an award-winning and academic best-selling writer, has authored more than 40 books and was the founding director of both the Cleveland State University Poetry Center and the Program in Writing Arts at S.U.N.Y., Oswego, where he taught for 31 years. In 1992 he received a Distinguished Alumnus Award from UConn's Alumni Association. Now retired, he resides with his family in Dresden Mills, Maine.

The following poem, "William Mason 1952-," was selected from the award-winning collection The Green Maces of Autumn: Voices in an Old Maine House, published in 2002. The house depicted in all of the book's poems is located on the Cate Farm in Dresden Mills, Maine. Although each poem in the book is named after someone who has lived in the home, the earliest people depicted in the series are fictitious; as the sequence progresses, they become less and less so.

WILLIAM MASON
1952-

We gathered in the spring to make
the old women a winter place to live
out of the shed of the old house.
We tossed the mathoms, the forgotten treasures,
out of the breathing window. We built with them,

to start, a tell of years that rose,
oddment and shard, to the flower of debris.
The women moaned, picking through their
lives, but we were ruthless. There was no place now
for the past in the ell, for the winter lay

couching beyond the river and
its currents. When we were done we gathered
in the loft to raise the floor, board
by board, the dust raining through cracks and gaps, guano
and beans falling like hail in a choking fog.

Our lungs were sacks of wheezes, eyes
slick as onions. Outdoors the rain fell. Sere
bridles soaked themselves to mud, and
lanterns leached a liquid rust--whatever was
left over from former light. None of us had

ever seen a loft like that, its
eastern end suspended in the air by
great chains slung over the rafters,
not a beam or a pillar to lend support.
We read a board inscribed last century by

the country inventor of this
system of instability; then we
salvaged his chains. We stared down through
his joists, and took them up as well. When we were
finished, we saw that we had created space.

In the air there hung a billion
motes, a slow universe of particles
silently descending, swirling
in nebulae, great spirals of the past
falling, moments coming to rest.