THE MELANCHOLY SOUND OF FOG HORNS
Those Maine mornings
in the relative safety of Blue Hill
with its art galleries and book stores,
I’d try to lie awake, dreaming
of dream houses shrouded in cloud cover,
decks perched above the Penobscot.
But I could hear in the distance
the melancholy sound of fog horns,
and imagined the lobstermen
checking their catch before dawn
in the calm waters just off Stonington.
The year I vacationed there
we called those men townies;
they called us summer-shitheads,
moneyed people they needed and disliked.
They frightened me, the way desire
mixed with something like guilt
has frightened me. I felt as if
I were in a foreign country
no one had ever recorded,
and I kept my pen cocked
and my notebook open
as they went about their cold labor,
listening to them speak a language
that must have been their fathers’ –
fuck this, fuck that, punctuated by shared
silences, contempt turning into camaraderie.
If something strange like a shoe or jellyfish
showed up in one of their baskets,
I watched them play with it, toss it around.
Whatever their catch I’d likely hear about it
at Frank’s watering hole where afternoons
the men went to brag and brawl,
delaying long drives home to domesticity.
One time a lobsterman recognized me
as the man who took notes at the dock
and snarled, “What do we have here.
a Stephen King?” Amid laughter, another said,
“Just looks like a shithead to me.”
I wanted something they had,
and the bartender whose face and biceps
seemed to threaten the world
I’d soon return to, suggested a Bud Light,
and slid one toward me as if he knew
a Blue Hill man when he saw one.
TO MEROPE, SOMEWHERE IN THE SKY
Merope: a Pleiade, the only one who married a mortal (Sisyphus). The gods changed her star into a star dimmer than the others. She’s known as “the lost Pleiad.”
You had to be brave to come all the way down,
must have known you’d be upsetting the universe.
Now no one can find you, while the others shine.
You had to be brave to come all the way down,
must have known you’d be upsetting the universe.
Now no one can find you, while the others shine.
The best gods tend to conserve; others are just mean.
You knew their often petty laws.
You must have been smitten to come all the way down.
They dimmed you, they made you feel shame.
To your earthly man they did something worse.
Now no one can find you, while the others shine
in the night sky, and your husband again and again
repeats his life. For love, you made your choice.
Did it feel at all heroic, as you came down?
Attractive women can’t escape being seen.
You must have known there’d be a price.
Or had it become a burden to always shine?
You rationalize, you dream; in obscurity you try to remain
your own bright thing. Yet it has come to this:
It may have been brave, even necessary, to come down.
But now no one can find you, while the others shine.
Stephen Dunn's book of poems PAGAN VIRTUES was recently published by Norton, and his collection of essays DEGREES OF FIDELITY by Tiger Bark Press. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, among his other awards are fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and the Paterson Prize for sustained literary achievement.