Crossing
  
  
 From Port Clyde, Maine, you board on foot.
 Maybe your belly is full of clams or lobster.
 It is windy onboard, so you hold onto your hat.
  
 Five miles out, the mainland slips away,
 Christina’s world, all that mid-century reaching,
 Sarah Orne Jewett, too, old pointed firs and talk, talk, talk.
  
 The ferry lulls you into calm, alert solitude.
 Passing little Manana Island, perhaps you spot a goat.
 You step onto the wooden dock at Monhegan,
  
 find your legs a little land-sick at first,
 but they recover. You walk along the rocks,
 savor the shingle-sided buildings weathered
  
 to that silvery-grey like the breasts of doves, note
 cresting swells, white embellishing blue waves.
 There is a local museum, a petite library,
  
 a pay-toilet, but you want to leave this age
 behind for an hour, so you head away from town,
 hike up to Cathedral Woods, enter the windless hush
  
 of spruce needles underfoot, quiet soaring of rough bark.
 Your pulse slows. Pungent tannins hang in the air.
 You hear insects, a Golden-winged warbler. At your feet,
  
 as your eyes adjust, you perceive tiny doorways, flagstones
 of shells, palisades of broken twigs. As you lean, curious
 but respectful, toward one fairy dwelling you tumble
  
 headlong into the true magic of this place: clouds
 of tiny white moth wings over greening moss; pink
 mushrooms, smaller than fingernails, still spangled 
  
 with last evening’s rain; and red spruce seedlings 
 mere inches high but protected in the filtered light. 
 You allow yourself to kneel, just for one breath, long
 enough to notice your breath becoming song.
  
  
 Leslie Schultz 

My thanks to Maine writer Kristin Lindquist, and to the Stuart-Cole family who introduced our family to the magic of Monhegan in 2011.