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.
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,
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,
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.