Wednesday, August 26, 2009

HAWTHORNY THOTS

Just wrote & sent this2 NPR/S.F./KQED-FM "Perspective" (2min.) audio-feature heard often daily. (update: next day) Hi Bill Thanks for your interest in Perspectives.Unfortunately, I'll have to respectfully decline the submission. Mark Trautwein Editor, Perspectives

HAWTHORNY THOTS

by Bill Costley (Jr.)

As Fall approaches, tho I now live at the bottom of San Francisco Bay, my thots drift back to Massachusetts Bay, & where I was born: Salem. You can’t be from Salem & never encounter Hawthorny thots.

Guilty from birth for John Hathorne, who’d tried & condemned the innocents of the Great Witchcraft Hysteria of 1692, he changed his family name to Hawthorne by deftly inserting a w, but long-inherited shame continued to obsess him.

Centuries later, my Glasgow-born father would hide his physical shame – ‘the heartbreak of psoriasis’ – from people by only swimming at the U.S. Naval Air station beach hidden behind the Salem Willows amusement park, assuring me “It’s not because of dissipation.” (Whatever that was, I wondered as a boy.)

Decades later, I was complicatedly miserable in Salem at 43, having broken up with a young New England Conservatory-trained pianist to return to Scotland (& she to Switzerland.) Returning to Salem, I sat in the noonday sun on the naval jetty a few yards from the Custom House where Hawthorne had once worked, a few yards from the House of Seven Gables Settlement House where my Polish-speaking mother had been taught to speak Yankified American-English.

I watched something moving & wrote about it:


"Wet Dreams" speedboat cuts a wake btw us
as I cast pebbles @ nrby lobster-buoy 3278J,
its one red star-on-white bobbing as
I cast my thoughts towards you,
like handfuls of pebbles,
none touching you @ all.
I think of you on Lac Neuchatel
w/ its palisades, spinnakers, utterly unlike
sober Salem's as my heart treads water, like
a heavy black bird, rising to 1',
skimming out of the innah hahbah.

[from my neosonnet series "Hammered Silver" written in Scotland, England & New England, 1985.]

(26 AUG 09)

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