(after Natalie Goldberg)
the one that turns off Route 9 at the Old Clock Farm
and dips its curve through saltwater marsh
how we’d roll our windows down and gulp
sea air into our lungs eyes closed hair streaming
in the wind. How the car would fly over the bump
and we’d sqwee with delight and how years later I taught
my own daughter to sqwee her ancestral glee over the bump still there.
I’m thinking of how the snowy egrets slash white
through the tall green of cord grass and the Cooper’s hawk soars
over the flats landing on the one stump high up the river
where it meanders into mud just at the bend before
the sheepfold and the cemetery with a host of Hoveys buried
and how the wave of sandpipers would startle into sky
when you’d paddle into view a sudden human in a blue kayak
floating through the flat expanse of silence.
I am remembering how we’d monitor the moon and tides
and pick the time to paddle to Cape Porpoise to make it back
by dinner but still have time to lollygag on the sand flats
as sandpipers and piping plovers poked for lunch. How we’d paddle
past Goat Island spying ruddy turnstones flip-flipping rocks
for nibble bits underneath and oystercatchers would stand sentinel
red-ringed eyes eying us as we bobbed on waves of bladder wrack
that skirted the barnacled rocks.
I am thinking of how names can make you cry
Goose Rocks Horseshoe Cove Biddeford Pool even
Goldthwaites Tides by the Sea. How we’ve scattered
ashes under cloudless blue skies
in the hidden pool that reveals
its sanctuary self just between the tides
in its sudden stillness the float of cremains sifting
slowly through the clear water
like smoke or incense. Something holy
gone now.
I am thinking of the road to the beach
the one that turns off Route 9 at the Old Clock Farm
that’s been uncoiled and flattened
black tarmac now straight to the sea.
This poem first appeared in Literary Review of Canada (2024).
—
Nancy Huggett is a settler descendant who writes, lives, and caregives on the unceded Territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation (Ottawa, Canada). Find her work in American Literary Review, Passages North, Poetry Northwest, and The New Quarterly. She’s won some awards (2024 RBC-PEN Canada New Voices Award) and a gazillion rejections. She keeps writing.
