The heat just keeps simmering, but yesterday after dinner T and I finally got out for a walk. This part of Vermont was settled as dairy country, orchard country--open rolling fields, orderly trees: a domesticated prettiness that is nothing at all like the scrabbled forests, compressed skies, and stony dooryards of central Maine. The residents of these places are equally different from one another. Still, both regions are labeled rural New England, as if merely not being city or suburb drops them into the same bucket.

I wonder if I would become a poet if I'd spent a quarter-century in the Champlain Valley instead of Somerset County, Maine. There's something so visually unchallenging about this landscape, whereas Harmony confounded me at every turn.

Of course there is struggle everywhere. I would have wrestled, no matter where I was. Something would have happened.

But what happened to me was the woods.

Dog in Winter

Dawn Potter 

 

Up the boggy headland, frozen now, where a stone fence

Submerged in snow and earth-sink hints at pasture

So long vanished that the woods are convinced

Grassland never existed, two bodies climb—one fast,

Black, doe-agile; one slogging and foot-bound

Like a superannuated tortoise.  Guess which is me.

Easy to badmouth my grace but oddly hard to expound

On the postcard beauties of our workaday scenery—

Giant pines draped with frosting, wisp of chimney cloud

Threading skyward, and behind the frosted window

A glorious wall of books, lamp-lit; a dear bowed head.

In tales, common enchantment always merits less than woe,

            And perhaps I should collapse on the stoop like a starved Jane Eyre,

            Pleading heat and mercy. But I earn my joy. I mean, I live here.

 

[from Same Old Story (CavanKerry Press, 2014)]