A Life in Lubec Poems by Gunopeta Photos by Viriyalila
Hardhack and Hackmatack
Hardhack and hackmatack, spruce and fir; chokeberry, chokecherry, bramble, thorn; water where you don’t want it, ledge where you do. Thirty years mowing and thirty years growing: the trees watch their children hidden in the grass. Where cows puddled the clay soil, alders followed. Where sheep wandered the cleared land, wire lies down. Hundred-year-old fence wire, found by the feet at the head of a gulley or above the bay – running now under the roots of the spruces. On the hill slope there must have been a woodlot. After the fire of ’57, it all came back birches. Dead snags still hugged the skyline in the ‘80s – we watched an osprey perch there, tearing a fish. Last time I climbed: snags fallen; young softwoods. Rectangles of field stones show under the turf. Bricks – an old chimney – under the spade. Liniment bottles, bits of rusted stove. Our house needs work. There’s no foundation. Just an old cellar hole, slumped in and muddy. Thirty years mowing and thirty years growing: once we’re gone, the trees will own the fields.
At the door of a small house on an old cellar hole on a June night in Maine
I would rather live where I can hear the bullfrogs a mile away up a silent road and see ten thousand fireflies doing their bugged-out strobe-dance under a quarter moon and shoo mosquitoes so that the air near the roses moves and scents the still night than to be smarter better happier richer anywhere else in this sick old USA.
The Translator
She sat next to me, reading La Neige Tombant Sur Les Cèdres the whole flight, east coast to Seattle, except for a meal, a nap or two, her book filling the dry cabin high, high above the parched nation with mystery, with green and solemn light. I felt then the cedars I was leaving and those toward which I was passing, how cool they would be, even in summer, and how in winter the snow off Fundy or Puget Sound would hold the half-light steady in its moist fingers, weaving a story, the same and not the same, among the branches over my upturned face.
Prayer For My Old Age
Oh, may I not be a saver of small things, like my mother and so many old women and the occasional surviving old man. Let me not accumulate used tea bags in a saucer or opened single-serving-sized salad dressings in the fridge. Let me not hoard newspapers, plastic bags, books, or ideas. Let me relinquish, as she is doing now, phone numbers, motor skills and the days of the week. And as for memories, when the time comes, may I take them out, one by one, and give them up lovingly to the people sitting beside me, to my right and to my left, who have none.
Tracking Buddha This morning was perfect for tracking Buddha: a little fresh fluff on crust you could run on: snow’s formlessness holding the perfect forms of the prints. I found plenty of squirrel tracks – tracks of whitefooted mice – voles – the lick of their tails – a shrew’s starved scribble – coyotes, hares – fox’s purposeful meander – but no Buddha. Searching the field edge, crossing the wide glare to peer under apples, spruces, I read the news of porcupines – deer – raccoons – even, by the marsh, some geese. No Buddha. Then, on my neighbor’s land, near the vanished farmhouse and ramshackle barn, I found where a grouse had stepped out from the woods, stitched its careful, straight seam – put its wings down, once – and flew, what, five yards?, six?, surely just a single beat, to land in a sliding skid of two long parallel furrows.
I imagine that bird waking after a bitter night to peer from cover into sun – step forth – look around cautiously and, knowing it is alone, execute a moment of perfect impromptu silliness before walking on, wings at sides as if in silent meditation into the far trees.
Aurora
I went out and the hair of the night was standing on end above the huge forehead of pale shining. In the still air all the animal sounds and people and place sounds mingled: a distant truck, a foghorn, the grumbling tides, a million yips and yowls. The night stood up on its hind legs and everything on earth was looking and speaking in tongues.
(from “Two For Don�)
Water-Rock Poem
When you challenged the incumbent, we were “hippies that ran around in the woods naked smoking dope.” When you went downstate to read, you overheard in the ladies’ room that you “didn’t smell” the way she “thought you would.” My father, tapping the inside wall that was also the outside wall, pronounced our situation “marginal.” My mother fretted and fretted until we finally got a phone, although for a long time it was under the stairs in an unused house ten miles off. Still, we have been here over thirty years together, living our poems, painting them on rocks, the bark of old trees, in water, in rain that blows in from the east, sun that blows in from the west.
Gunopeta has been living in Lubec, Maine with his partner, Nancy Nielsen, for over thirty years. Lubec is a small, quiet community nestled along the US eastern shore at its border with Canada. Gunopeta, ordained in 1997, moved there with his partner, Nancy, after returning to the US in 1980 from England, where he had lived near the old Archway Center and at Aryatara outside London. He saw the early days of Aryaloka develop and is a valued member of the Regional Order even though he lives a good 8hour drive from most of his fellow Order members, a journey he has been unable to make in recent years. Living on the edge of the sea, in the quiet simple surroundings of downeast Maine, Gunopeta and Nancy spend their days planning their garden, writing their poetry and living life fully and simply. Photographs by Viriyalila, who finds Lubec to be the place of dreams. Visiting as time and circumstances allow. When she does, rarely is she found without camera in hand. For more poetry by Gunopeta, and his partner, Nancy Nielsen, visit www.saltandstonepoetry.blogspot.com