(Marston Sargent, Gene Wadman, and Phil Rusden)

Think first of the good warm cracking fire

That shook the shadows over four of us

Who sat with our feet up on the broken chair,

Speaking with few words, and without them, too.

Think of the tall thin lonely spire of smoke

Against that night-time sky from that old house.

Then think what we were thinking of, the sum

Of other nights when we had climbed and lain

Flat on our backs on top of Oldtown Hill

To watch the stars, the lighthouse, and the train;

Or days we set out straight across the marsh,

That grass-blown reach of flatness where the sky

Goes further up than sky goes anywhere.

Barefoot we crossed warm mud and dry sharp grass.

We leaped the narrow ditches, followed one

Till, baffled by the search, we turned; and found

On the way back a gunning shelter hid in grass

Think next, as I am thinking here, of how,

Across salt-meadows and out beyond the dunes,

There was the sea, always the far-off sea.

Sometimes in clear clean air the eye would catch,

Above the uneven golden line of the dunes,

Deep-water blue touched with a crest of foam.

Far out, and up, and melting into the sky

The ocean moved. We never spoke of it.

But sometimes when the wind blew in to us

A muted roar from the nine-mile sandy beach,

We'd stop to listen, and shade our eyes to look.

Time was a great invisible music there,

Never quite captured but about to be.

It was so slow in the old groves, and so deep,

So gold in the waving of the long marsh grass,

It was so many-voiced, and the voices all

In the sun, all in the wind with the year's changing,

We guessed it; we were swayed in it; knowing

As much of the music as the music knows.

Day there was only sunlight, coming up

Red from the sea at morning, wide at noon,

And blazing low in the west by Oldtown Hill.

We thought the darkness there was more than dark.

We thought the world there turned slowly over

Into a darkness never to be light.

The shadows grew, and moved out toward the sea,

Grew gray, grew dark, and darkened into night.

We thought night had its noon and afternoon.

And sometimes from the firelight in the house

We stepped outdoors together and stood in grass

All silent, and all aware of some immensity

Where dark and light are unimportant words.

Time takes us, time has taken us away.

What is the good now of thinking in the past?

But the sun shines, and the day falls, as once

It fell on us wading in tall grass down the lane,

Coming at twilight toward the house, with food.

Think with me now of the days we said were good.

Do you remember rowing on the river then?

The oar-blades dipped, pulled, and lifted wet?

We pulled up-river past the bridge, the stream

Floating us back, our arms and oars at rest.

We rowed down-river on those rainy days

When tide and wind were opposite and strong,

Dipping deep, and the bow banging the water.

We heaved hard, and cursed the tricky wind

That blew the boat off-course and let the oars

Stagger in the empty air between waves.

Or that more tranquil rowing when the fog,

Diffused with moon, made all the brimming plane

Of river wider, the world more lonely-lost,

While we went gliding smoothly on a mirror

Laid flat and clouded round with moonlit mist.

Once for a week, when tide was early high,

We dropped an anchor-stone down four clear feet

Just off the sand-bar, dozed, and read, and burned.

Seagulls rose anxiously, and settled down.

Water slapped gently at the bow, and rocked

The row-boat like a cradle, while the sun

Lay hot on miles of quiet marsh and bank.

Where you are now, a long time afterward,

Do you remember how the sea, far off,

Stirred in us always a strange uneasiness?

Do you remember spaces where the heart

Found God's own reach of room, and never a wall,

Along Plum Island's nine-mile empty beach?

We chose high tide to row from the river-mouth

Across the bay to the island's inside shore,

And drag the boat up on the low mud bank.

The half-way house would stare us down the path

To the turn between the scrub-oak trees and plum.

Do you remember where we climbed the dune?

The wind blows, and sun is hot. The cool surf

With green and creamy roar, crashes in waves

For miles and miles on sand, as it always did,

Crowding in toppling crests all day on the beach.

Great sun. Great sky. That was discovery;

We were always explorers, always each

Was his own Balboa, breaking with a shout

Upon some ocean first of all his race.

It is twenty years since we shouted on the dunes,

A long time back to ask a man to think

Of nothing more than fire, waves, trees, and sky,

And a small house where we sat at night to talk.

Once we transposed the green organ music

Of ocean, and thoughtful music in the wind,

To one straight clean uncomplicated song.

We stripped naked standing on a windy dune

And ran in the cold surf, shouting and wet,

Burned red in the sun, the white skin whipped cool,

All morning; stood waistdeep and took the blow,

The cold, hard, stinging shock again, and gasped,

And ran toward the towering wave, and fell, and ran.

We felt the caving sand beneath the foot,

Raced in the shallow reach of dragging foam,

And dried at last with towels of wind and sun.

That day we gathered wood all afternoon,

The cracked timber, staves, and sand-worn boards

Once part of ship or cargo swept in storm

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

Behind the dunes we laid a six-foot fire,

And lit it in the cool blue light after sunset,

With night going out to sea. Hard timber-strength

Escaped to action in an eager roar.

Flame in the red center lashed like sea-waves,

Cracked in hot ribbons in the wind that rose

Out of the fire's heart. Between us and the stars

Black smoke went piling, bending, flying up

A hundred feet in a red fling of sparks.

When we are old, and must remember joy,

That is a day to think upon as fierce

And full of sunlight. That was exploration,

Heroic and sudden, toward the edge of time,

As if we planted for a 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 out a wedge of ripple river-wide.

But all our eyes were on the island-fire

Burning alone and brightly while we rowed,

And miles away, between the earth and sky,aWe left it burning when we went to sleep.