Reflections from Rhodora

During our recent retreat in the Katahdin region, the Maine Arts Commission gathered at Rhodora, the historic homestead once owned by American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church. With our host Jen Woodworth, we experienced an evening that reminded us of the profound ways art and nature come together.

As the sun sank behind Millinocket Lake, Maine Arts Commission Executive Director Amy Hausmann reflected on Church’s legacy, drawing from her time as director of his Hudson Valley home, Olana. Her words carried the spirit of this place, where creativity is inseparable from the land.

We were honored to welcome poet Paul Corrigan, a native of Millinocket whose work carries the voice of Maine’s woods and waters. Paul shared his poetry as the evening sky deepened, reminding us that art is rooted in presence, community, and place. One of the poems he read, He, to His Wife, captures the fleeting beauty of moments too easily missed:

He, to His Wife
by Paul Corrigan

Sit with me here on the landing
And watch how the moon hangs
Like some pale winter fruit
In the branches of our crab apple tree.
I noticed it last night, but you
Had gone to bed. And since last night
The moon has ripened and is full
And looks ready to plummet off the tree
And drop below the horizon.
Sit down here beside me.
It’s not something we’ll see
Every month. The leaves will hide it,
Or the clouds. One of us will be away,
Or we’ll both be asleep and it will rise
And hang there in the branches without us.
How odd not to have noticed it before now;
To have lived in this house a year
And not had a cloudless night when the leaves
Were down and the moon was waxing.
How soon will it be before clear weather
Again reveals it in its brightest phase
Hanging in those bare limbs?
We ought to watch the skies more faithfully
And try to be here on these stairs
To catch the next conjunction
Of the moon in our tree.
Sit with me in the dark a while.

—Paul Corrigan,

Published in Blair and Ketchum’s Country Journal

The evening at Rhodora was one we will never forget. We are grateful to Jen and the Woodworth family for preserving and protecting this sacred place, to Paul for his poetry and presence, and to the spirit of Frederic Church, who seemed to shine a guiding light across the lake that night.

It was a reminder that art, nature, and community are not separate threads but part of the same fabric, one that heals, inspires, and connects us all.