Trying To Find Poetry in The Land of Pines

I have not written any poetry since I moved, since I left the Midwest. I was thinking about that this evening. Some places are more conducive to writing poetry than others. Interestingly, sometimes I write poetry months after an event, not during.

Such is love and sorrow-it may become more understandable in reflection.

But, again, geography affects my poetry genes.

It is too quiet here. There are no cicadas singing at night. There are no tree frogs. I have only heard two different owls, once each, in a month, and one mysteriously chirping bird on one morning; a bird which sounded like the peal of bells. I was so excited I listened for the entire half-hour as it sang its evocative song. For forty years, I kept a bird diary and I memorized bird songs. I have no idea what bird blessed the air with its change-ringing.

Now, it is too quiet.

I only have one small patch of sky above me, as I am in the forest. I cannot write about my beloved stars. These elude me, hiding in the arms of the trees. The sky is dormant in clouds and rain during the day. But, Dublin rain inspired me, as did London rain. This north country rain does not inspire me. It makes me cold and wet.

At night, the trees in the forest seems like the ones described in my children's book, Heidi, with the wind in the pines and firs magnified by the tall trees. I call this Heidi's Grove. But, there is no kindly grandfather. I miss my duvet, a word not known here.  I did not bring a feather bed, as I had no idea that Summer and her train of flower-maidens had left this area in disgust and walk in the southern lands far from these dark lakes and tumbling rocks, like the Entwives, seeking a better home.

It is too dark for me to take a walk at night down to the closest lake, as I have no chaperon, and this is a wild land. It is not the animals that are wild, as they are in the dark forest, not by the lake. The wild ones are the strange people who come and go like ghosts camping on the edges. They come from the past and live in the past and have no poetry. Their camps are ghost camps, with ghostly fires, and ghostly sounds. I have met people with no poetry in their bones or souls. They sit in front of campfires with old boomboxes spewing out 1980s music, as if time has stopped here. In fact, where I am staying, all the clock are broken. I tried to change the batteries, but none work, and there are many, many clocks, gathering dust, caught in a gloom of Miss Havesham's house.

Pip: 'Is Manor House the name of this house, miss?'

Estella.: 'One of its names, boy.'

Pip: 'It has more than one, then, miss?'

Estella.: 'One more. Its other name was Satis; which is Greek, or Latin, or Hebrew, or all three—or all one to me—for enough.'

Pip: 'Enough House,' said I; 'that's a curious name, miss.'

Estella.: 'Yes,' she replied; 'but it meant more than it said. It meant, when it was given, that whoever had this house, could want nothing else. They must have been easily satisfied in those days, I should think.

Some people seem satisfied without poetry.

Perhaps, I write better in more domestic or urban atmospheres. In County Meath, I wrote tons of poetry a few years ago in a small town punctuated with roses, roses, roses, and the red moon. I could see the road running down to Cnoc na Teamhrach. And I have written in England, the land of poetry, in a small room near the Surrey Hills, with the sound of robins in the hedge purposefully getting me off tack, and the scent of the sea springing over the hills like the young lambs, full of life and joy, gamboling, reminding me of the stomping feet of the dancers around East Coker.

…In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie-
a dignified and commodiois sacrament.
Two and two, necessarye conjiunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or arm
Whiche betokenth concord. Round and round the fire
Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth
Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
As in their living in the living seasons
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death.

I know why T. S. left Harvard. Perhaps I need the mists and the sea. Perhaps, I need the sound of church bells, or the blackbird. Perhaps, I need a certain domesticity, like walking to Mass, coming home for a coffee and croissant, getting the post, praying at regular hours, studying at regular hours, cleaning at regular hours, walking to a sunny place and corner shop to say hi to friends, going to the small, dim chapel for Adoration where the old nuns sleep; and, me, sleeping when the sun goes down and rising when it rises. The trees hide the sun here. I cannot see it rise or set. And, my bell-bird has left me.

My mother is a St. Louis girl and I wrote a poem long ago about her. It was published. She once said to me that she loved the big cities as one could be anonymous. Perhaps, I need anonymity, which one does not find in a hamlet where everyone knows everything about everybody back a hundred and fifty years.  I am the stranger, which is fine, but strangers are not welcomed in the big tree country, not even as staying strangers. We are suspect. Maybe I am suspect because I might write a poem about the hamlet, about the hatred of strangers, which I see is really the fear of people who are not their own.

Not having poetry breathing forth from my soul is like breathing with one lung. Perhaps, the air is too rarefied here, too high, in these foothills. This is not a land of poetry; it is a land of action, hunting, fishing, striving, sitting without thought at the end of an endless day with a weak beer. But, even my ancestors on the hard-working prairie played the violin and read Jungmann in the twilight.

I shall have to go to a land of poetry. I can write in pubs and in country houses where there is a rhythm of life. I can write in London, or any place where history crawls up and strokes its back on my legs and feet, wanting attention and love. I can write by the Middle Sea, where the waves crash into the rocks seen by Turgut Reis.

Perhaps, it is this lack of history. In some of these forests surrounding my view, no man or woman has ever walked. Perhaps, it is the lack of resonance with any past which stops my words. But, when in Alaska, God's own country, more remote and detached, I could see poetry pouring out of Kenai River, on the backs of the Sockeyes, but not here among the balsam fir and red spruce.

The Benedictines moved to the mountains and the Cistercians took the valleys. My home would be with the Cistercians, in-between the nursing arms of the rivulets, bouncing down the hills, like at Fountains. The Benedictines would climb these foothills to the mountains, and clear a place for a great monastery. But, none ever came here, only the lone Jesuits, carving out the sacred in the profane, leaving no tracks, like the wild boar I think visits the side of the house some nights. I know the smell of a pig. But, it leaves and trundles back into the wild, needled, red ground, a trespasser, like the Jesuits, who walked under these fir trees. The Blackrobes pierced the krummholz with the Kyrie eleison, and conquered the then unnamed Lampson Falls with preaching and the mumbling of Vespers, but they left no mark on this red, sandy earth.

I can only write a short poem for now, a haiku.

Black fir sentinels
Bar the sun and sounds of grace.
She sits in darkness.

Well, as I am in the Dark Night, perhaps this is appropriate, like a pathetic fallacy. One can only wait for the sun and the sky to open up. I wonder if I shall find poetry in this place of firs and pines?