July 17 – Once More, to the lake

Michigan, West Coast

The long blue edge of summer

Soul claps hands and sings

I told someone that you can the boy out of the lake but you cannot take the lake out of the boy.

I was able to spend a couple of days along Michigan’s West Coast, the East Coast of Lake Michigan.

The smells.

The sounds.

The feel of the water, the sand and the air.

I could have been 10 years old, 59 years old or any age in between.

The long blue edge of summer.

Back in the day, 1982 to be precise, my Mom bought a vacation guide to the shorelines of Michigan.

Since we lived on the shore of Lake Michigan, just south of Grand Haven, in the Summertime, I had to ask why she thought we need a guidebook.

That is where that line comes from in today’s Haiku.

“I don’t know,” said my Mom, “I just liked the title, The long blue edge of summer.”

The last line is from Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler Yeats

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

III

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

But then again, it is really not from Sailing to Byzantium.

Soul clap its hands and sing is a re-occurring theme throughout the writings of Jim Harrison which is where I first read it.

It shows up in several of Harrison’s writings along the lines of this passage from The Road Home.

The question, of course, is how you make your soul clap its hand and sing. My bones seemed to be built out of incomprehension.

All I can say is that I stood on the edge of Lake Michigan, along the long blue edge of summer, with my feet in the water and my soul clapped its hands and sang.

Usually the title of each day’s haiku is the first line.

But for the Landmark Bookstore Haiku Contest, the submissions needed a title so for this one I decided on, Once More to the Lake, which allows me to get in another EB White tribute.

W. B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium” from The Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright 1933 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed © 1961 by Georgie Yeats. Reprinted with the permission of A. P. Watt, Ltd. on behalf of Michael Yeats.
Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)