8. Location

Our neighbor, the Reaper, says: "Memorable literature is the history of authors who have successfully presented their intimate involvement with an identifiable region."

Region is a hazy word, like mist rising from a river. Or white-outs in a blizzard. Regions can be in the mind or heart as well. Poe lived somewhere down of Baltimore. But I catch the drift. Frost’s New England. Robinson’s Tilbury Town. Even Ginsberg’s American Vortex Sutra.

The Merrimack River is mine for better or worse, not that I do it even a fluid ounce of justice. But I’ve lived in its valley for my lifetime. There is so much history in its stream and nature on its banks that I keep on coming back to it as my source of inspiration, be it my history thesis or this first attempt at a long(ish) narrative (somewhat) poem.

Around Dodge City and in the territory out west, there's just one way to handle the killers and the spoilers... And that's with a U.S. Marshal, and the smell of...Gunsmoke! Around the Merrimack, there was only one man who could get you to the other side, and that’s the Ferryman. Quatrains 23 & 24 of Jules Chauvin, Ferryman in Exile:.

Outside, the river surged upstream, an utmost
Atlantic forcing meadows, foothills, peaks
and all their distant runoff back to join
its source. Ice was lifting, fracturing,

collapsing over other slabs of ice
as history unfolded. Soon a bridge
would realize what the ice could never give:
firm footing over long disturbing currents.