They came out of West Lynn or East Saugus years ago,
dark mushroom seekers, with their long-pieced poles,
their own language whose word for amanita,
to the initiate, would tell where their roots
began, whether they were Florentine, Roman,
or islander, Piana di Cartani.
They might say Cocoli, Coconi
orCoccori,
the delicacies growing thirty or forty feet
up on the great elms in the circled green
of Cliftondale Square, those huge sky-reaching elms
that fell to the hurricanes of ’38,
or Carol in the 50s, finally to the toll of traffic
demanding the green
be cut down to size.
Once, in a thick fog, on my third floor porch,
the mist yet memorable,
I remember thinking the elms were
Gardens in the Clouds.
I felt a bloom
rise in me, a taste
fill my mouth.
They don’t come for amanita anymore
because the elms have all gone,
those lofty gardens, those mighty furrowed limbs;
now shrubs and bushes stand in their place you can
almost see over.
Nor do the streetcars come anymore
from Lynn into Cliftondale Square.
They say the old yellow and orange ones,
high black-banded ones,
red-roofed ones,
real noisy ones,
ones long-electric-armed at each end,
the ones off the Lynn-Saugus run,
are in Brazil or Argentina or the street car museum
in Kennebunkport, Maine,
quiet now forever
as far as we are concerned,
those clanging, rollicking machines that
flattened pennies on the tracks so that good Old Abe
became a complete mystery,
or the Indian Chief
as flat and as charmless, him and his background,
as his reservation.
From my porch high on the square,
I’d watch thin long poles extending men’s arms,
needles of poles they’d fit together,
as they reached for the white-gray knobs
growing in cloudy limbs.
They wore red or blue kerchiefs around thick necks,
like Saturday’s movie cowboys if you could believe it,
as if any moment they could slip them over their faces and hide
out in such bright disguises.
They’d cut or tap loose the amanita, see it fall slowly
end over end like a field goal or a point after,
down out of the upper limbs,
cutting a slowest curve and halved orbit,
and they’d swish butterfly nets to catch the aerial
amanita, or Cocoli,
as it might be;
or their women, in kerchiefs and drawn in
and almost hidden away,
faces almost invisible,
with an upward sweep of gay aprons
would catch the somersaulting fungi,
the amanita colyptraderma, or
being from Piana di Cartania, calling out its name
Coconi or Coccori,
Oh, Mediterranean’s rich song airing itself
across the green grass of Cliftondale Square,
Brahminville being braced,
uplifted.
I was never privy to know their roots,
their harsh voyages, to know where they landed and why,
and now their sounds are lost forever, their voices across
the square, the gay and high-pitched yells
setting a brazen mist on Brahmin Cliftondale,
their glee as a soft white clump of fungi went loose from its roost,
coming down to net, swung apron, or quick hat
as if a magician worked on stage in the square,
heading for RussulaDelica,
CocoliTrippati, Veal Scaloppine,
Mushroom Trifolati, Risotto Milanaise
or plain oldBrododeiFunghi.
All these years later I know the heavens of their kitchens,
the sweet blast front hallways could loose,
how sauce pots fired up your nose,
how hunger could begin
on a full stomach
when Mrs. Forti cooked or Mrs.Tedeschi
or Mrs.Tura way over there at the foot
of Vinegar Hill.
and I grasp for the clang-clang of the trolley cars,
the all-metallic timpani
of their short existence, the clash of rods and bars
stretching to the nth degree, of iron wheel on iron rail
echoing to where we ear-waited
up the line with
fire crackers’ or torpedoes’ quick explosions,
and the whole jangling car shaking
like a vital Liberty Ship I’d come to know intimately
years later on a dreadful change of tide.
How comfortable now
would be those hard wooden seats
whose thick enamel paint peeled off by a fingernail
as you left her initials and yours
on the back of a seat,
wondering if today someone in Buenos Aires
or Brasilia rubs an index finger
across the pair of us that has not been together
for more than fifty years. But somehow,
in the gray air today,
in a vault of lost music
carrying itself from the other end of town,
that pairing continues, and the amanita,
with its dark song-rich gardeners,
though I taste it rarely these days,
and the shaky ride the streetcars gave, for all of a nickel
on an often-early evening, softest yet in late May,
give away the iron cries and, oh, that rich Italiana.
This night I sleep in village disguise beneath a roof without starry eyes, beneath the quilting, quiet fog covering sea and sand and bog, and in that dark of graying ghost I lay my mind out to the coast, let the sea fill all my veins; the dread of deeps and hurricanes, the creaking of the Dutchman’s ship forever eyeless in its trip, touch scarred galleons in their graves, flinch at traffic of the slaves, know some U-Boat’s trembling pause as it slowly sank from wars, feel fears of the Murmansk run where men lay frozen in the sun. Oh, to know, in this gray retreat, the sea is touching at my feet, know here this night at Warren’s Point the sea is balm and does anoint.
What of all the spills that ache here — upland dosage where the delta’s done and settling its own routines, the near immeasurable transfer of land and other properties of the continent chasing down Atlantic ways, shifting nations and cities from directly underfoot, moving towns along the watershed, oozing territories.
Oh, how I loved the river feeding the ocean.
I have plumbed the Saugus River at its mouth, found the small artifacts of its leaning seaward, tiny bits of history and geography getting muddied up against the Atlantic drift, suffering at tide’s stroke, roiling and eddying to claim selves, marveling at a century’s line of movement, its casual change of character, its causal stress and slight fracturing under ocean’s dual drives, the endless pulsing tide and the overhead draft of clouds bringing their inland torment and trial, land and loam and leaf running away with the swift sprinters of water, the headlong rush of heading home like salmon bursting upstream for the one place they can remember in the chemistry of life, impulses stronger than electricity, smells calling in the water more exotic than Chinese perfume.
The flounder, sheaving under the bridge at the marsh road, pages of an un-sprung book, one-eyed it always seems, hungering for my helpless and hooked worms, sort over parts of Saugus in this great give-away, and nose into the extraneous parts that were my town, my town.
“Listen,” my father said to me, his eyes dark, oh black during a whole generation, “for a sound whose syllable you can’t count up or down, for what you might think is a clam being shucked, a quahog’s last quiet piss on sand, a kelp bubble exploding its one green-stressed overture.”
He talked like that when he knew I was listening, even at ten years of age.
He wasn’t saying, “Listen for me,” just, “Listen for the voices, the statements along Atlantic ritual, every driven shore, rocks sea-swabbed, iodine fists of air potent as a heavyweight’s, tides tossing off their turnpike hum, black-edged brackish ponds holding on for dear life, holding a new sun sultry as anchovies … all of them have words for you.”
I hear that oath of his, the Earth-connected vow all the sea bears, the echoes booming like whale sounds, their deep musical communication, now saying one of his memorials, “Sixty-years and more, I feel you touch Normandy’s sand, measuring the grains of your hope, each grain a stone; and I know the visions last carved in June’s damp air.”
“Oh,” he’d add, “you sons, forgotten masters of our fate.”
Deepest of all, hearing what I didn’t hear at ten, but hear ever since, the hull-hammered rattling before rescue from the USS Squalus, 60 fathoms down off Portsmouth, the sound and the petition count never fading; three quarters of a century of desperation and plea hammering in my ears.
Say it straight out: “Some were saved and some were lost. That is a memorial.”
The eels squirm and fidget on Saugus farmlands, pitch-black bottom land gone south with rain and years, gutter leanings, great steel street drains emptying lawns and backyards and sidewalk driftage into the river below black clouds. The worn asphalt shingles on my roof yield twenty-five years of granules, and now and then tell that story inside the house.
A ninety-year old pear tree shudders under lightning and offers pieces of itself as sacrifice to the cause, dropping twigs, blasted bark other lightning has tossed into the soft footing, the grayed-out hair of old nests, my initials and hers and the scored heart time has scabbed up, dated, pruned, becoming illegible in the high fancy of new leaves and young shoots. There, too, went my father’s footprints in one April storm, washed away in late afternoon as he lay sleeping in that tree’s hammock; and grease off my brother’s hands from his Ford with nine lives hanging on a chain-fall; and across the street a neighbor’s ashes spread under grapevines and pear tree an August fire later took captive in dark smoke I still smell on heavy summer evenings.
This is my word on all of this:
It is where the river’s done, where a boy’s hung between the sunlit surface and a pinch of salt, who’s read of twisted souls at sea, knew sweet misery of warming sand, I know how water marks horizon’s dwelling where dark stream and ocean meet twice in the flow of bayside surge and ocean merge grasps the river’s downhill push, losing lush things like the very gravel I have trod, and the locks and board holding back my river horde.
Oh, believe … I have come up by image from the sea in other times, by overhand, by curragh, by slung-sailed ship of oak, afloat a near-sunken log; have crawled sandy edges of the bay, looked back at waters’ merge and flow, found the river’s crawl reversed where floating parts are nursed, toting redwing nests the winds abuse, good ground the rain in swift return hauls down the river … Saugus on the loose.
Ever now, when I fish at the mouth of the river, rod high, and hope too, I catch awful parts of Saugus. I know the stream and ocean meet where I dare dangle my awkward feet, where love-lies-bleeding and the primrose meet, where tempting sea and bay greet all of rhyme and so its clime:
The rainbow catches up the horde;
. . . . . . Sea color is set by gracious Lord.
. . . . . . . . . . . . This, in faith, you can believe;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . It’s Saugus I can’t lose or leave.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . …………… I race the river to the sea …
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Always it’s ahead of me.
. . . . . . Through the long slanting of the gray day
. . . . . . I, mute and immobile, watched my son through
. . . . . . The window, saw him use hands as tools, arms
. . . . . . Working hard as crowbars, an energy split of
. . . . . . The sun, my atom building a fort housed of dreams.
. . . . . . Oh, years close such ugly jaws between father
. . . . . . And son, between the old and the dreaming,
. . . . . . Between the looking back and the looking forward,
. . . . . . So I cheat sometimes and think the looking back
. . . . . . Has more magic, the greater reserves of splendor.
. . . . . . It happens when I stop at task to breathe against
. . . . . . The hot sun or feel the night with a caress
. . . . . . Faint but daring as a girl once known near darkness.
. . . . . . Looking back is more than perfume time; it’s past
. . . . . . Perfume, past touch, past the wonder of guessing.
. . . . . . It’s back in the prehistory of dreams and daring
. . . . . . When I was him and building a fort to house dreams
. . . . . . And perhaps my father loved me from a window.
. . . . . . It’s touching on the magic of Roland and Arthur,
. . . . . . On Charlemagne, Richard who roared, and red-crossed
. . . . . . Phalanxes moving as a wedge at a word or cry.
. . . . . . It’s where Beowulf has gone, to a land and time
. . . . . . Not to be known by me again, to a place called
. . . . . . Childhood, the true democracy of imagination.
. . . . . . Looking, I was delirious for him, felt the happy
. . . . . . Stones banging the barrel of my chest for him;
. . . . . . He was knowing what I had known and lost along
. . . . . . The way like a red-lit caboose cutting a curve
. . . . . . In the dimness that was my little years.
. . . . . . I ached, knowing that I had come of age, of importance,
. . . . . . That my little dreams are cries for peace
. . . . . . And sweat is sold for food to fill his mouth.
. . . . . . The world had fallen in my path and I had scaled
. . . . . . A mountain away from him. I wanted to leap
. . . . . . Chuteless from its peak into his time, to know
. . . . . . Once more the sense of glory and romance
. . . . . . In all things the mind has fingers for.
. . . . . . In the evening, pink threatening red on the horizon,
. . . . . . He finally came to me, the seven years of him
. . . . . . And a day of his days enfolding more mystery than fog.
. . . . . . “Come with me,” he said, eyes of miners’ lamps,
. . . . . . A face blacker than coal is black, where dirt
. . . . . . Had so much freedom you would think he had never
. . . . . . Been clean, had never been discomforted by soap.
. . . . . . “My fort, it’s over here. It’s secret and mine.
. . . . . . I’ll show it to you. Only once, though. Big people
. . . . . . Aren’t supposed to be here.”
. . . . . . Quiet, motionless as a beached ship, the fort
. . . . . . Was built against a split-trunk maple tree;
. . . . . . Limbs bare and black hung over a pit nearer
. . . . . . Darkness than all the caves I had known.
. . . . . . Canopied arms rigid over a small darkness
. . . . . . Huddling like a rabbit down the barrel of a rifle.
. . . . . . I turned back on myself, into dreams, onto pages
. . . . . . Long since read. Ah, how high and strong its walls,
. . . . . . Built of stones I dared not move, set magically
. . . . . . With a mortar I could not mix. Passageways
. . . . . . And tunnels with dumb mouths stared back,
. . . . . . Mysteries leaped, dangers crept, silent
. . . . . . As Sicilian Vespers. Hamlet’s father would walk
. . . . . . Such walls. Quasimoto lurked quietly overhead.
. . . . . . Lafitte, Long John Silver, Grendel, shared the dark.
. . . . . . On my spine ice began to flow. I was knowing again
. . . . . . The lost land, the lost time, the lost dreaming.
. . . . . . He crept along the wall, motioned for me to follow,
. . . . . . Whispered a sound I’m helpless to repeat and can’t forget
. . . . . . As if a ghost of me were calling on a cold gray moor.
. . . . . . Back, still back, I went, spinning in a machine
. . . . . . Tumbling off my hard edges, knowing the deliciousness
. . . . . . Of fright, savoring one grand moment in a life
. . . . . . So old to magic. And he huddled, my son, my coming man,
. . . . . . For a moment, for a split second of forever, against
. . . . . . The high walls of his childhood. I dared not move
. . . . . . For fear I’d break them down.
Sheehan served in 31st Infantry, Korea 1951-52. Books: Epic Cures; Brief Cases, Short Spans; Collection of Friends; From the Quickening; The Saugus Book; Ah, Devon Unbowed; Reflections from Vinegar Hill; This Rare Earth & Other Flights. eBooks include Korean Echoes, The Westering, (nominated for National Book Award); Murder at the Forum, Death of a Lottery Foe, Death by Punishment, andAn Accountable Death. Work in Rosebud, Linnet’s Wings, KYSO Flash, Soundings East, Vermont Literary Review, Literary Orphans, Indiana Voices Journal, Provo Canyon Review, Nazar Look, Eastlit, Green Silk Journal, The Path, Faith-Hope and Fiction. He has a National Book Award nomination and 28 Pushcart nominations. In the Garden of Long Shadows and The Nations (Native American fiction collection), were recently published by Pocol Press with reviews in Serving house Journal.
–Art by Rona Keller