{"id":3767,"date":"2023-04-21T01:00:04","date_gmt":"2023-04-21T05:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/spire\/?p=3767"},"modified":"2023-04-21T09:03:11","modified_gmt":"2023-04-21T13:03:11","slug":"bernier-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/spire\/2023\/04\/21\/bernier-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Poetry Series: Fontaine de Jouvence; Purple Finches; Dead Men\u2019s Clothes"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Matt Bernier<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Fontaine de Jouvence<\/span><\/h3>\n

As an attorney, he always began with the facts\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

how many salmon he\u2019d caught and their lengths\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

but after the first scotch the Maritime rivers<\/span><\/p>\n

turned mystical, infused with dancing golden light,<\/span><\/p>\n

as though the few extra minutes of daylight<\/span><\/p>\n

on summer solstice were a suspension of time,<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

no one aging, which is how he says he found<\/span><\/p>\n

the fountain of youth, actually, a spring seeping<\/span><\/p>\n

into a pool on a tributary to the Miramachi River\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

dark backs of adult salmon swaying in the<\/span><\/p>\n

cool eddy like the discarded clothes of lovers\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

he\u2019d cast toward a suspended salmon and then<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

reel them in as 2-year old parr, which leapt<\/span><\/p>\n

into the warm air arched like tiny rainbows\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

I pointed out that the thermal refugia must<\/span><\/p>\n

have held brook trout too, but he raised his<\/span><\/p>\n

hand in lawyerly objection, refilled his glass<\/span><\/p>\n

and mine, so that we pondered the magic of ice,<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

groundwater seeping out of a gravel streambank<\/span><\/p>\n

in remembrance of a glacial past, ice a mile thick,<\/span><\/p>\n

water cycling from winter to summer like the<\/span><\/p>\n

elliptical journey of an Atlantic salmon, up to<\/span><\/p>\n

Greenland and then back to natal rivers, asking<\/span><\/p>\n

whether we should still refer to jetstreams as<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201ccurrents\u201d when they stalled in the future with<\/span><\/p>\n

climate change, remembering the lost runs of<\/span><\/p>\n

Downeast Maine\u2014the Narraguagus, Machias,<\/span><\/p>\n

East Machias, Pleasant and Dennys Rivers\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

he\u2019s chasing the Atlantic salmon north, he says,<\/span><\/p>\n

New Brunswick then Newfoundland then Labrador,<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

but eventually he\u2019s going to run out of road, find<\/span><\/p>\n

find himself at the edge of a trackless wilderness,<\/span><\/p>\n

dark robes of spruce trees in judgement before him\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cSo fountain of youth it is,\u201d he rests his case,<\/span><\/p>\n

which I tell him is \u201cfontaine de jouvence\u201d in Quebec\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

because everyone\u2019s guilty of something.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Purple Finches
\n<\/span><\/h3>\n

Another farmer\u2019s obituary in the newspaper today,<\/span><\/p>\n

and purple finches strafe over the unmown field<\/span><\/p>\n

as if they own the place,<\/span><\/p>\n

grasses bent over with burdens as invisible as wind,<\/span><\/p>\n

single thistle plant rising above the dusting of snow<\/span><\/p>\n

like a control tower;<\/span><\/p>\n

and when they extended the runway and cut the trees,<\/span><\/p>\n

taking his land, they say he fell quiet, watching<\/span><\/p>\n

migrations out his window<\/span><\/p>\n

across the patch of remaining hayfield, white as a<\/span><\/p>\n

bandage, burning the last of the cleared oak trees in<\/span><\/p>\n

his rusting woodstove<\/span><\/p>\n

as the contrails crisscrossed the sky like cracked palms,<\/span><\/p>\n

until even making a strong cup of tea felt like work;<\/span><\/p>\n

its own reward, yes,<\/span><\/p>\n

cup on the windowsill defrosting a hole so he could<\/span><\/p>\n

see whom he would leave it all to, purples finches in a<\/span><\/p>\n

gathering flock,<\/span><\/p>\n

dressed in the pinstripes of a long ago baseball team;<\/span><\/p>\n

all that mowing, Little League diamond and hayfield<\/span><\/p>\n

now roughly grown up,<\/span><\/p>\n

no time for games, everyone hopping on airplanes and<\/span><\/p>\n

outracing great flocks of geese with plumes of carbon<\/span><\/p>\n

and headphone rock-and-roll,<\/span><\/p>\n

snowy owls flushed by hunger from tundra to tarmac<\/span><\/p>\n

until they\u2019re chased away, everyone with their wide<\/span><\/p>\n

wings outstretched<\/span><\/p>\n

thinking they can fly, that they invented flight and the<\/span><\/p>\n

common sense idea of going someplace warm in winter,<\/span><\/p>\n

cheating the seasons of life.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Dead Men’s Clothes\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n

Morning sun streams through the front window<\/span><\/p>\n

of a thrift shop in a coastal Maine town<\/span><\/p>\n

and it dawns on me that the best clothes<\/span><\/p>\n

belonged to dilettantes,<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

men who owned cable stitch fishermen\u2019s sweaters<\/span><\/p>\n

and never set a trap or net, gentlemen farmers<\/span><\/p>\n

who never wore out the seats of their overalls<\/span><\/p>\n

mowing their lawns;<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

but that\u2019s alright, we Mainers are in solidarity<\/span><\/p>\n

with landfills not metastasizing like cancer;<\/span><\/p>\n

there\u2019s a quiet reverence, almost a holiness,<\/span><\/p>\n

holding up flannel shirts<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

to an LED sunrise in a downtown storefront<\/span><\/p>\n

on a reborn Main Street, staid and plaid,<\/span><\/p>\n

occasional artifacts of the homegrown<\/span><\/p>\n

industries of yesteryear<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

hugging us like Hathaway dress shirts sewn<\/span><\/p>\n

beside a frothy Kennebec River in Waterville,<\/span><\/p>\n

or Bass penny loafers handstitched in Wilton,<\/span><\/p>\n

heels ticking across floors like time;<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

the all wool, all cotton, Made in Maine quality<\/span><\/p>\n

that has no right to outlast us but often does,<\/span><\/p>\n

a legacy of keeping next generations warm,<\/span><\/p>\n

an afterlife, a reincarnation,<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

for dead men\u2019s clothes.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Matt Bernier   Fontaine de Jouvence As an attorney, he always began with the facts\u2014 how many salmon he\u2019d caught and their lengths\u2014 but after the first scotch the Maritime rivers turned mystical, infused with dancing golden light, as though the few extra minutes of daylight on summer solstice were a suspension of time, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2245,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_blocks_custom_css":"","_kad_blocks_head_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_body_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_footer_custom_js":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spire-2023-issue"],"yoast_head":"\nPoetry Series: Fontaine de Jouvence; 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