following.

This weekend I met a poet. I met him in Concord, where I had gone to hear the poetry of one of my co-workers. It was a quintessential fall day in New England: we sat on a blanket, wrapped another around us, and ate pecorino cheese and pepperoni slices on ciabatta bread as yellow, red, and orange leaves blew across the lawn of the Old Manse (www.oldmanse.org). Even in the sunlight it was chilly, but no use complaining - winter will be here soon.

The poet told me that Sylvia Plath lived in Winthrop for several years of her life, and penned "Point Shirley" for the part of Winthrop where her grandmother lived.*  I am not very familiar with Plath's poetry, but as a writer I am mysteriously affected by the knowledge that she once lived where I do now. It's not that I think Main Street is haunted, or that the rocks on the shoreline hold unspeakable secrets of the true Sylvia Plath, or even that her grandmother's house (which is still standing) will inspire me to write a book about the granddaughter who may have run through the rooms or played on the lawn or fell asleep at the table years before she put her head in an oven with the gas on, her children sleeping in the next room. But I do feel a new connection to where I live, a new sense of belonging and, perhaps, a calling - a calling to create and nurture art where it has been created and nurtured before, a calling to find in my surroundings the beauty, the secrets, the muse that others have followed here.

The first time I felt this strange sense of being pulled to a place, the sense that I had accidentally followed someone there, was four years ago when I moved to New England.  I rented an apartment in Somerville, and only after moving in did I realize that I was only a few streets away from the house and baseball field where my grandfather had grown up - the grandfather who inspired my graduate thesis which has now become my memoir.  After the initial "what a coincidence" feeling subsided, I felt profoundly connected to Somerville.  As I wrote about my grandfather, I walked the streets he walked, sat in the bleachers and watched the field where he played, and tried to imagine that in some way - any way - he still lingered in the air, a cell, a molecule, a hair, a cloud of dust from the infield.

Since that time, there have been other strange and beautiful instances.  My boyfriend, a gifted musician, discovered that he had rented the same apartment above a pizza joint near Boston College that one of Boston's greatest musicians had once rented while in school.  We made this discovery at a small music festival in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, that we went to solely to hear this musician (Ellis Paul - http://www.ellispaul.com/).  After the first performance, we found him sitting alone at a picnic table, and had the chance to talk for a while.  He was friendly, appreciative, interested in our personal artistic pursuits, and revealed that in the old apartment, under layers of paint from all the tenants in between he and my boyfriend, he had painted Mickey Mouse holding a can of Bud Light (we briefly entertained the idea of knocking on the door, explaining the story, and scraping the paint off the walls of Ellis's old room).

When my older sister wanted to teach abroad in 2005, she applied to many places and ended up at a school in Okinawa.  While she was preparing to go, an eerie shift took place: she packed bags and filled out paperwork and bought a plane ticket to Okinawa while my grandfather slipped in and out of lucidity, battling Alzheimer's and the post-traumatic stress he'd brought back from Okinawa towards the end of World War II.  He'd unpacked his Marine bags years before, but a few items were tucked away, reappearing in nightmares, tremors, and his frustrating secrecy about the past.  Once he died, these items finally left him, and shortly after, my sister left for the island where he'd faced the most brutal fighting of the War.  While there, she explored the caves where Japanese had been killed en masse, sealed in from the outside with smoke and flamethrowers.  She visited the American army base and memorials, and took pictures; her pictures showed an idyllic island with sun, palm trees, and smiling children making the peace sign with their hands. 

I am fascinated by the unexpected following, the realization that we end up in certain places for reasons unknown, reasons suddenly unimportant as we discover the significance of the place, and the people who have gone before.  Is the place so intrinsically special that it continues to draw people?  Or do the people who go before us make a place special, leaving a trail of footprints to follow?  Sometimes it is clearly one or the other, but in some cases, it must be both.  I didn't see the light from Point Shirley or Sylvia Plath's footprints leading to Winthrop, but I followed them all the same.  And now that I'm here, I will leave a set of prints; whether I leave them in wet concrete or in the sand just before a wave breaks and washes them away, I will leave them, and they will be there for someone else to follow.


Point Shirley
by Sylvia Plath



From Water-Tower Hill to the brick prison
The shingle booms, bickering under
The sea's collapse.
Snowcakes break and welter. This year
The gritted wave leaps
The seawall and drops onto a bier
Of quahog chips,
Leaving a salty mash of ice to whiten


In my grandmother's sand yard. She is dead,
Whose laundry snapped and froze here, who
Kept house against
What the sluttish, rutted sea could do.
Squall waves once danced
Ship timbers in through the cellar window;
A thresh-tailed, lanced
Shark littered in the geranium bed ---


Such collusion of mulish elements
She wore her broom straws to the nub.
Twenty years out
Of her hand, the house still hugs in each drab
Stucco socket
The purple egg-stones: from Great Head's knob
To the filled-in Gut
The sea in its cold gizzard ground those rounds.


Nobody wintering now behind
The planked-up windows where she set
Her wheat loaves
And apple cakes to cool. What is it
Survives, grieves
So, battered, obstinate spit
Of gravel? The waves'
Spewed relics clicker masses in the wind,


Grey waves the stub-necked eiders ride.
A labor of love, and that labor lost.
Steadily the sea
Eats at Point Shirley. She died blessed,
And I come by
Bones, only bones, pawed and tossed,
A dog-faced sea.
The sun sinks under Boston, bloody red.

I would get from these dry-papped stones
The milk your love instilled in them.
The black ducks dive.
And though your graciousness might stream,
And I contrive,
Grandmother, stones are nothing of home
To that spumiest dove.
Against both bar and tower the black sea runs.

 
*for more on this, see http://www.jeffreyround.com/WinthropByTheSea.php