beyond Gloucester harbor. At night, boats return to land guided by the Eastern Point lighthouse, whose beam telescopes through Olson’s southern window. Directly across the river from Olson’s apartment sits the Gloucester Sea Jacket Marine Paints Manufactory, housed in a faded red wooden building with white block letters emblazoned on the side. Down the street, to Olson’s left as he looked out the window, a shipbuilding yard: ribs of empty hulls poked the wind. From Olson’s front steps, I watched the ocean stretching toward Europe. The city of Gloucester pulled back, inland farther west. I was thinking of a film clip I’d just seen: Olson reading a poem from Maximus in his kitchen. Poems and maps thumb tacked to dry wall; the poet’s bear growl voice resonating as he gesticulated enthusiastically in horn rimmed glasses and black, bushy eyebrows, sweat beading on his bald head.
Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld]
I come back to the geography of it, the land falling off to the left where my father shot his scabby golf and the rest of us played baseball into the summer darkness until no flies could be seen and we came home to our various piazzas where the women buzzed To the left the land fell to the city, to the right, it fell to the sea...
Affixed to the white brick foundation of Olson’s apartment, a small bronze plaque emblazoned simply: “Charles Olson, Poet, 1910-1970.” The plaque was added just a few years ago, during the filming of “Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place,” by Henry Ferrini, whose father, Vincent, was a poet, a close friend of Olson’s and the original recipient of Maximus’ letters. Snapping a picture of the plaque, I suddenly noticed a huge seagull, mottled brown, perched on the peak of the roof. It gawked down and shuffled its webbed feet. I couldn’t help but imagine Olson himself, hulking, pale and bald, keeping watch over his beloved city.
I, Maximus of Gloucester, To You ...when even our bird, my roofs, cannot be heard when even you, when sound itself is neoned in? when, on the hill, over the water where she who was used to sing, when the water glowed, black, gold, the tide outward at evening when bells came like boats over the oil-slicks, milkweed hulls And a man slumped, attentionless, against pink shingles o sea city)
My father worked for nearly 40 years as the chief engineer on an oil tanker, sailing as far from Massachusetts as Egypt and Greece before settling into a usual route between Texas and California. The summer I graduated college, I sailed with him on The Brenton Reef from Port Arthur, Texas through the Panama Canal, to L.A., and finally on to San Francisco. Each evening we sat on the bridge outside the tanker’s steel wheelhouse, nursing chamomile tea as the sun dunked luminous into the ocean. Hundreds of miles out to sea, the horizon is a ring, 360 degrees unbroken. Out there as no place else you are aware of the curve of earth. Sailors say the sun flashes green the moment it disappears below water. Olson worked on a Gloucester fishing boat one summer, but never took to it; at six-foot-seven, he was far too tall to be a sea-legged sailor. But he referred to that summer throughout his life, and always felt an affinity for those who chose the sea. Today I’ve been in the bars with my friends the fishermen, the skipper Cece Moulton, an old mastheadsman Walter Burke, Jim Mason, and an old striker (Gloucester for harpooner) whom we call Long Ranny—he has two inches on me but he’s been so stowed in the peak of so many vessels he’s bent like a cadaverous Atlas. —Charles Olson, Letter to Waldo Frank, March 25, 1940 Charles Olson, Selected Letters, ed. Ralph Maud (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) 29.
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