Not long after Deborah Fries submitted to Terrain.org, and we included her work — such as the poem below from Issue No. 7 — we knew a lasting relationship was developing. Several years later, we reviewed her excellent first book of poetry, Various Modes of Departure, and then invited her to join our editorial board and write a regular column, Plein Air.
In reviewing the wonderful poetry from that issue, it seemed remiss not to first highlight one of our favorites:
Alone on Más a Tierra
Immediately our Pinnace return’d from the shore, and brought an
abundance of Craw-fifh, with a Man cloth’d in Goat-Skins, who
Look’d wilder than the firft Owners of them. He had been on the Ifland
Four Years and four Months, being left there by Capt. Stradling
In the Cinque-Ports; his name was Alexander Selkirk.
— Woodes Rogers
Imagine the turquoise horizon. Days you saw a lozenge of grey, thought it a sail,
knew better. No one would come. Alone on Más a Tierra, you were everything
to yourself: grocer, governor, butcher, tailor, surgeon, shepherd, pastor, lover.
Imagine the loss of language. Years without speaking, not even calling the cats
to supper: Ben Feet, Ol’ Soot, Cap’n Cook, No Whiskers, Johnny Boy, Ratso.
The motley kittens with no names sleeping against your face. And in dreams,
old friends speaking without words.
Consider the beach after the storms. Bits of ships that never reached you. Mounds
of shellfish and kelp. The blue French bottle you thought a jewel. The groves
of broken palms and a good white goat floating in the tidal pool. No one to clean up
but you and God.
Consider the animal you became. Faster than the others. A quick and clever
carnivore without salt or bread, sugar or silver. A man who took a goat,
and then another. A man who whimpered in his sleep, dreaming
of the chase: the green forest, the flashes of brown and white and grey.
Remember the nights you went out of yourself and looked down
at the island, ringed with phosphorescent spawn. And back again
in your dark shack, tried to recall music and the smells of tobacco and soap
to forget what would happen when the Spaniards found you.
Remember the cabbage and pimento trees, the yellow snails and parrots;
the hot, white sun. All this beauty is mine, you thought. A Scottish mind
abandoned off the coast of Chile. You colonized the cats, governed the goats,
made linen shirts, grew rich and brown. The gentleman.
Imagine the day Woodes Rogers arrived. England had come for you. And without
words or fine clothes you needed England to understand how you had made
Más a Tierra home. Tour guide to your house of skins, the hoards of cats,
your worn Bible, the gracious uses of a common nail.
Imagine the stories they would tell. Peculiarities of your ordeal: the man
who had forgotten ale, waltzed with tabbies, run down prey. A character,
and bigger still. Even as guest, sharing Christmas goose and sherry, they would see
you as the story man: voracious, unclothed, indifferent to a well-set table.
~~~
View more of Deborah Fries’ poetry at http://www.terrain.org/poetry/7/fries.htm and http://www.terrain.org/poetry/15/fries.htm, and look for new poems in our next issue, No. 25.
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