Scars across this “sharpening rock” (Nauset people honing tools and weapons) would seem a glacier’s striations, if they didn’t run like talon slashes counter to the grain, didn’t have the texture of intention instead of time. A tourist’s bench, now, with vistas of the marshes where Champlain took it all in—wild grape, beach plum and crops of corn, pumpkin—decades before the Mayflower (hunting the Hudson) spun across trench and filigree, the Cape’s chronic wrist and forearm, shattered elbow. In Chatham, his plaque classifies “…explorer, navigator, mapmaker, journalist, artist and soldier.” Where is the middle distance of history? (Is it true that plates from Vietnam, leftover metal pads for chopper landing skids have been sunk vertically like cultivar blades, integrated patches in the border wall?) Nearly a mile of spartina between voracious surf and this bluff. Improbable, that whoever drew an axe-head down this slot, stone to fashion stone, would have mistaken those cones of sumac berries for cardinals, tattered meat.
On the photo, “Children Bathing, 1947” —Charles “Teenie” Harris Summer relief was different for us: playing Cousteau in another galaxy, relinquishing our makeshift grappling hook (broken rake) when it snagged a mooring chain, the brave among us diving, eyes clamped, kicking downward to plunge forearm deep into muck for who knows what. At school we’d seen beneath the ocean’s infinity; filmstrips erased reflection, filtered murk of fathoms to reveal the continent’s continuation. We understood where we stood was just our slab’s extension; without water, we could stroll to basalt basements, the Marianas Trench, and find what we’d always suspected yet denied without a way of being part. So, what am I searching for in these faces under a Pittsburg hydrant’s sidewalk storm? Why this need to superimpose my own, or even venture that they’re studying future selves with a kind of enigmatic dignity, imagining other people pinned to bricks by hose jets? We crowded the gunwale, drawing our perforated bucket up, its plume of silt in the sunshot green a suddenly redolent, fecal glyph smearing the prow, which, once the sand was under our feet, we rinsed with a handful of Atlantic.
My college girlfriend read her other boyfriend’s poems to me one night, some graduate student who drove from Boston on weekends, whose name was George, because of which he somehow seemed more literary than I. I remember some conceit about maps: the routes through their time together, how he strode along the “blue turnpikes” of her veins with his tanned fingers, etc. She must have loved them (the poems); they were for her, but suddenly offered to me as if her own, written for me. They were. My humiliation probably not what she was after, nor praise for my rival. We leaned against each other like lovers, though we weren’t, really, (some dead aunt’s couch bandaged in afghans, weed-smoke). Once, I met them back from one of their hikes, absorbed his praise of trailside grapes: “…pungent, intoxicating.” What people use this language? I thought, standing bathed in the florescent corpse-light of the dorm’s hallway, its tangled, stubborn smells, our brands of deodorant and beer, limited, identifiable.
The swim was a means of stripping the patina of tourist’s grime. Dust sueded the leaves, hung over the parking lot like cannon smoke, packed gravel still trembling with the decamped army, sated herd. That day, I’d imagined enough proof of revolution, a road quilled with bayonets, seen the famous recon- structed bridge, tracked (from the safety of Emerson’s arbor) a thunderstorm strafing hills, all gunpowder and bilious pewter. The pondwater was clean. Serious swimmers in Lycra and goggles passed me as if I were roadkill, trolling the freight of torsos and legs in haphazard lanes. It was then I considered the urban refugees back in their walkups, sad the chill of the dip had fled their skin while cussing out a sun that wouldn’t quit. Too hot to cook, showered and shirtless, were they firing up their fans, shivering in the mist before the plundered tombs of their freezers, equivocating takeout? Tacos? Mongolian barbeque? On my back, ditched noncombatant angel, I gave up lumbering up the ladder of thought- over-thought from my buoyant self, capsized, set my compass for sink and stroked through the green fantasy of getting to the bottom of everything.
Ralph Sneeden was born in Los Angeles in 1960 and grew up on Long Island and the North Shore of Massachusetts. His poems and essays have appeared in AGNI, The Adroit Journal, The American Poetry Review, The Common, Ecotone, Harvard Review, New England Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Slate, The Southampton Review, The Southeast Review, Southwest Review, The Surfer’s Journal, and many others. He is the author of Surface Fugue (EastOver Press, 2021) and The Legible Element (EastOver Press, 2023.)
These images are from a 1921 illustrated guide to figure skating by Bror Myer, a Swedish skating champion. Meyer felt the guide necessary as in “latter years the art of skating has made such rapid strides.” On his use of photography, he said: “To facilitate an easy interpretation of the text, as well as to show more clearly the various movements, I decided, after great consideration, to illustrate the work by means of photographs taken with a Cinematograph.”
From Public Domain Review
