No one will see
The light-stepping deer
When they come out from the alders
To look for windfalls
In the abandoned orchard.
No one will see the daylilies
The color of red foxes,
Waist-high coarse-textured lilies
That spring from the tumbled stones
Where there was once a farmhouse
And crowd around the cellar-hole
Now thick with raspberry-canes
Where hornets forage.
Mink live here, and voles,
There are seals on the offshore ledges
And herons with their harsh cries
Are nesting up in the woods,
But the man who was down by the shore
Scraping the hull of a boat
The woman feeding her hens
The child playing with fir-cones
Have been gone for a hundred years
And in the still harbor
There is no skiff but ours.
* *
*
These granite and limestone islands,
These tops of flooded mountains
Are scattered all over the bay
Their clearings shining with wildflowers,
The live coals of hawkweed,
The daisies’ fiery white,
And finespun birdsongs shiver
Over their scraps of forest.
They’re moated with ice-cold channels
Deep enough for a whale,
Where once or twice a summer
With a slow throb of engines
The Swedish freighters go by.
When the sun comes out
The sky speaks blue
And the whole bay
Down to its least cove
Takes on a dazzle of blue,
Becomes a field of splendor.
* *
*
High up over the harbor
Of the fishing village
On another island
Is St. Mary Star of the Sea,
Built by Italian stonecutters
Who came to work in the quarries
It’s a white frame building
The size of a one-room schoolhouse,
With six milky windows
And a low spire.
Below are the steep-pitched streets
And the fishermen’s wooden houses
With their stacks of lobster pots
Their granite garden walls
And their small gardens flaming
In the short northern summer.
Through St. Mary’s windows
Half open in the summer
We can see the harbor,
The water bluer than larkspur,
The sloping folds of granite.
An old Italian woman
Who gets to Mass early
Has come with dahlias and roses
And the stonecutters’ grandchildren
Carefully chant the Gloria
In their transparent voices
For the one who carved the islands
Has come to live among us,
And this is the house he has chosen,
St. Mary’s Star of the Sea.
--Anne Porter (1911-2011) from Living Things: Collected Poems (2006)
