Three Rivers Anthology: Collected Poems: John Fitzsimmons

I’ve always made my way down to the three rivers. Even now as I sit on my back porch, I hear the rush of the Assabet a half mile to the north, already filled with an early and surprising winter melt. Any leaf of me could fall and be carried back to the fork of the Sudbury and Concord rivers where the three rivers meet at Egg Rock. My whole life has been a continual returning to these three rivers and the confluence of my common ground—the water, fields, woods and village of Concord and now, just to the west, the small mill town of Maynard.

More and more I remember less and less, but there are still granite walls that will not change for another thousand years and still a few hills to defy development; still a few farm-stands with the same trucks and tractors parked by weathered sheds, and still a few cantankerous old souls hiding their smiles behind seventy or eighty New England winters. I wonder if they remember the kid who worked for them so long ago? I wonder what they remember? I wonder what they wish they’d kept?

This collection of mine, culled from my previously published works: Raccoon, Thanksgiving, and Crows & Swallows, is my way of keeping what I remember—or at least what I need to remember. Musketaquid is the native name for the Concord River. Someone once told me that it meant “slow moving river.” It seemed like a fine and apt name to me, so much so that it didn’t bother me to discover the actual translation is “grass grown river.” The fields are now all wooded over—a bramble of Hawthorne and Swamp Maple hiding almost every view; but it still a slow moving river—and always will be. Even the Nipmuck's and Pennacook's would have to agree with that.

These poems are what I have to add to the rivers. They are the small streams of my experience becoming a smaller part of the Musketaquid, which, hopefully, flows into some greater sea of understanding and insight. They are the good, the bad, and the ugly drafts of my life scattered in here with the randomness of the winds and tides that have driven me and carried me to so many shores—and have always brought me home.