April Bonus Poem: I Will Build My Cottage

April is National Poetry Month (silly concept, actually) and I happen to have been writing a lot of them lately (for me). I think of poetry as speech that is skewed toward the numinous, making compromises with sense in order to draw up something unexpected and until then hidden. With a definition like that, you can write prose poetry, you can play with formalities any way you like.

I love poetry but do not read much of it any more. What I love is that people write poems, and hardly know themselves what for. It will always be a minority report, misfit ruminations. In the case of my own poems, I think of them as rudimentary observations. Very simple, very tonal and moody. Certainly not deep.

Anyway, a couple of mornings back while jogging I passed a purple and orange house with lobster traps stacked in the side yard, and I thought, "I'd like to build a little cottage in the back of that house," and knew then that I had a poem in mind. It recalls an old poem by William Butler Yeats, Lake Isle of Innisfree. That one begins:

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.

I knew immediately that the poem gestating in me as I ran would be a kind of Lake Isle poem, so, well, I jogged home and wrote it. I'm calling it, I Will Build My Cottage.

I will build my cottage
in the back yard of the purple and orange house
on the pebble road to the beach, the one
with the lobster traps stacked
against the green fence,

under the old willow,
and it will be made of sea wrack
and sea foam, and painted the color of islands,
and flash in the light like a gull’s wing
in the morning,

and there will I wile my time,
lost to the world of plans and contingencies,
carefully sculpting my stories,
becoming a legend.