Many of the poems in my head have an upward or outward energy. That does not necessarily mean that they are all cheerful and inspirational, rather that the words feel turbocharged.
In both poetry and narrative, there is a story to be told, but the words of a good poem travel on wings. That’s why I like to memorize my favorite ones. Then they are right there in my head when I have time to reflect, such as on an early-morning springtime walk in the neighborhood.
I’ve custom designed a three to four-mile route that takes me past the prettiest and most fragrant tree blossoms: apricots and redbuds in late March and early April, crabapples in late April, one lovely and lonely pink dogwood in mid-May. Soon afterward, the spring breeze carries the delicious scent of chokecherry and honeysuckle blossoms.
My route changes as the trees go through their natural (and in this climate, very risky) progression. When Mother Nature shook the dice in 2021, the crabapple trees rolled elevens, but my backyard lilacs rolled snake eyes. There are just a couple of full-on blooms as the last few dribbles of snow plop softly to the ground.
Sitting at my writing desk on May 11, the west-facing window shows budding trees and gray skies. A continual swish of tires passes by on the street running along the north side of the house. It’s midafternoon on a rainy, cold and gloomy Tuesday. The pattern is predictable: silence for about two minutes, then car-car-car-car-car-car, then repeat. A new signal light about three blocks east, although much needed for safety, has brought rush hour to the neighborhood.
Meanwhile, the red-hot Denver real estate market has ushered in the added commotion of construction traffic. It’s a daily Tonka parade, heaven for vehicle-obsessed four-year-olds and hell for everyone else. First come the gooseneck trailers carting in the bulldozers to accomplish the latest scrape-off. Then come the dump trucks to haul the dirt away. Then come the cement trucks to pour the foundation. Then come more dump trucks to fill in the hole. Then come more trailers to bring in the frame, along with the big crane to drop the big pieces on top of the new creation (typically around 5,000 square feet on a 6,000 square-foot lot). This parade has a soundtrack as well, starting six days a week around 7:30 a.m.: grumbling, belching diesel engines, incessant backup beeping, nail guns playing three-part harmony, trash banging and echoing on the metal surface of the three-on-every-block trash containers…etcetera.
This used to be a much quieter neighborhood, but like much of the Denver metro area, it has grown a lot in the past decade. For many years before that, the population increased steadily, but slowly enough for the existing streets, bricks and mortar to adapt. Lately it feels like we’ve passed a tipping point, and as a home-based freelance writer, I must adapt as well.
Today, my escape plan is to reflect on “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” a favorite poem of my mother’s and mine. For one of her birthdays, I made her a framed calligraphy version of it. All around the outside of the poem are ink and colored pencil drawings of some of her favorite flowers: lilacs, dogwood blossoms, columbines, roses, lupines and violets. It’s hanging in a downstairs room, so I think of the words and carefully visualize each one of the flowers, as if I am treading the decorated border on the parchment. Just now, typing out the verses, I misplace a few semicolons and spell the word “grey” as “gray.” Otherwise, it comes out just right, smoothly flowing from my brain straight out the ends of my fingers. As I type the last couple of lines, the muscles around my sternum tighten up and a few tears issue forth.
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made.
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.And I will have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping like the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.I will arise and go now, for always night and day,
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore,
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
W.B. Yeats received the inspiration for this poem from his yearning for peace and quiet while walking in London in 1888. He writes, “I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem “Innisfree…”
The memories of the heart are where the poem takes me—suddenly, like Yeats described. The “pavements grey” are right outside my window, along with the rest of the urban world I live in. It would be good to “arise and go now,” so I do just that.
I open the door of my crown chakra, inhale and go straight up, like a column of smoke on a windless summer evening. On my exhale, I touch down lightly on the bottom step of the wooden stairway leading from the beach down to a beautiful pond, surrounded by woods, near Wellfleet, Massachusetts. It’s early fall and there’s no one around. The water is inviting, but having swum in this pond before, I know that it gets deep pretty quickly, to a maximum of about 50 feet. The clear water is inviting but mysterious: what lies below?
It doesn’t matter, whisper the waves, lapping peacefully with low sounds by the shore. Plashing, my mother used to call it. The little sun-crested waves break just like the big ones, but not from such a great height. The motion creates the gentle plashing sound in the foreground, while the pounding North Atlantic surf is faintly audible about a mile to the east.
After a bit, I return to the here and now, with the swishing tires on the pavements grey. A cat gently inhales and exhales on my lap, and peace comes dropping slow.
