The Poetry of Maine

Crossing the Field by Kate Barnes & a trip to Maine with my lover <3

I’m recently returned from a trip to Maine that began, of all places, in New Hampshire. Lake Sunapee is extremely beautiful, with a yacht club that makes me want to put on a rollneck sweater and drink a dark and stormy (which we did, with good, kind friends). For the entire weekend, the clouds—no I won’t ever shut up about them—hung low over the water like homemade whipped cream in a big, cold, silver bowl sitting on the counter in someone’s blue, blue kitchen.

On Sunday, we were in Maine rapidly—only an hour or so to the state line. One thing about me is that I’m addicted to car travel and prefer it over any other mode of transportation. We had already driven the distance to New Hampshire, so this was a short leg. But yes, I prefer it, even when it takes nine hours (which it did on our way home), and even when there’s traffic (there was), and even when your butt starts to go numb (it did). I want to be able to put the ten inch cast iron pan I’ll buy in the backseat and not think about it again until I have to carry it up six flights of stairs.

But I also want to meditate and do the very best thinking that I’m capable of, which is what I do in the car. We drove almost every day, and we split the distance mostly—my lover and me—I would have done it all, honestly, but I didn’t want him to forget how to drive. Maine has the fourth longest coastline in the United States, so there was a lot of distance covered to go around this inlet or that.

I knew I would want to tell you about our trip, but I’m really not a travel writer, so I did the obvious thing. I went into Sherman’s (the oldest bookstore in Maine) and carried myself right over to the Maine books section. I tried this first in the Boothbay Harbor location without luck, but in Bar Harbor, I found what I was looking for: a slim and obscure (to me, for now) volume of poetry, written by a Maine poet.

What I found, was Kate Barnes, and what a gift! Her collection, Crossing the Field, beckoned to me from the shelf with a stapled spine like a magazine and a beautiful wood engraving on the cover. It is a kind and gentle book of poems. It laughs through the spring and swims through the summer and weeps through the fall and hopes through the winter. It jokes, it winks, it pierces, it levels. All of those things!!!!

There’s horses in the pasture that you would need a “pencil of light” to draw. They “live in God’s pocket,” they “want nothing but to be where they are.”

There’s a catalogue of lakes and ponds that trips rhymingly along—a list of names in turns earnest, silly, and impossible to pronounce. There are “many words for ‘water,’ many eyes that see the sky.”

There’s a poem for her daughter, who she must admit, with juice running down her chin, was right about the fallen peaches getting ripe in the end. There’s the “faithful attendant spirit,” the wolfhound, who lives in her house. There’s the raw garlic sandwich that you can eat “when you live quite alone,” there’s the bear waking up from a long sleep, when all of a sudden “time has decided / to turn into spring again / after all.” There’s a wish for “stronger and fiercer” words to write, and there’s the wolfhound again, gone away where none can follow.

It was really very difficult for me to pick a favorite poem—I loved them all so much. But one I think captures the spirit of our trip to Maine, the spirit of Maine itself perhaps. Who’s to say that we brought the spirit there with us? I suspect we did, at least a little bit, but the spirit was probably already mostly there.

In “The Night Tide,” an unspecified we arrives at the beach house as the moon is setting. Behold, the star Arcturus shining and “the salt river / moving back to sea with a silent power / so deep that a yellow planet stood reflected / burning the same from the sky and its calm surface.” With this scene laid out before them, how could they stay? Even if the house wanted them to. And so they run out, with the curtains touching their shoulders and the broom falling at their feet on their way out.

They run past—or maybe through—the oyster shells and reeds, past the scuttling crabs who are “trailing paths of green fire that grew to tendrils, / tendrils to leaves, then phosphorescent branches / blossoming from our bodies as we swam” into the water and into the miracle, through the miracle.

And from the other side of the salt river, the light in the little windows at home calls them back, wants them back, and so they swim again, a little afraid this time. Fear is not to be felt on the setting out, only on the coming home, when what’s there to be lost is in the line of sight. But on the other shore, they emerge reborn, walking back through their tracks. What goodness awaits:

and all that night we swam in a tide of stars,
and all that tide we bloomed in a tree of light.

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My favorite parts of our trip to Maine were the mostly unplanned ones. We had lists of places we wanted to go and restaurants we could eat at and stores we could pop into, but there is no feeling so powerful as driving down the highway and seeing a little sign poking out on the side of the road and saying I’m going to stop here, and just doing it because you’re in charge and you can. It’s like eating candy for dinner but better because it doesn’t make your stomach hurt. It’s even better when you don’t notice the sign until it’s almost too late, so you really have to whip it off the side of the road. We made a lot of these kinds of stops.

We visited, in this order, Kennebunk, Kennebunkport (two different places!!! As the locals will make sure you know), Freeport (exclusively for L.L. Bean), Boothbay Harbor, Eastport, Lubec, Bar Harbor, Southwest Harbor, Camden, Rockland and Portland (which we admittedly didn’t see much of—only stopping for (a very delicious) breakfast on our way out of the state). Camden was our last real stop to celebrate our friends’ wedding, which was truly glorious, with a big fat blushing full moon.

The best meals were at Bev’s Cafe in Kennebunk and Peekytoe Provisions in Southwest Harbor. And Long Grain in Camden. And Dot’s Market in Lincolnville. Oh god, every meal we had was so good except for one. Helen’s in Machias was a last minute stop and had the best fried haddock—so light and airy. They also had chocolate cream pie <3. No one is talking about haddock enough as far as I’m concerned. It’s all lobster this and lobster that. What about the haddock!?!?! The lobster was good too. My favorite lobster roll came from the Boothbay Lobster Wharf, though it was only one of three that I tried.

I can’t not mention (in other words, I must mention), Raye’s Mustard in Eastport, which is the last remaining stone ground mustard mill in the entire United States. I tried 17 different flavors, while looking out at Canada across the water, and I came home with more mustard than a normal person could consume in a year. I’ve already made some progress with salad dressings and salmon marinades.

We ate a lot of ice cream, and I left wondering why maple walnut isn’t a more mainstream flavor. Put walnuts in more ice cream!!!! In Bar Harbor, I had fresh basil ice cream from Mount Desert Ice Cream, which was really quite spectacular, until I started to feel like I was eating a candle. You know? We bought a whole blueberry pie out of a family’s garage, and we cut into it before it set, creating a little pond of blueberry filling.

We watched the sunrise in two places, but really only saw it happen in one. In Lubec, at the West Quoddy Head Lighthouse—the easternmost point in the contiguous United States—the sun rises at 4:58am. At that same time, when we were there at least, the fog is so dense that you can’t even see the ocean, let alone the sun. We had slightly better luck at Cadillac Mountain in Acadia.

We didn’t just drive up the hill in Acadia—we hiked too. Beehive and Gorham, and my face turned red as a tomato from the heat and the climbing, but I was happy as a clam (which we also ate plenty of). We went to Sand Beach, and aside from NOT buying a berry colander from Good Earth Pottery, my only regret from the trip was forgetting to bring our swimsuits when we did.

We went to many head-spinning, heart-filling antique stores, a few of them so large that even a collector of stuff like myself became overwhelmed. My favorites that we visited were Americana Workshop in Kennebunk, Higgins Antique in Southwest Harbor, and the aptly named Clutter Shop in Lubec. 1A Relics and Big Chicken Barn are the enormous ones. They’re near each other, so you could make a whole day of it and spend literally 5 hours in each one. My most prized purchase, among a couple glass apples, and a couple glass swans, and yes, the ten inch cast iron, was the set of vintage kitchen canisters (flour/sugar/coffee/tea) that I found at The Red Barn Marketplace in Lincolnville.

And now, I find I’ve gone on too long! And I’ve surely left out some important things. But of course, as is always the case, and as my sappy ass can’t help but mention, the best part of the trip and my real favorite thing is the company, my lover, who I love just an absolutely unseemly amount.

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Kate Barnes passed away in 2013, and I found her obituary most touching. I could not find anywhere suitable to buy Crossing the Field online, but her two other full-length collections of poetry are available here from independent publisher, Godine.

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