Chickasheen

As you come back to the waning summer of New England
along the arrow-straight tracks near the trickling Chickasheen,
with your beer swilling and burp-fests, and are disgorged
with a diesel-electric roar near your institutions of higher learning,
it would be well to consider that stream, flowing through woods
of maple and red oak, white birch and chestnut, scrub pine and bayberry.

Canonchet, sachem of the Narragansetts, friend to the Wampanoags,
once ruled the land. We are to be forgiven our detachment as it shudders past:
It has been overturned so many times since Canonchet lived
that there is no sense of it stretching through time,
except that stone walls meander far from any road or path,
piled to clear fields for farming, and there are no fields near.

The Chickasheen also remains, making its thin way
through the tumbledown of seedlings and weeds by its banks,
a tangle densely green by summer, sparser and light brown in winter,
when, to the south, the coarse, speckled beaches are strewn
with seaweed and eelgrass and broken shell, the water frothy
and numbing cold, with crusts of rime ice on the sand.

Try, though, Miss Budweiser, to imagine the December night
when, near the frozen Chickasheen, soldiers of the colonies,
guided by Mohegan scouts, attacked the Narragansett fort in the swamp.
A preemptive strike, it’s called now; a way to twist your history ahead of time.
Hatchets, cutlasses, muskets, baying hounds; death first by fire, then by ice.
A thousand spirits whisked away, just like that, just down that road, not far.

It would be worth leaving these tracks and hunkering down
beside the quiet witness, Chickasheen, some night in the winter,
smeared in fish oil and bear fat, or in a fleece cap and down parka,
in a New England now wholly yours, now with moss
on the hand-hefted stones of the old walls,
a land hurricane-trimmed and tractor-smoothed,

alert to your place and moment, watchful like a skunk or a deer,
no reason to be, and no reason not to be, not listening but hearing,
not thinking but knowing, with the wind whipping leaves off the jittery trees
and spinning them at the moon; the leaves on the ground making
a constant hiss, the ground all black and silver, and you,
a small heat source, detectable by satellite.
~~~~~~~~~~
Douglas Logan
"Chickasheen" appeared in 2007 in Balancing the Tides.

Comments

[Padraig Murchadha]

"A thousand spirits whisked away, just like that, just down that road, not far."

The sense of history fixed in place is palpable in this line. Cormac McCarthy would be envious. Seriously, this is a fine poem in the American tradition.