Excerpts and Summaries

This is no time for moods, though. It's after midnight and people are going home. The festivities are over. They go back to the hotel and the strange room, the second in a string of scores they will occupy for a night in their travels. They go to bed and discover each other again and much later sink into the gentle oblivion of sleep after love.

So it's time to start all over again. From zero. Even less than zero this time, because now he's in debt and forty-two of his years are gone.

Until they get used to it, the quiet in the evening is actually disturbing. After the unending noise of the city - the sirens, the profanity, glass smashing, cars starting and passing, horns blowing - the new silence of the country is upsetting. Alex finds himself waking in total darkness wondering what is wrong. He strains to hear if someone has gained entrance to their home, but all he can detect is the faint shushing touch of air moving through the pines and the nearly inaudible rustle of a short-tailed shrew nosing about in dry oak leaves under the bedroom window.

If you are reading this one and the phone rings, you will not want to answer the phone.

The fog was so thick you could feel it if you moved a hand through the air. Against your face it was like webs clinging and pressing.

A Seaman was on the bow and we couldn't see him from the cabin. Visibility was down to almost zero.

For more than an hour the horn had been sounding. Had any other craft been on the water anywhere near us it would have heard and been warned.

Ther was no wind. The sea was flat calm, the light a gray murk.

A blip had appeared on the radar screen quite a bit earlier. As we moved nearer it seemed more and more likely that it was the Sea Bird. When we were close enough, and the coxswain had used the bull horn to announce that we were the Coast Guard, I had taken the mike and said, "Lisette? Michael? Are you there?" But there had been no answer.

"Two hundred feet now," said the radar man. "Dead ahead."

The coxswain set the motors in neutral. The engineer and I stepped forward onto the deck. We could just barely make out the form of the man on the bow. He had put out fenders to keep us from damaging the other craft when we came alongside. There was no sound except the faint hum of the radar transmitter and the soft wash of water along our hull sibsiding as we lost headway.

Like a gray ghost the outline of the Sea Bird materialized before us. We bumped against her. It took only a glance to see that there was no living soul aboard. Slumped over the small outboard motor, however, was the body of a man whose head had been crushed. It wasnt Michael.

The front doorbell is ringing. I come up out of sleep into the dead of night and know that the sound has been going on for a long time, insistent now, maybe angry.

Hap puts her hand on my shoulder. "Dont answer it," she says. Her voice is little and tight where usually it's almost like somebody singing.

I reach for the lamp on my side of the bed and turn it on anyway. Whoever is at the door, spots the light and lets up for a minute, then buzzes again.

"I'll have to go see what it is," I say.

Hap doesn't answer. She's closed her eyes. Now she pulls the covers over her head. She seems to be shivering.

The bell is ringing again. I get out of bed, draw on my pants, get an old sweatshirt from the closet and go downstairs barefoot.

The June night is warm. We've left the windows open upstairs and down. From somewhere in the bog behind us comes the soft faint tremolo of a screech owl's call.

I stop, halfway to the door. "Don't answer it," Hap said. Somehow I know her reaction was right. I could turn around and go back upstairs now and refuse to find out what brings someone to my home in the middle of the night. I feel my feet turn to ice. The hall clock says ten after three.

But they've seen me. There are side lights by the front entrance. I can make out a heavy form on each side of the door, outside, profiled in the headlights of the car. They're peering in. They've caught sight of me. I've got to open.

Before pulling the door wide, I take a careful look and see that both men are in uniform. They've stopped ringing the bell. I open. The only sound is the steady drone of the car motor. The car's a cruiser. A Barnstable cruiser. The two men are cops.

The one on my left says, "Mr. Helming?"

I nod.

He ducks his head. "I don't like to have to tell you, " he says... "maybe you'll want to be sitting down.. - "

I know what he's going to say. I can hear it before he says it. I want to close my eyes (the way Hap did when I turned on the light), shut my ears so I'll never hear again, disconnect my head...

"There's been an accident..."

I can't blot out the sound of his voice. It's become a roaring inside me.

"Your daughter ... at approximately one forty-five this morning..."

He has raised his eyes. He stops. I turn and see that Hap has come to the top of the stairs. I start toward her. I'm running. I reach her just as she folds into a heap and begins to come rolling down the curved stairway. Somewhere in the back of my mind I hear the words "never regained consciousness." Are they spoken with reference to Hap, who will never be the same again? Or to our only daughter, who is gone now? Or to me?

The Good Bad Landlord

Under a loose board, beneath a barrel, at the foot of the basement stairs, lived a small gray mouse. He had fine translucent pink ears and long whiskers and a restless black nose which could always lead him to something to eat.

Now everything was fine as long as the good bad landlord let the dirt and the trash and the garbage pile up under the stairs. The small gray mouse grew fat and married and had many many tiny children.

But one day that nice bad landlord sold his house to a maniac - a crazy man who liked to have everything clean!

Imagine! From one day to the next the beautiful ripe smelly fish remains and the old greasy bones and the rotting vegetables disappeared.

The small gray mouse lost his fat belly and his wife and children began crying with hunger. What a racket! What pandemonium!

And you know what? That cruel good landlord, when he heard all that squeaking and crying, came with a shovel and scooped up the whole mouse family and threw them out in the alley.

And that was the end of THAT!

Half an hour before sunrise.

I was standing in the marsh, a mile from the road, on a Sunday morning, waiting. Mist hung in the air around me, moist tattered veils of nighttime turning slowly, the quiet total, perfect, all nocturnal creatures gone to burrows, roosts, and grassy tangles, daytime's players still asleep.

Would the elusive yellow rail I'd found a week before appear again? I wanted to see this bird another time, wanted to get to know him, had come at first light and walked out here, jumping ditches, pushing through the reeds to reach the same place where my rail had lept up, flown maybe fifteen feet, dropped into a runnel and disappeared.

But just before the first catbird was ready to speak, out of the vapors around me stepped a young doe. I'd been motionless a long time. Did she think I was some fixed part of the marsh, a tree trunk, a post? That was unlikely. I saw her nostrils quiver. She knew that I was human. She knew humans were trouble. Our eyes met and in hers I read a question. A child would have looked at me the same way, wanting to ask but unable to find the words.

For every writer and reader of poetry, the question of what is poetry, sooner or later, is certain to arise. Probably there is no satisfactory response. What often, today, is called "poetry", and is published, even in prestigious magazines, bears little resemblance to work found in early anthologies.

There was a time when rhyme and meter were accepted as being central to the poetic effort. Some hint of the musical, sounds perhaps lilting or sonorous, incantatory, also played its part in what we used to read.

Today, that which may have the appearance of being a "poem", and is still called by this name, is often devoid of these elements, shuns alliteration and onomatapeoia, cringes before inadvertant rhyme and goes limping and stumbling off the page.

This is not to say, though, that the new freedom precludes any poetic achievement. In fact, it adds a further dimension to an art as old and as imperative as the need to love and be loved.

I like rhyme and meter and am sometimes their slave. In the poems assembled here, arranged roughly in the order in which they were written over ahnost fifty years, the old and the new mingle.

I think a poem should be brief and focused, most often should fit on a single page. I don't care for the kind of the enjambement that breaks a thought or word in two, to the delight of many modern "poets". I like most lines to be a unit of some sort, though this guidline, like all rules, must never be taken as inviolable. I think those writing poetry should avoid using the tragedies of others in order to add drama to their own work. And maybe the best subjects for poetry are found in the intensely personal, what has touched and moved the human heart. To put the reader in the presence of something he, or she, has always sensed was there, but could never have perceived with the same clarity without the poet's words - this may be the essence of poetry.

Each Year Now

			Each year now
			as the days grow longer in March
			and dusk
			that last quarter hour before dark,
			le crépuscule,
			comes on,
			I remember stepping out the door
			and into the back yard
			where we once lived,
			to listen,
			to wait as it grew colder,
			for the first rasped call
			from somewhere in the grasses
			near the edge of the bog.

			I stood there many nights,
			beyond the light of my family
			in the kitchen,
			chill gathering,
			until I heard him -
			that harsh note from the ground
			and moments later the sound of wings
			on the air spiraling upward,
			a mingling of high thin sparse
			teakettle whistlings
			and wingbeats.

			Sometimes,
			against day's failing light,
			I'd glimpse him for a second
			circling higher before he'd end ascent
			and come tumbling, spinning,
			pinging-singing 
			back to earth.

			Each year now,
			about this time,
			I remember those moments 
			of pure joy,
			then supper,
			my children,
			my wife -
			and the nuptial song 
			of the Woodcock,
			the Timberdoodle.