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.

Burning A Draft Card Never

After the 1963 assassination of JFK, the United States became more embroiled in the Vietnam civil war.

Support for our involvement was widespread, however according to Wikipedia a twenty-two year-old conscientious objector, Gene Keyes, setting fire to his card on Christmas Day 1964. While the federal government declared the destruction of a draft card a prison able crime. From 1965 to 1973 over 25,000 young men set their draft cards afire.

In 1968 I tried to join the US Marines at 16. My Uncle Jack had served as a combat USMC lieutenant in Korea. The recruiter at Lower Mills, Boston said I was too young to join, but to return the following year when I turned 17. I wasn't interested in fighting the Viet Cong, but getting out of my hometown on the South Shore and away from a Catholic education under the Black Robes.

In May of 1969 I returned as requested. The same recruiter gave me a parental permission slip for a seventeen year-old. My mother, despite being a virulent anti-communist, refused the signature and I was stuck in that town.

In June 1970 I received my draft card and draft lottery number. A very low 96 and the Pentagon had almost a half-million troops in that involvement with no sign of the promised peace. I went to a local college and grew my hair long.

In 1972 then an anti-war hippie I failed Multivariable Calculus in my sophomore year of university. Failing out of college meant loss of my student draft deferment. My Selective Service # was low. 96. An F meant I was Vietnam bound. Professor Remy Marcou took pity. His daughter was my friend and he passed me with a D- on the promise that I drop my math major. Thusly I was spared from the slaughter.

I never burned my draft card, but protested the War as I now protest the current Endless War.I still remember seeing you on the floor outside a BC cafeteria and asking you”What are you doing” Your answer :” I am a dead Vietnamese peasant,sssh” I stepped over you and went to lunch.

I still have it,

ps I left Boston in 1976 never to return, but I named my son Fenway.

The Now World

Skateboarding never gets old.