Arrowhead, Pittsfield

Here, at the back of Massachusetts’s throat,
          the sense that I might, at any moment, be swallowed whole.

The view from the study window: Mount Greylock, whose hulk,
          a docent says, “was no doubt the inspiration for the whale.”

It surfaces from the Berkshires’ yellow-orange hilltops,
          frothed with a fog that rolls up the floor of the valley

and crashes at the farmhouse door. “He buried himself
          in his work. These pastures, for him, became the sea.”

Walking the grounds strewn with the shells of chestnuts,
          I feel I’m wading into the anonymous deep,

as though I might be swept up in the baleen of a thicket,
          or gnashed in the graveyard’s storm-battered teeth.