“Searching for Mary Oliver in Provincetown; Finding Faith Shearin”— Ann-Marie Nazzaro
The northeast corridor of Amtrak, our nation’s passenger rail system, includes a ride along long, dreamy stretches of Connecticut’s Atlantic coast; up-close window view and reverie come with a ticket to Boston from the NY metro area. I took that seat this past June when I accepted an invitation to spend four days on Cape Cod with friends Erica and Tom, who do a month there each year. Hunkered down for so long in the pandemic, I said “yes” to this spontaneous, random, mini-vacation. Vaccinated, masked and feeling a bit of unease for this first venturing out (after 15 months of no-travel), I went.
The rewards were many. The journey itself—the water, the boats, the relief that horizon-gazing gives the soul started the vacation.
I wait on the ferry in Boston Harbor under a blue and white sky. The motor starts and black smoke spews, I am with soot, scent and all. Then we move away and still, there’s Boston Harbor. It’s the back of the ferry, there are 7 of us: a couple, another woman about my age, a small group of young people in grunge and goth attire. We are all sitting at the back, sitting to see what we are leaving. We are accustomed now to looking back, to calculating the history, the shape of us, reflecting, remembering. Trusting the boat will take us forward, we want to see where we’ve been. What lies ahead, we have relearned these many Covid months, can’t easily be known.
The young people start as 2 then are joined by a third—a man with a long dark beard, he’s tall and a bit stout, his nails painted alternately red and black; a woman with psychedelic green hair hugging her scalp under a mane of black, she wears a skeleton on her shirt; the third, a woman, has a face like a 19th century beauty in a painting, she is wearing a sheer lace top over a halter and short-shorts (not 19th century) that show her strong upper leg muscles. The 3 stand now at the edge of the stern, stretching their arms out to the sky.
We’re still close to Boston; the passengers are drinking beer. The woman my age is from Seattle but misses the east coast and comes to the Cape every year. She is reading Vivian Gornick’s The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir, which she recommends to me.
Coming off of the Provincetown “fast ferry” with people who were especially friendly and helpful—maybe from shared joy at traveling again—I’m hugged and welcomed by Erica, Tom and dogs Leo and Finn, and then asked what I’d like to do with these days on the Cape. “Very little,” I reply, then “just one thing—to see where poet Mary Oliver lived in Provincetown for almost half a century.”
On my second evening on the Cape I found four addresses of homes in Provincetown where Mary Oliver lived during those decades. Three were on Commercial Street and one on Bradford. So on a very hot and brilliant June morning, one with that unique brilliance—an ocean-coast brilliance, Tom and I went on a pilgrimage to each house. We started at the high numbers on Commercial and worked our way down. I have found that 95% of the time, it pays to talk to people, even people you don’t know. That Wednesday on the Cape reaffirmed this. We approached a woman who was parking her car at the first house. She tells us she is the gardener for a poet of some renown, Gail Mazur, who lives in the house now, or at least summers there. That introduced us to the work of poet Gail Mazur whose artist-husband had recently passed away.
At the second house on Commercial, there is no one out and about to speak with us, but we checked off seeing it and noticed a small structure behind the main home, a little house, now holding bikes. This is perhaps, the tiny house Mary Oliver herself built.* The third “Mary Oliver” house on Commercial is 535, the second in number sequence as we make our way down from 561, but her last house in Provincetown, the one she shared with her beloved partner Molly Malone Cook who died in late August 2005. 535 is a row of attached townhouses called the Old Waterfront Apartments. As we look on the façade of 535, we meet a woman coming out of the last unit on the left. We let her know we’re visiting each of Mary Oliver’s homes, but we don’t know precisely which one of these townhouses it was. “Come with me,” says the woman, "I’ll point it out.” She walks with us down to the end, to the unit farthest on the right, no. 1, “this was it,” she says. We don’t get to go in—except for almost. Standing in front of the large picture window to the right of the entry door, we can see through to the back picture window which faces the ocean. Under the back window is a table, looking exactly like the table where Mary Oliver has been photographed writing, thinking. For looking out, going out, was for Oliver, as for Muir, going in.
There’s a feeling you get on Commercial Street in front of 561, 535, 531, where there is nothing between the back of these homes and the ocean. Looking, lines of poetry come to mind, lines written here or transcribed here from walks in woods and around ponds—words that are recipes for ways of seeing, ways of being in this world. Sacred words, sacred guidance.
We are already over the moon as we cross Commercial to get a wider view of 535 and to plan the rest of our walk. A woman approaches us; she had heard us talking about Mary Oliver and wonders if we are writers. “Wannabe’s,” I reply and ask, “Are you?” The woman, smiling, pleasant-faced, so evidently at ease with herself in a summer sundress and floppy straw hat and carrying a paper shopping bag with lunch for her daughter, says, “I’ve written some—poems mostly.” We exchange names; hers is Faith Shearin. She tells us we can see some of her poems online. We tell her we’ll look for them later but now we are heading over to the parallel Street—Bradford, to complete our pilgrimage at 205A where Mary Oliver lived on her arrival in Provincetown. Faith offers that she has time and can walk with us for some of the way. She tells us to check out Mark Doty’s house on Pearl Street and just up from it, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. The group that had given Faith a grant to live in Provincetown and write at the start of her poet-writer career.
A warm good-bye and Faith leaves us to bring lunch to her daughter. Tom and I get to 205A Bradford which is encased by gardens. Perhaps, if Mary Oliver had a top floor, she saw the ocean from here too. We head back to Commercial for lunch—on the seaside of the street, of course. I ask the waiter if Mary Oliver had eaten here. “I’m new, but my manager’s been here a long time, I’ll ask,” he offered. The manager comes over to our table. “Mary Oliver had lunch here regularly,” he said. “She lived right in the neighborhood.” We smiled.
Later that night, at home, we look up Faith Shearin and find she has 7 published books of poetry. We’re in touch with Faith through email and have walked her through this Cloverhill Literary Society website via zoom. We stay in touch. We are reading all of her poems,** and thanking Mary Oliver for introducing us.
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**Faith Shearin’s published poetry books are: The Owl Question (Utah State University Press, 2002), The Empty House (Wordtech Communications, 2008), Moving the Piano (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2011), Orpheus, Turning (The Broadkill River Press, 2015), Telling the Bees: Poems (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2015), Darwin’s Daughter (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2017), Lost Language (Press 53, 2020).
