Provincetown
by Howard Faerstein
There were mulberry limbs twined with mimosa branches leaning close to the back door. Stretching, I could barely reach the fruit hanging high above a narrow path. Mulberries for breakfast, mulberries with lunch, our teeth stained that whole week. Each of us believed the other was dreaming. Imagination wasn’t necessary. Late afternoons we took the small, crooked side streets leading to the harbor, passing scrolled awnings and furled flags, porches intaglioed by purple morning glories. A raft of eider ducks with their black bellies and white backs visible from the bleached wharf. It was July 4th, nearing dusk, when we joined the promenade up Commercial Street. Couples arm-in-arm: men with men, women with women, women with men. The smell of mud at low tide. A street musician played a Bach suite on her viola, an elegantly dressed woman sang from Carmen in faulty French. Down one clamshell alleyway, I thought I heard a bobwhite’s whistled call, perhaps answering those first explosions. Long Point Light and Pilgrim Monument always in the distance, the mast of the schooner, Rose Dorothea, threatening to rise through the library steeple. And at every open space between crowded shops, at every corner, fireworks erupting. The childrens’ moon at first quarter as the sun dropped lower. Already the days beginning to shorten. Once we reached the West End breakwater, we forgot everything. That’s what we told each other. Imagination wasn’t necessary. Each of us believing the other was dreaming. Then we swung round and strolled back, stopping in a painter’s studio where a show was being hung. The artist said, I don’t want to know what I’m painting. But every move she’d made had intention, every step we took, the bleeding berries, bobwhite calling its mate, light tumbling off runged constellations, each star in the ladder tipping over, spilling song, filling the darkness that finally stretches over lands end, the bursting flame over half the world.
Howard Faerstein’s full-length book, Dreaming of the Rain in Brooklyn, was published by Press 53. A second book, Googootz, is forthcoming in October, 2018. His poetry has appeared in such journals as RATTLE, Great River Review, and upstreet. Faerstein is Assistant Poetry Editor at Cutthroat and lives in Florence, Massachusetts.