Island Meadow

Ah, summer in Maine--there's nothing like it. Below is my friend and writing buddy Elizabeth Garber's poem that captures the intoxication of hanging out on a summer day. She wrote it on Great Spruce Head Island in Penobscot Bay, which was the summer home of the painter Fairfield Porter. The family offers an annual Art Week Residency for a dozen visual artists and one poet, which is how Elizabeth and I got to be there for different summers.

To best appreciate the poem, you need to hear Elizabeth read it in her soft, warm voice, but here is the next best thing. The form  is an old French one called a villanelle. I'll let you google it.

Island Meadow

For days I lay there, drugged amidst the blooming milkweed,

where butterflies rode perfumed thermals for the joy of flight.

I nestled like a deer in the shining grass and could not leave.

While bees foraged in their urgent work, barging with greed

into indolent globes of milky blooms, Victorian pink and white,

for days I lay there, drugged amidst the blooming milkweed.

I stepped through summer’s shimmer, orange jolts of hawkweed,

crisp currents of blueberries under foot, sweet fern, knee height.

I nestled like a deer in the shining grass and could not leave.

Mornings in my darkened cabin, I woke to days eclipsed of need,

pillow glancing towards dawn’s fingers, streaking golden delight.

For days I lay there, drugged amidst the blooming milkweed.

Butterflies dipped, drank, stroked avalanche of blooms to feed;

a chase, a flutter, a cascade of gauze wings leaping out of sight.

I nestled like a deer in the shining grass and could not leave.

Waking from a dream, happiness flooded, my Beloved held me,

our bodies merged like butterflies, only meadow filled my sight.

For days I lay there, drugged amidst the blooming milkweed.

I nestled like a deer in the shining grass and could not leave. 

("Island Meadow," copyright Elizabeth Garber, 2012, www.elizabethgarberpoetry.com)

This photo is from Bear Island, which is in the same archipelago as Great Spruce Head, just across the gut from it, in fact. This island was the summer home of Buckminster Fuller when he was growing up, and his family, who has owned the island for over a hundred years, rent the four cottages on it for part of the summer. http://bearislandmaine.com/Welcome.html This is the view out one of the windows of the cottage three other writer/artists and I rented for a retreat last month. No electricity, water hand drawn from the well, and quiet.