First Encounter Beach
“…they heard a great and strange cry… arrows came flying amongst
them…. Afterwards they gave God… praise for their deliverance…
and called that place the First Encounter.” —William Bradford
I hear in the ebb & flux of frazil ice, the ocean speaking
in slow voice, its hush, hush-sh-sh,
today only to me, not the men I see as mirage
coming round the curve of Cape, the woolen saints
whose clothes froze like coats of iron in salt spray,
or the men on shore dressed in winter skins.
Descended from neither one, alone I come,
wind beating against my eardrum.
Redwing nearby heralds his early arrival.
Laughing gull shreds a shriveled blue crab.
These are my host in the silence of this monument,
granite & bronze, the plaque that proclaims by name
the strangers who rowed a shallop ashore, states
no deed, feat, no family name of men whose ancestors
lived here at Nauset ten thousand years.
Whose stored corn—kernels of red & white & black—
corn the strangers & saints stole from under the sand
uncovering graves those “pilgrims” savaged.
Whose tongue one among the pilgrims’ flock—
a man of cloth schooled by Nauset kin to hear each pause,
tone, each inflection—tendered the first surrender
of their speech to ink, rendered it in the first scripture
writ in this land & printed on a press at Harvard Indian College.
That language which hushed for more than a century.
On this outpost of sand fortified by ice,
Heron stands watch for her time to squawk.
Sound Mirror
Sun blasts brassy over ice, glacial & glistening
the breaths of bison in a u-shaped valley. Here,
inches of hoarfrost assemble in structures
to amplify its reach. A bull elk bugles, shrieks.
Echo layers like morphemes, as if to contai
some grief. I fix to this parabola of sound
my notion of half-lifes, of diminishing
floes & question: what’s undone? Inside
the vestibule of mouth there opens a dome of anxiety.
In a crack of lake-ice that ricochets off mountains
I locate a world of trickle & sorrow.
At the instant of death, will body spill a rippling
whisper to honor the water that shaped me?
I crouch to sip this stream. Feel its breath as my own.
Cirque. Moraine. Ungulate. Kootenai.
Overture to Riot in C Major, 1967
July. Outside Detroit. Twilight at our house
its footprint identical to postwar plots
rambling past a terrace of driveways.
Outside my bedroom window, I hear voices
from the patio—our neighbors’ enter
my room like a song on cigarette smoke.
A bass solos—they’re taking over our cities—
Karl, a cutter at National Twist Drill bellows
about Black Power.
My father, a Chrysler engineer & tenor counterpoints
in high C. Beatrix, from Texas, once a non-
combat WAAC, tinks time on a glass-top table.
Her nails I know are shellacked red—a red
she told me female bugs ooze on trees in Thailand.
Bea leads a round in sarcastic soprano—
curlers & kerchiefs worn out to A&P.
Bridgie, the cribbage queen, harmonizes
her love of bobby pins making waves under lamé turbans.
My mother begins the alto fugue.
Today’s meeting with the butcher, tomorrow’s
with the principal for something my sister’s done.
Other mothers chime about men who deliver—
the sweet milk man from Avon Dairy,
that dreamy golf coach at the high-school
who moonlights for the dry cleaner, those travelling
Fuller Brush men who rarely come twice.
Bridgie whines about Karl’s late shifts.
Mother compulsively clicks her Zippo lid
to the intermittent clink of cocktail ice.
Men twitch & my father whistles outside my window
from which I now watch, amid westerns
& string ties, a trio of bowling shirts
sporting their backers’ colors—John DeLisa’s Pizza,
Milt Weaver Realtor, the Knights of Columbus—
embroidered shirts that match the wives’ flats & capri slacks.
I flick my radio on, CKLW still turned up loud as day
& Aretha, like some ecstatic queen, wails
R-E-S-P-E-C-T & that outdoor chorus
roars race music, jungle dancing, they’re stealing our kids,
& I ain’t lyin’ my mom slaps me, unplugs my music
& slams the window down.
My door bangs shut & left alone to reflect on what
I’m meant to learn, I recall fear & cigar smoke—
how rank, how caustic—curls of it blurring
Mother’s face, its scent from her hair left behind in the room.
My fear growing hot as her handprint.
How could a girl know what misery smoke could bring?
The Motor City burning. All that stink of gasoline.
How could I grasp all that loss of life?
The school, friends & home we quit as Mother’s new Belvedere II
—its 383 V8 engine engineered to do 0 to 60
in 7.6 & top out at 128—sped us thru Canada,
my red transistor pressed to my ear, listening till CKLW failed
to transmit thru New York & that blizzard
in New Hampshire made everything so white.
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Sheila Sinead McGuinness is the recipient of a poetry fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, also support from Vermont Studio Center and from Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill. A former editor of CutBank, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bright Bones: Contemporary Montana Writing, Provincetown Arts, Main Street Rag, Natural Bridge, Art New England, and Cape Cod Poetry Review. She lives barely above sea level in Provincetown.