MAKING MAYBASKETS
by Patricia Ranzoni
 

Written for the Centennial of the Ellsworth Public Library Festival of Poets, April 1997
 
 
 
 

Your mother trades her eggmoney for pleats of tissue
and crinkled crepe paper at the 5 & 10 the colors of arbutus trailing
on the ledges where handsome young Lyman and Joannie Hutchins from your mailman’s
family drive head on  one after the other exploding into those cliffs missing the turn
off the Waldo-Hancock Bridge where Bill Carpenter will someday come to write and run
come to live and breathe in  what people imagine you girls imagine about those sailors
off those tankers and barges come to load and unload.  Don’t go down town
there’s a boat in come straight home there’s a boat in your father and mother and teachers warn
lest you pick all Bucksport’s rare wild rose yarrow on the way to the wharf,
encounter rainforest you don’t know about emotions, become women right there on the dock
emerging with foreign flowers between your souvenir breasts for the rest of your life.

You don’t know Robert Lowell is learning sailing
and kissing a few miles downriver summers
you don’t know about, classic summers, Elizabeth Bishop
names it in North Haven poems. You don’t know E.B.
has been crossing the river on the Prospect-to-your-town ferry years
before that stanzaed bridge is spun, his domestics scared
for where they’re being taken and Lowell’s help is right.
These are dinky roads.

You don’t know there’s any such thing
as a slick magazine called The New Yorker
though its paper could’ve been made right here
by your father and uncles and neighbors,
or that  One Man’s Meat is anything but all
a war-horrified boy home from the Pacific wants
for the rest of his life--a page of pasture
with a job at the mill to make sure.

Not crocuses, snowdrops, hyacinths from bulbs
you don’t know about needing planting at closin’-in
time, who’d have the time or money to spare, not for sale
anywhere you’ve seen anyway you don’t know anyone
who actually has daffodils.  But pussywillows, dandelions
(a food not weed), skunk cabbage, maple and chokecherry
flowers, fiddleheads, and

Oldtime daylily shoots clumpin’ up 'longside cellarstones
facing south. What grows on homesteads bequeathed by creation
and relatives and oldtimers wantin’ you to have some.

Within a wall as white as milk,
within a skin as soft as silk,
within a fountain crystal clear,
a golden apple doth appear.
No doors there are to this stronghold
yet thieves break in and steal the gold.

You don’t know anyone who writes
for a living or that there’s any such thing as that kind
of living working to get words right for printing
though your mother knows and always wanted to
but women don’t. Wins a dollar
in the WABI contest with a poem they read on the radio
about the well in winter freezin,’ in the summer
goin’ dry, after that song  Life Gets Tedious Don’t It.
Always bringing up Thanatopsis from her  classic Abbott
School education how anyone so young
could know to write such a thing! Doesn’t know
before her life is through that poem will name any such thing
as a heavy metal band. Reads you Mother West Wind How,
Mother West Wind Where, Mother West Wind When
stories not poems exactly still they sing in your mind
the same way you tease her to recite Little Orphant Annie again.
You better mind yer parents, an’ yer teach/ers fond an’ dear, ...
Er the Gobble-uns 'll git you/Ef you/Don’t/Watch/Out!
Going right along with the naughtygirl tale
in the children’s book your warbrideaunt Gabrielle Joan
Pendred Lockwood oo ...brings you from England
where a small girl falling asleep on the beach
is bound by her wrists by creatures she doesn’t know about,
pulled with cords to the clouds down skystreets she
doesn’t know about where people shame shame
to work for Mrs. Do As You’re Told and Mrs. Mind
What I Say her sorrys and tears to no avail until sufficiently
improved she’s allowed back through those approving now
faces, waking in the dunes to be forever, now, good.

You learn there’s a Bar Harbor and Mount Desert Island
when the radio says your town’s sending engines, scared
sparks will cross to the mainland, then the truck ride there,
eyes watering to see up close the loss you don’t know is instruction
for the decades: how the most amazing
greens spring from burnt ground no matter how tall
and fog-blurred the ghosts or how long they insist
like those charcoal spruce and fir. How seeds come through fire
flare into their best destiny after all.

And your father never does anything without some
colory words probably got from his Scottish granddad, the voice
teacher come over,
and going with his sisters Beulah and Hazel with their great aunts
to drive the cows home to verse.

You admire the sound of Tojo
the name your father with an ear for Longfellow
gives the Husky puppy he brings home after his discharge
not knowing you’re loving the name of the prime minister
of Japan the arch enemy he reduces to a dog
before he is hanged.

Under  a spreading chestnut -tree
The village smithy stands....
he orates between love songs and The Old Rugged Cross,
beholden to Henry :
And looks the whole world in the face,
For he owes not any man.....flexing his muscles
shaving in the mirror, delighted or distraught with himself
as Robert Lowell who could be shopping right next to him 
for his own gallon of cheap wine
to quiet or reward his own warring mind.

They could be brothers you don’t know
you’ll be jolted to see, Cal Lowell looking so familiar
in books baring his soul they could be brothers
but their worlds will never
touch that they’ll know about good thing too no doubt
though they might’ve found something to admire in the other
if they’d dared find their common ground, until,
one proud he went to war
for his family and country the other proud he didn’t,
they’d’ve come to blows sure as hell, Lowell
coming for these tennis summers (which is not to forget his
kind of elbow grease in his kind of barn), your father
never owning playclothes his whole rich life
when he plays he rolls up
or takes off.

You don’t know you’ll someday bet they might
in rare thoughts
have been proud to suppose themselves friends
but in the end when they couldn’t forgive themselves
or each other who they were and were not,
they’d’ve given up, missing the glimpse of themselves
received from the other at their best all
of their fallingstar years.

But doesn’t Lowell make your mother’s
people’s cemetery and our skunks famous (not the other way around
the way your father’s people wore skunk oil against the croup)
seeing his own moonstruck eyes in theirs confessing his own
wild taste for cultured trash?  How Hancock County serves
his genius these days freeing him to loosen and swivel
his aesthetics no less, you may never be forgiven
for proposing, than Elvis, and shush .....
                                         ;        what’s this Howl!

You’ve heard of Luzon and Mog Mog Island
in the Phillipines but don’t know there’s any such place
as Brooklin Maine or Eggemoggin Reach except for the skit
Mr. Mac has each 6th grade do called The Lighthouse
Keeper’s Daughter where the tallest boy gets to be the light
so Bobby Terrill is yours and how you all split
when Alfred Kettell like Barnacle Bill
 

(sung)

Who’s that knocking at my door... cries the fair young maiden.   It’s only me from over the sea , says Barnacle Bill the sailor

 
chases Judith Cropley you don’t know will die so young
losing her leg, 'round and 'round Bob you don’t know
will die so young working maintenance at the mill
no connection they’ll say. Gangly he stands while all roar
in the gym but you’ll hardly be able to smile
his last reunion his face turning back into that light
he’s leaving on and Dear Christ
you hope you kissed him goodbye.
         This is the forest primeval you memorize with voice sad
(and not unprophetic) for Rena Grey in 7th or 8th and
...he tapped with his whip on the shutters, but all was locked
and barred;/He whistled a tune  to the window,/and who
should be waiting there .../.../.../ Plaiting a dark red love-knot
into her long black hair.

You make boiled flour-and-water paste.

You don’t know E.B. these years calls the management
of his desk paste a # one problem.
You don’t know George Oppen is pasting words
over words (because neither he nor Mary type) but loosely
so they can be tried and untried
like where to stick the right bud and leaf on what handle
or ruffle, floating discrete words over Penobscot waters you
don’t know about  from their island-bobbing boat. You
don’t know you are learning alliteration from wagons
on depths just as capable of drowning. Not the rhythm
of trimming sails exactly but build that load, walk  that hay,
trimming, trimming, your father’s chants teaching you that
ballet where to tread to an edge to balance and not fall off,
your own sweat your own salt, chaff
an inland sting and after full days after days of it not
foxtrots you don’t know about over any harbor
you don’t know about but The Barbara Polka, the schottische,
and Irene Goodnight at the Gypsy or up to the hall, spitcurls
on your cheeks, blackest ponytail the Methodist minister
calls a sin down to your waist swingin’ in squares and rounds,
not chintz and linen you don’t know about but cotton broomstick
skirts (you don’t even need a pattern for) twirling
over net petticoats starched in sugar water dripped outside to dry
so stiff they scrunch like iceout from the racing brook
that spicey old scent of life wanting to chase and kiss itself.

Last of April you make the fill.  Your mother’s divinity, sister’s
peanut butter, your
cocoa fudge keeping the old secrets of the full rolling boil
to the soft ball stage you keep testing for
with drops in cups of cold water
'til the syrup gathers in your fingertips
like a nipple at rest
then waiting, waiting, to let it cool
before beating out its shine
having waxed paper to turn onto that instant it sets.

May First it goes like this: you’ve picked through dreams
through days and nights where
you’ll deliver, which
heart where, not by moonlight

but after school after supper after chores before dark.
After rings on the still-party line all agreeing to fake,
listening for who’ll be home when. I’ll come to thee [before]
moonlight, though hell should bar the way.

Across the valley youngsters watch who’s where, when.
Baskets behind their backs, they walk or bike
to each house, those inside pretending not to notice.
Not since Una Wardwell’s day when from eggshells
fancied with wallpaper have most Maybaskets
been light or right enough to hang from knobs, so you nest
them on granite and wooden steps quiet as birds
setting down. Knock and run! Cheeks flushed to russets,
you chase   kiss   chase   kiss   remember this!
 
You don’t know someday you’ll wonder why, living here,
your paths never crossed, all these late great poets
along your coast, although you could have waited
on them not knowing, not allowed to talk.
You don’t know how some shocking day
owning your own voice,  you’ll  re-see
serving people like that not joking with them or fraternizing
like that crewcut Kitchen Boy Phippen
you don’t know about tryin’ to be good over to Hancock
you don’t know about, but with one arm locked bent
across your waist behind your back as required in your
station, deferential, and how that will someday bend
how you say what you say. Too bad
they missed what you might’ve held in that hand
back there.

You don’t know the Philip Castine come home
to honor his and your ancestral grounds here most of all
will come to own the path your family takes to the shore,
and harking some slanted day for his own life’s work you
don’t know about may hear heart caught there,
and thrashing, from a noisy child never shown how to swim right
but figuring it out enough to make her own claim
wrestling saltwater and riding that bigol’ slippery trunk
rolling in That Time’s tide.

Sally over the ocean
Sally over the sea
Sally broke a beanpot
and blamed it onto me
I told ma
ma told pa
Sally got a lickin’
so ha ha ha holding hands treaddancing and bursting as high
out of the water as you can on the ha’s, crashing back
into the waves 'til your bottom bounces
on the water’s floor or hear where a Mainechild cried,
teaching herself her legacy (Amy Clampitt will come here to learn
and Minnie Bowden already knows) and none
too soon how neither tears nor words are anything
to an ocean.

You don’t know when or where in any world off
or near, poets Little and Mancuso are. D’Angelo,
Shepherd, Blair. Or Hanson. Or Thomas, Kestenbaum,
Greenberg, Stover, Shetterly, Hubbell, Pollet. Or
how you will will to come some
time in time to find their spirits here. Nor have they had,
these years, any way to grasp the neighbor you are,
nor to guess, if they slipped quietly out into your valley
hanging a paper formed grocery hope
on your May door
how you would soar for the poem
in kissing them!

See Patricia Ranzoni's Author Page.

(c)1998Patricia Ranzoni

Previously published in Puckerbrush Review. Republished here by permission from the author.
 
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