At the Grave of Wilmot Redd
Poems by Claire Keyes
Only it’s not her grave but a memorial
to a woman hung as a witch in Salem in 1692.
She’s remembered here beside Redd’s Pond
at the foot of Burial Hill in this town I call my home,
her birthplace. The pond’s my neighbor, but not
Wilmot,
known as Mammy. Perhaps she was too mouthy for
her time,
too outspoken and rowdy, this fisherman’s wife,
like the wife in that fiary tale. The talking fish
grants wishes to the fisherman who caught
and graciously release it, but the wife is another
story.
She asks for a bigger house to replace the shack
they live in, then for more and more extravagance.
She can browbeat her husband, but not the fish,
a price in disguise. Outrageous in her demands,
The wife is cast back into her odd, pinched life.
Had mammy been our neighbor,
we would have cut her a wide swath. Make room
for Wilmot Redd. Don’t annoy her. She’ll swat you
with her broom, throw dust onto your skirts, and
she’ll hum,
Mammy Redd, something rude from the base of her
throat
Her accusers writhed and moaned on the courtroom
floor.
A sad condition, she allowed.
No defense mattered.
She got hung like those other “witches” and thrownnto a mass grave. We haven’t pursued its whereabouts.
Instead, we bow our heads for Wilmot Redd,
her memorial fronting old gravestones which pock
the grass.
A path winds to the top, the Atlantic cool in the near distance,
but Mammy confronts us here. She taunts: You’re next,
Then cackles. We shudder and turn away.
First published in ONE PORT, Derby Wharf Press
The Deer on Lime Street
The Deer on Lime Street
I'm driving my Subaru along Lime Street, the Charter School on one side,
an open field on the other when a deer trots onto the road heading towards me.
I stop. The deer stops. A man on a bicycle pulls up behind the deer and watches.
The deer’s a yearling and assesses the scene, head high, his body perfect, young
and limber like a runner poised for the race. He gazes straight ahead.
He doesn’t see me only my car: a weapon that, if deployed, could take him down.
Not a chance: not bullets and death headed for a man reaching for oatmeal
in a city supermarket, the shooter having driven 200 miles to make sure
he’s got Black shoppers, his particular insanity. Bang, bang my brother would holler
as he aimed his toy gun, playing. We thought he was cute, not destined to fill with blather
about maleness and guns and the power to kill. But no guns here, please,
not on Lime Street where the deer only has to share the space with a car
and a bicycle, where someone calls 911 and the deer speeds across the open field
and into the narrow woods promising freedom, possibly safety.
First published in ‘The Ravens Perch’
The Floating Hat
It’s September, and my love is well.
He wears one of his signature hats,
a baseball cap with a proud “B”
for Bowdoin or Boston,
take your pick.
People die
less successfully than you think.
He looks happy.
He looks alive: I don’t want to tell him,
don’t want to be the one.
Sometimes I see his hat
Floating by outside a restaurant
And some other man under it.
I find one of his notes
and there’s the scrawl
that was his signature, the only sloppy thing
about him, the crazy loop of the “J,”
the squiggle melding to a fast signing that says,
Letters do not contain me.
In the dream he wants to know
how I’m doing. Listen, he loves me.
He can’t help it. Why else
does he visit so often, tipping his hat
like some chevalier?
First published in ONE PORT, Derby Wharf Press