Scott Ruescher, “On the Lane”

In his new poem accompanied by personally-recorded narration, Boston-based poet Scott Ruescher unfolds a story of his connection with iconic Maine artist Marsden Hartley and tales of other local history.


 

Marsden Hartley, Brilliant Autumn, Landscape #28, c. 1930. Oil on canvas, 25 × 31 ¼ in. (63.5 × 79.4 cm). Colby College Museum of Art, Gift of C. David O’Brien, ’58, 1983.006.


On the Lane

Scott Ruescher, 2023

 

He was leaning on his rake in the immaculate garden 

Of the ostentatious, five-million-dollar, log-cabin mansion 

Of a real estate tycoon from the North Shore of Boston

Between a blooming witch hazel and a green rhododendron

And tipping back his ball cap, in a brief break from work

 

That I more or less made him take, in the western Oxford County 

Foothills of the White Mountains, on the lane along the shore 

Of the lake named for the northwest wind, Keewaydin, 

In the Hiawatha of Longfellow that caused such a sensation

In the late nineteenth century, among the genteel population,

 

When I said to him, Dan Barker, on my way back to the house

From a run around the lake, summarizing everything 

He’d made the mistake of telling me, and nodding 18 miles east

Toward the contiguous towns of South Paris and Norway, 

That he probably hadn’t needed to know, 40-some years ago, 

 

To pass humanities or Maine history, to graduate with honors

From Fryeburg Academy, and to teach music for many years 

At the Oxford Hills high school, while indulging interests 

In art and culture that would make him an accessory 

To a famous artist’s legacy, and even earn him credit on labels 

 

In the first room of that artist’s retrospective exhibition

That I first saw on a solo excursion in New York City

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and then again later, 

With Rebecca and our good friend Judith at the Colby Museum 

In Waterville, that Marsden Hartley, the Modernist painter, 

 

Born to British parents, who grew up in Lewiston, 40 miles

Northeast of here, over there, beyond Oxford Plains

And Mechanics Falls, with the children of French-Canadians

Who worked in the textile mills, in what is now among 

The largest communities of Somalian refugees in the nation,

 

Spent at least one, if not several seminal summers, here 

In the 19-aughts, living among the stoic locals and dilettantes

From Boston, a gangly, odd, homely young introvert

Who wore, they said, no matter how hot, a long dark coat 

And who knows what, sleeping in a shack in a field on Hut Road,

 

Over in the vicinity of North Lovell and West Stoneham

That I was pivoting in the general direction of now,

A dedicated loner painting in oils the most prominent features

Of the landscape along the Maine-New Hampshire border

That we see from turns in the road a few miles south of here,

 

Marsden Hartley, Landscape with Aqueduct, Provence, 1928. Oil on canvas, 19 ¼ × 25 ½ in. (48.9 × 64.8 cm). Colby College Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Charles P. Kuntz, 1960.009.

 

Depicting, under oddly cheerful, solid white cumulus clouds,

In surprisingly bold colors, in paintings that applied 

The Post-Impressionist style of Paul Cézanne in southern France 

To the landscape of New England, that put him in the company

Of Georgia O’Keefe and Arthur Dove, the vertical cleft of Miles Notch 

 

And its cliff to the right, the minor bumps of Durgin

And Butters Mountains on the Red Rock Ridge horizon,

And his very own Mont Sainte-Victoire, Speckled Mountain 

On the left, just as it all appears in the paintings, with a cove

Of Kezar Lake bold and blue in the lower-left foreground,

 

Marsden Hartley, Kezar Lake, Autumn Evening, c. 1910. Oil on cardboard, 12 × 12 in. (30.5 × 30.5 cm). Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest of Lee Simonson, 1967.43.
 

 

For once a Maine artist who wasn’t “from away,” who wasn’t 

From Boston, New York, or Philly, say, and who also wasn’t 

So exclusively attached to the coastline of the ocean, 

Like Winslow Homer at Prout’s Neck, Edward Hopper 

On Monhegan Island, or Andrew Wyeth in Cushing—

 

 

By which time Dan, no longer nodding in assent, cracking 

A quiet grin, or pushing back the brim of his ball cap 

To wipe sweat from his brow, would have been putting 

The tines of his rake to the gravel, to continue corrugating 

The path of the real-estate tycoon down to the shore of the lake.

 


Scott Ruescher, retired administrator of the Arts in Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Waiting for the Light to Change (published by Prolific Press in 2017) and Above the Fold, forthcoming in 2025 from Finishing Line Press. His poem “On the Lane” is one of his many efforts to make personal connections to public topics—in this case remembering a one-sided conversation with a town historian about the legacy of painter Marsden Hartley in Oxford County, Maine.