Amy Lowell Prize, selected by Martha Collins
The Dark Night of Charles Olson (1910-1970)
Gloucester, Massachusetts, November, 1968
At two in the morning a poet six-foot-eight casts a long shadow,
pen-named MAXIMUS passing from streetlight to the water,
walking the crescent of Pavilion Beach with both hands
buried in satin—it lines the pockets of his outsized coat—
staring toward the lighthouse on Ten Pound Island
where the fishing boats will plow past into the raw dawn.
Gulls don’t follow the out-bound boats at dawn,
but wait like ladies’ ghosts for tea time to shadow
the catch coming in around the scruffy little island,
dipping like white gloves into oily water.
Sometimes a spot of bloody offal makes a corsage on a coat
of greenish gear grease dumped by deck hands.
After his bad augury—fishing expedition—it’s out of his hands,
but it doesn’t seem that way, not here, waiting for dawn
to crack that black rim into full morning. He shivers in a coat
heavy as grief, his gut churning at all the clichés: to be a shadow
of his former self, a shade… but it’s all writ in water:
anything can change, a man, a poem, a cell, an island.
He’d come to Gloucester like Prospero, washed up on an island
to wreak magic out of Dogtown’s ancient deeds. In his hands
the prosaic—cellar holes of houses built, burnt, moved by water,
arcane principles at work in the myths of possession—led to the dawn
of a new civilization: his Oceana. (Finding COURAGE in the shadow
of Babson’s runic boulder, he’d saved a pebble in the pocket of his coat.)
In the dark, he can just make out the old paint factory: one coat
of Tarr & Wonson copper paint kept off the barnacles. The island
and Rocky Neck, they’ve been painted too, in sunlight and in shadow
by Lane and Prendergast, Homer (sighted Winslow) and Hassam, dab hands
at prettifying what nature made glorious, sunset, storm, dawn,
though even he had never bested (blind Greek) Homer’s “wine-dark water.”
Words from Genesis float into his head like wreckage on water:
he’s read too many myths to see God’s face in the mirror. His coat
catches a wave and for an instant he wonders if it would dawn
on anyone that he’d meant to go like this, to the island,
wading Woolf-like to the lighthouse. But it’s cold and his hands
shake and his bones ache and he has no wish to die, not in her shadow.
In the shadow of the abandoned Birdseye plant, he grabs his coat
and wrings water from the slapping hem. He stops at the traffic island,
turns to see the hands of the City Hall clock, then faces down the dawn.
Nancy Brewka-Clark’s poems, short stories, drama, and nonfiction have been published by Red Hen Press, University of Iowa Press, Southeast Missouri State University Press, and Routledge U.K among others. Her debut poetry collection Beautiful Corpus will be published by Kelsay Books in June 2020. Please visit her website nancybrewkaclark.com