On Maine and ponds

Patty and I have been in central and coastal Maine this week. We stayed for a short time with Patty's brother Wesley and Wesley's wife Diane at their summer cabin on a lake. Or as they say in Maine: their camp on the pond. Above is my beautiful wife P. having, as she called it on seeing the photo, "a pond-gasm" on the deck by the lake at about 8 in the morning. Wesley McNair, Patty's brother, is what I would call a SAP, or Significant American Poet. In addition to many award winning books of poetry, Wesley has published anthologies on Maine writers, a book of essays, and I think is due to publish a memoir. He's been honored by the Library of Congress and all kinds of official ways. He's also extremely fond of, how shall I put it, "ribald" humour. I'm hoping to get him to agree to an interview for this blog at some point. The Boston Review had a good sampler of Wesley's work at the following link:

http://bostonreview.net/BR14.3/mcnair.html

Here is one of his poems:

The Name
At the end of her life,
when the fire
lifted her house away,
and her left side
vanished in a stroke,
and she woke
in that white room
without apron or shoes;
she searched each face, 
including his,
until she found her twice-
divorced daughter, the one
she’d always said wasn’t
over Fool’s Hill yet,
and, taking her hand
as if they’d all along
been close, began
to call the name
the frightened daughter
never heard before,
not father or brother.

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