We’ve just come back from three blissful weeks at Blackwater Lake. We’re already figuring out how to clear the calendar for eight weeks in 2017. That will be the longest stretch of time I’ve spent there since I first began going with Bill in 2008. We were dating then, and he told me he owned an island in Canada. I was immediately dazzled by the prospect of a picturesque cottage with evening cocktails and balcony views.

True love ensued. Good thing, too, as Dickinson Island, when he took me there for my trial run, turned out to be a one-acre pile of rock with pine trees and no plumbing. No electricity. No clean linens. No exit without a boat. Discovering the dead mouse in the water bucket could have been the end of the romance. But no.  

I passed the “test” and eventually married the man. Dickinson Island, it turns out, is where my Muse resides. When I go there, I write stuff. It is a refuge off the grid, where stillness creates big spaces for thought.

SAPPHICS AT BLACKWATER LAKE
 
Early afternoon and the wind goes softer.
Only poplar leaves have a way to whisper.
Somewhere waves are lapping against a rowboat,
thumping a rhythm.
 
Hear it? Here’s the poem you think you came for,
speaking artless syllables. Never mind your
inspiration. Something is making music
better than you are.
 
Song goes deep at Blackwater Lake. The burr of
insects eating into the fallen pine trees,
sparrows, bumblebees in the tangled bushes
back of the cottage.
 
You can hear the hummingbird long before she
swerves in view, a thrumming of small propellors.
Listen. Listen. This is the earth’s own poem
perfect and wordless.
 
Barbara Loots
Published in I-70 Review Summer/Fall 2013