(I found a noble ancient name in French,

Which being Englished means "Old Shack."

I'd never want it painted on the door,

Yet in its foreign queer exactness

It seemed a worthy word, potent for good.)

Part One

THE FIRE

I think first of the good warm cracking fire

Remembering Parker River and the shack.

Could Marston, Warner, or could Gene or John,

Basil or Phil, remember anything

They've done more often at the River

Than peering at the fire or fetching wood?

Or sitting round it, pipe in face, and face

In book, and feet up on a chair?

The sum

Of windless nights when we have climbed and lain

Flat on our backs on top of Old town Hill

To watch the stars, the lighthouse and the train;

Of days we've climbed to mark the river's curse

Put to the sum of early morning walks

Up-lane among the apple-trees for milk,

Or quiet nightly half-miles with a pipe,

Swinging the milk can on past shapes of trees

All these would still be less than all the fires

We've laid and lighted, talked and read besides.

Add in too, the sun for good beginnings.

Waking us every morning through the door.)

Gather these sums together, let's take up

The four corners of memory, and tis

Our gold, and weigh it with the fires we've built.

See! They balance, calm, serene, unfretted

Like life itself - if lived at Parker River!

Part Two

WALKING AND ROWING

All the good feel of thoughtful things we've dine,

And cared to do again, when we have made

Some width of water, marsh, or country road

Immortal with a gesture of the mind!

There's nothing but is worthy setting down:

The times we've talked the graveyard road

Through woods, past pine and barberry bush,

Past apple orchards back of old stone walls,

Through to the clearing, out to the island

Where to see the long line out to the island

Where we see the long line of yellow dunes,

And talk, and watch the mountainy cloud blow by,

Speaking with few words and without them, too;

The times we've set straight across the marsh,

That grass-blown reach of flatness where the sky

Goes higher up than sky does anywhere.

Barefoot we felt the warm mud, the dried grass,

And leaped the narrow ditches, followed one

And then were baffled by the marsh, and fond,

On the way back, perhaps, a gunning shelter.

Once for a sunny week when tide was high

Early, I dropped the boat's round anchor-stone

Just off the sand-bar, dozed and read Charles Lamb.

Sea gulls rose anxiously and fluttered down.

The water slapped gently at the bow. rt rocked

The row-boat like a cradle, and the sun

Was hot on miles of quiet marsh and bank;

The hours we've spent in rowing on the River:

Four oar blades dipped, pulled, and lifted wet,

Dip, pull, with arms taut, leaning and laying back,

To think the skiff a scull and think the water

Goes by, the bank and boats go by, swiftly.

Pulling up-River past the bridge, the tide

Floating us back, our arms and. oars at rest.

Or that more biting sport, to row down-River

When the tide and wind are opposite and strong.

We dip deep and the bow bangs the water,

We all heave long and curse the tricky wind

That swings the boat off-course, and makes a fight,

A full- strength fight of rowing home again

When we have drifted past the last red buoy.

Or that more tranquil rowing when the fog,

Diffused with moon, made all the brimming plane

Of river wider and more lonely-lost,

While we went smoothly gliding on a mirror

Laid flat and clouded round with moonlit mist.

Part Three

OTHERS

For all we say or think, only we five

Go down to Parker River on the train,

Taking our three day's food like pioneers.

We make one column of thin lonely smoke

Against the sky from one lone house, the shack

On an edge of marsh under a tall sky

At the lane's end.

But this is our ideal

Of Parker River, this is how we think

Of it away from it. For others come,

Shadowy, not quite real, except the Hills.

Clammers go by each day when tide is out,

And Gus and Mister Green and Mister Fox

Are neighbors in their degrees of solitude

To a vague scattered score of cottages,

This brings us to the launching of the raft

When ballad-poetry happened in this ways

Season and tide to launch the swimming raft

Were right, and on a sunny week-end day

The men, the solid citizens with pipes,

In flannel shirts, old pants and old straw hats,

Gazed contemplatively upon their task.

And all they gravely did not say enlarged

Their fine deliberate air. A driftwood fire

Was lit, and tarry smoke belched blackly out.

Thee children, Johnny Green and sizes up

To Elma in a scarlet swimming-suit

And helmet, watched, beside Virginia,

Their fathers lay the rollers down and heave.

The raft was floated and the run made fast,

But long before that scarlet plunge clove air

And water quick and clean, I felt, I knew

This scene could stand on any sturdy page

In some old Settler's History - the men,

The River thus, the children and the launching:

The thing had a brave epic quality!

This poem for that day to catch it's grace!

PARKER RIVER POEM

Six fishermen met on the sand

To launch a high-beached ship.

Three hauled with arm and hand,

Three pushed with back and hip.

Their children sat on a log

Half buried beside the shore.

One teased a shaggy dog,

One a green head-band wore,

The girls were golden-haired

And long-limbed every one,

Two with the boys were paired

And these were browned by sun.

A fire still burned by the rock,

Black smoke blew out in streams

From tar in a melted block

That had sealed the ship's dry seams.

A girl tied a flag to the mast,

Laughing and scarlet-coated,

When the boat was launched at last

And light by the pier floated,

Old sails were shaken out

And hung from the main-top-yard,

New rigging was placed about

And bound down hard,

At evening under the stars

The fishermen went to rest,

But over the river-bars

Young eyes watched the west,

Hand in a warm hand pressed,

Gold hair in the light wind blowing -

And this was best,

For the boy would be going.

It was late when the lovers slept,

And the children were all asleep,

None knew the watch she kept,

Nor heard her weep,

It was early when she awoke

And a single name she spoke,

And the dim moonlight had failed,

And the ship had sailed.

Part Four

THINGS THERE ARE ONLY ONE OF

Listening

Then there's the sea, always the sea, far off,

Across the meadows and beyond the dunes.

Sometimes in clean, clear air the eye can catch,

Between the golden ridges of the sand,

Blue of the wave, and see a crest of foam.

Far out and up, and melting into sky

The great deep lies, We never speak of it,

That long three thousand miles of silent sea,

But sometimes when the wind blows in to s

The muted roar from a solid nine-mile edge

Of vastness, then we say," The surf.." We listen.

Dark .

The dark at Parker River is a dark

Not merely the result of lack of lights.

The world, the world turns slowly over

Into darkness, out of light. Shadows grow

Inland, they move out toward the sea, grow gray,

Grow dark, and darken into night, slowly,

And what is lamplight, or the lighthouse flash?

Night also has its noon, its after noon.

We know this with a retina more delicate

Than that the eyelash guards, when we step out

In grass, aware of some immensity

Where light and dark are unimportant words.

Time

No clocks cut up the day in little lengths,

For clocks are something to be late by,

Or by thin pitiful virtue, early,

Or to miss a train, but Parker River

Is journey's last good end, nowhere to go.

There day is only sunlight, coming up

Red from the sea at morning, high at noon,

Blazing low in the west by Oldtown Hill.

Time is a great invisible music,

Never quite captured but about to be.

Sometimes we hear the single instruments

Ponder their theme, and feel the counterpoint

That gives a meaning to the melody

Part Five

PLUM ISLAND

An old curious savage legend tells

Of runners to a mountain height, who failed,

One after one, but each man climbing higher.

The last man topped that far-off-sighted peak,

Only to see, still further west, mountains

That lifted larger still, hidden in cloud:

Thus we, who make our fortunate escape

And push where many a stout heart cannot come.

But Parker River's not the journey's end,

Those are warm words for comfort but not true.

It's a last outpost, bordering on a dream,

Like the review of day before we sleep,

For there's the sea, always the sea, far off,

Beneath the sunshine peace that we have won

Always there stirs a strange uneasiness.

Nothing our words tell, though perhaps our eyes

Move quick and restless with a yearning thought

For all Plum Island's nine-mile empty beach,

Where ocean tramples in with growling roar

Its mighty marching of the ranks of wave;

More than a thought for that hard-pounded beach

Where we have ranged for long miles either way,

And found one limit lonely as the other;

More than a thought for spaces where the heart

Finds God's own reach of room to go in,

Be hungry for, strain to, and never fear

That satisfaction will dull down the ache;

A thought that on the windy thundering shore

A man may know he's small in the world's plan,

And straighten up, harder and tall, to shout .

Later, he's larger than the inland men.

To reach Plum Island, row on a high tide

Down the River, across the shallow bay,

And drag the boat up on the muddy shore.

Half-Way House, this side of the sand, will stare,

Thinking of us, will stare us down the path

Till we turn between the scrub-oaks past the plum,

Go by the cranberry bed and climb the dune.

The wind blows, and sun is hot.

The cool surf

With green and creamy roar, crashes in waves

For miles, for miles. This is discovery,

And we are always explorers. Always

Each is his own Balboa, with a shout

Breaking upon Pacific stillness first

Of all his race and kind.

Yet what are we

To be heroic longer than a moment,

Even in secret silence - to renew a claim,

And plant for the King a staff, a proud flag

Here on the wide still margin of the mind?

From heroes we are only men again,

Or children, running on the wave-wet sand.

We once transposed the green organ music

Of ocean, the throb of thoughtful music,

To one straight clean uncomplicated song.

We stripped naked up on a windy dune

And ran in the cold waves, shouting and wet,

All morning. Hurricanes in Florida

Made surf' that summer on the whole North Shore,

Hard surf that punched and battered at the sand.

That day we stood waist deep and book the blow,

The cold stinging shock, again and again,

Feeling the caving sand beneath the foot,

Raced in the shallow reach of dragging foam,

And dried with towels woven of wind and sun,

That day we gathered good all afternoon,

Cracked timber, sand-worn boards and barrel-staves

Once part of ship or cargo swept in storm

To the beach, with all the sea dried out of them.

Behind the dunes we laid a ten-foot fire

And lit it at dark. The hard timber-strength,

Released to action, made an eager roar.

Flame in the deep center lashed like sea-waves,

Hot ribbons cracking in a wind that rose

Out of' the fire. Between us and the stars

The smoke went piling, bending, flying up

A hundred feet in a red fling of sparks.

That day ocean, fire, and song without words,

As inarticulate and eloquent

As the heart's blood, were our philosophy.

When we are old, and must remember joy,

This is a day to think upon as fierce

And full of sunlight. This exploration,

Sudden and perilous, on the edge of Time,

May yet extend the boundaries of the mind,

For there we planted for the King a flag,

And claimed that Day horizoned by the sun,

The ocean, earth, and sky, forever ours.

And rowing homeward up the River, late,

On the full evening tide, silvered with moon,

The bow pushed slowly at a wedge of ripple

River-wide. Our eyes were on the island-fire

Burning alone and brightly while we rowed,

And miles away, between the earth and sky, It still was burning when we went to bed,