Indebted to Shakespeare - Sonnet 73

Harthouse on Main - Brookfield

"At Maples on Main"

has never been published.

At Maples on Main

James Hart

“Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”

-from Walt Whitman, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”

When I consider my current email moniker, harthouse “at”

my present provider, the harthouse part I’ll always maintain

as easy extension of myself. But lately I’m debating naming

my house “Maples on Main,” recalling my grandfather’s home

on South Virginia in Carrollton was called “The Maples”

until the Great Depression booted them from its door,

that exit spreading melancholy over my mother’s life to me.

These maples I planted here decades ago have outgrown

my house’s height, touch the stars when I look up and sigh.

They shelter me from summer’s heat and piercing sunlight

and winter’s sorrows of the sky.  I can put them to my own

reclusive uses now: imaging limbs as antlers thrashing

in time’s tormented storm, or seeing the season’s leaves form

airy aviaries for wrens, robins, and jays—nature’s cathedral

for my choir of insect buzz and birdsong news.  Shakespeare

calls these boughs “bare ruined choirs” when a man looks

into the autumn of his bones: sunset, twilight, night, the ashes

we spread on God’s heavenly bed.  I have learned to lose William’s

dimmer view of “Death’s second self” and view blackest night

as my own second home, much like Whitman’s patient spider

launching filaments of loneliness to lodge against the universe

and take hold somewhere like a rope anchoring destiny

to a pledge:  I no longer see myself as unaccountable,

I’m no longer twinned to echoes of familiar hollowness.

I too can walk out like Orion striding blind beyond the western

ledge, the eternal huntsman clothed in his own shrouded skin,

his constellation forming the hourglass of a winter passage,

his tread steady as a man determined to bridge unbroken voids.

This is how our going out should be: into the armature of night,

into the silence of the stars, whether going to take the anxious

dog for his walk, collect the paper from the remnants of the rain,

or speak to shadows of a love you thought you lost one fabled day.

February 3, 2013