Arthur McMaster

​After Safe Harbor
 
She drives home in the late afternoon sun, the sun falling like warm copper 
on her white convertible, past the city’s dazzling new soccer stadium, past
the pricey restaurants, the shops on Main, on past the Peace Center where 
someone is doing Legally Blond, this woman, hungry for a pleasant dinner 
with her husband, decides she will come back to this house, volunteer again 
to teach poetry for a few days, back for the dozen or so women boarding 
here, cajoling them to write something—anything— the very young holding 
their dazed toddlers, staring down at the empty notepads on their laps, others 
holding their thirty- or forty- or even fifty-something-year-old breath when she
asks who wants to read, as if they did not know their breath was all they had 
they could count on, they wanting to know but never asking what she knew 
about life, whatever the hell she could understand about rage, and she trying 
to get them to write a poem about what love means—love!—about what regret 
feels like, tastes like, those long-playing bass notes of grief, what forgiveness
means; telling them not to overwrite, to go for the suggestion, allusion; to reach
deep within themselves for what she likes to call that perfect, muted metaphor.
 
**
 
That Fast-Breaking Water Line
 
We wonder now where they’ve gone, those winsome, casual neighbours,
a somewhat older couple—not unlike us, visiting their daughter—all
sharing an upscale resort with pool in the Low Country of South Carolina. 
Having forgotten their real names, if we ever knew them, we’ve settled
on Pete and Ginger. And having misplaced as well where they might live,
I’ve assigned them a stylish white brick townhouse in one of the prettier 
sections of coastal south Jersey. Let’s agree to Asbury Park, home of the
Stone Pony, where most mornings anyone of us might catch them walking 
along Brady Cove Beach, to watch a potpourri of dogs racing along the 
fast-breaking water line, pups meeting up with one another: young and hale,
or perhaps hobbled—fat, short, white-muzzled old timers— none of them 
harboring biases or agendas for or against much of anything. There, just to 
take the air, the briny water to cool them. Barking at whatever comes along
or runs away. For some reason I have to think the long, bony brown one 
is named Thurman. Another, a mottled Bichon Frise, will be called Adèle, 
although no one can say if she’d be happy with the appellation, little tease
that she is. Their owners, tanned and toned, along with one portly bald fellow
I’ll call Carl, nodding and smiling knowingly to one another, yet all keen to 
move along because a latté, or maybe a draft beer, would be ever so diverting 
just now, the tawny lifeguard taking it all in, perhaps anticipating what he 
and Gloria will be getting up to later that night, after a pizza. Although I have 
no idea if that is her real name. Gloria. Nor could I begin to tell you how she 
worries about her aging parents up in Tom’s River, dad just home from a scary
bout with some respiratory disease. Meanwhile, not much chance we’ll ever 
run into old Pete and Ginger again. Or the distracted lifeguard and Gloria, or 
Carl. or Thurman and that scampish Adèle. Not that we’d miss them all that
much, in truth. And yet we wonder, don’t we, just where they have all gone. 
 
**
 
One Hundred and Twenty-Seven Presbyterians   
 
a parcel of them under the age of four, plus one infant girl clinging to the neck 
of her distracted mother, listen, enraptured, to their deep-voiced minister, he
dressed today in a white golf shirt and tan slacks, all settled well into aluminum 
chairs on the shady church lawn facing him and his bearded, guitar playing 
accompanist this bright summer Sunday, the heavens above the truest blue; 
plus, smack in the center of it all, maybe twenty feet from the preacher, sits 
one attractive woman in a floral-print dress with her impatient French bulldog, 
he nosing for something winsome in the long grass, pretty much everyone else
taking up the tune, and not dispiritedly, about saving their oh-so anxious souls,
when the dog spots a squirrel, barks like hell, and rips loose from the woman
to give chase, the startled squirrel scooting away and up the giant oak that has 
uncompromisingly given us all shade, surprising the much-admired minister 
and his irritated guitarist, one hundred and twenty-seven, much perturbed 
Presbyterians and their bevy of kids, the woman with the infant girl, and no 
doubt the agitated dog, as well as my wife and me, as if to suggest there’s a 
not so-subtle lesson here, for all of us, about temptation, about salvation.

**
 
Colonel Mustard  
                      
was found not guilty in a Jersey City court yesterday of offing Mrs. White and
released from prison, largely on a technicality involving forensics. No one was 
in any way happy about the old coot getting out, as he always smelt just a bit off, 
sour—his very presence like a stain you struggle to get out of your bowling shirt. 
And let’s not forget his family’s history of weaponizing gas, some hundred years
ago. Recall as well that the man had always had an eye on Miss Scarlet—but then
what man had not? Her so-called “scarlet ways with men;” her “Hey, what are you 
looking at?” look she practiced before the mirror, in the library, not to mention 
her grand sense of entitlement; while White, ever so bland, had long had a kind of 
love/hate thing for colourful men. Hmm. Now, back to Mustard: The work of one 
über-liberal judicial defense team in the city destroyed the prosecution’s chain
of custody case when it was shown that Professor Plum’s DNA was on the knife
found in Mustard’s possession. Coincidental? This whole shebang now gets pretty 
complicated: who, where, and with what awful tool? Figure Plum knows something 
and he’s not talking, duplicitous guy that he can be. Put the clues together any way 
you can, but recall that Mr. Green has not been seen for days. Okay, maybe Plum 
(the old fruit!) killed White, and planted the shiv on Mustard, he going down for 
the crime, but was it Plum? Or Green? Maybe the preening Mrs. Peacock, who was
pissed at all of them, tipped off the fuzz about seeing Mustard and White together 
in the conservatory minutes before that scream in the hall: poor, wan Mrs. White,
dead—or mostly dead—and old Mustard insisting he’d never seen that five-inch 
butter knife, like the sharp-tongued bastard had not spent his whole messy life 
around just such knives. And what about Green? Always fiddling with the rope
and those creepy candlesticks. White had jilted the dude just months ago when she 
learned he did not like board games. Her favorite pastime. So, who? Plum? Green? 
Mustard? Or Miss Scarlet herself, vamping in the billiard room, oh so hoity toity? 

**
 
My Grandmother was Born with Only Two Hands
 
yet, at barely nineteen years of age, the young woman began raising up six 
strong kids, one year after the next, my own father being the first—and he, 
I suspect, something of a surprise. The couple’s ardor not to be slaked: three 
boys and three girls, each with their own ideas, urges, Grandmother pruning 
and pushing them into shape, into their school work and household chores, 
guiding them through so many common fears and into whatever they’d set 
their minds to. Two young people determined to make those rails, ties, and 
cinders fit; her hard-bodied, ambitious husband, a twenty-year-old telegrapher
working the Delaware and Lackawanna line. He, following there his own dad, 
a brakeman, both far too weary from the commonplace struggles of coal-mining 
in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania to be overly concerned with what was going on 
that year in war-torn rural France, or in the raging fire fields of Belgium--
Passchendaele and Ypres burning in the daily papers—though that one brought 
about by a graver, far more pernicious kind of heat. One which may be returning. 
 
**

Arthur McMaster has enjoyed two careers, one in federal service, where he spent time in Europe. The second, as a university professor of English, creative writing and literature. He is a great fan of Robertson Davies, and likes to think he has learned something useful from him in his own fiction writing. His debut novel, In the Orchards of Our Mothers, taken from a line in a poem by W.H. Auden, was recently released. He has three published volumes of poems, the most recent, The Whole Picture Show, from a small press in Limerick, Ireland. He enjoys the prose poem form for the freedom it offers to the narrator. To the story-teller working with allusion and fresh use of language. 
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