A Collection of Poems: Isleboro by Ice, Last Ride of the Icebreakers
By Matt Bernier
Isleboro by Ice
1835, Feb.8. Bay frozen to the outermost islands. Sleighs passed and repassed across the bay until March. J.Y. McClintock was the first to venture by this mode of conveyance to Islesboro’, after which many others followed his example.
History of the City of Belfast in the State of Maine (1877)
He opens the barn door on another
cold morning and discovers they’re
both restless, his horse’s eyelashes
fluttering at the sunrise across frozen
Belfast Bay, James worrying that
the ice’s thickness portends another
1816, another year without a summer,
when the crops failed and his father
crunched across a July hoar frost and
starved his youth of his family’s mare;
James never thought of the eruption of
Mount Tambora in the Dutch Indies as
the volcanic anger of a wrathful God,
more like a shot heard across a field,
and then another field, and another,
until the cold echoed around the world;
he tried to think of this year, 1835, as
just another year, but the ice reminded
the old timers of the winter of 1787,
ice so thick on the bay the king tide
lifted boulders from their sea beds
and moved them around like troops;
hay is already getting scarce, from
fifteen to twenty dollars per ton,
but James is surprised, when he finally
looks into his horse’s eyes, at the
defiance, a snort and emphatic kick
cracking a hemlock board on its stall;
an expression, staring out the open door,
that James later describes in terms of
revolution, his horse leaning into the
February cold with the shiny steel bit,
leather harness as stiff as tree bark,
as James marches horse and sleigh
to Board Landing and climbs onto the
wooden seat, wrapping himself in a
thick bearskin that once rolled in ripe
blueberries on the east-facing slope of
Frye Mountain, gliding out onto the
heaving frozen harbor, free of freight,
so that when the ice rings out like
a cracking whip the horse thinks
the race is on, something out of the
mythology James used to teach students,
the winged story of Pegasus, perhaps,
quickly becoming the tale of Icarus
as the horse follows the sun, gliding
southeasterly across Penobscot Bay;
later James cannot explain why he
didn’t turn the horse back towards
a quick jaunt to Searsport, even when
they sailed over the place where
the two hundred seventy-seven pound
halibut was caught years before, where
they would later harpoon bluefin tuna;
something about the vast, glittering
whiteness of it all suggested a divine
destination, a place you were supposed to
reach for when gunshots and volcanos
exploded, even when you were thirty-four,
not knowing it was the end of an era,
the Little Ice Age, it would be christened,
and the manufactories and coal fires
and locomotives would eventually ensure
that the bay would never freeze, and the
untrammeled sea ice and steam from your
horse’s nostrils kept you stoking the fire
until you saw land, Turtles Head, the horse
not daring to stop, ruffled Atlantic beyond,
Islesboro by ice by the grace of winter.
Last Ride of the Icebreakers
The end to Maine winters was prophesied
by one last ride of three icebreakers,
65-foot Coast Guard cutters, harbor tugs,
converging on a frozen Penobscot River,
black hulls reinforced for a denial of ice—
Bridle slipping out of Southwest Harbor
before dawn, Tackle from Rockland already
looming in the darkness, awaiting Shackle
to slip its bonds in South Portland
and storm northward past Vinalhaven—
new moon wrestling tides, an existential
struggle with sea level rise, nature defeated
a year earlier in Antarctica, Twaites glacier
retreating, collapsing, the news finally reaching
the shores of North America, yet one last
winter for Maine—a cold snap and frazil ice
piling up in Winterport until the ice was
compressed into diamonds sparkling in
a fiery sunrise, day breaking on an epic
battle, one last chance to move fast and
smash things, Bridle cleaving the ice floes
in two, Tackle and Shackle sending smaller
pieces spinning into coves—unlike the
old days when the ice was a solid foot thick
and the coastal mountains echoed with
shrieks and crunching armor, eiders cloaked
in black-and-white certainty nodding
on the bay, icebreakers stopped cold—
ice surrendering freely, “cocktail ice”
the Coast Guardsmen later recalled,
toasting a heritage of freeing the river
for oil tankers that warmed the world.