This Be the Place: I Shall Gaze

This Be the Place is a series of short essays in which poets explore the mysteries and meaning of a particular place.

It was there when we moved in seven years ago. An octagonal, wooden pavilion in the yard. A gazebo. A tiny plaque bolted to the side told me it was a gift from the local garden club to the previous owner. It seemed wondrous for my husband and I to have our first house, set back from the highway at the end of a dirt road in a tiny town in Vermont. The house borders a forest and an escarpment—a term for when the ground abruptly changes elevation. A 200-foot cliff rises out of the woods and looms over us, its top like layers of trees floating atop trees when you look out of the gazebo screens. “Is the fog lifting or the trees rising? Who cares.” I wrote in my poem “Routine.” Locals call the cliff Hawk Hill because red-tailed hawks live there, circling and shrieking. One killed our chicken, Anne Sexton. And as I worked on editing this very line, a hawk swooped right into my window and straightened up with a little blue bird in its talons before rising back into the trees above the trees.

The gazebo wasn’t actually that great to sit in, at first. So, last year, we screened it in and bought a blue-and-brown, outdoor loveseat and a few pillows, and hauled out an old coffee table. Suddenly it became a real space—a shelter still open to the elements, connected to the natural phenomena of a yard beside a dark forest.

Is it too dramatic to propose that the gazebo’s proximity to the seeming abyss of the dark wood coaxes a libidinous, cosmic force in the human mind? Who cares. I hear that the humblest human might attempt to commune with God in a hut in the woods, but I’ll settle, too, for Keats’s nightingale rendered in my pitiless, speckled hawks.

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Place in my poems reflects the places I seek out in my life: those which connect the inner and outer world; places of paradox. I find these places in human architecture, the kind that looks outward while letting in the immaterial—light, wind, framed shadows.

I think of the importance for the poet of finding a place in which to cultivate reverie, a state which I link to revelations. Pursuing reverie in the garden club’s gazebo, I might lose myself back into the world—if even for a moment—held in my opened birdcage.

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“It’s always the same in Bianca’s poems,” a guy said in graduate school more than a decade ago. “Someone is sitting at a window . . . and then they think something.” The gazebo is perhaps my natural progression. Surrounded by open/enclosed frames, my someone becomes multiplied in her thinking something.

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My gazebo has a little, mossy cupola at its top, which looks like another tiny gazebo (I imagine a tiny Bianca is up there writing her tortured poem about a dying fruit fly), and this is known as a roof lantern. The lantern lets in air and sun, heat escapes while protecting the interior from rain, and I love it very much. Birds perch there. Below, vines of Morning Glory ascend chaotically on a single, frail stalk around a rope outside the screen—the exterior always seems to want in—a raspberry plant’s single tentacle pokes through a crack in the floorboard. The gazebo’s interior is wooden, geometrical. It spirals inward neatly toward the center. To look up (as one does, lying on the tiny couch) you see a kitschy, hanging cluster of wicker balls, entangled with Christmas lights, something the preceding owners added. To lie facing the woods (about 120 feet away), my back is to the window of my study, a converted walk-in closet on the second floor—and the same vantage point. A boggy expanse of mostly goldenrod leads into the woods.

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I heard gazebos are as old as gardens. Our gazebo sits between our house and the forest. My house is painted black-brown, so it feels like the gazebo is a tiny hut between two immense forces. Wind enters freely through the gazebo’s screens, on which the mosquitos make their apocalyptic, disordered ranks like a mob of zombies. A pensive candle is lit at dusk. Within this perforated hut I embody the dialectical, human separation from the world and simultaneously condemn, negate, and disprove separation from it, by writing poems.

A hardcover, The Domain of the Self, lies beside me, covered by a thin sheen of pollen. The coffee-stained fragments of notes curl in the humidity. The words of others weave into the poems along with the images of the landscape. Place is never without the context of reading; a neo-Romantic gaze senses the books in its peripheral vision. Gaze, linked to the poetic reverie. I realized the word gazebo includes gaze. When I look it up, I read that gazebo was likely a word jokingly pasted together in the 18th century to sound Latin. The suffix ebo is added to words in the future tense, to denote the phrase “I shall.” So, gazebo translates to: “I Shall Gaze.” An object to contain others and nothing—wind and sunlight—with a first-person, disembodied speaker already in its name.

I shall gaze, between woods and my own house, even if as ruinously as Orpheus, back at the fading beloved in the underworld, poised at the very mouth between worlds. Even at the death of a tiny bird, our dog digging deeper into the mole holes, my daughter throwing a propellered balsa wood airplane across the yard. The moment of the poem, even if I don’t have the words—it’s somehow all there in me, poised, flying at unfathomable speed and precision: it is interior. And the work of making it exterior is the devastation of the artist.

In late August, I am surrounded by insects at their biggest and loudest. I mourn a little the coming winter. But into the poem go the catbirds, the crickets, the attitude of the garden; my shades of consciousness, the anatomy of a shared lonely world—the reader might enter, and from that first line say: I, too, shall gaze.