During the summer, my sons and I live in a way that deeply connects us to the natural surroundings of the cottage. Now an amateur astronomer, my older son discovered his love for the stars here at the Lake, where he first noticed the night sky in a way he never had at home. My younger son discovered his interest in birds and animals here. He knows the comings and goings of the robins as they dig up worms to bring back to their young; he knows the nest they make in the same sassafras tree each spring. He hears the regular calls of the mourning doves and watches their soft gray figures peck at the lawn. He has spent hours playing with inchworms, urging them to creep up the ropes of the hammock. In my poem, “Lake Effect,” I write about how their summers by the lake bring them face-to-face with nature:

It’s worth noting that these lines draw inspiration from Rilke’s poem “I,” in his Book of Hours, as well as from my sons’ interactions with the cottage landscape. By the end of my poem, they find light blossoming in the darkness:

I must admit that my sons never actually dissected a water lily at the cottage’s dinner table. For me, as for Wright, Rilke, Carson, Miró, and many others, finding creative expression for one’s experience at spiritually-charged places (however each artist experiences “spirituality”) allows these places to take on the same mythical role as places in the Bible or the Odyssey or the story of King Arthur: some of the places in these texts geographically exist. Some do not, but all receive the same narrative treatment, and it is left to the reader to distinguish between real and imagined – or not. So, too, did some of the events in these texts take place, while some did not. As a poet, I wonder to what extent language itself led the writers to blend the otherworldly properties with the factual properties of the events and places they describe. This question is best left to Biblical, classical, and Arthurian scholars; to me, it doesn’t matter. The texts in themselves satisfy my spiritual yearnings. Did Rilke really hear voices come out of the violent green storm? I don’t know, and I only invent the storm’s green color to satisfy my own yearning for an intimate connection to the landscape which inspired the Duino Elegies.

How slow is the slow trance of wisdom, which the swimmer swims into.^[9]

When a particular landscape becomes the physical conduit of the “human truths” an artist discovers there, that landscape takes on a mythical nature, in that it yields an experience that cannot be explained scientifically, nor by research into historical fact, yet the experience happens nevertheless — between the artist and the water or land that surrounds him or her. The lines between mythical and spiritual are, of course, blurry: there is a rock that juts four feet out of the cove on which our cottage sits, known in our family as “The Rock.” It is not only evidence of the movement of the glacier that carved this lake out of the earth 20,000 years ago; it is a concrete reminder of the sorrows and hardships my family has endured. We have all in our turn looked out on that rock while worrying the bead of some significant loss. Perhaps it’s not unlike my Celtic ancestors, for whom the rock-studded waters of Ireland took on a similar meaning and so became deified. I’ll admit I’ve prayed to that rock more than I’ve prayed to the Christian god of my upbringing – the god that, for my mother, was symbolized by the very same rock.

Miró once said that “an artist must put down roots in the soil,”^[10] and many artists and poets would agree, feeling that we must find our own place in which to take root, or at the very least let a place find us, and — here’s the trick — remain rooted there, even when we cannot physically be there. My school-year mornings may be mayhem, getting my two sons off to school, the dog taken care of, and myself off to work, but I sip my coffee, cradling the warm mug in my hands. The cottage is quiet. A couple of fishermen drift in the bay, catching nothing. The heron suns herself on the rock that juts out of the lake, her black wings spread wide. And so begins my writing time. The Lake is here. The Rock is here. The landscape is here, inside.