Ocean Drinker: New & Selected Poems (Deerbrook Editions, 2006)
art books (Selection)
Paintings of Maine
Art of the Maine Islands
The Art of Maine in Winter
The Art of Monhegan Island
Edward Hopper’s New England
Winslow Homer and the Sea
Beverly Hallam: An Odyssey in Art
The Watercolors of John Singer Sargent
Nature & Culture: The Paintings of Joel Babb
Painting Maine: The Borrowed Views of Connie Hayes
Wendy Turner: Island Light
William Irvine: A Painter’s Journey
Philip Barter: Forever Maine
Irene Hardwicke Olivieri: Closer to Wildness
Eric Hopkins: Above and Beyond
The Art of Dahlov Ipcar
Philip Frey: Here and Now
Island: Paintings by Tom Curry
Vincent Andrew Hartgen: His Art and Legacy
The Art of Francis Hamabe
Jeffery Becton: The Farthest House
Art of Katahdin (with David Little)
Art of Acadia (with David Little)
Paintings of Portland (with David Little)
Mary Alice Treworgy: A Maine Painter
Art of Penobscot Bay (with David Little)
Wood Engravings of Siri Beckman
Blanket of the Night Poems
deerbrook editions
Carl Little
published by
Deerbrook Editions
P.O. Box 542
Cumberland, ME 04023 www.deerbrookeditions.com
Preview list: www.issuu,com/deerbrookeditions
first edition
Copyright 2023 by Carl Little
All rights reserved
ISBN: 979-8-9903529-3-3
Book design by Jeffrey Haste
Cover art: Abby Shahn (United States, born 1940), The Blanket of the Night, 1984, egg tempera on paper, 55 x 92 inches. Portland Museum of Art, Maine. Museum purchase with gifts from Joan B. Burns, Annette and Rob Elowitch, Alison D. Hildreth, Peggy and Harold Osher, Horace K. Sowles, Jr., Roger and Katherine Woodman, and one anonymous donor, 1985.4. Reproduced with permission of the artist.
“There is music in the spheres of the body.”
—Philip Schultz, “The Music”
What He Brings to the Table
Cutlery and mom’s China, candlesticks, unshaven jaw, crooked hands, a life’s worth of dreams, some transcribed, unworthy looks and privilege, new hearing aids and hairy ears, cat hair on pants, a food prayer on Thanksgiving, waste not and want not stuff, smallest talk and time-honored trivia, the news of the week in review, unwashed thoughts and severe inaction, no clothing sense, and the absentee Mr. Manners who puts his elbows where he shouldn’t— “This is not a horse’s stable” advised his parents in chorus, their wisdom in one ear— removes dirty dishes dutifully, extinguishes candles with wet thumb and forefinger, folds napkins in ungainly squares till table is tabula rasa
except for water rings and scratches from where he clung to its dark wood as if to a raft, waiting for his family to find him, adrift and without sustenance, sharks circling, darkness coming, seated at the same surface he arrived at years ago, whispering prayers, holding back everything and nothing.
I. The Moving Panorama of the Sky
“But blessings are never to be dismissed, they are even secretly longed for, in the core of self, the seed from the genetic granary that remains embedded beneath all that is assumed elsewhere, among other places and other people.”
—Nadine Gordimer,
“The Pickup”
Spring Pick-Up
Dozens of mattresses line the road, neighbors tossing beds as if the hotel bedbug blight had reached down east.
Some are stacked like the princess and the pea while others float like rafts on brown shoulders, taking in the rain and, yes, it’s Maine, a coating of snow, which makes you shiver, whose dreams shift to Arctic places when your wife pulls the comforter away in her troubled sleep. Miserable things, not the body count your mother called street-side bags of garbage in the city, more morose than that, unfit for making love, for even meanest slumber unless you’re homeless and exploring Somesville in April, in which case
you can’t believe your luck, a bed every hundred yards or so buttressing the cold road awaiting the blissful collapse of your worn and wandering body.
Zones of Peeper
Driving home from a party, parsing conversations, car windows down to greet first real summer heat, we pass through zones of peeper—
not song, not chorus, though scientists no doubt find pattern in the high-pitched whatever it is. Nor peep, which reminds you of silly chicks falling over each other in an incubator. Every moist venue between Pretty Marsh and Somesville, every hundred yards or so brings
this antic singing, somewhat alien in tone, magical too, like fireflies but auditory, not synthesized but a perfect
cacophony of the higher ranges, tiny frogs doing their spring thing, flinging music into dank milieu of pond edge and marsh, inspiring
a certain joy in our recap of the evening as if every fault could be forgiven when you consider the rest of the world wild and wet and flipping out.
Green Grass Snake (Great Spruce Head Island, Maine)
Slithers through the grass, although that verb doesn’t do its movements justice— maybe glide or ripple or shape-shift, so delicate, thin, moving up the path just ahead of our footsteps.
God or someone saw the shape in the grass and called it green grass snake, an easy ID compared to, say, Bactrian camel or nudibranch or ocelot, all part of Paradise, which makes me think
of the poor snakes of St. Croix enjoying reign of a virgin island looking up one day to find a mongoose in their path, which proceeds to rip them skin from skin, the carnivore imported
to clean up Eden, a Rikki-Tikki-Tavi nightmare for the serpent crew, a kind of injustice played out by man playing almighty. Ghosts of those snakes rattle the dry corn shakes while here
on this isle a slim slider of a pale green hue that wouldn’t know a mongoose from a mole hill veers to the left in search of edibles in the northern kingdom of Great Spruce where no one holds dominion over nothing.
For Anina Porter Fuller
Small
The Exit (North Meadow, Great Spruce Head Island)
“Is it possible for a human being to literally walk off the earth in full view of witnesses?”
—Frank Edwards, Stranger than Science, 1959
Reading how David Lang disappeared in front of his family in a field in Gallatin, Tennessee, on a sun-filled day in September 1880, I always pictured my father in the back meadow in Water Mill (where he later planted Christmas trees), swallowed by sandy Long Island soil he loved so much, and how we’d search and search without reward and grieve and wonder. Today I’m imagining my turn, standing in expanse of tall grass calling out to my children, waving once and poof, gone without a trace, perfect exit strategy, no assisted living or bedside manner required, no questions about comfort, no memory issues except theirs of me, who went missing that day in an island meadow, a mystery that baffles science, a flawed discipline that can’t begin to understand something as simple and imprecise as a miracle.
Resting Face
I don’t follow unless you mean Auntie in casket, wearing glasses she never wore alive disturbing a perfectly fine wizened visage and eyes that shone even when you commented on the weather.
Once a deer leapt through Auntie’s windshield— she survived. Another time she took a bite of mom’s shepherd’s pie hot from oven and went face down in her plate. We thought she’d died, but she lived a lot longer, until 1979, age 89, interred at Oak Grove Cemetery after the viewing where those spectacles caught me off guard, thinking how useless they’d be where Auntie and all of us were headed.
in memory of Aunt Agnes Little
Dear love, we mourn our younger selves, the ones whose eyes sparked and shone when we caught a look as lights dimmed, when shyness turned to clothing strewn. And now the nights come on, covers crept under, bodies shifting toward the center where warmth is held by sheets and breath is hushed and only the clock provides light. We listen hard for a sigh, my love, and hearing it turn the other way, resigned to separate till morning. Let us no longer lament our looks and youth but untuck the day as it arrives and wander through the splintered woods beyond the stakes that mark our lines and take each other’s hand where possible among the tangle, lead and follow, and vice versa, watching our steps in the snow that fell yesterday and brings light to a dark world. Yours, my beloved, forever yours.
When Gomez Addams kissed his way up Morticia’s arm after she said something French, I made a boyhood’s mental note:
broad smile and sharp pecks from wrist to neck—that was the way to make love to a woman.
Later moves ran a bland gamut: slow dancing, locking eyes, a bit of begging. Never came easy, pitching woo, but whatever woo was, I wanted to be the ace hurling curveballs that had brunettes
falling into my arms where they’d sigh “mon amour,” a signal to my lips to start their ascent up the smooth arm
like Gomez with his pale bride, his smile flashing as he imagines the rack in the other room where the loving happens
in a house sadly not at all like mine.
Making the Bed
Is my job and this morning her side is still warm as duvet is whipped straight, pillows plumped and replaced, dreams removed for the day.
A man once made the bed with grace more than I can muster now: sheets that won’t stay put and blanket with mind its own. That man I knew could smooth a running ridge and mastered hospital corners. Lucky duck, I say, with no one else in the room to witness my hands lingering where her warmth remains.
Hiking the Tuckerman Ravine Trail with Jets
Where trees close in on either side and water drains from elevations, causing a constant lovely ruckus, here, away beyond leaf blowers and chainsaws
jets shake the air and disturb the ears and remind you how much you detest the Air Force motto “We own the sky”
as if that were possible, all the blue and light and storms that pilots blast through barely taking in the scenery—no time
to find an enormous fish in a cloud or a panting dog or even the eye of God in all her heavenly glory sashaying in LGBTQ+ prisms—
heading home to Pease AFB by way of Pinkham Notch (opposite of good children, heard but unseen), lickety-splitting this canopy and canyon
where we step stone to stone taking our time, no rush to return, whistling a song about coming around the mountain when we damn well please.
For my family and friends and in memory of some of the loved ones who nurtured me: Inger Hagen, Lori Jossen, Phyllis and Freddy Grimshaw, Katia Alexeieff, Geneva Davis, Jane and Don Seabury, and Minnie Cotton Rice.
Acknowledgements
Some of these poems appeared in The Café Review, The Catch (University of Maine), Chebacco, Down East, Ellsworth American, Goose River Anthology, Island Reader, LOCUSPOINT, The Lowell Review, Maine Arts Journal, Narramissic Notebook, Off the Coast, Puckerbrush Review and Reflections (Osher Lifelong Learning Institute). “My Mother and M*A*S*H*,” “Genie” and “The Echo” were featured on “Poems from Here,” read by Stuart Kestenbaum on Maine Public Radio. “Hedge,” “The Reveal,” “Turning In,” “Spring Pick-up,” “Ellsworth Carwash” and “Shoveling” appeared in the Deep Water column of the Maine Sunday Telegram edited by Gibson Fay-LeBlanc and Megan Grumbling. “Zones of Peeper” and “Last Writes” were included in “Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry,” edited by Wesley McNair. “If van Cliburn Hadn’t Died Yesterday” appeared in Words & Images and the Union of Maine Visual Artists’ Maine Arts Journal. “Spring Pick-up” appears in 3 Nations Anthology: Native, Canadian & New England Writers (2018). Kristen Hodak read the poem on “The Poetry Express” hosted by the Maine Humanities Council and WERUFM. The poems “St. Eustace” and “Water Lily” originally appeared in 3,000 Dreams Explained (Nightshade Press, 1992). “Yours” was chosen by the Poets Corner to be read at “Love Letters” Zoom event, February 2023.
“Jamaican Grille” and “Oly, Oly, Over” are from a series of poems inspired by the paintings and drawings of David Estey and were read as part of the Belfast Poetry Festival in 2009. “Abandon” was read by the poet in the main hall of the Portland Museum of Art as part of the 2017 “Art Word: Ekphrasis at the PMA,” a collaboration of the museum and Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “The Blanket of the Night” was featured in the 2020 edition of “Art Word.” “Flicker (The Reveal)” was written at the invitation of Rebecca Goodale and read by her in the Special Collections Library at Bowdoin College on the occasion of the monthly turning of the page of the John James Audubon The Birds of America folio. “This Little House of Hers” appears in William Irvine: At Home (Marshall Wilkes, 2018).
