Three Poems for Higgins Mountain Preserve and Kennebec Estuary Land Trust
by Robert Carr
May, 2021
Higgin’s Mountain Without My Father
I’ve come to Lichen
Loop to find quiet
in the cracks of my face.
Everything about this
mountain, split.
Ageless granite, wedged
apart by ice.
Stone, crowned
by deep green pillows,
boulders wrapped
in blankets of British
Soldier. At the summit
I find deer scat
on a bed of needle.
I am tired.
The buck, somewhere
hidden in scrub
brush. I touch
the season of ground
cover, lichen and moss,
the final rift
of fathers and their sons.
Something Pretty
Skin cools through worn jeans.
I sit on a stone cairn,
where Land Trust signage
warns: Leave All Rocks
Exactly Where You Found Them.
I roll fungi between fingers,
mica chips lose sparkle
in my pocket, I toss
a skimming stone across a bed
of oak leaves. Tragic, human,
I can’t touch a place
without taking something pretty.
Georgetown Island
An oak and I have stumbled
on the mountain—
broken bark and bloodied shins.
I lean on the nurse
tree, a thick pitch pine.
She shines graffito shades
of green. I roll fungus,
oddly familiar,
in my scuffed palm. A phone-app
names the unfamiliar:
Cladonia: food source
for the caribou, last seen
in Maine on the saddle of Katahdin,
a hundred years ago.
Harvested and sold as fake trees
for model train displays.
That’s it, why this feels
like childhood!
Artificial landscapes—bubbling
lights, asbestos snow, tinsel
on spruce branches, the dyed fare
of vanquished caribou.
I’m quieted by memories—
electric trains, the Lionel Line,
circling Christmas trees.
Injured on this mountain,
I negotiate my place
in an ocean wind of highways
down below, the pencil
yellow loads on logging trucks,
the screaming crow.
Robert Carr is the author of Amaranth, published in 2016 by Indolent Books and The Unbuttoned Eye, a full-length 2019 collection from 3: A Taos Press. Among other publications his poetry appears in the American Journal of Poetry, Massachusetts Review, Rattle, Shenandoah and Tar River Poetry. Robert is poetry editor with Indolent Books and recently retired from a career as Deputy Director for the Bureau of Infectious Disease and Laboratory Sciences at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Additional information can be found at robertcarr.org
Kennebec Estuary Land Trust (kennebecestuary.org) is committed to conserving land and wildlife habitat of the Lower Kennebec and Sheepscot River estuaries. They are a community based membership organization serving the towns of Arrowsic, Bath, Bowdoinham, Dresden, West Bath, Georgetown, Richmond, Westport Island and Woolwich.