At Nine, and Just Past Six

Green Point, West Quoddy Head,
Lubec, Maine

At Nine, and Just Past Six

It must’ve been you were seven or not quite

and so I was nine and we were

together most of the time but this time

it was the end

of blueberry season and the cases

and cases of beer

waited on the backs of trucks

and we took one each but really I was alone

I don’t know where

you’d got to or if you were

even there that day I think maybe

you’d stayed home with a sunburn

because yesterday you’d forgotten

your hat and Dad was in a different

field than us and we’d switch off raking

and sitting raking and sitting out

the glances of ridicule from the old-timers

the men and women who took

their vacation time into the blueberry

fields and made enough money

to give their kids school clothes. 

But you, too young to notice or even care,

picked up rocks and put them in  your pockets

to lay on the window sill in your room how

different they were

than the ones at the beach.  But maybe

this day you’d stayed home

and I was alone when I found

the old dead crow who’d blown

off his stake somehow and was

flat and broken against the boulders

I’d rake around on those old glacial bogs.  An ant

was crawling in and out

of his tufts of blowing-in-the-wind

breast feathers.  All

during season we’d hear the guns

and didn’t it make for something absolutely

real when we tore over the trench

wall and squashed our enemies with our

birch-branch rifles and granite grenades.  We’d made good

time over No Man’s Land and had the enemy

in our hands by mid-afternoon and soon

his supper was ours and we gorged ourselves

on green apples and white cranberries

and any leaves we could eat that were sour.

And wasn’t it awful!

wasn’t it just the way we were made

to survive in war! and we’d both grin

and take our victory in while the guns

shooting off a mile a or more ahead

kept us company.  The sky was its own kind

of blue and only occasionally a crow

but mostly gulls and some ducks.  I’d never

seen one up close before, or close

enough to touch, and the hot gloss

of his chest made me ache someplace, 

but maybe I watch too many Westerns

because I wanted to take those black wings

home with me, but he was dead already and didn’t

give up his life freely, I know, he was shot

on purpose and hung out warning

all the others off.  I wanted to show him

to you, we could bury him like a comrade

and he’d thank us by letting slip

a feather or two, but that day was just getting going

and besides the boss brought beer

and Dad would be a long time

at the tailgates of friends and I’d take

(I already said) one or two beers myself, I’d smuggle

‘em out and sit alone thinking about you

being home and the crow prone to bugs and others

and everyone laughing, the guns taken

apart and taken home.

And isn’t all over lonely my friend

and isn’t it foamy and fizzy and piss

sizzle blond and all about who didn’t make it out

and wasn’t I glad I used the teeth 

of my rake

to bury that old crow anyway

taking a sip of Pabst Blue Ribbon every now and then

at the work.  The blueberry money was

in my pocket and the crews made their way

home and after a while I did too,

and I remember you now, meeting me

at the end of the driveway with an Indian paintbrush

you’d picked and me a rock

and the glossiest of feathers, two of them, 

black and perfect, and that was all I had

and somehow it was enough.