3.
BRINGING A TURTLE HOME
On the road to Bangor, we spotted a domed stone,
a painted turtle petrified by fear.
I picked it up. The turtle had come a long walk,
200 millennia understudy to dinosaurs,
then their survivor. A god for the out-of-power.…
Faster gods come to Castine, flush yachtsmen who see
hell as a city very much like New York,
these gods give a bad past and worse future to men
who never bother to set a spinnaker;
culture without cash isn’t worth their spit.
The laughter on Mount Olympus was always breezy.…
Goodnight, little Boy, little Soldier, live,
a toy to your friend, a stone of stumbling to God—
sandpaper Turtle, scratching your pail for water.
4.
RETURNING TURTLE
Weeks hitting the road, one fasting in the bathtub,
raw hamburger mossing in the watery stoppage,
the room drenched with musk like kerosene—
no one shaved, and only the turtle washed.
He was so beautiful when we flipped him over:
greens, reds, yellows, fringe of the faded savage,
the last Sioux, old and worn, saying with weariness,
“Why doesn’t the Great White Father put his red
children on wheels, and move us as he will?”
We drove to the Orland River, and watched the turtle
rush for water like rushing into marriage,
swimming in uncontaminated joy,
lovely the flies that fed that sleazy surface,
a turtle looking back at us, and blinking.
6.
GROWTH (HARRIET)
“I’m talking the whole idea of life, and boys,
with Mother; and then the heartache, when we’re fifty.…
You’ve got to call your Notebook, Book of the Century,
but it will take you a century to write,
then I will have to revise it, when you die.”
Latin, Spanish, swimming half a mile,
writing a saga with a churl named Eric,
Spanish, Spanish, math and rollerskates;
a love of party dresses, but not boys;
composing something with the bells of Boris:
“UNTITLED, would have to be the name of it.…”
You grow apace, you grow too fast apace,
too soon adult; no, not adult, like us.…
On the telephone, they say, “We’re tired, aren’t you?”
12.
OUTLIVERS (HARRIET AND ELIZABETH)
“If we could reverse the world to what it changed
a hundred years ago, or even fifty,
scrupulous drudgery, sailpower, hand-made wars;
God might give us His right to live forever
despite the eroding miracle of science.…”
“Was everything that much grander than it is?”
“Nothing seems admirable until it fails;
but it’s only people we should miss.
The Goth, retarded epochs like crab and clam,
wept, as we do, for his dead child.” We talk
like roommates bleeding night to dawn. You say,
“I hope, of course, you both will outlive me,
but you and Harriet are perhaps like countries
not yet ripe for self-determination.”