"Soliloquy in Dogtown-Cape Ann" by Mardsen 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.