On the Muses Summer Vacation

…kind of Algonquin Roundtable meets Outward Bound meets St. Barts. The muses lounge around all morning in their slippers and lacy robes, a dip in the pool, followed by a pedicure and a massage. Then after a lunch of dainty finger sandwiches and iced tea, they change into some rougher clothes, take a last longing look at the shining pool and head out into the world, unseen by humans. They gather inspiration food to feed us throughout the coming year. They witness glaciers melting and puppy mills and the officer issuing parking tickets. They go by twos to refugee camps and domestic abuse shelters and brothels and they cannot help but witness hunger which paints a hole on their soul that can never close. They watch the thresher take down big rows of wheat in the breadbasket of America and they watch the rice begin to blossom on the terraced steps of China. They watch winter spring summer and fall each take root and slough off the season that came before.

The muses especially like trees in full bloom and fireworks.

They like the sound of

ocean waves and clear black starry nights. They like to hear poetry and garage bands and Gregorian chant but they also fill up with sound of lonely crying and the dull thud of the printing press as it churns out a nights worth of the morning edition.

They arrive back at the pool where they are served a lavish feast of roasts and potatoes and cheese fondue and chocolate cakes frosted with butter cream and coconut. The feast bends and stretches the table it is served upon, but the muses, your muse, never eats a single bite. They simply desire all the food in front of them and it is that craving that keeps them alive and ready to fill you with creative impulse. In fact, on the years that your muse appears to be AWOL, he probably broke down and ate the beef bourguignon and forgot why he came. Like you, food does that to a muse.

And with that ache in their belly, they prepare to leave summer vacation, return to you and spend another year inspiring you to bare your soul, dig deep into your memory and rise up with poetry, sculpture, a new aria or simply great metaphors. If you are lucky enough to be invited on the muses summer vacation you might be asked to stick around for their closing cocktail party where you often hear the muses make comments like this:

“I cannot come up with one more metaphor for love. Why can’t humans just get over this love thing? Once Elizabeth Barrett Browning counted the ways that should have been enough.”

“…so dense. I have been knocking and waving and whispering and he still thinks he is an accountant. I think I am going to have to drop an impressionist painting on his head. What does it take?”
“I am all for giving muses of poets special privileges. I would never want that job. Special people those poetry muses. All that dreck. One artist’s teen years would have me in a straight jacket.”


Perhaps you are frustrated when your muse leaves you.

Perhaps you beat your head to your keyboard begging her to return, say hail Mary’s to the blank sheet of paper, get your haircut, drink too much peppermint schnapps and puke in the toilet. Know this dear writer, your muse loves you and wants to be there for you, but sometimes she needs a little vacati

on: a chance to run in daisy fields and drink absinthe by a roaring fire. Take a lesson from the lowly muse.

--Amy for the Poplar Grove Muse

Sky on Friday Morning

As I was driving into work on Friday morning, I enjoyed watching the sky. It had rained all night so the ground and trees were shiny with water. I drive to work facing west so the sun was shining on everything at which I was looking. Because there were a few clouds left in western sky, the sun created a kind of gold glow on black clouds. Everything: trees, flowers, houses, cars, all had a sparkly haze upon it. Everything was shiny and since fall is dawning, the barest hints of orange and red and brown were cueing up to take the stage.

I poked my son who was preoccupied with his game device. "Look up at the sky, isn't it amazing? Look at the way the sun shines off those black clouds. Look how everything is shiny and glistening. Isn't it like magic?"

He looks up at the sky away from his game and miraculously gives me his attention, and although I think he going to shrug and say so what, he humors me and says, "Yeah mom, it is really nice."

I say, "It is so beautiful, I would like to hug it or lick it. I want you to notice things like the sky. The sky is pretty important." I must sound desperate.

He says, "You know, mom, you can't touch the sky. It isn't really there."

"I know," I say. "When I was a kid and found out that you couldn't ever touch the sky, I was pretty bummed."

"Yeah, me too. How old were you when you found out?" he asked.

"Oh, I suppose I was 5 or 6."

"Too bad," he says.

"Too bad," I say.

We pause for a moment imagining a world where you can touch the sky and what it would feel like and taste like and would it return a hug? The sky is still beautiful and for these several moments in the car, my son and I understand each other.

How old were you when you realized you couldn't touch the sky?

--Amy Cornell for the Poplar Grove Muse

Reverie Lost, and Regained(?)

I’ve been spending significant (for me) drive time in the car lately. When my oldest started middle school last year, with after-school extra-curriculars all year, I felt like I was entering a long, dark tunnel of chauffeuring—most of it east-west (the worst way in Bloomington)—that I wouldn’t emerge from until 2017 (her younger sister’s high school class). It made me just want to lie down and cry for our Cambridge days, when we walked the same infant child everywhere, taking the car out of the garage once a week for groceries from Star Market.

However, over some months, I have devised several strategies to improve the drive time:

When other drivers are crazy and erratic, I practice mindfulness, cultivating a sense that I can afford to be generous, patient, and safety-conscious, letting other cars in and stopping for pedestrians. In short, PRESUME GOOD WILL, the mantra of WWF(a)C. After a recent devastating student pedestrian death on campus, I am aggressively stopping for walking students, even as I fear it will make them ever less wary about the dangers they seem so oblivious to. It fills me with a genuine sense of gratitude and a desire to foster good will and protect my fellow vulnerable humans, and frequently leaves me calmer and more positive than when I climbed into the driver’s seat.

Another informal therapy I engage in while driving is NOT multi-tasking. I multi-task so intensively all the time “on the ground” that I often fail to listen to the very answers to questions I have solicited from my children. I almost never talk on the phone while driving, can’t focus on the GPS while navigating, and more and more often, don’t even turn on the radio, news junkie though I may be. Often, I will find myself entering the kind of open, “mental space” that I find essential to writing poetry, and have conceived a number of poems while driving. (Of course, even to note ideas briefly puts me back in the multi-tasking dilemma again, and many would-be-poems have been lost in traffic.)

Other days, I find blaring classic rock music with the windows open a fabulous way to regain the youth I never had in a car (so wedded was I to the red Raleigh Grand Prix bought with babysitting money that I swore I would never learn to drive or get a license). Cheap and effective therapy also.

On the carpool days, I get to listen in on the lives of my children and their friends, which is fantastically informative. (I am not so good at not entering the conversation, my daughters report with annoyance; several years ago, I asked my oldest which parent in a multi-family carpool was the best driver, in a general sense, and was told in no uncertain terms that the best is the best because she says nothing.)

Finally, I am endlessly fascinated by people, watching the worlds and populations I drive through. In recent years, I have felt somewhat sad at how many pedestrians are plugged in, listening to or talking with someone else instead of thinking their thoughts and allowing time for some precious reverie. I will always remember a handwritten letter I received in England from one of my dearest friends, recently returned to the States, in 1983. She wrote of her daily walk to and from Harvard Med School, and what she thought, and what she sang under her breath (Linda Ronstadt’s “I never will marry, I’ll be no man’s wife, I expect to live single, All the days of my life,” after a breakup with her old sweetheart).

My kids, hemmed in by an uncrossable state highway, walk very few places, although they have had the privilege of walking to a neighborhood elementary school and we water our dog around the neighborhood several times a day. I don’t walk many places either, for reasons of time and traffic and multi-tasking. In place of the reverie once enjoyed while walking through our lives, I’m trying to restore a new version in my car.

Mary Peckham for the Poplar Grove Muse