Edited and introduced by Gibson Fay-LeBlanc.
Here’s a poem by Stuart Kestenbaum, the current Maine poet laureate, from his fourth book, “Only Now.” I love the way this poem opens with the widest of wide-angle views: a telescoping history of Maine’s coast that begins with molten rock and ends with a certain doughnut shop.
Every time I read this poem, I laugh at the name of that doughnut chain, which is one of New England’s most recognizable. Name brands aren’t supposed to appear in poems, right? But, in this poem, Kestenbaum reminds us that even such a place can offer maybe a chance to start over and see the world anew, only not in the way we thought at first.
Rocky Coast
By Stuart Kestenbaum
First there was the pink granite
molten and buried for 350 million years,
then there was the ice encountering the ledge
dragging rocks and trees over the land
and then the lichen working in the cold, ceaseless wind,
cleaving to the stone, resurrecting the soil by eating away
at the mica and quartz to make a thin layer of earth
that the coast rests on. And then there was the Dunkin’ Donuts
built on the ledge in 1989 in Bucksport, Maine, the town where
the paper mill makes clouds and sends them billowing
out into the landscape, the Dunkin’ Donuts where
the coffee is always fresh and when you inhale its aroma
it’s as if you are starting the day again or starting
your life over. One more chance. This is where I buy
my chocolate sugar donut and drive down Route 15 in the dark,
when I bite down on an earring-back baked into it.
I dream of the million-dollar liability settlement, enough
to do whatever I would want to, and return
to show with horror the small steel post to the young woman
in bright polyester at the counter who offers me a dozen
free donuts, not enough to change my life, but
enough to feed me for a while, and what else
could you need: sugar, fat, and the first bite,
like Eve’s, just before she walked out into the fallen world.
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is Portland’s poet laureate. This column is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2014 Stuart Kestenbaum. Reprinted from “Only Now,” 2014, by permission of the author.
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