Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday.

The Cow
of Dogtown

How many days, months, years
can I go between seeing those mounds,
those rocks, feeling them press up
against me                  and still
looking at the pale blue sky
through the ruined branches of the black walnut
I know they are there, the memory of
the coolness of the rock, the feel of moss,
dead leaves underfoot.

I can go days without seeing the ocean,
just the pooling of tidewater in the marsh

off of Friendly’s, and the river
as I go over the bridge,
closed-in waters, bound,
never quite wild.

Even that stretch of land
between Hough Ave and Stage Head,
even that with its improvements,
painted sidewalks, invasive trees removed,
new structure to old memorials,
that lives more in my memory,
the path covered in glass, the trees I climbed,
Half Moon water shining like stars.

It is hard now, as a woman, as a grown woman,
with children nearly grown, and work to do,
and a house to clean, and garbage to get out
on Wednesday mornings, and mail to open,
it is hard to find the time to press my back
against these rocks, to be alone
with particular trees, to spend hours
watching the way eddies change with the tide

                                   (Sunday. April 21, 2024

This poem is part of an ongoing project which responds to each of Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems. Olson’s “The Cow of Dogtown” appears in Volume VI.  

Amanda Cook lives in Gloucester, MA. She kept a blazer in her locker in high school in case she was taken seriously. Amanda Cook has been writing for years but would prefer not to talk about it. She has shoes shaped like pencils. That’s enough. Amanda Cook doesn’t know what to cook for dinner most nights.  Amanda Cook lives in Gloucester, MA, where it is hard not to write. Her 2018 book Ironstone Whirlygig was published by Bootstrap Press.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx