Poems (Scudder)/A Provincetown Summer
A PROVINCETOWN SUMMER
FOR M.A.R.
One summer I spent on old Cape Cod In a town where the "Portygees"Were at strife with the lean New England folk For the spoil of the cold North seas.
I rented a room in a big white house— How the artists loved to paintThe sulphur roses and hollyhocks That grew in its garden quaint.
I would wake at dawn in the high white bed And gaze up the narrow streetTo the wee churchyard where the tall headstones Stood orderly, grave and sweet
Though so few were straight and the most part leaned To each other in friendly wayLike the sober greeting of Quaker dames In their russet and gentle grey.
And all through the leaves of chestnut and elm The sun made a cool green glow As it shone through smaragd tinted water Round the weedy piers below.
And then I'd dress and go hurrying down To the rickety barn that we Called "our studio." I was often late, But the coffee kept hot for me.
We were always sketching a red-roofed pier Where the seagulls whirled all day, Or a boat that turned on its helpless side Like an empty mussel lay.
Or a rusty can that the shrinking tide Left glittering in our view With such tints of copper, garnet and rose That Titian would love it too.
—One day I went to the upland moor And a thunder-shower came; But I braved the wet for I yearned to paint How the fireweed's rippling flame
Went scorching through heather dust-brown and dead Till it quenched at last might be In a small round pool that stared at the sky Dead-blue as chalcedony.
Well, the pictures we toiled so hard to make— They were crude affairs enough With the paint laid on in "daring" strokes, All ragged and thick and rough.
—But oh, for the fearless eyes of my youth That were never afraid to see, And oh, for the glamour of summer days In an artists' colony.