I Stay
I stay.
But it isn’t as if
There wasn’t always Hudson’s Bay
And the fur trade.
–Robert Frost, ‘An Empty Threat’
But you never had it planned.
Then the trail wasn’t yet blazed
As the First Nations moved
Through without leaving a sign
For the First Settlers to follow–
And yet they never gave it away,
The invisible gathering place
Stretching without a trace
Too vague for a castaway–
I stay.
Only shards are found
On these islands, anyway.
You don’t mention where you are
Or have been anymore.
You cast your line into the surf
On a beach below the cliff–
There’s already been enough trouble
You think, getting to this point.
The Muse’s words linger–If,
But it isn’t as if…
It seems centuries since
Another refugee cleared a field near
The far shore scattered with dead fish.
He sometimes told of bones plowed up
But he didn’t say where they are–
He had trouble enough, enough hearsay
To bury the unmarked graves
Without the rattlesnakes and arrowheads.
And when he’d been drinking, he’d say
There wasn’t always Hudson’s Bay–
And long ago he didn’t stay; and
Others came through and moved west,
Leaving a faded blazed trace
For scribes of hieroglyphs
Or petroglyphs on the riverbanks.
Long-haul truckers masquerade
As sleepless pioneers throwing clouds
Of dust as fine as ash across the feral fields–
Unsettled again, and again renegade,
And with the fur trade.
Speak For Yourself
Speak for yourself, John Alden.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Courtship of Miles Standish
1
Ley Lines —
Seasons of mist and brine,
The scent of spring in the cold–
A quiet cove where the locals
Curl inside a chambered nautilus,
A Palladian colonnade built around
An old stone cenotaph —
I have no will, just a wish:
Saltwater bays where I can slip anchor
And drift unseen, unnoticed
Under a smuggler’s moon,
Bearing contraband relics
From a faraway cay,
No blind response, no backward
Look, no ravening recognition.
The past changes with the future
Driving past remains of the Marie Celeste
Or the grander experiments
Of the Titanic or the Hindenburg.
Slowly we become no one
With no trailing embers
That lead you to a dying inferno
Which the stars are, even the sun
Which will become a black hole
Storing memories of millennia.
2
Soundings
Sailing without water, you dream
That darkness waits in desert islands,
Hidden rivers and lunar tides
And unknown undercurrents stream
Into oases’ pools reflecting a turquoise moon
Emerging among the vast flowing dunes.
As thundering breakers still pour jade foam
Over indigo seas, echoing beneath high bluffs–
Punctuated by the cries of seabirds driven inland
On a shoreward gale reshaping the coast.
And you, should you search beneath fragments
Of memoirs for the lost songs that water makes,
Raise anchor, as an hourglass pours sand
Into sand, before setting sail for timeless seas.
3
Listen…
Listen. Thunder rumbles offshore.
Seabirds wheel in before the storm.
And the seasons shift against a dark plain
Of half-truths, putting the past to rest
As easily as we retrace our steps
Into the new snow, that itself melts away–
You brush away the debris of grief
Misplacing comfort for belief,
Stoking the last gleaming embers
Of last evening’s winter blaze.
Teach us a treason to ourselves
In the battle between love and fear,
You resist returning again —
The river skim ice has already melted,
The air tangible, electric,
Gathering cold gusts–
Leave the timeless
For your children’s children
To paint the great migrations
In the flickering light of sacred caves.
And though past the last step is space,
Where your deep breath is exhaled–
John Alden rests his case,
Speak for yourself, Priscilla.
Edward Baranosky has painted seascapes since he was seven years old. His focus on marine-scapes, draws him back to visit his native home in the American east coast, for inspiration from the North Atlantic. As a poet-artist he crosses the channels and pathways between the visual and the textual. He continues to exhibit in the United States and Canada. Baranosky owns a small press EAB Publishing, for poetry chapbooks and related material. He currently lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Visit his website. Portrait painted by his friend by Melisa Fauceglia from Ravenna, Italy,
Featured Image: “Melting of river ice 1950” by Voutilainen Erkki under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
