"Bones," a poem from Newport

I hope more than one piece of writing will come out of my trip to Rhode Island, but something was definitely stirring about my attempt to stand near Mary (and William) Dyer's grave site, which I wrote about in my previous post.

Here's what I drafted last night. I like it, or at least it captures exactly what I was thinking at the time and throughout the trip, the meditation on past and present I was so caught up in. Somehow, so far at least, I needed to mark clearly thoughts I was having in that place as distinct from lines of the poem as I am writing it afterwards -- that these were in fact thoughts, not lines of poetry. We'll see.

Bones

Newport, 2018

I think, the past is a locked gate:

a rusty fence surrounds the derelict

brick boxes of the Naval Hospital.

Underneath its grassy grounds, or the blacktop

beneath my feet on ordinary Cypress Street

lie the bones of Mary Dyer, martyr.

A block away, unpaved Dyre’s Gate Road

leads to a puddle, a lost child’s bike,

a path between tall rushes, railroad tracks.

I think, time itself is violence:

a grave-spot locals once showed travelers

erased now, their knowing unknown.

At water’s edge I try to view this round

collar of shoreline with its island shelter

as it met her eyes, unseeing

four centuries of human clutter.

Your own death is the least of it;

nothing you loved will last.

This flat sheen to the horizon. This sound

of small waves shushing on the beach:

how many billion, uninterrupted, each

break like a rung on a ladder you could climb

back to a day she stood here living?

I breathe and center. Sun on my hands.

Loss and loss, everything vanishing

but the innocence of ground, wind, water;

and here we are now, licking our salty lips.

Here is the sight that triggered the thought "the past is a locked gate":

Here is a partial view of where Cypress Street dead-ends at the shoreline.

A view of the Naval Hospital found on Pinterest -- this is where the Dyer farm is likely to have stood. Most of the buildings are abandoned, though there are newer active ones to the north. The end of Cypress Street is at the far left. The search for an image led to my learning that (predictably enough) it is believed to be haunted -- though not necessarily by any Dyers.