the good nights.
The anointment of stars, the sudden smell of beaches
in soft black air.
Now they are gone.
They died in their shrunken and tired visions
and their absolving joy.
Their swift deaths came dumb like afternoons
when little things of season slipped unnoticed.
And there is no geography now to bear the hermit's laughter
or kill the hurricane or silence the tongue scalding
hot tea and lemon syrup after a chill or an occasional cough
of cloud or sneeze of rain or footnote
the complaint of foghorns and the grip of gulls
groaning in the wind; or reach the stony pain
of their singular and sacramental endurance
upon that holy fragment of New England sea.