from Arundel by Kenneth Roberts

I have often puzzled over the difference between a brave man and a man who is not brave, and it is a thing that will always baffle me. Indeed, I dislike to say this man is brave and that man a coward, because often a man will do a cowardly thing that requires more courage in the doing than a brave thing. There are many who have done brave things because they were afraid to do the cowardly things they would have preferred to do. Also some are cowards about fighting but heroes over money; some brave before audiences but cowardly alone; some brave alone but cowardly before audiences; some deadly afeared of sickness but contemptuous of a storm at sea, and so on. When I think about these things, my brain is muddled; and I arrive at no conclusion, save that every man, somewhere, has in him the spark of bravery.

* * *

from "Waterlily Fire" by Muriel Rukeyser

Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me.

Fire striking its word among us, waterlilies

Reaching from darkness upward to a sun

Of rebirth, the implacable.      And in our myth

The Changing Woman who is still and who offers.

Eyes drinking light, transforming light, this day

That struggles with itself, brings itself to birth.

In ways of being, though silence, sources of light

Arriving behind my eye, a dialogue of light.

And everything a witness of the buried life.

This moment flowing across the sun, this force

Of flowers and voices body in body through space.

The city of endless cycles of the sun.

I speak to you      You speak to me

Yesterday afternoon, on our way back into Portland Harbor after three hours on the mailboat, we saw a pod of porpoises. We had been sitting in the prow, eating tomato sandwiches, and suddenly there they were, arching alongside the boat, gleaming with muscle and spray.

It was a good day to be on the water: bright and brisk and not too choppy; a good evening to eat mountains of steamed mussels and then sit on the deck with cannoli for dessert.

Still, I felt twinges of the fear I wrote about yesterday. I think that may be a permanent condition.

Fear

The birds are screeching like mad this morning--seagulls, terns, crows, sparrows: all of them carrying on to high heaven. I woke at sunrise, ice-cold in the brisk wind that was swirling through my tree-house bedroom. When I got up to deal with the cat, I saw that the moored sailboats on the bay were drifting silhouettes against streaks of finger-paint sky. The view was as eloquent as a drugstore "I love you" card. Sometimes this town is ridiculously beautiful.

All winter and spring and summer, I have been trying to find a rickety balance . . . among where I am, where I was, where I will be. At the same time I find myself obsessed with the public life of the nation: where it was, and where it is, and the horrifying chasm before us. In the confusions of my thoughts, the physical presence of now--this place, this moment--is in constant conflict with the made-for-TV thuggery of our rulers. I swirl in place, trapped between cherishing and mourning, and meanwhile the headlines scream, "Whole US mainland in missile range." The fragility is terrifying.

Today we will spend the day on the bay. I will pack curried chicken sandwiches, and fresh tomato salad, and sweet cherries, and we will meet Tom's parents at the ferry, and we will ride on the mailboat among the islands and swells. The sun will glint on the waves, and, if we're lucky, porpoises will surface alongside the prow.

Probably it won't be our last day on earth.

Like you, I woke up to learn that the despicable Republican party was foiled, yet again, in its midnight attempt to destroy my health care. I have consistently voted against Susan Collins as senator; I voted against John McCain as president; yet along with Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, they appear to be the only moral voices among their colleagues. The malice, the sheer evil, of the party is breath-taking.

And then there's the sideshow with the White House staff, involving schoolyard insults and middle-of-the-night phone calls to reporters and deleting Tweets for the the purpose of "transparency." It's like living in a world invented by professional wrestlers.

So in the face of all of this garbage, I am glad to have something to celebrate. Today my magnificent firstborn son, James, is 23 years old. He has spent his life raring to light out for the territories, to do everything by himself, to invent and cogitate and untangle every knot. And now, a year after graduating from college, he is working full time for a well-established network television show. He is sharing his life with a charming and intelligent woman. He has grown up to be funny, resourceful, responsible, and loving. I cannot believe that I, the flustered unemployable one, managed to raise such a sensible person. And today I will celebrate his birthday by buying airline tickets to go visit him in September.

It's raining, which gave me some hope that the horrible house painter would take the opportunity to skip work today. But no. I hear someone outside rattling a ladder, which means another day spent alongside a guy who stares into windows, drops cigarette butts everywhere, splashes paint onto beautiful trees, argues loudly with his boss, and generally behaves like a boor. And you know I say this as the wife of a house carpenter: guys like this painter are bad press for the fine workers who abound.

At least the coffee shop down the street is pleasant enough. Yesterday I sat next to two men talking about rehab followed by a man and a woman discussing fundraising. Yet I also managed to finish a poem draft and copy out several Rukeyser pieces. I wonder how I managed to be so productive.

Oh, speaking of poems: I should tell you that the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance has formally announced my upcoming 10-week poetry master class, which will be held here in Portland on Thursday evenings, starting in mid-September. I'm quite excited about this workshop. It will be a treat to spend so much time with the same group and to watch poems evolve from first drafts to finished pieces. I don't get to do that very often.

Yesterday I finished editing the first of four Juniper Prize manuscripts. I will be editing the other three as well, but they have not yet appeared in my inbox, so theoretically I have today to myself. Yet given the ubiquitous and irritating chain-smoking, mess-making, shouting-arguing-thunking house painters who have been draped outside my windows all week, I'll probably have to wander down the street and find some coffee shop to take me in. As the wife of a house carpenter, I am generally the last person to complain about workmen. But even Tom is rolling his eyes at this crew.

On my way to yoga class last night, I stopped at the library and took out two books: Kenneth Roberts's Arundel (1930) and the complete stories of Jean Rhys (first published between 1927 and 1976). Arundel is a potboiler: a historical novel about pioneer-era Maine that I last read in high school. But when I learned that my dear friend Steve, a birchbark canoe builder and an expert on the Maine wilderness, also fell in love with it as a child, I decided I should read it again. Moreover, most of it is set in my beloved homeland: the forest of the Kennebec River corridor. The plot centers around Benedict Arnold's trek north through the woods into Quebec, in the pre-revolutionary days before he defected to the British. It should be the quintessential I've-got-to-kill-time-in-a-coffee-shop book.

I know less about the Jean Rhys stories, though I've read a couple of her novels before. But Ford Madox Ford loved her work, so that is a good-enough advertisement for me.

We live now on the edge of what's known as the Peninsula; it's that jut of land, just below the bridge, that forms the 4 o'clock section surrounding the circular body of water, shown in the NASA photo below. The circle of water is a tidal estuary known as Back Cove, and Portland's older outlying neighborhoods are built around it.

Our new neighborhood is located at about 10 o'clock on the Back Cove circle, and our house itself is about a half-mile inland.

As you can see from the photograph, it's hard to get away from water in Portland. Everywhere you look you see a tidal river or an arm of the bay. Further inland a myriad of freshwater rivers and streams feeds into the watershed. This is the wateriest place I've ever lived, and I say that as someone who grew up on the Atlantic seaboard. I still can't get over the views that arise at the end of every other street, around every other corner.

This morning the tide is out, and the mudflats are visible around the islands in the bay. At low tide Back Cove becomes nearly empty--an expanse of mud dotted with tidepools. It's unusable for commercial navigation; the only craft I've ever seen on it are kayaks and rowboats. But it is a safe home for waterbirds--egrets and ibis and herons--and I'm looking forward to getting know them on my new walks.