Cape Cod, the setting for ‘Shake Shingle,’ is a 65-mile hooked peninsula that muscles from the State of Massachusetts into the Atlantic like a flexed arm. The poem offers a mélange of references to cities and places on the peninsula (Harwich, Wellfleet, Provincetown, Buzzard Bay) and leans on some local references and idioms that – as a visitor – I may have concocted. The line “traffic dims on 6 and 28” refers to U.S. Route 6 (also called the Mid-Cape Highway) and Massachusetts Route 28, which connects to Route 6 and runs along the southern shore. The cape has long been a tourist destination, and these roads can be bumper to bumper in the summer months. The poem envisions them quiet in the off-season autumn when followers of the regional sports teams have shifted their focus from the Boston Red Sox professional baseball team to the New England Patriots of the National Football League (thus the seasons fade “Sox to Pats”). 

For me, the primary life cycle is the repetition of spring, summer, fall, and winter, which four times each year requires an emotional (and sometimes a physical) letting go of one season and an embrace (or at least an acceptance) of the next. My favorite is autumn, and, each year, with its passing, I console myself that another autumn will come. ‘Shake Shingle’ is inspired by my aunt and uncle’s summer home on the cape. In addition to letting go of summer emotionally each year, they must also choose exactly when to close house and literally drive themselves away from the season, a bravery that I don’t have. The poem is a wish for them to stay – just once – and have a “second summer” in that welcoming home.  

We humans mark seasons well and may be lured into believing we are part of the seasonal cycle. This is not true. Unless the planet dies some other way, there remain 30 billion seasons until the earth falls into the sun, which means there will be 30 billion seasons without you, me, and everyone we know. As these poems say, after a certain age “more midnights lay behind us than ahead” and “you never know which time / has no next.”

We can’t halt the world and stop a cycle that will continue indifferent to our absence. (A notion that at times alarms me and at other times brings comfort.) I hope, however, I am not being too generous to suggest that ‘Summer, Late’ and ‘Shake Shingle’ in some small way serve the work of poetry, which is a means to hold time down in our minds, pause the cycle for a moment – make it always in that poetic instant late summer, or maybe a place to spend a fantasy autumn at the Mashpee Commons Octoberfest. Perhaps the poet and the reader can arrest the cycle briefly in our shared imagination, and, in that way, insert ourselves into the foreverness of seasons.