Hallstatt: A Village on the Lake

TBT: Boyhood / Summer

Face in the Mirror

I once went on a camping trip to Fish Lake and didn't shave for a week, which meant I didn't look at my face in a mirror for a week.  We were in the woods, so no shop windows to check my hair, no car windows to glance at my reflection.  Sure, I could have looked at my face in the surface of the lake, just as Eve did after God had created her--and she saw an absolutely beautiful creature, so beautiful that Adam was a real let-down when she first saw him--but I didn't think to look at my face in the water while fishing.  I don't think I would have had an Eve-like experience anyway.

Instead, I was surprised when I got home at the end of the week, staggered into the bathroom, exhausted from a long day hiking, swimming, and fishing and from an 8 or 9 hour drive, and stood in front of the mirror on the medicine cabinet, reaching for my toothbrush and toothpaste.  (And yes, I'd been brushing all week long; don't get distracted from my story.)  So, a week away from a mirror and when I looked I saw a stranger.  I saw myself as I guess I really am.   I saw the wideness of my jawbones, the narrowness of my chin, the skinny roundness of my nose, the shaggy eyebrows, the bright blue eyes.  I saw all that and the rest from a different perspective, a perspective not governed by my own ideas of myself, not governed by the way I'd always thought of my face (unremarkable, but mine).  

I looked in that mirror, and I saw myself, but only for a moment, a flash of sight, and then there was just me, just Matt, looking back at me, a slightly quizzical look on my face as if that reflected self were amused by all that had passed so swiftly through my brain.  'Thinking too much again,' Mirror-Matt said, 'It's just you and me here.'  

I looked frankly at myself in that mirror, and I laughed.

--entry found in an old notebook back in 2014

(lightly edited)

Yeats and Pound: "Lake Isle" Poems

THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE

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 honeybee, 
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, 
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; 
There midnight's all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow, 
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day 
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; 
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, 
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

--William Butler Yeats      (1892)


THE LAKE ISLE


O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves, 
Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop, 
With the little bright boxes
               piled up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragment cavendish
               and the shag, 
And the bright Virginia
               loose under the bright glass cases, 
And a pair of scales not too greasy, 
And the whores dropping in for a word or two in passing, 
For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit. 

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves, 
Lend me a little tobacco-shop, 
               or install me in any profession
Save this damn'd profession of writing, 
               where one needs one's brains all the time. 

--Ezra Pound     (1915)

Tony Hoagland's "Field Guide"

FIELD GUIDE


Once, in the cool blue middle of a lake,
up to my neck in the most precious element of all,


I found a pale-gray, curled-upwards pigeon feather
floating on the tension of the water


at the very instant when a dragonfly, 
like a blue-green iridescent bobby pin,


hovered over it, then lit, then rested.
That's all.


I mention this in the same way
that I fold the corner of a page


in certain library books,
so the the next reader will know


where to look for the good parts.

--Tony Hoagland,
Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty,
Graywolf Press: Minneapolis, MN, 2010.


This book was a gift from my friend Meredith, and I appreciate the giving and the given.