How Burnt Cove Got its Name

I've known lobstermen with Harvard degrees
and others whose name was Weed--
"Several generations of Weeds," the old man said proudly.
But mainly there was Jacques
an old Acadian, the rarest of races,
whose fathers fished these little islands
before there were out of work
Cornish and Welsh stone cutters in the island quarries,
before the granite ran out and the libraries
had all been built in Philadelphia and Boston,
when they turned from stone to sea.

Jacques was my friend at the pump and wharf--
the man who never knew your name
but smiled, toothless, when you came by,
always alone (he had a wife who, he said,
his voice like the island mist in my ear,
"kept him straight" and she was dead.

How'd Burnt Cov come to be called what it is?
I asked him a month back.
He half shrugged, knowing that I would
trust his answer, then exhaled--"Welp,
What else'd you call a place that's all worm rot
and drift wood, no stone to tell of
--tide that never fill the basin
and sand the colour of ashes--
with no boat going in or able to get out.
Looks burnt," he said and all was sense.

I heard, I said, it came from your people--
the French named it "Brule-Cote," Burnt Coast,
because of the Indian campfires
hereabout. What do you think."

"I think as little as I can" he said, " and it don't matter
if it came from my people or the settlers
or whatever-- burnt."

He eyes my mask, for this is the season of plague,
smiles and bares his gums.
"But you lot who believe old men
will believe anything and nothing for sure.
I never believed in dentists,
Don't think no mask will save you neither."