Stephen Paling // My Writing
An Imagined, Poetic Landscape
We each have our true north. For me, true north is a modest stretch of wooded terrain along the New Hampshire seacoast. I only lived there for four years while I attended the University of New Hampshire. But that would miss what I find truly important about that terrain. I birthed myself as a writer there. I wrote before, and I’ve certainly written since. But much of my writing winds back to that modest area, an area full of woods, weathered granite protruding from the ground around it, and quiet spots along the shore, away from the tourist beaches.
Those woods are storytelling woods. Walk through them at night, and the country dark makes it easy to believe. A few miles north of Salem, Massachusetts, you can understand, perhaps, why the pilgrims felt themselves to be on the edge of outer dark. The terrain holds magic for me—lighter, daytime magic, and the darker magic of the nights. I can close my eyes and go there when I need reassurance.
I often don't write about the actual landscape. I write about an imaginary landscape, one charged with magic, a landscape that appears as a character in its own right in my writing.
NONETHELESS
An ordinary forest
about which
no tales will be written.
Each fall
leaves like birds
about to fly,
either
themselves breaking free,
or
lifting the tree into flight.
--from Rooms in Old Houses, Cayuga Lake Books, 2020
THE WOODS KNOW PATIENCE
The woods know patience
beyond human,
know the trail
to be the aberration.
One tree may fail,
whole stands, in fact,
but the creep continues,
the lean-above grows.
Wait long enough,
(as if you could)
watch roots
grow over your feet.
--from Rooms in Old Houses, forthcoming from Cayuga Lake Books, 2020
Even when I set a poem inside, the magic of that place still finds its way in:
ROOMS IN OLD HOUSES
Rooms in old houses
collect more than
dust and
old sewing machines--
layers of sunlit afternoons
cling in each room.
The shade of a widower
in white canvas shoes
is on the wall
next to a
dusty fishing rod.
In the grain of a wooden floor
a toy train waits
and waits at its
miniature station,
patient in the long absence
of a small hand.
The halls of these old houses
were built wide,
but each time you pass
from the kitchen to the bedroom,
the hallway is smaller
by a creak of the house.
First your shoulders will
rub the walls in passing, then
there will be a groaning
and settling in your back,
and the weight
of the accumulating sunlight
will press you to the wall.
--from Rooms in Old Houses, Cayuga Lake Books, 2020
What I learned there remains true for me. Modest places have quiet voices, you need to listen. You can grow magic in a landscape as sure as you can grow anything else. Stay. Even if you leave. Stay. The storytelling terrain remains with you wherever you are. Dwell.
The landscape does not always exhibit magical qualities, though. Sometimes I admire the lansdscape without elaborating:
SONNET WITHOUT SOUND
a leafless mountain
with the long, still
skeleton of a ski lift
an empty lodge
and a stony dirt parking lot
three birch trees
at the edge of a short cliff
boulders ripening in the sun
into round, stone fruit
the bare mountaintop
under my feet
not
one of these things
makes any sound
--from Rooms in Old Houses, forthcoming from Cayuga Lake Books, 2020
I can always close my eyes, and feel words about to form.
