Last of Crawford Pond
View bleaker image
Add cold weather and rain to this landscape and you can see why Mark Schreiber pushed so hard two years ago for a change in venue. He had just returned from Glacier National Park (this reminds me, Rakkity, how about Beartooth II?), having hiked in view of the majestic peaks, under the endless deep blue skies.
The truth is, most of our Maine camping trips look like this. It is a testament to our photographic and editing skills (Adam, Dan, me), that each year we produce a travelogue the Maine Chamber of Commerce would pay to have.
I snapped this shot as we were leaving our campsite, after the colorful tents had been removed. Note, reflected in the water, the wonderful gray ceiling, an armÃs length away, and all the vibrant fall colors long gone.
Touch Me
Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that’s late,
it is my song that’s flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it’s done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.
– Stanley Kunitz
But in that bleakness is a unique beauty of tree limb tangle revealed for the urgent structure that lifts leaves to the skies, a blackness of water that’s almost primordial, and rocks and sand like the bones of the earth. Monotonous only if you’re not looking openly, as your poem’s character is not. He longs for what he is no longer, to be that again, drawn to his old self’s flame by that of a cricket. That crickets can inspire I well understand, but crickets lead cricket lives. Ours play out in iterations, no simple prologue-crescendo-death. I know there is something in our revisiting these apparently empty places which speaks volumes about us. To go into Maine’s grey again and again and exclude the Beartooths might be tragic, but not in and of itself.
Comment by been there — November 19, 2004 @ 7:30 am