© Carle Gravey

MARYANN CALENDRILLE

Living the Life of Luxury

A person can jot down a poem almost anywhere: while waiting along with 20 other people, shopping carts chock full, behind the only cashier on duty at the A&P at 5:30 p.m.; while trawling for bluefish on a very slow day on Gardiner’s Bay; while sweating out the summer in a tiny fourth floor walk-up in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen.

I’ve done it in these places but perhaps have done it best while sitting quietly behind a humming typewriter: the sun setting brilliantly on the pond outside my window, the wind blowing lightly. I’ve noticed the absence of screaming ambulances, traffic noise, radios. Here, where it’s quiet enough to hear myself think, I feel my best work gets done. (I also find it productive to maintain a positive attitude about the place in which I live.)

It’s this quiet, backed by the rushing ocean, colored by seasonal geese, suffused with the white haze of sun off the water, that sets the gears in motion, that establishes a rhythm. Here there is space enough to concentrate unimpeded by steel and glass and cement structures towering over your cranium already crushed by the incessant chatter of a million voices, although those ingredients cook up another kind of inspiration.

But here, the rolling farm land, dunes, waves, help draw a poem out, pull the imagination one stanza further in long islands of thought.