Sea-bound Places I’ve Come to Know by Tom Sheehan

Brocklebank, Warren’s Point, RI is this place I’ve come to snug between rolling lawn and touching sea of brawn with million years of wear on salted rocks. Oh, the sea talks to me endlessly. And someone else must live here, turned into secret rooms, corners of the house dim as catacombs, and hearth that says: “Aha, I am warm. I have seen the fire. Let him leave who must retire.” Whose legend is that? Who the scribe? What heat of heart? From what tribe? Oh, someone in times past who passed by in single file, one act born of seaward trial?

Salt does not sting here, where iodine is water’s glee, and grass fights sand for eternal sanctuary

Huge rocks, brute turtles taking the toss of tempest tide, stand guard on the other side, where elements meet in heart’s sudden beat or slick magician’s feat. Again today, shroud of fog, secret as sunken log, hides in laces sheer as ghostly traces. Sand, in turn, accepts high waves, trees and brush the sea craves, and musical seas close their crescendos atop tomato rose like cathedral bells on cold gray stone where each of us thinks he’s all alone.

Such sound of hearts pushes inward to selves and swampy shelves, yet sea borne wits of us, water-drawn, know this father of seas touching at Brocklebank, vast house made of board and plank. Yet I feel the elders nearby. Perhaps brave Vikings ventured here: Oh, close my eyes, see high-Creatured spars, with helmet horns, their men of wars who come slowly on the tide with bare moons beside. What tempest journey here was done? Oh, what journey here was done by Brocklebank?

Ah, but we moderns weeping, under roofs sleeping, vast lawns sweeping wider than playing fields the Portuguese mows with thirst that glows, and grandfather’s hands gone numb: gnarled, rooted in tooling thumb, ideas and such at fingers’ touch, the sweat of things at home in harder bodies labor-leaning, while our white good collars need weekend cleaning. Such myriad paths lead through bush and brush and the shoulder-high tomato rose. “Footpath only. Not for carts or mowers!” reads the disputed sign along the line, as if to say, “Only for lovers of the sea, fishing men, and now and then, in thick retreats, those flesh lovers who love on matted grass and look into each other through eyes of glass.

This night I sleep in village disguise beneath a roof without starry eyes, beneath the quilting, quiet fog covering sea and sand and bog, and in that dark of graying ghost I lay my mind out to the coast, let the sea fill all my veins; the dread of deeps and hurricanes, the creaking of the Dutchman’s ship forever eyeless in its trip, touch scarred galleons in their graves, flinch at traffic of the slaves, know some U-Boat’s trembling pause as it slowly sank from wars, feel fears of the Murmansk run where men lay frozen in the sun. Oh, to know, in this gray retreat, the sea is touching at my feet, know here this night at Warren’s Point the sea is balm and does anoint.

The river’s a slow snake idling through eel grass (now and then its body pouches). Red-winged blackbirds watch the uncoiling, hide their young the way lint finds pocket depths. They are noiseless, stock-still (their hearts must beat like pocket watches). Kelp is kindling on the air, a hot house party of algae and brine; sea flowers by crude acres burst inland until love-lies-bleeding takes over, or lady slippers stepping into soft coves as though changing rooms in the middle of the night (you can’t hear silk talk).

A newsboy puffs images resting on a bank (he’s earned the butt, he figures), a beached dory powders the air with dusty ribs; salt works its wonders, mouth of erosion, mouth of dream. An old man, knee-locked, land-locked, a familiar roll still tossing his hips, casts his gray eyes outward at stoneless graves, hearkening his sons to his feet. Voices ride the tide, whisper the valid tongues of the marsh and the dark undertaking of root. Dangers are everywhere about the river: the porous bog whose underworld has softened for centuries, the jungles cat o’nines leap up into. Once, six new houses ago, one new street along the banking, two boys went to sea on a block of ice. They are sailing yet, their last flag a jacket shook out in the slow gray dusk still hiding in Decembers every year. The old man has strawberries in his backyard. They run rampant part of the year.

He planted them the year his sons caught the last lobster the last day of their last storm. Summers, strawberries and salt mix on the high air. A truck driver, dumping snow another December, backed out too far and went too deep. His wife hung a wreath at the town garage. His son stutters when the snow falls. At the all-night diner, a waitress remembers how many times she put dark liquid in his coffee. When she hears a Mack or a Reo or a huge and cumbersome White as big as those old Walters Sno-fighters used to be, she tastes the hard sense of late whiskeys. He had an honest hunger and an honest thirst, and thick eyebrows, she remembers, thick thick eyebrows.

Salt comes in on the morning air like the wounded walking home, a worked ripeness, a pain hanging. It promises to cleanse wholly a nursing home’s back room/stairs, all that’s hidden from Central Street. Salt teaches me balm and history; it occludes itself, becomes a soul masseuse, assuager, its thickness at times a spiriting; and when it gets too heavy, too much for the soul, I see the Great Salt Lake flats, burnt wide under the poring sun all its immeasurable reach being cut up in portable chunks for the West-spreaders’ wagons, hear the clout of it all.

In August, when marsh grasses and ‘nines burn past midnight, justice is left over from smoke; nests flare up who’s young the minute before winged off.

I share salt with strawberries, others’ sons, arathusa bulbosa sadly purple in hiding places, the red-winged shifty pilots near their linted nests, eels I won’t touch, turtles I do. We put flashlights and stones in glass milk bottles left over from Nicholson’s Dairy and inserted them in step locks to pull at alewives running their mad dash up the river before noon was known. By hand we caught them, salt healing wounds and bruises in our own whirlpool and illume.

Some of us heard the sea calling, even way back then, from Normandy, from Leyte and Anzio and the smell only Pusan Harbor knows. George knows the salt of the French coast, his nose stuffed with it forever, and tall, gaunt basketeer Ernie, hands splayed wide as maps, where the lifeline ran away from itself, kisses yet the first-wave salted sands Iwo Jima threw up at his mouth, or was it Kwajalein? memory asks. Once, near thirteen, we shared a cigarette under cover of the mist and the alewives passed us, upstreaming. That’s the night we forgot to listen.

Mist administers salt in dark dosages, or fog does the duty when streetlights flatten beneath the grip. Cures prevail. Some paralyses pale by comparison where warm waters muscle their way in. Some of these night esteemed neons violate the marshy estuary where time and tide meet and fuels are stationed.

At the rim of the reeds Standard Oil has a new red glare limping along the briny path. Strawberries sleep all winter. Only sons know the true darkness where the horizon comes down, where the salt is mined. Oil slicks are silent rainbows; under way the prism orients points of the moon and paths only deep waters know.

I still love the river the sea comes in on, how it knuckles down to the old milldam across

the street from me, twice a day touching, twice a day. And the salt borne, all the salt borne.

Saugus on the Tidal Run What of all the spills that ache here — upland dosage where the delta’s done and settling its own routines, the near immeasurable transfer of land and other properties of the continent chasing down Atlantic ways, shifting nations and cities from directly underfoot, moving towns along the watershed, oozing territories.

Oh, how I loved the river feeding the ocean. I have plumbed the Saugus River at its mouth, found the small artifacts of its leaning seaward, tiny bits of history and geography getting muddied up against the Atlantic drift, suffering at tide’s stroke, roiling and eddying to claim selves, marveling at a century’s line of movement, its casual change of character, its causal stress and slight fracturing under ocean’s dual drives, the endless pulsing tide and the overhead draft of clouds bringing their inland torment and trial, land and loam and leaf running away with the swift sprinters of water, the headlong rush of heading home like salmon bursting upstream for the one place they can remember in the chemistry of life, impulses stronger than electricity, smells calling in the water more exotic than Chinese perfume.

The flounder, sheaving under the bridge at the marsh road, pages of an un-sprung book, one-eyed it always seems, hungering for my helpless and hooked worms, sort over parts of Saugus in this great give-away, and nose into the extraneous parts that were my town, my town.

“Listen,” my father said to me, his eyes dark, oh black during a whole generation, “for a sound whose syllable you can’t count up or down, for what you might think is a clam being shucked, a quahog’s last quiet piss on sand, a kelp bubble exploding its one green-stressed overture.”

He talked like that when he knew I was listening, even at ten years of age.

He wasn’t saying, “Listen for me,” just, “Listen for the voices, the statements along Atlantic ritual, every driven shore, rocks sea-swabbed, iodine fists of air potent as a heavyweight’s, tides tossing off their turnpike hum, black-edged brackish ponds holding on for dear life, holding a new sun sultry as anchovies … all of them have words for you.”

 I hear that oath of his, the Earth-connected vow all the sea bears, the echoes booming like whale sounds, their deep musical communication, now saying one of his memorials, “Sixty-years and more, I feel you touch Normandy’s sand, measuring the grains of your hope, each grain a stone; and I know the visions last carved in June’s damp air.

” 

“Oh,” he’d add, “you sons, forgotten masters of our fate.”

Deepest of all, hearing what I didn’t hear at ten, but hear ever since, the hull-hammered rattling before rescue from the USS Squalus, 60 fathoms down off Portsmouth, the sound and the petition count never fading; three quarters of a century of desperation and plea hammering in my ears.

Say it straight out: “Some were saved and some were lost. That is a memorial. “The eels squirm and fidget on Saugus farmlands, pitch-black bottom land gone south with rain and years, gutter leanings, great steel street drains emptying lawns and backyards and sidewalk driftage into the river below black clouds. The worn asphalt shingles on my roof yield twenty-five years of granules, and now and then tell that story inside the house.

A ninety-year-old pear tree shudders under lightning and offers pieces of itself as sacrifice to the cause, dropping twigs, blasted bark other lightning has tossed into the soft footing, the grayed-out hair of old nests, my initials and hers and the scored heart time has scabbed up, dated, pruned, becoming illegible in the high fancy of new leaves and young shoots. There, too, went my father’s footprints in one April storm, washed away in late afternoon as he lay sleeping in that tree’s hammock; and grease off my brother’s hands from his Ford with nine lives hanging on a chain-fall; and across the street a neighbor’s ashes spread under grapevines and pear tree an August fire later took captive in dark smoke I still smell on heavy summer evenings.

This is my word on all of this, this act of love, this adoration: It is where the river’s done and has the yearling host, this boy’s lonely boast he’s lived the night at water’s edge, on safety’s ledge, on Atlantic side leaning inward from mighty crest and wave where fishermen become brave. I know panoramic view, gulls’ endowment, how fish shapes call them from Earth’s face, that spinning race about the sun and those who dare the seaward fare and spell of salted lung when a boy’s hung between the sunlit surface and a pinch of salt, who knows twisted souls at sea, sweet misery of warming sand, a hand not forgotten far from land where flotation guise reflects on lower skies. I know how water marks horizon’s dwelling where dark stream and ocean meet twice in flow of bayside surge and ocean merge loses out in river’s downhill push, losing lush things like gravel I have trod, and the locks and board holding back my river horde.

Oh, believe … I have come up by image from the sea in other times, by overhand, by curragh, by slung-sailed ship of oak, afloat a near-sunken log; have crawled sandy edges of the bay, looked back at waters’ merge and flow, found the river’s crawl reversed where floating parts are nursed, toting redwing nests the winds abuse, good ground the rain in swift return hauls down the river … Saugus on the loose.

Ever now, when I fish at the mouth of the river, rod high, and hope too, I catch awful parts of Saugus. I know the stream and ocean meet where I dare dangle my awkward feet, where love-lies-bleeding and the primrose meet, where tempting sea and bay greet all of rhyme and so its clime:

The rainbow catches up the horde;

     Sea color is set by gracious Lord.

               This, in faith, you can believe;

                           It’s Saugus I can’t lose or leave.

                                       I race the river to the sea …                                                                                              

Always it’s ahead of me.

Tom Sheehan