Stockbridge — We have learned that the poet, columnist and artist Michelle Gillett of Stockbridge died this morning, February 11.
We have known and admired Michelle, and her work, for the past two decades, as a weekly columnist for the Berkshire Eagle, as poet whose poetry we have published on The Edge, and as an accomplished painter whose creations we would watch as they emerged in the studio of the artist Joan Griswold.
A full obituary will follow shortly, but in tribute to Michelle’s true gifts as a poet and artist, and to her wonderfully generous spirit that she shared with others, including with my son Davy at Muddy Brook Elementary School where she volunteered to coach young writers in the art of poetry, we offer here a poem of hers that we published last year:
Not There
As we drive past Benedict Pond, you make me stop the car.
Listen, you say, a loon. But it is only the day
lifting out of its surfaces — yellow lilies
floating on the water, shade occupying the trees,
the kind of clarity that comes when there is no more
to say and we invent other sounds.
What do we need to hear beyond our stories,
to make this afternoon singular among the ones that go
so un-oracled they become the same
repeated notes? It is always dangerous to move
deeper into that forest of listening, always easy
to get lost in what is not there. The loon’s song
sounds like laughter when it means alarm,
but we imagine happiness — a mistake we can’t help stopping for.
