Eight years ago, after my wife and I had finally begged, borrowed, and stolen enough of a down payment to buy a house in western Maine together, my first thought was: How are we going to fill it? (Actually, my first thought was: I can’t believe I just bought a house with a furnace the size of Mary Anne from Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel? but that’s another story).
I can still remember our first walk-through before we’d moved in. With its blonde floors and newly painted whitewalls, the house felt full of air and light; less like the burrows we were used to and more like a tent preparing to detach itself from the earth and go sailing into the sky. I wanted to run through it with my arms waving, or sprawl in it like a cat basking in window light. At the same time, I had to admit that the experience of encountering so much distilled nothing was unsettling. It made me feel exposed, and more than a little worried about our future. After all, how could the life that we’d been living—a life that we had just successfully condensed into a U-Haul’s-worth of repurposed Amazon boxes—possibly expand enough to fit its new surroundings?
The question felt urgent then and has continued to agonize me ever since. And yet the weird thing is, the longer I live in western Maine the more I have started to suspect that it isn’t even the real question—that the real question is still lurking unasked just outside my grasp, like the empty house that I sometimes sense is still waiting for me underneath all the things that I have filled it with.
Unfortunately, eight years after moving in, I have to admit that, like most adults trying to live and raise a family under the onslaught of the world’s noise, I’ve spent way more of my time and energy ignoring this question than answering it. I’ve covered the floors with rugs and papered the white walls with bookshelves and paintings and drawings of pterodactyls with the word “daddy” spelled with four ds on them. This is what my wife likes to call the “Pier 1 Threw Up Inside Our House” school of interior decoration—a style that I recognize from my own middle-class American childhood. Its hidden-in-plain-sight meanings of plenitude and acceptance (“God Bless This Mess,” as the cliched crochet square says) are ones that I am grateful for, at the same time that I itch for the more elusive absence that its bounty is blocking out.
This is not to say that I haven’t had glimpses; in many ways glimpses are what I’ve learned to navigate by (A Door in the Dark, winks at the cover of the YA novel our ten-year-old is reading). A few years ago, for example, I stumble dover an exhibit at the Monson Gallery, in Monson, ME (pop. 609), which paired landscapes by the painter Alan Bray with poems by Maine’s former poet laureate, Wesley McNair. Walking slowly between the wood piles, pastures and ponds of Bray’s canvases, I felt a flush of recognition. Here, summoned via stealth and a kind of visionary gentleness, was the same present emptiness that I remembered feeling when we first bought our house. I could barely believe my eyes; but I had to, especially when I discovered that same space running through McNair’s lines.
Come, warm rain
and cold snap
come, car light
and country road
winding me
around dark’s finger
I met Wesley McNair too, by luck again or maybe just the kind of cosmic weft that in fairy tales calls devils into sacks and djinnis out of lamps. In this case, it called me through the snow-bunkered streets of the small town where I live to a classroom where a mixed group of students and “adult learners” had signed on to talk about Emily Dickinson. At least, that was what we were supposed to be talking about, although to be honest the thing that I ended up thinking about most when I shoveled snow in my driveway on the mornings after these classes was (you guessed it) nothing. Not the big nothing that another New England poet bluffingly called “their empty spaces/ Between stars—on stars where no human race is,” but the semi-domesticated margins, em dashes and line breaks that (as McNair explained) it was Dickinson’s revolution to invite into poetry, so that in line after line the meaning of what was said and what was not said synchronized, like the halves of a pounding heart:
There’s a certain Slant of light,
[shovel]
Winter Afternoons—
[shovel shovel]
That oppresses, like the Heft
[shovel shovel shovel]
