At The Beach 
Theresa Bernstein (1890-2002))

Marsdsen Hartley

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Soliloquy in Dogtown - Cape Ann
by Marsdsen Hartley


To have come among you, rocks - 
not with woodchuck's foraging insolence 
where levity of dust so anciently has blown 
giving certain lengths and widths of plain renown 
where junipers stand thick beside you, and 
themselves, 
making organpipes for fugues and fierce 
recessionals of wind that parry and pierce 
the flesh and bone of mortal mind 
left to suffer its own windblown oblivion. 
Bayberry sprays are spread like cloaks 
above the shapes of much - forgotten folks - 
cellars do not hide or ghost or shape 
but their own effigy in dusky, musky escape 
between the flourishing of hurried seeds 
to fleet the gluttony of blustery, purposeless 
weeds. 


Come among you rocks then, solemnly, and speak 
not even to the wings that pass in flurry 
to encompass earth and sea, and other windwing 
worry; 
I sit a spell, clutching at plain thoughts, wrenching at 
no secrecies, hearing the magnificat 
of afternoons and mornings united in their theme 
but broken up in segments by the bought 
extravagances of dream, wrenching and torn, 
warped and twisted, whisperings of the forlorn 
deceptive moment they were born - 
I sit, and note the stiff obliqueness of the north 
that mothers every strangeling mirth of you, 
glance desultorily among you as might an albatross 
if it would descend to such an instant's levity 
marking pontifical simplicity ranging over all 
your means and ways of being dutiful and proud 
ignoring every menace of lightning shaft or cloud 
that clutches enmity within its fists, or trysts 
with thunder at the mouth of death 
terribly suspending the breath; 
I hear the fugues and recitatives swell out, 
then die out 
in whispers of emaciated wind, suppressing shout 
or cry or what suppressed emotions answer by, 
and nothing seems to tell of high impress 
or infidel redress. It is a place up here 
where, confess, converse, sphere and sphere, 
detect, rehearse, delete, and in the last complete 
their everlasting trend, world without end, 
fast or slow, 
the way they always know and go, 
officials to the omnivorous 
paraclete.