Atop Chicktawbut Hill

Beneath Chicktawbut October 2023

This weekend
October 23, 2023
The south Shore of Boston
At a family wedding
At a golf course
Atop a high hill 
A new high hill
Created   
From the debris of the Big Dig   
Burying   
Our childhood swimming holes, 
The Quincy Quarries. 

I surveyed the Blue Hills  
Enthralled by their low line   
Stretching west To Big Blue
635 feet high  
My old neighborhood
Closer
Harborview Road
Beneath Chicktawbut Hill.
Invisible beneath the autumn trees   
The world of my youth
 I know this view well  
But from a different angle 
And another time__ 

June 1960 

My mother sat me 
Her second son
Eight years old
One of five children
In the family car
A Ford station wagon 
Parked before our split-level rach house
Alone
Her
Saying two words
"Chaney drowned in Sebago Lake." 
No explanation
Chaney my best friend
Eight years old
Her parting steps silent
Chaney and me swimming at Higgins Beach
I stared west to Big Blue Hill
635 feet high
Sunset close
The hill's silhouette a whale
Filling my eyes
Filling my horizon__

Chaney my best friend
From our old neighborhood
Falmouth Foresides Maine
Chaney and me throwing darts at seagulls
On the bluff
Across from Portland, Maine__
Then  
I prayed 
Alone 
In the Ford Station Wagon
To God 
For Chaney 
To come back 
From Lake Sebago
One prayer
Silence 
I knew Death from before
Last spring Chaney had shown me dead puppies
We poured them onto the shore mud
The tide took them
Underneath the water
Same as Chaney in Sebago Lake
There was no God_

That day
The hump of Big Blue filled the west 
God gone forever
Not Chaney
He is with me always__

Today  
October 23 2023 

 Now the same view  From a different angle

From a hill higher and farther northeast
I see  
Big Blue 635 feet high
No more a whale
Chaney always with me
I his eyes and ears of all the years__
In the autumn afternoon light
I turn my head
Boston Harbor a deep Atlantic blue 
To the North___
Behind me
My nephew's wedding swirls in dance
I am happy 
No, joyful 
To be here 
To see the Blue Hills again  
To breathe the familiar air of home__
 To feel the approach of the colder season ahead

It is a good day to be alive 

For me 
And for Chaney
Chaney never gone
I am never
Alone
Never
The two of us together forever__

Poems are never finished. every time read aloud they come to time and often a step from the written pat, although the druids exercised the power of memory in myth. Every epic poem memorized after twenty years of training without any help from the written word. Me, I can't remember anything other than sitting in the passenger seat of that damned car staring at that damned Big Blue at the age of age linking with Chaney forever.