Visible Poetry: Aesthetic Acts in Progress

On Brittle Ice: A Week of Winter Weather

2012-01-27T10:05:00.000-08:00

Clouds always tell a true story, but one which is difficult to read.
Ralph Abercromby, "Suggestions for an International Nomenclature of Clouds," 1887.

Saturday 21 January 2012--Water Pools in Dead Grass

Sun today, after snow and bluster and rain yesterday. It must be warm because the pond is slick and watery, though still frozen, snapping and groaning as the ice shifts. Blue sky; blue sea; blue ice. Frozen water pools in the dead grass, glitters in the sun. The ground is solid now, like rock, and won't absorb the rain.

Sunday, 22 January 2012--A Scattering of Snow

The sky is clear blue this morning, the light golden; a scattering of snow sparkles on the porch railings and floor, and swirls in strange looping patterns across the blue ice of the pond. Every contour is sharp, crisp, defined. At -11 it is cold enough that moisture has dropped from the air, and along with it, all haze. Another day of such cold and near stillness of wind and the sea will begin to freeze. Ducks swim in the shallows, eiders I think, but I would have to look through the binoculars to be sure. Out by the islands smoke rises from the sea, warmer water lifting into cooler air. A swath of brittle salt-ice limns the beach where the tide has pulled back.

Tuesday 24 January 2012 (Halifax)--Blot Out the World

A steady rain falls on the ice, the windows, the streets. Wind in the trees, standing water everywhere, the ice rotting and guttering, hiss of tires on pavement, darkness. A twilight day. A day to be home, to stay home, to huddle in bed beneath the eiderdown. Blot out the world. But I am not at home; I am here, in Halifax, and have to trudge to work soon. Cold feet, wet feet and a blown out umbrella--the joys of the day.

Rain. Rain. I listen to Bach's cello sonatas. The wind picks up, flings rain like pebbles at the windows. Time to get up and go now.

Wednesday 25 January 2012--The Sea is a Lung

Home again in woodsmoke and slush and yellow grass and damp earth and singing birds. High tide, and masses of seaweed are tossed up on the island, on the cove shore; they glow, rubescent, beneath grey streaky skies. Lines of light above the islands. A slight wind. Rain.

Sudden angle of near sun so that the porch floor begins to glisten, the water goes silver and the edges of things sharpen. And then it fades. A brief break of blue overhead. The last one. Seas nearly flat calm, just the motion of the tide rolling in, rippling the glassy surface. That movement always makes me feel as if the earth is breathing, as if the sea is the lung of the world.

Thursday 26 January 2012--Suddenly Sun Flashes

Blue light of a coming storm. Grey clouds, dull sea, a narrow streak of light across the sky to the south. Frozen pond. Suddenly sun flashes through thinning cloud and the sea glistens gold, a beaten brass pan.

Friday 27 January 2012--Descent into a Colourless World

A cold morning. The sea has frozen again nearly all the way to islands and shattered white sheets of ice, like glass, lie crumpled on the beaches. The sun is a pale white orb behind pale clouds; the pond and sea, too, are a whitened grey. Now is our descent into a colourless world. A storm is in the offing: snow, then rain then ice, oh joy. I am glad I do not have to come or go to the city today.

All night an eerie stillness as we wait for the wind to begin to sigh from afar.

Photos of ice and bladderwrack were shot between 22 and 26 January 2012 on Sober Island and in West Quoddy, Nova Scotia. Whole sequence may be seen here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/karincope/sets/72157629048704619/

Ralph Abercromby's comments on clouds are taken from Richard Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies. London: Picador, 2002, p. 253.

Quick. Exchange. Recycle. Reuse.

2012-01-18T15:26:00.000-08:00

I discover the "quick message" file on my cell phone and think it might make a good story if I rearrange the entries. What it makes is not "good" so much as funny. And every sequence leads to the same spot--I think--a leap into bed. Really? Sexting, it turns out, is inevitable. So too is sorrow. Where there is a telephone, someone is waiting. And nearly wordless.

Exchange I (Recycle.)

Where u at?

B there soon.

Tipsy?

I'm gonna B late.

What's up?

Booty call.

U know u want me.

RU up 4 it?

Your place or mine?

Let's do it!

Exchange II (Repeat.)

Do it!
You up?

Your place?
Yours. Gonna be late.

Where are you?
Boy call.

Again?
B there soon.

Exchange III (Restraint.)

Soon
be there

Want
up

Call
do

You
too

Late

Photos are of a plastic drop cloth hung out to dry. September, 2011, Halifax. Recycled plastic; reusable words.

When Last I Died, An Interview with Sophie Calle

2012-01-12T13:56:00.000-08:00

Let me be clear; it is she--Sophie Calle--who asks these questions. I simply answer, as truthfully as I can. (I'm sorry if you don't believe me. You should.)

--When did you last die?

--Late last night, three hours before the moon set. And then I woke again.

--What gets you out of bed inthe morning?

--In this season? The thought of getting back into it at night. And sometimes the promise of a hot eucalyptus scented bath. Coffee keeps me up, as does the endless list of tasks life has handed me. I cross one off, and it adds three. Or five, or ten. This is why I have to die every night; it is a way of resetting the clock. But, alas, the list survives.

--What became of your childhood dreams?

--They were all nightmares from which I am glad to have awakened.

--What sets you apart fromeveryone else?

-- Nothing. I wear others' castoffs, and can hardly remember the last new pair of shoes. In any case, I will surely fit into another pair someone else has tossed aside.

--What is missing from your life?

--Nothing and then everything and then nothing again, so that I tumble into a quandry without top or bottom.

--Do you think that everyone canbe an artist?

--Of course. Everyone but myself, naturally. Which is why I must make such an effort to insist that I too might someday think of myself this way. Just not yet.

--Where do you come from?

--I grew up in a flat place south of this one, a thousand miles from the sea. The lights of the city blocked out the stars, and I thought that the endless roar of the traffic was the sound of the void.

I was, perhaps, right about that.

--Do you find your lot an enviable one?

--I have no truck with envy, though desire is everything. Can you desire a lot? Yes, I do.

--What have you given up?

--Lent. Small purchases. And often, hope.

--What do you do with your money?

--I put it into a household account and there it disappears. I am not sad about this; what else should I do with my money?

--What household task givesyou the most trouble?

--I loathe vacuuming, spot removal, scrubbing the bathtub and fixing other people's computers. And correcting grammar mistakes. Yet I seem to be an expert in all of these things.

--What are your favourite pleasures?

--You really think I'm going to tell you? Okay, I relent. One is....dancing. Nothing makes me happier. I wish I had been a choreographer. Or had known Pina Bausch.

--What would you like toreceive for your birthday?

--A complete set of poetry by CD Wright. And a really sturdy tripod. And perhaps a new pair of shoes all my own. Or a swimming pool; the sea is really too cold for sport these days.

--Cite three living artists whom you detest.

--Artists? I can't think of one. But politicians, managers, corporate kleptocrats? May an infinity of evil befall the lot of them, they who are the evil that shatters us. You want me to name them? Ayy, where do I begin? Just pick up the newspaper and check off the names on the front page.

--What doyou stick up for?

--Virtually everyone else.

--What are you capable of refusing?

-- Butter. Sugar. Cream. A ride. I wish I were capable of refusing stupidity, but sometimes I tumble into it and cannot get out.

--What is the most fragilepart of your body?

--My feet. Or perhaps my breath. This is why I didn't become a dancer, although I still long for such precise athleticism. Words rarely fail me, but my body lumbers; it is less reliable than it used to be.

--What has love made you capable of doing?

--Love has made me capable of hatred. Of rage, of going to battle. Strange perhaps, because the opposite is not true--rage and hatred don't make you capable of love.

--What do otherpeople reproach you for?

--Unfinished projects. Belatedness. Abstraction. Absence. Falling down when I should be standing up. Loving the wrong things. And they are right. I reproach myself for these failings too, among many others.

--What does art do for you?

--It is sometimes the only door to hope. Without it, I don't think much of human beings.

--Write your epitaph.

--Wait, that's not a question. I would prefer not to. Not yet, though as I've said, I do sometimes die every night. See? Another unfinished project. A belated requiem. Let us sing.

--In whatform would you like to return?

--As a winged thing, fleet of foot; nimble, pirouetting, light of heart, ripe and tender like a peach in July.

The questions are French artist Sophie Calle's and have been taken from from “Sophie Calle:Interview.” Frieze Magazine. http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/sophie_calle/

Photo: Hotel bed, Philadelphia, PA. April 2011.

Shooting Ducks

2011-12-31T14:22:00.000-08:00

As the year began, so it ends, in darkness.

Rain all day, and then wind and waves, pushing rinds of rotten ice into shore. Out with the old....
In a day or two the sea will freeze over again.

The morning begins with gunshots--a hunter motors out beyond the skim of ice in an aluminum skiff. He wears desert fatigues to stand over the sea and fire at ducks. Unlucky birds! Targets as soon as their plumage brightens for mating. They're no good for eating, these "fish ducks" as they're called; those feathers are destined to be trophies, stuffed and hung on the wall. A whole industry of memory, monuments to successful aim, sophisticated scopes, his practiced trigger finger.

I'm perhaps no different, hanging out the latest shutter trapped colours, little shreds of recollection: one place and then another: I was here, hymning to the light.

Still, shooting done my way preserves the ducks, in light as in flight, for another day.

Frost Flowers on Glass

2011-12-27T12:04:00.000-08:00

Overnight, frost sketches strange forms on the windowpanes--long dendritic tendrils, ferns, floral bursts. These aren't technically "frost flowers"--those are three-dimensional ice sculptures that form over weeds or reeds at a lake's edge. Still, these etchings do flower here in the sudden cold overnight, racing up the window, crowding out the view. Rare now, in this time of energy efficient triple glazed argon filled panes, they appear magical, otherworldly, effortless art.

We are staying in a winterized but not thoroughly insulated cottage near Lac Pierre, just outside of St. Alphonse de Rodriguez in Quebec. It is warm--particularly near the wood stove--and we are cooking quite a lot, roasting game birds, making soup, roasting vegetables, so the air in the cottage is steamy. Outside, on the day I took the photos, it was bitterly cold. It is, at once, both the contact and the contrast between these two extremes--warm damp interior and cold dry exterior--that enable such frost patterns to grow up the insides of our windows. Warm damp air condenses on the interior of the window and freezes, forming frost crystals; each construction is, as the temperatures modulate, a sketch in progress.

The photographs were taken from the inside, looking out at snow-covered cedars and the snowy yard.

On Not Reading

2011-10-14T15:47:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago I tried an experiment--not to read for a week. I didn't think of this on my own; I was under the influence of some ideas popularized by Julia Cameron in her famous (or infamous, depending upon how you look at it) program, The Artist's Way.

At first the idea struck me--as it will no doubt strike you--as ludicrous. Give up reading?! For a week? During the teaching semester?! IMPOSSIBLE. But then I remembered that over the summer, while on the boat and in the throes of repairs, though I felt terribly guilty about it, I'd sometimes gone days without reading. I knew I could do it, so I decided to try. The week before the week I was going to give up reading, I read relentlessly. There were classes to prepare, things to find out, a sort of bottomless well to fill up before I ceased moving my eyes across print.

And then, suddenly, there I was, in my week. I resisted the urge to look at the paper in the morning, to log online and cruise the pages of the internet. I avoided facebook, long letters, magazines, and peering over the corners of others' desks at the publications scattered there. And with each gesture of "resistance" to the thrall of print, I became more settled and more relieved. I sat and just listened to what others were saying around, their stories and jokes and worries and tantrums. Sometimes I laughed, as if to myself.

Peculiarly enough, the week that I was to give up reading, I was also to go to Ohio, to celebrate my mother's 70th birthday. That meant that I would spend long hours in flight and transit lounges (there's a euphemism--uncomfortable places where loudspeakers exhort you, repeatedly, to watch your bags, report suspicious behaviour, step carefully onto the moving sidewalk and other inanities) without print to distract me. What was I going to do?

I walked. I looked at things. I spoke to people. I listened to more conversations. And I did, I'll confess, grade my papers (all of them!)--something I'd already decided wasn't quite reading, but more like accounting (ah the flexibilities of redefinition!) Once in the bosom of my family, I resisted the thousands of books stacked and shelved and lying about the house. I sat quietly, sometimes, or took photographs, or talked with my parents and siblings and their spouses and children. And I learned a few things--

Among them, that reading is often, for me and others in my birth family, a compulsive act of abstraction, a determined flight from the discomforts and disagreements so close at hand between us. I also realized that if I had a bar against reading, then I wasn't compelled to read whatever was set before me...the airline magazine say, or other books lying about, the "extra" and never finished supplements to my classes, or one research project or another....I permitted myself, thanks to the fact that I wasn't reading, to imagine or observe other things while I was waiting, or sitting for a moment, or eating breakfast or dinner alone. (Imagine simply eating! No words!)

I found I was happier, more at ease; I didn't feel guilty all of the time. I wasn't forever accompanied by that awful incompleteness that reading seems to deliver, the threat or the promise of the forever more, the feeling of being out of time, out of step with myself, forever behind.

I'm going to try this experiment again sometime--as soon as I can get through this stack of books and articles and magazines on and beside my desk, the bed, beside the bath, on my other desk, the floor....

On the Uses of Travel (or what I did with my summer break)

2011-08-26T12:52:00.000-07:00

I am adrift, severed from the sense of time or season that geography lends a life.
Travel has scrambled me, undone my sense of sequence, jumbled spring summer autumn and winter. The calendar of days where I was seems strange now, the unspooling of hours where I am equally odd. I can’t seem to catch up to myself. Where am I, and what is real?

I have no idea.

I race from east coast winter to a season of wind, dry days and cool nights in Mexico. Autumn?—but the calendar reads April, May. Then I return home, briefly, and rush away again, west, to British Columbia.

Habituated to twilight foggy Junes in Nova Scotia, I am frazzled by the constant light. Cold enough for three wool blankets at night, but the portlights stream with sun after 4 am. 18 hours later, we tumble towards twilight. Summer light but not summer heat. When will that come?

Oddly, only north of 50 degrees latitude do we discover heat. And deep fjords winding between snow-covered mountains. There a glacier, and here, seawater warm enough to swim. A landscape of contrasts so large your eyes feel as if they must roll in different directions.

We turn south into cold, and then fly east towards lightening—a strike on the wing!—fog, heat, more darkness. The loon cries; the full yellow moon says fall is coming. So too the calendar (for once they are in accord!), and the sudden onset of school related work.

It’s glorious but confusing. I can’t keep up, my sleep seems forever in arrears.

Adrift, in debt, a little bit lost—that’s sailing isn’t it? We are deranged into change.

Real Estate Speculation

2011-06-29T10:37:00.000-07:00

Real Estate Speculation

You never liked to be cold.

As soon as you died they came and took your things away.

(Yuppies’ trumpet).

Curtains beds sheets hassocks dressers rugs dresses shoes towels smocks scarves

--that infamous panama hat!—

boots umbrellas jackets your pea coat mules slippers and long lace up boots.

Estate sale.

They boxed your paintings—six donated to the local museum--then sold your horde of paint tubes and jugs on craigslist

rolls and cans of brushes bolts of raw canvas gessoed panels stretchers frames frameboxes buckets of turpentine pencils and pastels rulers glass belayers pliers hammers saws nails shears

--everything but the chalkboard you used to plan (wipe errors easily away!)

Gestalts and spectral surfaces buried here

When the plants died—who came to water them? Your executors? She’s in Ontario, he’s in Calgary—they tipped them out at the edge of the drive then stacked the pots beneath the stairs. Lumps of dry earth and brittle leaves.

(Chester L Stump Crust has joined a men’s group.)

They can’t wait to sell the house.

Anyone can see what they missed—

Gestalts and spectral surfaces buried here--

Yuppies’ trumpet scribbled on the wall or

a mouldering rind of cheese in the fridge

a half empty jug of orange juice a frozen chicken an open tin of salmon-flavoured catfood--where is your kitty anyway?

and that crude icon painted by your friend Fred. You bought it at the art fair just to encourage him—the title you figured worth $30

Chester L Stump Crust has joined a men’s group.

Silly junk of carmined wood stowed on the garage ledge with the spare key.

Your fingerprints span the doorframe trace rainbow patter on the thermostat dial.

You never liked to be cold.

These photos were taken at an estate sale property in Curteis Point, Vancouver Island, BC, June 2011.

The life of a painter imagined here is a fiction, and bears no relation to the life or works referenced in the photographs.

Reading the Lists of the Dead: Poetry and Social Justice in Mexico

2011-05-21T20:41:00.000-07:00

I. The Global Economy's New Killing Fields

Yesterday as we walked the dry hills, every small white stone seemed a skull.

Thousands litter the paths; I had not known there would be so many without number or name.

Journal entry, 1 March 2011

On February 17th, on my way to Mexico, I begin reading Chuck Bowden's Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields. We'd heard him interviewed on the radio in January, his voice languid and haunted, cracking from the speaker like something from the other side of death. Which in a way, he is. He's been counting Mexico's dead and often brutally dismembered--journalists, photographers, prostitutes, police, Central American immigrants, drug addicts, homeless, mentally ill, children, tourists, students, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, passersby--the mounting "collateral damage" of the joint US-Mexican "war on drugs." This month, May, the numbers of Mexico's dead stagger towards 40,000.

Bowden's book reads like poetry; it's an elegy for missing people; a maddened cry; a descent into hell.

Small details arc through the text. For the most part, Bowden cites newspaper stories--this one, for example, the 907th "murder" story filed in 2008 by his friend Armando Rodriguez, who was then gunned down before the story appeared. As Rodriguez wrote in El Diario in Cuidad Juarez the night before his own death: "The man assassinated Tuesday night in the Diaz Ordaz viaduct was a street clown, according to the state authority. Nevertheless, this person has not been identified, but it was reported that he was between 25 and 30 years old, 1.77 meters tall, delicate, light brown complexion, short black hair" (vi).

Nothing is known; everything is known; names are rarely reported. This is why, recently, in the days of protest called for by poet Javier Sicilia, whose 24 year old son, Juan Francisco, was tortured and killed in March near Cuernavaca, there has been a move to post the names of the dead in town and city squares all over the country. As Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos wrote in his letter of support for Javier Sicilia's call to action, from "somewhere in the mountains of southeast Mexico:" "[W]e know well that to name the dead is a way of not abandoning them, of not abandoning ourselves."

Thus, for a part of one year, 2008, in just one place, Ciudad Juarez, which lies across the mostly dry Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, Bowden tries to track and to name every one among the dead or brutally injured that he can find. He fails miserably.

Partly because he loses heart--or rather, he and his assistant Molly Molloy do--and partly because it is impossible. This is, in fact, one of the reasons they lose heart. As he writes in the introduction to his Appendix, titled "The River of Blood," an effort to track and translate the daily press reports of the dead, "At first, it is simply a clerical task. Read the papers and put down the names, if given, and the time and cause of death....[But] by June 2008, the city cannot handle its own dead and starts giving corpses wholesale to medical schools or tossing bodies into common graves. The list of the dead becomes a dark burden as solid information dwindles. And so it finally trails off, a path littered with death and small voices whispering against the growing night" (237). Elsewhere he notes, "By the summer of 2009, Juarez looks back on the slaughter of 2008 as the quiet time" (233).

But I've not gotten to this point in the book on February 17th when my flight lands in Phoenix, Arizona. Still, I understand one very important thing already: Bowden is tracking a logic of death, a pattern to the killings that will be, as he puts it, "coming soon" to cities all over the world. It's already scheduled, we could say, for a city near you.

"I want to explain the violence as if it were a flat tire and I am searching the surface for a nail. But what if the violence is not a kind of breakdown, but more like a flower springing from the rot on the forest floor?" (116) The factories of Juarez, its famous "free-trade zone" maquiladoras are, Bowden argues, "now the house of death, offering no future, poisoning the body with chemicals, destroying the spirit faster than cocaine or meth" (116). To make matters worse, they don't pay enough for anyone to get ahead. Prices in Juarez are basically US prices, but wages are at best around US$70 a week, and workers live in cardboard dumps, without security, benefits or protection of any kind. The children of these workers don't see any reason to join the wasting fields where their parents labour and die young for such dishonest wages. Drugs are rampant, so too labour in its fast factories, its killing floors--the new maquiladoras of the new century.

What if, Bowden asks, Juarez isn't "behind the times"--what if it isn't slow, not a spot not yet swept up into the development curve--"what if Juarez is not a failure," but an image of "the future that beckons all of us from our safe streets and Internet cacoons?" (117) What if Juarez is the very figure of neoliberal economic success?

"After decades of this thing called development, Juarez has in sheer numbers more poor people than ever, has in real purchasing power lower wages than ever, has more pollution than ever, and more untreated sewage and less water than ever. Every claim of a gain is overwhelmed by a tidal wave of failure. And yet this failure, I have come to realize is not failure....

"Everything in Juarez will soon be state-of-the-art. For years, the prosperous here have bundled themselves into gated communities, and now their strongholds are not sufficient, and security has vanished from the life of the city, After all, this is a city where the publisher of the newspaper and the mayor and his family live across the line in the United States in order to feel safe. There is no job retraining in Juarez because there are no new jobs to be trained for. The future is here now, the moment is immediate, and the message is the crack of automatic weapons. All the other things happening in the world--the shattering of currencies, the depletion of resources, the skyrocketing costs of food, energy, and materials--are old hat here. Years ago, hope moved beyond reach, and so a new life was fashioned and now it crowds out all other notions of life" (118).

What's coming isn't an apocalypse but the fulfillment of decades of policies that gut city services, destroy institutions and tax bases, separate the haves and have-nots, and ensure that the poor become ever poorer. Structural readjustment--soon to happen or already begun in a municipal or state zone near you. It's a great idea for governments to get out of the business of governing. You can turn everything over to business--or what you can call business. Remove oversight. Then it's all a free-trade zone! And by the way, bring your weapons, you'll need them. It's a jungle out there.

It is midnight when I zip the book into my bag, collect my luggage and walk out to the taxi stand. The air is warm, dry; a nice change from winter in Nova Scotia. I want to go to the Tufesa Bus Lines station in Phoenix. I have the address in my pocket and pull it out to ask the two young African American guys on night shift at the taxi stand how much a ride out to the mall where the tiny bus station is going to cost me.

Wait, where are you going? they ask me. They mean, once I get to the bus station.

To Mexico, I answer. I want to catch the 1:30 am bus.

Aren't you afraid?

No, not really. After all, I'm not going to a political meeting outside a grocery store in Tucson.

They laugh, wanly. On January 8, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords had been shot in the head 10:10 in the morning at a meet and greet with constituents outside of a Safeway Supermarket just north of Tucson. Altogether, 19 people were shot that morning, six killed, by a young man with a 9mm semi-automatic pistol and a mission to assassinate, and still many politicians and residents of the state continue to press for the right not only to carry arms of any sort, but, as well, for the right to carry concealed weapons.

The taxi comes. My cab driver is Iraqi; he's lived in Arizona since just before the outbreak of the Second Gulf War. When I tell him where I want to go, he too asks, Aren't you afraid?

Of going to that mall, or of going to Mexico? I ask.

I don't know, he says. Either.

Should I be? I ask.

This question makes him laugh; this is when he reveals that he's Iraqi, and has more than enough of his own dead to worry about.

The bus station is tiny and the only brightly lit spot in the mall. Be careful! my cab driver warns me, as he unloads my bags. I hope you know what you're doing.

I'm fine! I tell him. I've done this many times! But I begin, for the first time, to worry that perhaps I don't know what I'm doing. I'm sure this worry is a product of the influence of Bowden's book, but I'm sufficiently spooked that I decide it wouldn't be a good idea to be seen reading it just now, so I pull out a novel, something more innocuous looking--Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna. Who knows who might be looking, who might be watching?

II. Benvenidos a Mexico!

Sometime before 2 am we board the bus. The bus has come from Nevada, or perhaps somewhere in California. Nearly every seat is filled and the luggage hold, beneath the bus, is overflowing. A Peruvian family is aboard, touring the Americas, and their very large suitcases sprawl across the tops of every compartment. They and the driver wrestle gamely with these behemoths, but to no avail. Everyone laughs and holds up their hands: nothing to be done.

I take my seat, the driver switches off the lights and I settle into a fitful sleep. Half an hour north of Tucson, the driver pulls off of the road and turns on the lights. He waits a minute, until it's clear that everyone is awake, and then he says, very quietly, very seriously, in Spanish, In half an hour we will be in Tucson. If you do not have the papers you need to cross the border, you need to get off of the bus at the station in Tucson. US agents will be getting on this bus before we get to the border. You need to make sure you have all of your papers in order! Any questions? And then he gets up and walks to the back of the bus where I am sitting--the only middle-aged gringa on the bus--and asks me, did you understand that? Do you have your papers?

Si, I reassure him. I have a Canadian passport. Gracias. I tell him I will need to get off of the bus on the Mexican side of the border and go to migracion for a tourist visa. Will he wait for me to do that?

Si.

I am relieved.

No one gets off of the bus in Tucson. We pick up two passengers and head south in the dark. We stop on the American side of the border, the lights piercingly bright. Two border agents board the bus--a man who steps quickly to the back of the bus, and a woman, with a little hand-held passport reading machine who stays in the front. They begin to interview the passengers in Spanish. The woman is slow, gentle--the good cop, while the man is rough, even nasty. He tears open luggage in the overhead bins, shakes things, wants to know why we're all on the night bus, prods a garbage bag full of mysterious soft white bricks--baby wipes it turns out--roughs up a couple young guys. None of us look at each other or at him; we're all nervous, all ashamed, guiltily so. Anything could be an infraction; you never know what.

He seizes my passport and looks at it closely. You were born in the US, he says, why are you using a Canadian passport?

Because I'm a Canadian citizen I say. This is hardly good enough.

Why are you on this bus?

Because I'm headed to Guaymas, where I have a boat, and it's much less expensive to fly to Phoenix or Tucson and take a bus than to fly from Canada to Mexico.

Why are you on the night bus?

Because my flight arrived at midnight, and a bus leaves for Mexico at 1:30 am.

It's clear that he doesn't like any of these answers, not a single one, not from me, not from any of the others. But we're all clean. Apparently. No one is removed from the bus.

3:30 am. We slip across the border into Mexico and everyone must disembark and haul their luggage into the aduana, then step up and push a little button beneath a stoplight. Red--unlucky you!--you must have every item in your luggage unpacked and handled by the customs officer; green, you may drag your things back to the bus. I draw green, stow my luggage, remind the driver I must go to migracion, and then find someone to let me through the gate to the immigration office. The gate seems to be penning a dozen young men in some kind of custody. They sprawl on the concrete and talk from the corners of their mouths, spitting occasionally. A guard escorts me past them and into an office where a uniformed young woman hands me a an application for a tourist visa. I fill it in, pay 250 pesos, and am given permission to stay in the country 180 days. My passport is stamped, my visa card inserted, and I head back to the bus, escorted by the security guard.

4 am and everyone is on the bus. They've been waiting for me. I walk back to my seat and the older man sitting across the aisle behind me stands up and extends his hand, which I take. Benvenidos a Mexico, he says formally, bowing slightly. And then he straightens up, looks me in the eye and grins impishly. BE CAREFUL! he says loudly in English. I laugh, along with everyone else on the bus. Clearly, it's the new Mexican joke.

He knows, as well as I do, that it's what everyone in El Norte has said to me as soon as they hear I'm headed for Mexico.

III. Hasta la madre: poetry and social justice

I cannot bring myself to read the list of the dead. I have to--what other claim do these people have upon us now but this--to be remembered thus? And Chuck Bowden and his assistant Molly Molloy have been made crazy my compiling this list: it is something to which we must bear witness, but I fear it.

Journal entry, 2 March 2011

"One puts oneself to the pain of reading the papers," poet CD Wright observes in her poems of rage against America's contemporary wars, Rising Falling Hovering. I try to put myself to the pain of finishing Bowden's book, and the lists of the dead at its end. The details mount unbearably; more than 300 hundred murders in less than five months are documented thus:

"A homeless man was found this morning with his head destroyed by a large rock next to a wall in the Colonia Hidalgo" (238).

"This morning the mutilated body of another executed man was found..." (239)

"The body of Mirna Yesenia Munoz Ledo Marin lies in a white casket in the center of a room in a small adobe house in Colonia Mexico 68, watched over by her family and friends" (241).

"Corner peanut vendor murdered...at midday by a man traveling in a car similar to those driven by the State Investigative Agency..." (241-42).

"Vidal Arambula was violently taken from his home on Puebla Street, and after being handcuffed, he was apparently told to run for his life (la ley fuga) and was then machine-gunned in the street. His body was left lying on Avenida Mexico in front of a taco stand" (246).

The resonances of this last entry seize me--la ley fuga--in which both law and runner are fugitive. Without the rule of law this is the law, the rule, and it runs, "run so you may be a living target." Practice for future killings. Killing, the hardest habit of all to break.

February 13, 2008 is the date on this clipping. Who can go on? But the killings neither pause nor cease, and I am not even halfway through this single short list of some of the dead. If 100 abbreviated accounts are this agonizing, what of the 40,000 dead whose names Javier Sicilia and many others are trying to assemble, speak, and post in town squares all across Mexico? And so I read on.

A March 15, 2008 article from El Diario about the exhumation of 33 bodies from a warehouse in La Cuesta, Cuidad Juarez recounts the following story. While neighbours suggest they had "sometimes heard strange noises in the house that they attributed to tortured souls, ... an older man living next door discarded this idea. 'Look, here you have to be more afraid of the living than of the dead'" (265).

And this is exactly the problem. It's why Spanish reporter Judith Torrea--the only international journalist who remains in Cuidad Juarez--quit her New York-based job and moved to Juarez, where she reports on the killings, but also on the lives of survivors--mothers, brothers, lovers, children and friends of those gunned down in this joint US/Mexican "War on Drugs." Her blog, Ciudad Juárez, en la sombra del narcotráfico (Juarez City under the shadow of Drug Trafficking) is an oral history of the agonies of the living, of those who have buried one family member or friend after another, of those who hope without hope that their "disappeared" children or parents or partners will finally come home.

Torrea poses a question for us: "how many murders are needed in Mexico for some to enjoy a line of cocaine?" Like Bowden, who writes, "one way to lose your sanity in Juarez...is to believe that the violence results from a cartel war" (23), Torrea is explicit about why, we could say, la ley se fuga en Juarez, the law and the rule of law itself is on the run and being gunned down in Juarez: “The Mexican President, Felipe Calderon, and the army are not fighting a war against drug trafficking. They are supporting the Sinaloa Cartel and its head, ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, to defeat the Juárez Cartel." Or as Bowden describes this situation, "The state still exists--there are police, a president, congress, agencies with names studded across the buildings. Still, something has changed, and I feel this change in my bones" (22).

Everyone does. Not to feel it in your bones is already to be dead, perhaps. What should be legitimate is not legitimate--in Bowden's words, "in this new way of life, no one is really in charge and we are all in play" (22). The consequences of that are lethal, not only to life, but to truth.

When Mexican President Felipe Calderon insisted that the dead sons of one mother were gang members, Torrea investigated, and disproved that allegation. Not everyone who is gunned down in this "war" is a criminal, many are simply poor and unlucky, bit actors, walk-ons in the killing fields. Torrea and Bowden and virtually anyone else with the courage to report on it wrestle against the slipperiness of "truth" in this "war," where if you die you must have been in with a bad crowd, there must have been a reason; if not, after death, because you're dead, you're converted into a criminal. Or as Javier Sicilia puts it in his May 8 speech in Mexico City: "The wickedness of crime has killed [those who have died in this drug war] in three ways: by depriving them of life, by criminalizing them, and by burying them in mass graves with an ominous silence that is not ours [but the silence of the government, which stands by, even approves, as its citizens are assassinated.]" The alternative, as he writes in his open letter to the Mexican government and the cartels, is simply to accept that "death [is] a matter of statistics and administration all of us should get used to"--and this is completely unacceptable.

The phrase "no mas sangre, estamos hasta la madre, ni un muerto mas!" / "no more blood; we've had it up to here; not one more death!"--watchword of the 8 Mayo marches in Mexico--emerges out of the rage and sorrow of Sicilia's April 3rd letter, where he writes to Calderon and his minions:

There is no word to describe such pain [as we surviving family members feel]--only poetry can come close to it, and you know nothing about poetry. What I want to say today, from these mutilated lives, from this pain that has no name because it is the product of what does not belong to nature--the death of one’s child is always unnatural and this is why there is no name for it: one is therefore neither an orphan nor a widower, one is simply and painfully nothing--what I want to say from these mutilated lives, I repeat, from the indignation sparkled by these deaths, is that we have had it up to here (hasta la madre).

We have had it up to here with you politicians--and when I say politicians, I am not referring to anyone in particular, but to a large number of you, including those who make up the political parties--because in your power struggle, you have torn the fabric of this nation. Because in the middle of this war, which is badly designed, badly made and badly conducted, in the middle of this war that has thrown the country into a state of emergency, you have been unable---because of your meanness, your fights, your miserable skulduggery--to create the consensus needed by our nation to find unity, and without which this country has no way out. We have had it up to here because the corruption of the legal institutions generates complicity with crime and the impunity allowing it to be committed; because, in the midst of this corruption that is proof of the failure of the State, every citizen of this country has been reduced to what philosopher Giorgio Agamben has called, using a Greek work, zoe: that is, unprotected life, the life of an animal, of a being that can be subjected to violence, kidnapped, ill-treated or humiliated and murdered with impunity; we have had it up to here because you only use your imagination for the sake of violence, weapons, insult, and in so doing, you show a profound scorn towards education, culture and job opportunities implying decent and good work, which is what makes great nations; we have had it up to here because this short-sighted imagination is allowing our youth, our sons and daughters, to be not only murdered, but later criminalized, made falsely guilty in order to fulfill the intent of such imagination; we have had it up to here because another part of our youth, due to the lack of a good government program, have no opportunities to get an education, to find dignified work, and therefore, being pushed towards the periphery, are possible recruits for organized crime and violence; we have had it up to here because in view of all that, citizens have lost confidence in their rulers, their police, their Army, and they are afraid and full of sorrow; we have had it up to here because the only thing you care about, apart from gaining helpless power that is only good to administer misfortune, is making money, encouraging competition, your damned “competitiveness” fostering boundless consumption, which are other names for violence.

I have quoted Sicilia at such length because this is the letter that catalyzed the recent demonstrations in Mexico, and it's clear why; his is a language that has force and emotional resonance; it is a language that names things: loss, grief, nothingness, corruption, the point at which we've all had enough--hasta la madre. Now and then, this is something that poetry--and poets--can do, something we are called to do. Poetry doesn't make injustice cease or social justice happen--feet in the streets and the stubborn and unremitting press of bodies and shouts and national and international pressure are required for that. But poetry cries out; it names our sorrows and our yearning--even, sometimes those situations--a parent bereft of a child--for which we have no words. And although Sicilia has sworn off writing poems since his son's death, it is clear that poetry has not left him. On the contrary, now more than ever, as he dedicates himself to the urgencies of activism, he's drawing upon its deepest resources.

May's National March for Peace in Mexico has given rise to a call for a National Peace Accord, to be signed in Ciudad Juarez--"the epicenter of sorrow"-- on the 10th of June 2011. The terms of this pact are terms any citizenry ought to be able to demand of its government. They are terms forged in Mexico, and paid for in blood there--and in this season in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, the West Bank, Guatemala, El Salvador....in Tucson and Los Angeles, and yes, even in Toronto. Let us not simply read this poetry then, but line up behind it and act upon it:

1. We demand truth and justice.

2. We demand an end to this strategy of war; what we need is an approach to governance that ensures the security of our citizens.

3. We demand a fight against corruption and impunity [from prosecution].

4. We demand a fight against the economic roots of and proceeds of crime.

5. We demand emergency care for youth and effective actions to reconstruct the social fabric.

6. We demand a participatory democracy, a better representative democracy and the democratization of the media.

As Javier Sicilia warns, "If we don’t do this our children, our boys, our girls, will only inherit a house full of helplessness, of fear, of indolence, of cynicism, of brutality, and of deception, where the señores of death reign with their ambition, their excessive power, their complacency and their complicity with crime" (8 Mayo speech in El Zocalo, Mexico City)

Notes:
Quotes from books are cited by page number; citations from websites are linked back directly to the source cited.

Books:
Charles Bowden. Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields. New York: Nation Books, 2010.

Barbara Kingsolver. The Lacuna. New York: Harper Perennial. 2009.

CD Wright, Rising Falling Hovering. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press. 2009.

Online sources:
Interview with Chuck Bowden. "As it Happens." CBC Radio. 13 January 2011: http://www.cbc.ca/asithappens/episode/2011/01/13/thursday-january-13-2011/

The number 40,000. Cited by Javier Sicilia and others in http://globalvoicesonline.org/2011/05/05/mexico-prepares-for-massive-national-protest-on-may-8/

Javier Sicilia's call for days of protest: "A National Emergency: Javier Sicilia Calls Upon the People of Mexico."Youtube Video posted by Yabastanomasangre. English subtitles. http://youtu.be/T_CiKzttxMQ

Letter of support from Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos to Javier Sicilia: English translation: http://glasgowchiapassolidaritygroup.wordpress.com/2011/05/02/letter-from-marcos-to-javier-sicilia/ Espanol: http://javiersoriaj.wordpress.com/2011/04/28/carta-a-don-javier-sicilia-de-subcomandante-insurgente-marcos/

Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords shot in the head: a detailed summary of events and links to news stories may be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Tucson_shooting

Judith Torrea, the only international journalist who remains in Juarez: Silvia Duarte. Judith Torrea: Under the Shadow of Drug Trafficking." Online magazine Sampsonia Way. January 2011: http://www.sampsoniaway.org/bi-monthly/2011/01/18/judith-torrea-under-the-shadow-of-drug-trafficking/
Torrea's comments come from this article.

Judith Torrea. Ciudad Juarez en la sombra del narcotrafico. Blog. http://juarezenlasombra.blogspot.com/

Javier Sicilia. "Javier Sicilia Speech from the Zocalo in Mexico City" May 8, 2011. The Narco News Bulletin. Published May 10, 2011: http://www.narconews.com/Issue67/article4413.html
In Spanish: http://www.proceso.com.mx/rv/pda/detalleExclusiva/91052
and http://marchanacionalporlapaz.blogspot.com/2011/05/discurso-de-javier-sicilia-8-de-mayo-df.html

Javier Sicilia. Open Letter. In Olivia Stransky. "Letter from Poet Javier Sicilia to Mexican Government and Cartels." Online Magazine Sampsonia Way. May 17, 2011. http://www.sampsoniaway.org/blog/2011/05/17/letter-from-poet-javier-sicilia-to-mexican-government-and-cartels/
In Spanish: http://www.internationalpen.org.uk/go/news/m-xico-estamos-hasta-la-madre---carta-abierta-a-los-pol-ticos-y-a-los-criminales

National Peace Accord: Full text here in Spanish: http://marchanacionalporlapaz.blogspot.com/2011/05/discurso-de-javier-sicilia-8-de-mayo-df.html

Six key demands are listed in English and Spanish (awkward English translation) here: Geraldine Juarez. "Mexico Day 4: 80,000 Citizens Demand Peace Justice and Dignity Against the War on Drugs." Global Voices Online. Blog. 13 May 2011. http://globalvoicesonline.org/2011/05/13/mexico-day-4-80000-citizens-demand-peace-justice-and-dignity-against-the-war-on-drugs/

Cows With Horns

2011-04-16T19:37:00.000-07:00

4 March 2011
Puerto Escondido, Baja California Sur

Two nights ago our friend Dorothy dreams--really it is a nightmare--that she is being gored, cleanly, by a bull. And that, although many people crowd the street, no one comes to her aid.

Did anyone notice she was being gored? She cannot say.

Then yesterday as we walked up the dusty road to the tienda, a strange lowing animal cry floated out from the bush. We looked, and saw nothing but buzzards circling in the sky, riding the currents up the pink mountainsides of the Sierra de la Giganta.

We entered the tienda--we were back again another year! The owner greeted us like old friends. Everyone remembers Marike, la Maria grande who speaks fluent Spanish with an Argentinian accent. We bought a few supplies: tortillas, a head of cabbage, peppers, yoghurt, onions, some chicken, avocados, some tomatoes, raisins. No cucumbers--they froze in the last cold snap and aren't available.

Suddenly, outside, a commotion. Bellowing. There at the side of the shop is a horned bovine. Your bull! Marike cries to Dorothy. And then we notice the hanging udders.

The owner comes out and chases off this skinny desert cow, who clatters up the road to join a lowing companion.

She's a bad one! the owner says. Bit off the water hose earlier this year--we had water shooting fifteen feet into the air.

You see that green there? She points to a patch of bushy blooming bougainvillea, the only green palm and some grasses. It's all grown up because of that water, and now she comes to eat it, the wretch!

A smart one, Marike says tapping the side of her head. Inteligente.

As we walk back up the road Dorothy comments, that's not the cow of my dreams.

Because it's had a sex-change operation?

No. Because it's more white than black.

That sounds like a metaphor or a moral, but its import escapes me. Was this walk a fable?

Images
Cactus, San Juanico, Baja California Sur, Mexico
Buzzards, Puerto Escondido, BCS, Mexico
Cattle skull, shadow, San Juanico, BCS, Mexico

Poet Tree

2011-03-29T11:26:00.000-07:00

The Poet Tree grows at the back of a narrow strip of sand and cobble beach in the Bahia San Juanico, also known as San Basilio, a remote harbour in the Mexican state of Baja California Sur. Fittingly, it stands alone, back against a cliff--this is and is not a metaphor.

San Juanico is vast and easy to get into in the dark, which is why we like to go there when we're crossing the Sea of Cortez from San Carlos, on the mainland. It is circled by cactus-covered mountains and virtually uninhabited--a few fenced cattle ranches ramble over the hills, their roads washed out, their gates rusty--and the back of the harbour hides an oasis where cattle gather, and sometimes die.

A volcanic reef stretches across the southeast corner of the harbour; it is home to sea lions and grebes, ospreys, gulls, pelicans and blue footed boobies. Sand dunes stutter along the backs of several beaches, rocky cliffs rise up like broken teeth; cactus driftwood and shell fragments gather in shallow caves, and buzzards circle in the updrafts, so too magnificent frigatebirds, their tails scissoring in the wind. San Juanico is a good harbour for sailboats and kayakers, safe in northerly, westerly and southerly blows, but there are few resources really--no fresh water and no food unless you fish it from the rocky ledges; the highway south to Loreto is 12 kilometers away across dry washboard dirt roads.

Still, the place is a focal point. Sailors gather here to shelter from winter northerlies, to burn trash ashore, to walk, snorkel, sing, cook together, or paint. In the last seven years, we've returned here at least fifteen times. Sometimes we're here alone. Other times, we have lots of company, including campers who brave the roads to set themselves up on a protected beach, or shrimpers seeking shelter while they sleep or make repairs. We've had bonfires, sing-alongs, painting parties, pot-lucks, beach parties, hikes--once with our friends Paul and Dee we even built a sort of beach fort as shelter from the sun so we could paint and read and swim and snorkel all day.

Huge sandbars extend from some of the beaches, so that you can wade for a very long time without getting your thighs wet--we like to pretend sometimes that we can wade almost to our boat, though really, that's just an optical illusion.

For years now, people who arrive in boats have left mementos of their passage on the Poet Tree--glad to be here, glad to have arrived, glad to have survived--usually their leavings consist of sand in a bottle or their names inscribed on a scrap of wood or a bit of shell or a ripped up cap or shoe.

Most of this tree graffiti doesn't last very long; within months the sun and the wind destroy whatever any of us have left. This year, on my annual pilgrimage to the tree I noticed a new addition--a silly plastic skull, obviously from Day of the Dead celebrations last year. Tree trash or poet tree, take your pick. The date remains, but I have no idea who put it there--their boat name is already wearing away. Within a few months, only the photograph will remain.

If skulls don't remind us how short life is, what will?

Finally, my favourite bit of the poet tree--another heavy-handed metaphor, a bit of broom to sweep out the mess, the old ideas, the dust that gathers daily and clouds the mountain tops or settles in every crevasse and corner and cushion. Perhaps I like this straw poem too because it isn't a macho instrument; I'd bet the broom-leaver was a woman.

A confession: we've never left anything at or on the poet tree. I'm not sure why--shouldn't a poet leave something on a poet tree?

But I never know quite what to say; I feel overwhelmed, not by the tree--it's small there, in this vast space, decorated in leavings, boat nail parings, not quite almost trash. So I stand beside the tree and look out, look away, over the bay, and paint or snap away.

No poetry for the poet tree, just visible poetry, here....For it is also true that this blog, visible poetry began there, in San Juanico, with looking and painting, and then, later, with some lines of poetry.

Images

Poet tree, Bahia San Juanico, Baja California Sur, Mexico

Bahia San Juanico seen from nearby hilltop

Cattle skull, mouth of the oasis, looking out to sea

One of the Bahia's many beaches

Jay and Anita Bigland make beach music

Sand bar, Quoddy's Run (on the right), rocks at the SE edge of the Bay

Poet tree messages

Another beach, low tide

At Rancho Santa Ana

2011-03-15T19:06:00.000-07:00

At Rancho Santa Ana,
you can hear the sea

and the loneliest sound in the world--
a metal gate, creaking in the wind.

Rancho Santa Ana, Bahia San Juanico, Baja California Sur

Abundance in a dry land

2011-03-15T18:41:00.000-07:00

Flowers bloom in a crevasse, La Ramada, Baja California Sur

February in Mexico

2011-03-15T09:53:00.000-07:00

19 February 2011

San Carlos, Sonora, Mexico

It happens here that the seasons get confused in your head.

I imagine it is summer, but it is not.

At home the snow piles in banks as high as my shoulders.

But here, the red mountains glitter in a green sea,

and the pelicans drop cleanly into the water.

25 February 2011
San Juanico, Baja California Sur, Mexico

Still, it is cold here.

Nights drop below 10 degrees C and we huddle in the cockpit beneath blankets, marveling at the stars. It will snow today on the California coast, and tomorrow on Tucson; on Sunday, here in the Baja, we will reap a harvest of wind and more cool air. Then, next week perhaps, warm. Strange to walk in the desert unparched, feet, head and arms cool.

The air smells of sage and bitter oranges, the buzzards circle overhead, cacti twist and spread, but the earth is cracked and broken, the ocotillo clatter into the sky, leafless, the whole plant forcing just a single scarlet bloom. This, or death.

Cholla lose their bark, shells sink in the dirt, the grasses are bleached yellow and grey.

Even the water is cloudy, the birds scarce; for the moment a hard season here.

But the mountains remain, their peaks and cutaway faces shifting colour in the light: grey, yellow, rose, ochre, green, sanguine, blue, violet, black.

Images

Bougainvillea blooms, pigeons on a wire--San Carlos, Sonora

Moon sets above reddening mountain, early morning, Bahia San Carlos, Sonora

Quoddy's Run in Bahia San Juanico, Baja California Sur

Scrub growing on the lowlands, La Ramada, BCS

Desert track into the mountains near Bahia San Juanico

Ocotillo branch scrapes the sky near Bahia San Juanico

Buzzard in flight

Dried grasses, La Ramada

Scarred Cactus

Cactus covered peak near oasis, Bahia San Juanico

Rocks bordering northern anchorage at sunset, Bahia San Juanico

When Peace Tastes Like Hunger: A Raptor Fable

2011-02-01T09:41:00.000-08:00

We're eating lunch when suddenly, in front of the house we notice a commotion. An eagle is hovering at the edge of the sea ice, diving, skimming the water, banking sharply, hovering again, its enormous wings beating the air. It scoops the water with its beak, climbs sharply, drops suddenly, intent on its prey and oblivious to us, closer to the house than any eagle we've ever seen.

We see something thrashing in the water, what looks like a fish jumping, though the water just off of the point is so shallow no large fish could swim there. Then we realize the prey is a seabird, a dovkie or black guillemot in its winter plumage--we've seen at least one of these around. It snatches a breath of air, and dives under the water again; the eagle dares not follow it, but drops and swoops above the small bird, like a fighter jet. Dogging. Terrorizing.

It looks as if this battle can end in just one way--the little bird thrashes a bit more each time it comes up for air. Then two crows converge on the eagle--like us, they've been drawn by his strange movements, his repeated rise and fall over the water. The eagle turns for a second or two, distracted by the crows as they fly past him, and the little bird whips itself into the air and flees, flanked by the crows. They fly over our yard and the eagle will not follow, but banks and rises, circling to the east and out to the islands.

Hunting is hard in the season of ice. Peace tastes like hunger.

Sobering to think this is also true for us, two-legged raptors plundering the earth. It's an uncomfortable thought as I watch events unfold in Egypt: demonstrators on one side, and an illegitimate regime backed by nearly two billion dollars a year of American military aid on the other. Is that what the powerful believe too: peace tastes like hunger? I watch for a miracle, for the arrival of canny crows. They create their own problems, but we'll worry about that later.

The Beauty of the Ice

2011-01-11T15:45:00.000-08:00

The beauty of the ice has everything to do with where water gathers,

and how it cracks.

Gammon's Pond and West Quoddy Bay, Nova Scotia

A Brief Picture of Delight

2011-01-07T14:26:00.000-08:00

How fitting that the history of the word delight runs back to the Latin word delicio, meaning, "allure," enticement, sweet attraction. "Delicious," too, emerges from this antique root, where pleasure lies side by side with charm, luxury and attraction.

We are utterly seduced by the arrival of snow--and any sort of delight--and wish both were less fleeting. Still, were they not, would we luxuriate in them so?

Here, as in many things, I take the dog as my model. She knows more than I do.

Look Forward, Look Back

2011-01-01T17:57:00.000-08:00

(A Short Pronouncement that Turns to Dialogue. And Citation.)

Look forward, look back: isn't that what we we do on this day? But why just this day, or yesterday, or during the intervening week between Christmas and New Year's, when news is on short rations and so simply recycles? Always so many questions we might ask, but don't:

Who knocks as the clock clangs, as the snow piles up, flake by flake?
Will I be the one who must answer?

Our beauty so fleeting it runs out like ice on a hot day.

How far do I have to run to avoid coming back?

--As if you could, you know.

"Death is all things we see awake; all we see asleep is sleep."

--I know that, that's Heraclitus. Just so you don't have the last word, here is another of his aphorisms:
"If all things turned to smoke, the nostrils would sort them out."

Or this: "The fairest order in the world is a heap of random sweepings."

--I knew you'd do that, get the last word.

But it wasn't me; it was Heraclitus.

And now it's you.

No, it's you.

Notes:
Heraclitis, Fragments LXXXIX, CXII and CXXV from Charles H. Kahn. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979.

Photo: Old Montreal through the side mirror

Who Doesn't Love the Night?

2010-12-08T19:34:00.000-08:00

What...person...doesn't love...the light...the waking day?
Novalis, Hymns to the Night

1 December 2010 5:19 am

It's the first of December and so I am up before dawn making lists. The moon has just risen, late; it hangs in the southeast above the sea, a narrow crescent surrounded by stars. A planet--but which one?--glitters brightly above the horizon like a spaceship or satellite. The water is silver, a reflecting pool of light, the sky dark, the islands darker still, black mounds hunched against the water. Wind whistles and pushes at the north wall of the house, making the wooden beams creak.

The wood stove crackles. Zero degrees outside, just freezing. Damp. I huddle in my housecoat and slippers--have to make this quick, these lists, then toss more wood on the fire so I can slip back into bed, beneath the eiderdown and the purring cat.

It's been weeks since I've written anything but emails--and notes and suggestions in the margins of student papers. I realize I'm enjoying the sensation of the pen traversing the page, the satisfaction when the words gather and shift, then click into place, sentence by sentence.

I wonder why I can't do this more often. Chores, it seems, get in the way--laundry, cooking, correcting.

But this too: pleasure in walking or drowsing in the light or before the fire, those moments of animal comfort we steal from the run of things to do, in order to keep ourselves flaring and flaming despite the coming season of ice and winter nights.

Must the morning always return?
Novalis, Hymns to the Night

8 December 2010

5:30 am and it's pitch black but for a streak in the sky to the southeast, a break in the clouds.
Rain pours from the gutter and drums over the roof.
The dog sleeps on the couch, wakes, sighs.
The fires have all gone out, so I light them again, make a cup of tea, begin my enumeration.
Chores for the coming day.

Someday, perhaps, I'll simply rise at this hour and begin the day. But now, given the hours we keep, it is simply the middle of the night, the time when I wake long enough to sort out a dozen miniature dilemmas, small dramas, manic schemes--anything to keep them from sieving sleep some other night.

No one knocks on the door at this hour--no one from the outside that is--which is why I can finally hear my inner rattle, the scrabble against the walls, the turn just before the moments before the coming of the light.

Practical Economies (Must We Always be In Arrears?)

2010-11-14T09:55:00.000-08:00

3:30 am, Sunday 14 November

like the chinook
salmon jumping and falling back
nosing up to the impossible
Robert Lowell, "Waking Early Sunday Morning"

The fire crackles, flames, scatters orange light across the room. Sleepless again.

A sudden gust of wind rams into the wall of the house, rattles the beams, tests the flex of the wood. Winter is coming and we are getting ready for it: six more cords of wood stacked in the garage now, our hands and wrists aching from so much picking up and shifting, lifting, placing.

The sea was purple last evening at sunset, my only camera my memory, my eye. --For we were otherwise occupied, racing against dark, falling dew, cold, to get the last row loaded on the truck bed, then stacked, moving shadows in a yellow puddle of electric light.

I had wakened Saturday morning, cross despite the sun, overwhelmed by a dread of what seem like infinite numbers, those large collections of multiples we must manipulate--wood to stack, pictures to snap into powerpoint slides, pictures to review and edit, papers to grade, laundry to sort and do and hang, articles to revise, letters to write.

Wanting, instead, just to drift lazily in the morning sun, unaccosted by the rough discipline of counting or accounting in spheres where I am always found wanting.

Stop, back off...
Fierce fireless mind, running downhill.

Death seems close when we are only counting. As if all we can manage is a life lived in arrears. Unadulterated despair.

But Robert Lowell says it well in "Our Afterlife I," a poem in his last collection, Day By Day (he too struggles with the stacking up of impossible accounts):

We are things thrown in the air
alive in flight...

Yes, that's what I mean! I want to sail--
aloft

ride the wind

away--

Stop the accounts, the endless worry. Now!

Notes
Robert Lowell, "Waking Early Sunday Morning" Near the Ocean (1967). Other lines in italics in this piece "Stop, back off....Fierce, fireless mind...." are also lifted from this poem, which is really a lament about a loss of sacred spaces in a time of greed and war, a time that remains our time.

Lowell's "Our Afterlife I" in his last collection, Day By Day (1977), is dedicated to the poet's old friend Peter Taylor, who goes on, Lowell jokes, planning to live, despite the recent deaths of friends Ezra Pound, Edmund Wilson, and their nearer contemporary, W.H. Auden. More than anything, however, here Lowell writes for himself, for at 60, he is feeling increasingly weary and physically unwell. In 1975 and 1976, he will be hospitalized three times to try to control his mania, and then again in January 1977 for congestive heart failure. He will die in a taxi of a heart-attack on September 12, 1977, enroute from Kennedy airport in New York. He had just left his third wife, Caroline Blackwood, in the UK, and when he died, he was on his way to rejoin his former wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, in New York.

Cracked? --Or Cut?

2010-11-14T08:27:00.000-08:00

What difference does it make when rot has set in?

Not even the birds are tempted.

Nightwatches

2010-11-09T11:43:00.000-08:00

6 November
(Sunday, 4 am)

Turn on the light. Turn over.

Tonight we 'fall back' into Standard Time. It's the one night of the year when a body might painlessly gain an extra hour of sleep, and I'm insomniac, mind full of manic burble.

Rain spatters the window, the wind moans softly but the air is still pillowy, warm. I pad about the house in my bare feet. Outside: pitch black, the horizon folds upon itself. No islands, no sea, no sky, just darkness visible.

As usual on such nights, I create titles, lists, map out future projects. Usually, initially, a single word or phrase pries me from bed: tonight, perhaps tellingly, that word is "cracked."

I get up so as not to have to remember, so as to be able to forget. Writing the words down at once pulls a long thread of associations and absolves me of clinging, repetitiously, to these shreds of the night. I'll be able, soon, to return to sleep, to return to that endless and flooded/ dreamland....

I huddle under the lamp, make lists, and cannot find words for what truly cleaves my heart:
to each death we bring every other one.

That must wait for morning.

Notes
The first two instances of italics in this entry are, in fact, lines lifted from Elizabeth Bishop's poem, "Sunday, 4 am." The last line in italics is mine.

Days of Death II: Awake So as to Find Words

2010-11-02T12:34:00.000-07:00

4:44 am

I cannot sleep.

The crescent moon has risen, and throws an hour-glass shaped path of light across the bay. It's bright enough that a few of the islands are illuminated.

Why am I wakeful? I feel, somehow, a failure of words. It's not just a failure in the face of death--though our neighbours' son's suicide, and the impossibility of saying anything meaningful to anyone or about anything in the face of such a yawning gap plays its part in this night.

Suicide is a break in the compact we make with each other to try to survive; it is this compact that keeps us alive. We all see how the parents have plunged, themselves, into this brokenness. We say, I don't know how they'll survive it. And as we speak perhaps we mean that phrase metaphorically or psychically. But it is also terribly literal, awful in its concreteness--the father speaks nonstop like someone drowning in waves of emotion beyond words--and he is. The words keep him drawing breath; without them he simply gasps for air.

I can't stop hearing his cry as he ran upstairs and paced the empty rooms: oh Sonny, Sonny, Sonny, why did you do it? Anguish so large it spills over, laps around our necks. I hold my head above it, but just barely.

Every heart knows something about such a cry. --But not this, not this: the sudden shot to the head. Who could know that? It's beyond knowing.

Just before he ran off and began sobbing, the father stepped over to me and asked, Is my eye bloodshot? I feel like my eye is bloodshot.

No, I said. His eyes were red-rimmed, but not bloodshot.

Well I think it's bloodshot, he said. It just seems bloodshot.

Oh my dear, I said, it's your heart that's bloodshot. The words just tumbled out of me. A truth. Blood shot indeed. And he ran off, gasping.

I feel badly about that, although I also know he probably barely heard what I said. The wailing wasn't about what I'd said. It was that his son was blood. Shot. Who knows? Maybe in the eye. We've assumed it was the head. Because for us, in part, it is. Your mind just stops working when you think of such tragedy, such catastrophic collapse.

Words are dangerous. They always say more (and less) than you think you mean.

Perhaps that's why I've been finding them such hard going of late. I seem to be able to find a few right ones. A few wrong ones. And then pockets of silence, that's all. Pictures hum more loudly, echo in my inner (bloodshot) eye.

I think of one of Paul Celan's last poems, "All those sleep shapes" ("Alle die Schlafgestalten") written not so long before he too committed suicide, unable any longer to count up the fragments:

All these sleep shapes, crystalline
that you assumed
in the language shadow,

to those
I lead my blood,

those image lines, them
I'm to harbour
in the slit-arteries
of my cognition--,

my grief, I can see,
is deserting you.

I know we cannot guard others' grief for them, or from them, no matter how wakeful we remain. My wakefulness this morning will not have meant, I am on watch so another can sleep. My watch relieves no one; it simply keeps me here, in the compact with other sorrowing souls. All it really can mean is that I, too, rise, dull before grey dawn--to continue, with the rest, as best we can.

Notes
Paul Celan, "All those sleep shapes" ("Alle die Schlafgestalten"). First published posthumously in his final book, Zeitgehoeft (1976). In English in Poems of Paul Celan. Trans. Michael Hamburger. New York: Persea Books, 1988, pp. 336-7.

In fact, however, I've quoted this fragment of Celan from American poet, Claudia Rankine's meditation on death, depression, loss, family, sleeplessness and hollowness of contemporary American life in Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2004, p. 61.

Days of Death

2010-11-01T15:37:00.000-07:00

We heard the news yesterday. Our neighbours' son had committed suicide. He'd been missing for a couple of days, and the family was frantic.

A hunter found the body in a nearby quarry. Now the family is devastated. Nothing will ever be the same again: no sunrise, no sunset, no turn of the season, no lightness--or light--on the horizon.

We have words for nearly every loss but this one, Marike points out. Widow, widower, orphan. But what do we call it when a parent loses a child? It's unspeakable. The kind of loss you do not recover from.

We gather in small groups at their house. Everyone brings food, but no one is hungry. What I put in my mouth turns to stone in my stomach the mother says.

None of us know what to do, neither we nor they. We stand around, talk, don't talk, some cry, some laugh. Coffee percolates through the pot, over and over.

The food, Marike points out later, is an admission of impotence, of incompetence. See here, we're with you--we don't know what else to do either!

Finally I take my camera and walk along the road. I frame dead leaves in the memory of this one, a reflection as I think of another. The cold damp, the rotting leaves, the falling dark are apt, words without words on this sorrowful day.

We are all here to tend towards death, says another neighbour. This is true, but it is no consolation.

Remembering, among many, these near anniversaries:

Travis Watt (8 February 1976--28 October 2010)
Bill Readings (5 February 1960--31 October 1994)
Ann Smith (5 October 1918--25 November 2002)

Learning to Stand On Our Heads

2010-10-28T07:02:00.000-07:00

25 October 2010

I'm in Ohio, and my niece and her friend want to learn to stand on their heads.

I show them how to make a tripod consisting of two hands or elbows and the head. We practice. I do stand on my head--I can--but I haven't thought to do so for years.

And so I begin to wonder--when do we lose the enthusiasm for such dramatic shifts in perspective and in the orientations of our bodies? At eight, most of us thirst for such upside-down intensities. But scrape adulthood and all of our dignity gets vested in staying upright. --Or, if we do now and then stand on our heads, it is within the context of a practice, like yoga, or anti-gravity exercises, and not for the sheer glee of seeing our feet in the clouds.

It's a pity--and why hanging out with kids can be such fun. They're so inventive and so erratic. And honestly, who doesn't need to balance her head on the ground now and then?

Image
Rachael DuLaney in the leaves--or are the leaves on Rachael?
Thanks Rachael for all of your laughter and great ideas!

Dreaming Sloth Leisure

2010-10-06T09:39:00.000-07:00

Still mourning the passing of summer--the slippage from heat, light and leisure to frost, darkness and haste. Once the semester starts I feel forever behind--in tatters, belated, in arrears. Breathless. I will never catch up. So I hear, particularly loudly, Robert Lowell's lament to Elizabeth Bishop, when, in the full sweep of too much going on he writes:

[C]an anything be well done that isn't accompanied by dreaming, sloth, contemplation, leisure?

In part, he's trying to make Bishop feel better about the painstaking slowness with which she writes--months and years may run out before she completes a poem. Though at this writing, in late October 1963, revolution and a military coup are brewing in Brazil, where Bishop lives with Lota de Macedo Soares, and Kennedy will soon be assassinated--preoccupations that may slow even the speediest of poets. And within weeks Lowell will be hospitalized by the onset of another manic episode--his own painful way of braking excessive speed.

I just catch the flu--and then scramble on. As Lowell writes, signing off, "Pardon this flurry. It's just in the nerves."

Notes
Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, "Letter #285" (October 27, 1963). Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton, eds. (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008): 513, 514.

Muzzling, or Where Does Creative Thinking Really Happen?

2010-09-28T18:18:00.000-07:00

Several weeks ago, back before the hurricane, before the summer skidded abruptly into autumn, before the fog and rain and shriveled brown leaves became a part of the surround, I got up one morning and thought about the day, and the night before:

Hazy pink morning, the sea grey. The sun a red ball. Still. We wake in the night and fret: the stillness is eerie, unsettling. The owl at the back of the pond hoots into the silence: Hoo! Hoo! Hoo! Hoo! again and again. Why does the owl sing at night? Marike asks. And why the same song over and over?

This question, as soon as she asked it, as soon as I recorded it, inspired another sort of mimic hooting in me: for it set lines from Wordsworth's Prelude to echoing so loudly in my head, that I had to run to the shelf and begin paging through the volume of poetry just to still their rant. (Or is it cant? What theory of the origin of language is here?)

Here, so you can still the echoes in your own head--or begin to hear them if they don't already rattle--is Wordsworth:

There was a Boy, ye knew him well, ye Cliffs
And Islands of Winander! many a time
At evening, when the stars had just begun
To move along the edges of the hills,
Rising or setting, would he stand alone
Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering Lake,
And there, with fingers interwove, both hands
Pressed closely, palm to palm, and to his mouth
Uplifted, he, as through an instrument,
Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls
That they might answer him. --And they would shout
Across the wat'ry Vale, and shout again,
Responsive to his call, with quivering peals,
And long haloos, and screams, and echoes loud
Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild
Of mirth and jocund din! And when it chanced
That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill,
Then sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprize
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain Heaven, received
Into the bosom of the steady Lake...(Prelude Book V: 389-412)

Why does the owl sing the same song over and over? And why are we so drawn to imitate it? Surely Wordsworth is somehow right--this imitation of nature--this play of mimicry back and forth, this enthusiasm for such exchanges must be at the origins of our language, our poetry... In any case, I've been musing on these questions ever since.

In fact, in a strange and perhaps altogether predictably repetitive twist, I've been musing on the word musing.

Wonder where that word comes from? Marike asked, and so one night after dinner I pulled out the dictionaries--an old compact Oxford English that belonged to her father (1934) and Skeat's Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (c. 1900). Muse, I mused, must be related to light-heartedness, to amusing. Perhaps. But not quite.

The etymology of muse is far more beautiful than that. And perhaps it answers to why we are given to such mimic hootings of, and wild concourse with the animals around us. Not because they inspire us, in the way of the nine Muses of classical mythology. That strain of the word is descended from the Greek Mousa, which shares the root men-, or mon-, with other words denoting to think, to remember. But muse, as I marked it, meaning to wander about in your thoughts--or as the Oxford dictionary would have it, "to ponder, reflect, gaze upon meditatively..." this muse derives, it seems, from the Old French muse, or MUZZLE, which is to say, to "sniff the air when in doubt about scent."

Or as Skeat argues it, the word comes into English from the "F[rench], muser, 'to muse, dreame'." Before that, he says, one finds the roots of the word in the Old French muse meaning "the mouth, muzzle....The image is that of a dog sniffing the air when in doubt as to the scent; cf Ital[ian] musare, to muse, also to gape about, 'to hould ones musle or snout in the aire' Florio, from Ital[ian] muso, snout" (Capricorn Edition, 1963, 341).

Now that's a beautiful etymology! The origins of creative thinking found, not in sight or hearing, but in what--or more properly, the way--a dog sniffs the air.

We often say, as we watch the dog scent out the messages left in the yard overnight, that she is reading the morning news. Indeed. And all my mimic hooting, here, is only that, a weak, attenuated imitation of the dog's MUZZLE.

--Which is to say--if you follow out that etymology--TO BITE.

But more on that--the link between thinking, creating and aggression (or between people and dogs)--another day.

A Change of Season

2010-09-11T15:45:00.000-07:00

Suddenly Fall is here.

Hurricane Earl blasted the bloom from our world; now every leaf is salt-burned and red or brown. Dying, even before the frost. All around, cranberries ripening underfoot. And a cooler wind, though the earth still feels warm under bare feet.

This weekend, the highest and lowest tides of year. And today, my mother's birthday--sudden joy! How beautiful the world is still!

Squall and Bluster--a Report on Hurricane Earl

2010-09-06T12:14:00.000-07:00

When the storm is over, and you know you've survived--the roof still, more or less, intact, and so too, the people and creatures that you love--it's easy to make light of the wind.

If you've survived, a worse storm could forever be imagined; if you were really prepared for this event, its hours of gusty conditions and salt spray--even an inconveniently long loss of power--will have seemed like a let-down.

For as a hurricane, Earl wasn't much. Top winds in Nova Scotia clocked in at 135 kilometers an hour at Beaver Island Light, our local lighthouse, offshore 10 miles. That's about 84 miles an hour--enough to classify the storm as a hurricane, but not of the sort that "tears up trees or "carries buildings before it"--these attributes are reserved for 100+ mile winds on the Smeaton-Rouse Scale of 1759, an early attempt to measure and codify wind strength. Except....we have seen some number of "torn up trees" and toppled sheds. Does a storm have to be utterly catastrophic--nay, apocalyptic--to count as a fearsome or awesome event?

--Perhaps, if extreme weather is one of the few routes left to the real--real emotions, real events, real disruptions to our daily modes of organization and response....

However you measure it, a hurricane creates strenuous conditions--as the second Beaufort Scale (an early 19th Century scale that in revised form is still more or less in force among sailors) puts it--"Force 12 winds are a Hurricane--Or that which no canvas could withstand."

If we'd not had repeated updates and weather reports streaming through every media outlet, however, we might not have seen this one coming. (Would that have made it more "awesome"?)

Here, a time-line of observations, beginning with

The Morning of the Day Before (Friday 3 September 2010)

The air is still, hazy, hot, grey--not even a wisp of cloud in the sky. The sea shines grimly: the water is flat and utterly still, a mirror extending for miles beneath a white and empty sky. If you didn't know, you wouldn't suspect a hurricane was on the way.

Except. Something at the back of the neck prickles; you feel the barometric pressure drop. It announces itself in a dull headache, a breathless sort of buzzing worry. Even the animals seem jittery and reluctant to stay outside.

I clear debris and move objects from the yard, tie down the lid to the trash box, make lists of necessary items, hang out a wash. In the bones of my skull a sort of chatter, a sensation like the humming of rails as a distant train approaches. Not yet visible, but on the way.

Still, this bothers me--would I be attentive to the significance of these signs if I didn't think I knew what they were about?

Later

Faint echoes of wind piffle the hot air. Small waves run into shore as the afternoon progresses. At 5:00 pm we head to the beach. Walk. Swim. By 6:30 clouds are clustering in the west.

By 10:00 the clouds have disappeared and the Milky Way spangles above us. Nothing is really going to happen is it? There won't be a hurricane on the morrow. The air is soft, warm, still. We are chased indoors by mosquitoes buzzing in our ears.

Midnight and that illusion is dashed. The horizon has closed. Both sea and sky are black, the islands invisible in the inkiness. Thin bands of light to the northeast and southwest. The air is syrupy with humidity.

A whiff of wind, a low moan, as if from a long way away. The doors clatter as the air sucks at them. It's coming this storm, this wind and rain.

Light gusts press against the walls of the house. The wood creaks. And the cicadas continue to sing into the dark.

Another low moan like a warning or premonition: it speaks of howls to come.

The Day Of

7:30 am. I awaken to a brief spattering of rain--a warning salvo. Overnight, the wind has increased in intensity. It moans, rattles at the windows and doors, spins dry leaves into whirling spirals. Waves roll steadily into shore, slapping hard and then harder against the stones. I rush about, closing windows, make a pot of tea, empty the full-again dehumidifier, and decide to harvest some more lettuce and pick an armful of blooms before the flowers are shredded by the storm. Neither cat nor dog is interested in going outside.

The wind builds as I am picking; it wrenches a bag from my hand and sends it up the road; it peels the shirt from my back. But the rain holds off until I am done--just a few plump drops on the top of my head.

And then the storm begins. The radio blares warnings; we watch as the surge fills in at low tide, pressing water up the shore and deep into the cove, stopping just below the high tide line. It is a day of perpetual high tide. Rain runs horizontally across the the windows, the rivets holding a gutter in place give way, and the ragged downspout twists in the wind, clanking. Water pours from the roof, begins seeping in around windowsills, running in streams from spots we had thought were long-repaired leaks. Not anymore. Marike and I run around the house stuffing towels on sills, settling baking pans under drips, emptying a drawer full of water-colour paintings into another room.

Then nothing to do but watch and wait it out. The power lasts until 2:30 pm, then flickers one last time and dies. By 3:00 pm, the rain has stopped and the wind changes direction; it is no longer coming from the sea. But it strengthens, ripping leaves and twigs from trees and flinging salt spray over the house. Clouds race across the sky, gathering and separating. For seconds at a time, we catch sight of blue sky. It's over, this storm and it hasn't really been too bad--not here anyway.

We decide to head out, with the dog, to see what we can see.

Downed trees--we have to swerve around many; some hanging over power lines. In Port Dufferin, an electrical line on a school bus--the power trucks are already there. A man in a cherry-picker, at work on a transformer. The roads covered with debris. Here a tree fallen on a house; there a hole in a roof top. Apple trees fling green apples along the side of the road.

In Sheet Harbour we look in on our little boat, Lark. Oops! The mainsail has worked partly free and flaps in the wind. Nothing we can do yet, however--it would be impossible to row out to the boat in this wind. Kenneth Routledge, who has let us moor the boat in front of his house, comes out to tell us they thought sure she would be lost at the height of the storm. The rudder had worked loose, too, and was flapping, and she'd been rocking from gunnel to gunnel and then suddenly she was down, knocked over completely! That loosened mainsail didn't help any either, he says, fixing us sharply. They looked again, and she'd come back up--it was a close one. We all sigh with relief, and perhaps a twinge of shame. Kenneth's wharf has taken a beating too--we tell him we'll come back the next day to help him patch it together.

Our survey of the neighbourhood finishes up at Sober Island. We park at Ramey's place, Factory Cove, to hike out to the seaward point. Ramey motions me up to the house--he wants us to take along a friend of theirs, an intrepid woman in her 70s. She collects her camera and rubber shoes and we're off, "monkeybarring" over and under fallen trees, racing towards the thunderous sea. Then there it is: stupendous and roaring. Spray fills the air.

In seconds we're drenched, and laughing like maniacs. Only Bathsheba seems worried; it's clearly daft to be out here in this weather. We pick our way along the coast, staying well back from the crumbling edge, trampling ripening cranberries underfoot. You have to keep a hand over your ear to keep it from filling with water. Our fellow traveler, Barb is filled with glee and shouts out, "If I die tomorrow, it won't matter, I've been here for this!" I feel exactly the same way.

We return home, towel off the salt, and eat supper by candlelight: blinis with smoked salmon, a spicy whipped cream and vodka. It's a pleasure this quiet, this darkness. We toast to our good fortune, to have survived--even enjoyed--this storm. And then suddenly Bathsheba is barking, as if an intruder is entering the house--which, in a way, it is. The power is back on.

The next day will be clean-up. We'll help Kenneth repair his dock and then row out and tidy up Lark. We'll wash the cars down and take vinegar, warm water and squeegees to the salt-sprayed windows. We'll put the fence back up around the vegetable garden, and try to rinse off the salt-burned leaves of the plants. We'll wash all the wet towels we used to sop up the leaks, and hang them in the air to dry. We'll go for a walk, and watch the gulls wheel up into the wind.

We got off easy this time, and we know it; Earl was a good ride--fine thrills, little calamity. A tap, a warning. Another time we won't get off so easy. Thanks for that kindness, Earl.

Images
Big waves at Sober Island (4 September 2010)
Spray at Sober Island
2 views of Taylor Head Pysche Beach (3 September 2010)
Seaweed in wave at Taylor Head (Psyche Beach)
Clouds gathering in the west (Sheet Harbour 3 September)
Rain at Quoddy (4 September 2010)
Rescued flowers (4 September 2010)
3 views of waves and spray at Sober Island (4 September 2010)
Salt spray on the windows (5 September 2010)
Salt-burned vegetation (5 September 2010)

Quotes from the Smeaton-Rouse Scale of 1759 and the Second Beaufort Scale come from Richard Hamblyn. The Invention of Clouds. London: Picador, 2002, pp. 193, 197.

Impending Events

2010-09-01T19:10:00.000-07:00

September first and the air is full of impending events. School begins of course, and with it, for me, the fuller contours of a new job. But what is preoccupying everyone here along the usually cooler shores of Nova Scotia is the heat--and the threat of hurricane Earle, swirling up the seaboard from the Caribbean.

For now, the air is still, nearly windless; the sea calm, warm enough to entice us to stay in the water for abnormally long periods. Whatever this is, this heat and stillness, it will not stay, that much is certain. We look over our shoulders superstitiously--how must we pay for this slice of Paradise? And then that worry subsides, worn away by the suck of water on sand, the joyous play of a dog with a stick and the cool prickling of salt on skin.

We are enthralled by the light.

Images
Psyche Beach, Taylor's Head Provincial Park, Nova Scotia
Bathsheba on the beach
Marike rescues a beached crab
Bathsheba buries a stick
Evening light

There Where You Are Not

2010-08-26T09:01:00.000-07:00

The hardest thing about death is the way your senses are trailed by ghosts.

For a very long time, maybe forever, a dead one whispers into your surround and you think you see this one, there, over there. Or you pick up the drift of her scent, the timbre of his voice. The corners of your eyes, the backs of your ears, the edges of your palate, sometimes even the insides of your elbows are in haunting collusion with the dead; together they conspire to keep you on the switchback between sudden hope and crushing sorrow. Even today, nearly 15 years after my friend died in an airplane crash, I sometimes think I see him, in a city where he'd never been, striding down the street in a lemon yellow raincoat, hair flapping over his eyes, grizzled rain on Halifax sidewalks.

Love conjures these ghosts; we look for those we miss everywhere. Unceasingly, as if in prayer.

We returned from Mexico to a house without Linus, but her shade is with us still, in every creak and crack and wail and cranny of the house, in sunbeams and on blankets, in our gestures and responses, our habits of listening, of moving; she remains sewn through the motions and spaces of our daily living.

We will learn new habits, but we will never entirely lose the spectral sense of emptiness that particularizes these places, here, there, where she was and is home no longer.

This is how we feel the proximities of each death: again and again, our hearts rent like fabric, a patchwork of tearing that can only continue until we too, will die.

Images
Linus spaces: chair and blanket, sunbeam and radiator, edge of the bath, food dish for raw liver, chair and bear, cat-clawed chair

The Solace of Colour

2010-08-23T09:23:00.000-07:00

Grief. And Grace. II

After Linus died, and the bees came--and the wind, pinning us into one harbour after another--I began to dream in colour. Marike and I would pack a lunch, bottles of water and gatorade, our swimsuits and snorkeling gear, and paper, brushes and boxes of paint, and head to shore. We walked, swam, looked out to sea, and painted. What mattered, to me anyway, was not so much the quality of the final product, but the fact of making something, the layering of colour, like a laying on of hands in our hearts. Not healing exactly, but solar solace, a bouncing of light beams, a rendering of the world which rent us, at once awful and beautiful and more vast than we could tell.

Broken rocks for broken hearts.

Images
Watercolour sketches, San Juanico, BCS, Mexico, 18 March 2010

Grief. And Grace

2010-08-20T10:27:00.000-07:00

Sudden and sharp, grief cleaves us as if cleanly, but the wound is forever jagged.

You never get over sorrowing after a creature who once clung, closely, to your skin, who huddled in the curve of your hip, who attended your waking and sleeping and sickness and joy. "Nurse kitty," we called her, after her habit of looking after all of us, her closeness, her attentiveness, her insistence on grooming every one of us, licking the hairs of our heads into place.

All of us miss her in acute and particular ways, including her closest friend, dog Bathsheba, who fell into a profound and terrorized depression when Linus died; for days and months it seemed, Sheba sank wearily onto her bed, limbs cracking and creaking. Big sighs: nothing in the world seemed to count anymore. We worried that she might give up too soon, herself, on living.

But here, the end of the summer, and we do all go on, managing now joy and not (always) nightmares. It has taken months for me to muster the courage to tell this story.

I think again and again of the last lines in Toni Morrison's Sula, when one character realizes, years later, just how much she has missed her friend. Sorrow has dogged her, hovered just out of sight, like a little ball, off to one side of her head. But she never turns to look at it. And then one day dead awakens, becomes memory, words, then "not even words. Wishes, longings...A soft ball of fur [breaks] and [scatters] like dandelion spores in the breeze." The loss of her friend Sula presses down upon Nel and she cries out. Morrison's story ends here, with this description of uncontainable grief: "It was a fine cry--loud and long--but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow." Here is something I know--we know--in living with our surviving animals after the trauma of Linus's death: Rilke got it wrong. So too did Levinas. Not only "our eyes are turned backward..." Any animal, and not only humans, is

twisted around like this, so that
no matter what we do, we are in the posture
of someone going away...Just as, upon
the farthest hill, which shows him his whole valley
one last time, he turns, stops, lingers--,
so we live here, forever taking leave.

(Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, VIII, trans. Stephen Mitchell)

We all have faces, inward looking eyes; all of us know something of our own mortality. If you doubt this, go sit in a vet's office where animals are daily put to death and watch them, even the most aged and lame, resist crossing the threshold--or else pass, head down, already resigned to the death sentence. Look into the eyes of cattle destined for slaughter and see if you don't recognize there, that "recognition of mortality" Levinas believed was so crucial to having a "face" that could command the ethical imperative, "thou shalt not kill." --But enough of this; already I am off topic. These are arguments for another day. What I wanted to talk about was grief. And grace.

Here, notes from my journal, a sequence of days.

Cats Bees Broken Hearts

12 March 2010

Puerto Escondido, BCS, Mexico

Something worse than the worst thing I can imagine (have ever imagined) happened yesterday morning--Linus was cornered and trapped on our porch by a neighbour's two huskies, who had escaped, and killed. Elisabeth and Sheba witnessed it--Elisabeth's hands hurt as she was trying to get Linus away from the dogs. She kicked them, finally lifted the broken cat body above her head and got her inside. But Linus soon died. Dante cat has disappeared. No one knows if she too was mauled or killed or has just run away in terror. It is cold again in Nova Scotia.

Elisabeth buried Linie with the help of neighbours John and Paulette today; she is under a pile of rocks back by the garden where Binky and Negrita and Tiger are also buried.

Here, the wind blows and we are heartsick. I feel hollow, like an empty broken thing. Fell out of the dinghy and into the water today, I was so upset. Fully clothed in foul weather gear. It does not float. But the water was warm, at least. Our friend Allister, who is visiting for ten days, jumped down into the dinghy and hauled me out of the water, for I was laughing and weeping and couldn't pull myself up. My arms had gone rubbery and useless.

14 March 2010

Isla Carmen, Ballandra Cove

How do you address a sorrow wider than your body and range, a sorrow that rips you open, flays you, empties you of joy? Dante still not found.

We are anchored in Ballandra. Violet flowers scent the night air; the stars come out; the sun rises and the bees come, hunting for water. Northerlies are on the way, but for the moment we're sheltered and resting. A hard sail yesterday--surprisingly high winds on the last tack and we were over-canvassed, boat dogging in short period steep waves. Not a very long trip but I was violently sick, hardly able to hold on, physically or emotionally. I have to find my center, some place where I might hold onto my stomach, but I don't quite know how.

Still waiting for Dante, calling her, calling her in the sleepless nights. I'm exhausted, sick to my stomach. Have to rest. Have to push away the sorrow, develop some other project. I think, I am in Mexico, where calaveras are treasured; I have to make some pompes funebres for my little ones, some ritual offerings, some celebration.

Bees fill the cabin. They are seeking our washcloths. I hang them out, but Marike is made frightened by so many buzzing insects. Each one a potential death sentence. I don't want to kill a single one, so put on gloves, shake the washcloths, drop them into a bag. We light mosquito coils, and bit by bit the bees disperse.

What shall I collect for my precious ones; what toys would delight their souls? I think of flowers and feathers and small shells to bat around. But my arms are empty, my heard afraid. It never occurred to me we could lose both cats in one swoop.

Fear is the field where courage grows. I have not to be afraid to go on living. Well. With joy and warmth and hanging on, as Linus and Dante would do if they could. I imagine holding a kitten, playing. This is not a replacement, but eyes that look back and fur and joy so that I may remember how marvelous life can be. Hope. Fear is the field where courage grows. But where can I find hope? I have not to close my eyes.

The wind comes up

and a dozen buzzards circle in the gap

between mountains, drop;

now ten are lined up on the beach.

They totter along the ground, some flap

their wings, naked red heads pointed seaward.

What sorrow draws you thus,

I want to ask them.

Haven't we walked enough beneath

the shadows of your wings,

dogged by death?

They wait for more

and the wind carries them.

Meanwhile I sit leaden, sorrowing,

too many absent already this year.

The bees land on me

their feet fur soft

I know they would comfort me if I were not afraid of them.

I know they would comfort me if I were not afraid.

Later

Dante emerges from hiding!!!

15 March Benito Juarez Day

Ballandra

Strong northerlies

The bees sip water from every surface:

condensation on the side of a yoghurt container

the residue of dishwater on a cup,

but too much and they drown--

the buckets on the stern accumulate carcasses.

16 March

Ballandra

Hooting northerlies, so still holed up here. One boat left this morning early, after what seemed to be a benign weather forecast. Within half an hour they'd radioed back: northerly winds of 25-30 knots and 5-6 foot swells, on the nose for those of us heading north. We decided to stay put, though in the silent spaces between gusts now and then we'll call out, okay, let's go! as if anyone could get anywhere in a 40-second calm. We sail at anchor in those 30-knot gusts and watch the spray mount at the edges of the bay. Pelicans gather in the lee behind the boats, floating, and buzzards line the beaches, rising and falling in the thermals, then resting.

The surf has cleared the beaches of stones, sucking them away, so for once the sand is soft enough to walk the strand barefoot. And the bees continue to stream to the boat, but they are dying in increasing numbers, drowning themselves in coffee, yoghurt, sink drains, buckets. I pluck them out by the dozens.

Bees swarming the paintboxes on

the beach today,

bees drowning in yellow ochre

ultra marine

viridian

burnt sienna.

I am dreaming in colour and it is a solace, as if I am visited by Linus's soul.

Images

Watercolour sketches of Linus (2009) and three views of mountains and sea from Ballandra Cove (16 March 2010).

Notes

Quotations from Toni Morrison, Sula. New York: Plume/New American Library, 1973, are from pp. 171 and 174.

I've also quoted from Rainer Maria Rilke's Eighth Duino Elegy. Ed and Trans Stephen Mitchell, in the bilingual edition, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. New York: Vintage Books, 1982, pp. 195, 197.

To be fair, I am characterizing re-readings of Levinas on animals, in particular his 1975 discussion of "Bobby," a dog that for a time visited the philosopher and his fellow Jewish prisoners of war company in the camp near Hannover, Germany where Levinas was kept from 1940 until the end of the war:

"And then, about half way through our long captivity, for a few short
    weeks, before the sentinels chased him away, a wandering dog entered
    our lives. One day he came to meet this rabble as we returned under
    guard from work. He survived in some wild patch in the region of the
    camp. But we called him Bobby, an exotic name, as one does with a
    cherished dog. He would appear at morning assembly and was waiting
    for us as we returned, jumping up and down and barking in delight.
    For him, there was no doubt that we were men." 153)

Levinas, Emmanuel. "The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights." Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Trans. Sean Hand. London: Athlone, 1990. 151-53.

See also John Llewelyn, "Am I Obsessed by Bobby? (Humanism of the Other Animal)," in Re-Reading Levinas. Ed. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Crichtly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991,

Cary Wolfe, "In the Shadow of Wittgenstein's Lion: Language, Ethics, and the Question of the Animal." In Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. 54-62 and

Tom Herron "The dog man: becoming animal in Coetzee's disgrace". Twentieth Century Literature (Winter 2005).

Further significant reflections on these points--and engagement with these texts is to come, here and elsewhere.

Vigilance

2010-08-14T19:40:00.000-07:00

who can see how eye can know

I awaken. Two large cat eyes, inches from my own, watch me, unblinking.

I think about some lines from a poem by John L'Heureux, "The Thing About Cats:"

A cat is not a conscience; I'm not

saying that.

What I'm saying is

why are they looking?

The cat looks at me this way for as long as I drift in and out of sleep. As soon as I've wakened and am truly conscious, she closes her eyes and relaxes, presses purring into my arms, catnaps. I watch her for several minutes, taking undue pleasure in the dark stain on her nose, in each vari-coloured hair, in the black spots on the soles of her feet. This much is clear: one of us must be on watch.

There is much to watch for. The world is thick with demons, not all of them dangers. Nor is everything that may be seen visible.

...who can see how eye can know?

Notes

"who can see how eye can know" is the tail section of John Hollander's picture poem, "Kitty and Bug." It is printed many places, but I first saw it in Vicki Hearne's Adam's Task: Calling Animals By Name (1987), 244.

The full text of John L'Heureux's "The Thing About Cats" may be found here (and many other places): http://www.freewebs.com/hlgstrider/quotablenoteables.htm

The picture, of course, is of our cat, Dante, who knows most things important to know, even with her eyes shut.

Infestation

2010-08-12T15:31:00.000-07:00

I dream that I've twisted the stem from a newly grown zucchini, revealing a flood of ants. The image is too silly, too much like Dali to be taken seriously. Yet it's horrifying. An infestation in a place I never expected to find it.

Another definition of horror--and of happiness--an unfolding for which one could not have been prepared.

On Not Having One Without the Other

2010-08-11T09:35:00.000-07:00

That's one pair. Here are others: no visible light without shade to frame its contours, no life worth living without the companionship of and consciousness of death, no love, as Vicki Hearne puts it in writing about animal training, "without teeth."

I am writing a poetic note here, one that would deserve philosophical elaboration. That too will come, given time enough. But soon.

For now I am musing on this line: "Horror stories are told to relieve the teller of the burden of judgment." Also Vicki Hearne on dogs. She seems, I'd say, utterly right.

How do you tell a hard story so as to put horror in its place, firmly, rather than running amuck in the world?
That will be my next job here.

Horror and cowardice. They are also companion pieces.

Ravishing

2010-08-05T14:27:00.000-07:00

We slide towards the end of the summer and the days and nights are ravishing. Hot sun. blue sea, the sea heather and wild roses and fireweed are in bloom; we pick handfuls of wild raspberries and blueberries as we walk along, and every night eat fresh lettuce plucked from the garden.

Yesterday we spent all afternoon on the water in the kayaks. We ghosted along the rocky island shores listening to the water suck at the bladderwrack and periwinkles clinging to steep shelves in the intertidal zone.

The arctic terns have arrived and they scrap and dive; the young ospreys are learning to fly and the young gulls to fish. They follow their parents, whining, frantic, but their parents, after delivering them to prime feeding grounds, just ignore them and fly away. We laugh at this, but we are sympathetic to such plaintive suffering too--it is hard to grow up, to learn independence. Life is full of risks.

Dante, for example, has found nests of mice all around; each morning she brings eviscerated headless offerings, tender mouse morsels no longer than half a thumb-length.

Mornings, butterflies and hummingbirds hover around the house, sipping nectar from the purple knapweed blooms. A kingfisher shrieks as it crosses the cove, and three blue herons wade in the shallows.

Afternoons, the boards of the house creak in the heat, the gulls scrap and cry out, and always, everywhere, the steady rattle of bees. Clouds stack up in the sky and move on, to the east or north; the wind rises, but only a little--enough to cause sheets on the line to snap and ripple.

Then evening. The wind drops, the sun sets--the terns wings flash in the dropping light. An orange glow suffuses the landscape and then it is night. Venus rises, the stars emerge; the moon, full and nearly full these last days, has been so bright that objects--the chairs on the porch say--throw moon shadows.

It is impossible to sorrow in such a time and place and yet, there it is, I feel it, a tinge of melancholy. Already the days are shorter by 30 or 40 minutes; in just a few weeks (the blink of an eye), I'll be firmly tethered to the fixed grids and temporal frameworks of classrooms and meetings and paper grading. These are not unpleasant really--often, on the contrary, I enjoy this purposeful school-based part of my life. But for a few more days (I'll try to stretch it into weeks) I relish how little thinking I must do for others, how few the borders round my imagination, my freedom to lose myself, as the French say, in the landscape, to dream and to enter--with skin and muscles and vision and appetite--into the breath of things.

Images
Inland fresh water lake (Muskrat Lake)
Raspberries
Blown out Fireweed
Rock, driftwood, bladderwrack at island's edge, Bay of Isles
Bee sucking nectar from Tufted Vetch
Porch, chair, hot day
Sheets on the line
Sunset over the pond
Marike's brandied cherries

Early Morning Insomnia

2010-08-05T13:42:00.000-07:00

I awaken before sunrise.

The loon calls.

Light streaks the clouds.

A young sparrow lands on the porch and hops about, curious, nervy, but not really afraid.

Juncos have eaten all of the ants that were infesting the porch beams.

Gulls cry out; the young whine.

Last night as the moon was rising, coyote pups began yipping and yowling; it sounded as if they were racing through the woods at the back of the pond. Bathsheba was jumpy; they'd been pursuing something. Dante, the cat, was still out, hiding out, but at around midnight she let me pluck her from her usual perch near the mailbox. I kissed her and kissed her and kissed her and she slept at my side all night.

Here comes the sun, casting orange light into the shallows.

I wonder now if I can go back to sleep.

Grey water, pinkish light.

Medusa

2010-08-02T10:41:00.000-07:00

Jellyfish wash up on the beach every day of the month of July. Their gelatinous bodies cover the rocks in the tidal zone in purple dressings, which dry to yellow-brown filmy crusts. No one seems to know why, this year, there are so many, nor really, where they come from. By the time we see them, they are usually dying, drifting slowly into ground.

Many people hate them, but I find them lovely so long as I don't have to swim among them. They drift on the currents, trailing their stinging tentacles, then suddenly--in contact with what?--contract, turn nearly inside out, change direction, push off and drift away.

Jellyfish. It is, if descriptive, not a very beautiful name for this fantastical free-swimming current-drifting plankton-eating creature, this stinging invertebrate made mostly of water and a few layers of tissue--though worse still is the German die Qualle: gob, phlegm. Other languages call "jellies" by "mythological names", as the French dictionary I consult describes the origin of the French word for this creature: meduse, from the Greek, medousa, a feminine form of the word medon, meaning, "one who rules over or guards," more specifically in this case, Medusa, the name of that mortal Gorgon with snakes for hair whose gaze was so awful she turned men (I choose my word carefully here) to stone. Clearly, some cultures and languages are more adept at storytelling than others--Medusae (scientific name) are known as medusa in Italian, as medusa or sea-nettle in the UK, and, in Farsi, as aroos-e-daryai or "bride(s) of the sea".

I like to think of these names as I wade in the frigid waters off of Psyche Beach, photographing segments of a bloom of purple Medusozoa.

My feet freeze and I stand still: stunned, fascinated. No larger than my palm, these medusae--yet fear and the camera eye make them seem monstrous, huge, terrifying. They are wonderful; and unlike Medusa, at once, metaphorically potent and really constraining. I hop aside to avoid a trailing tentacle

--which seems, all thing considered, a kind of justice. I may frame them here, but they are not entirely in my power.

Thanks to Lara Braitstein for the Farsi name for these creatures, and to Marie-Therese Blanc for reminding me that a large cluster of jellyfish is called a bloom.

VISIBLE POETRY I--THE BOOK!

2010-07-24T09:28:00.001-07:00

Visible Poetry I by Karin Cope | Make Your Own Book

Visible Poetry: The First Fifteen Months

2010-07-24T09:27:00.001-07:00

[E]verything and anything suddenly seemed material for poetry—or not material, seemed to be poetry, and all the past was illuminated in long shafts here and there, like a long-waited-for-sunrise. If only one could see everything that way all the time! It seems to me it’s the whole purpose of art….

Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell, about the poems that would become his Life Studies (14 December 1957). Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Ed. Thomas Travisano, with Saskia Hamilton. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008, 246.

When I set out to keep a blog I didn’t really know what I would be doing. --Do we say “keep a blog” as in a diary or journal or “write a blog” as in an article or a book? What’s the status of this kind of public-personal writing anyway?

I imagined a blog as a log of sorts, an account of activities more public than a diary, but not yet as formal and severed from my hand as a printed book. It would contain journeys, but also, itself, be a journey of sorts—I’d discover what it was by doing it. Besides, it seemed like knowing how it worked—how to blog—might be an increasingly necessary skill for any writer or public intellectual these days, as all around us, traditional print media and venues are collapsing and struggling to reinvent themselves. How or where in this environment, did one find an audience?

The blog began as a challenge I extended to my students--and some of them extended to me; could I do this thing, regularly or regularly irregularly; could I find enough to say to keep it going, to keep myself—or anyone else-- interested?

And how was I going to handle the visual component?—After all, one of the significant advantages of this digital medium is its inventio-- its capacity for both invention and inventory--the many ways text and image and research links and video and sounds can be transposed and interleaved on the same electronic page. I’d been thinking about the relationships between text and image--and working for several years on a long poem built from fragments of both; a blog seemed the perfect place to explore these obsessions more fully.

It is also, I’ve found, an excellent medium for travelers’ tales—a log is, after all, a pilgrim’s progress carefully dated, secularized and rationalized, and a blog, simply web-hosted, illustrated, a digitized log. Visible Poetry aimed to extend the log form to an expanded notion of poetry—which, it turns out, isn’t really a very large stretch.

For lyric emerges from song, from the rhythms of breath and the pace of walking. It’s a genre of discreet, carefully rendered observations, often punctual, sometimes diaristic. Photography too sometimes has this quality as camera and eye record daily movements through the world. (Turns out, happily, that the regular necessity of producing compelling images over the last fifteen months has made me a photographer; I now have a practice that continues to expand elsewhere too.)

If I began the blog as a way of trying to find or imagine an audience, it was in part because I was often lonely at my desk (desks are lonely places). Thus I’m very glad for those who walk alongside me, those who speak up, speak out, talk back, send me links, letters, ideas, images. When I sit at the screen I no longer feel like a solitary wanderer, and that makes an enormous difference.

Why now, a book? Because sometimes you want to hold the words and images in your hands or be able to flip back and forth between months and moments in a way the screen doesn’t (yet?) permit. Because a book lets you take stock of a distance traveled; quite literally, you can weigh it; it has heft, dimension, and the turning of the pages mimics the repetitious unfolding of thought across time. And because you can read a book on the beach and not worry that sand and water will ruin your connection with the world. On the contrary, they are the world!

Karin Cope

17 July 2010

West Quoddy, Nova Scotia

Low Tide (which is to say, full moon)

2010-06-28T15:02:00.000-07:00

Just be patient, dinner will soon be ready

2010-06-20T11:14:00.000-07:00

Undying Light

2010-06-20T10:43:00.000-07:00

15 June 2010

We're walking around the yard after dark. A pink glow backlights the silhouettes of trees to the west, a sliver of moon begins to set as the evening star rises, and bats flit through the air.

The peepers are still singing; the wind, which raged all day, tossing stinging salt spray across the yard, has settled; a flower of some sort opens and vibrant perfume fills the air. We walk along the water's edge; our feet are in darkness but the sea still glows softly silver. "This time of year," Marike says, "the light seeks surfaces where it can linger."

It's as if, just like us, it's not ready to slumber yet, but clings, wakeful, to every last minute it can turn to day.

The Menace of Everyday Things

2010-06-06T13:27:00.000-07:00

I fall asleep.

I dream.

I am driving along a winding country road.

Very fast.

I can't quite see clearly, and so I drive still faster.

Suddenly the fear of death grips me, a thrill or rumble in my belly, and Bathsheba, who has been snoozing on the couch with me, jumps up to bark at a phantom.

No one is at the door.

Rain rattles against the windows.

I am awake again.

Valdesca: On Cancer and Courage

2010-04-26T14:29:00.000-07:00

"Fear is the field where courage grows"

Fifteen years ago, one of my best friends died in a plane crash. We had been planning to meet for dinner that night; in fact, we and several others had planned a Halloween night party. Instead, on the first leg of his journey, the plane, a turboprop used on short commuter hops, had been forced by a landing queue to circle in freezing rain for an hour. Ice built up on the wings; the plane became unstable, flipped and slammed into an Indiana bean field. Nothing larger than a bread box, it was said, could be plucked from the wreckage. No identifiable portion of my friend's body was ever recovered.

In the weeks and months following this accident, I came, myself, disassembled. The simplest things seemed difficult, even impossible; I did not know how or why I ought to struggle on. I had not known death could strike so suddenly so near. I had not known it would start to call me too. I gave myself over to death in some way, even while it terrified me.

While I was in this state, another friend--an acquaintance really--came to visit and decided I needed a change of both scenery and ideas. He packed a picnic lunch and drove us from Montreal to Lake Placid, in upstate New York. There was someone there he wanted me to meet, he said, a man in his nineties, a veteran of the "Great War."

I don't remember much about that day--in fact I couldn't remember at all where we'd gone; I had to look it up in a road atlas and make probable guesses. I can't even remember either man's name: such holes in my recollection are signs of how terrible those days were, how far I'd dropped into sorrow. But I remember the meeting--in the library of a private school--green and maroon volumes in wooden shelves ranged along the walls. And I remember the story the old man told me, for it was about his own experience of grief.

He'd come home from the war, body intact, but mind utterly blasted, another shell-shocked survivor, unable to imagine how he might rejoin the legions around him simply living everyday lives and petty concerns. "I knew nothing," he told me. "On my own, I would not have survived. But there was this school here, and someone asked me if I could look after the primary students during recreation times.

I did not think I could.

Children terrified me. They were fearless, wiggly; they moved erratically and asked questions. They were energetic, alive, a kind of future--and I wanted nothing to do with them. But standing with them while they played, that was my job.

At first I stood at the back of the playground, my face to the wall; I couldn't even look at those children. But they would not and did not leave me alone. They asked me questions, wanted me to throw a ball or look at a bloody knee. And gradually, day by day, as they played, they returned me to the world.

For you see," he said, turning to look me in the eyes, "fear is the field where courage grows. If I was to live, I had to dare to walk there. I was brave--I had been in the war--I'd seen terrible things. And because of that, I was afraid. I entered my fear like a shell and tried to hide there. But as the man who gave me the job of watching the children knew, I couldn't stay there and live."

When we left Lake Placid a few hours later, I felt as if I'd been delivered an oracle. But exiting the state I was in wasn't easy--it took years, in fact, of effort and therapy. Grief casts a long shadow; once it touches you it never quite leaves, but always hovers just there, alongside you, over your shoulder, almost out of sight.

Still, what I took from my meeting that day was a handhold, a grapple, a tool I've since used again and again when I've needed to haul myself back to hope, to reason, to the pleasures and accidental joys and engagements of life.

Often at sea I think of the old man's line--fear is the field where courage grows--and use it, like a mantra, to calm myself down. For even if you set out feeling fearless, a match for anything, the sea will educate you otherwise. An experienced sailor is someone who's been scared silly again and again but refuses to be paralysed.

Fear is the field where courage grows: you don't do brave things because you're somehow especially brave, but, in fact, because you're mortally afraid.

We go to sea in a stout, ocean-capable "blue water" keel boat packed full of survival gear and food and a watermaker and spare parts and tools and communications devices and elaborate medical kits--everything that Marike's lifetime of sailing experience and our combined foresight can imagine to put together. And still, often enough, I feel anxious, bounced around, at some edge. So when I see people who embark on long voyages in kayaks or other small boats I am full of admiration--these people must be very courageous indeed.

One small boat in particular moves us--the Drascombe Longboat, a yawl-rigged open boat--in part because it is so pretty and so practical at once. NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School) operates a small fleet of these "teaching boats" in the Sea of Cortez, and it is a lovely thing to watch them come around the corner and into a sheltered cove. They're versatile--one can attach a little outboard motor, or row or sail these 22-foot beauties.

This year, in San Juanico, we encountered another Drascombe, home for three months to Claudia, a geologist, and Tim, an artist. Right away, Claudia asked for our story--how had we come to be sailing in the Sea of Cortez? What accident of life gave us the urge and the capacity to be away from Nova Scotia for a chunk of time and living on a boat there? Mix the feeling that life is short and not to be squandered--we'd left jobs we hated after too many friends had died and tried to make a new life-- with the wish for a boat, the chance that the boat we most wanted was for sale at a very good price in San Diego in 2003, and our story unspools from there. Having answered, we turned the question around--how did you two come to be sailing a Drascombe here? we asked.

The answer was short, sharp, shocking and very clear: Claudia, a geologist who had worked for Los Alamos labs, had had three rounds of cancer. Last April, everyone had thought she might soon die: she'd even registered for a place in a palliative hospice, so it would be available when the time came. But then she got an idea. She'd quit her job and get into shape and they'd have an ADVENTURE in the Sea of Cortez, where she'd done fieldwork for her PhD. And that made her feel like living, which is exactly what she was doing. When we met her, she looked hale, tanned, strong; you'd never guess she'd so recently been so ill.

In many respects, the way they were sailing took a lot more physical strength, planning and courage than the way we were sailing. It could be much colder, much less sheltered; they were constantly closer to the elements, at risk of being swamped; they had to camp on the beach each night to sleep. But Claudia was clearly thriving--obviously much to Tim's relief. To risk her life was, not to save it so much as to seize it and make it worth living; because she had courage, because they had courage, they were also utterly alight.

Same lesson, different, thrilling, example. Thank you, Valdesca, thank you.

Notes

For more on Claudia and Tim's adventure see

http://valdesca.blogspot.com/

For more information on the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) and their sailing program in the Sea of Cortez, see

http://www.nols.edu/courses/locations/mexico/bajasailing.shtml

ONE RIVER--Window on a Universe

2010-04-17T11:01:00.000-07:00

Wade Davis. One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.

8 March 2010

How to characterize a book that cracks a window on an entire universe? No summaries are possible. A dozen roads radiate from this point, each a potential and remarkable journey...

In One River, Wade Davis testifies to the intellectual, cultural and geographic origins of his own work and thinking. A tribute to his mentor at Harvard in the ethnobotany program, Richard Evans Schultes, and another of Schultes' students, Timothy Plowman, with whom Davis worked, the book tracks two circuits of ethnobotanical research in the Andes and Amazon river basin--Schultes' work of the late 1930s, '40s and early '50s, and Davis' own introduction to Amazonian rain forest botany with Tim Plowman in the 1970s. Written when Schultes was an old man, and just after the sudden and premature death of Plowman in 1989 from AIDS, this book traces the contours of lost worlds, of languages, cultures and lifeways stamped out by the obsessions and ravages of capitalism, the American "war on drugs" and widespread neo-colonial attitudes, in which an Indian not indentured or enslaved probably ought to be dead.

The book is tinged by great sadness--above all for the disappearance of worlds, lifeways, views, knowledge, habits and languages that it can only point to in small, piercing vignettes, as when Plowman explains to Davis, in chapter two, how the Kogi people, weavers, journey, as in a weaving, across the landscape (52ff). Or Plowman's account of the perspectives that different languages hold. For a group in Uruguay, one of the Gaurani groups, he explains, "the word for soul was 'the sun that lies within.' They called a friend 'one's other heart.' To forgive was the same word as to forget. They had no writing, and when they first saw paper, they called it the skin of God--just because you could send messages" (37-8).

Davis recounts one awful colonial history of destruction after another, but is able to separate insightful missionaries and clerics from ignorant proselytizers. He gives a short (and terrible) history of rubber production, recounts a tale of the creation and marketing of cocaine from the 1850s onward, tracking America's embrace of false promises and then its overactive prohibitions and international "interdictions."

I find here a thousand stories I want to follow up on: I realize I need to find out much more about the rise and fall of the Incas and their remarkable building projects--dependent in part, upon seeing stone as a living thing (434-5): "stones are dynamic." Likewise, I think now, having read this book, I'll make better sense of the work of Mick Taussig, and of Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff. I want to look at Davis' photography (Light at the Edge of the World), and the films he's made with National Geographic. I want to read Weston LaBarre on the peyote cult of the US Southwest--part of the last gasp of indigenous resistance against the totalizing spread of white culture and spirituality and the reservation system. And I want to live and travel in South America, but as a much better informed and fluent Spanish speaker. Too, I see the contours of another novel-sized tale that would take up my obsessions with flight and religious ideas in the story of the US evangelists in Ecuador in the 1950s, their attempts to placate and domesticate Indians already driven off and exploited by the Shell Oil Company at Shell-Mera (256-67).

The next ten years of life could unspool from here. I have a lot to learn from Davis' openness and curiosity, his generosity and attention to detail. Let the work begin!

Adrift in Paradise

2010-04-13T16:42:00.000-07:00

7 March 2010
Puerto Escondido, Baja California Sur, Mexico

What strange creatures we are: adrift in paradise, and thoroughly squeezed by terrors.

I had a terrible dream last night. Like a 1940s movie, it unspooled in black and white. A cityscape. Long sidewalks, skyscrapers, busy people, cars, and buses that somehow tilted into intersections, their back ends raised over the sidewalks.

In my dream there had been a warning, a rumour that sometimes these back ends lowered without warning and pedestrians were crushed by them.

I paid no attention to this information really; I thought the tale was a myth meant to scare its listeners.

And then there I was on the sidewalk, waiting to cross the street. The back end of a bus hovered over me and I jumped aside, but not quickly enough. It lowered, lowered onto me.

Help! I cried, help! but the rattle of the bus and the rest of the traffic made my voice inaudible.

Slowly slowly--but I could not move quickly enough to extricate myself--my back was crushed by the weight of the bus.

In the last shot, I'd disappeared.

8 March 2010 Puerto Escondido

This morning I dream some one has handed me two sheets of paper. They are folded--this is a letter of some sort.

I open it expectantly, eagerly--there is a message here I want to understand.

But before I get to the first word, I awaken.

That Old Song Again (A Finch Story)

2010-04-11T15:01:00.000-07:00

A Rough Sketch, A Sense of the Fold

2010-04-11T14:51:00.000-07:00

2 March 2010
Ballandra Cove

Trying to capture the folds of the mountains, but the boat swings around too quickly for me to finish the sketch. Oh well, a sense of the fold is there, the spiny cordillera.

It's a beautiful morning: cool, clear, wisps of cloud reach across the sky. I am feeling well in my body, relaxed after our six hour walk up and back along the stony path carved by the arroyo through the mountains. We'd aimed for Salinas, but stopped short at the last range crossing the island. There the stream bed had become narrow and steep and strewn with boulders; water, when it ran, had etched a canyon into the range. We'd not started early enough to keep going and still make it back, and we were hot and a bit tired--the sun in our faces the whole way back.

In that other world in there, in the mountains back of the sea, there are flowering plants, birds, lizards, even long abandoned waterholes and ranching projects. And clinging to everything, the heady purple scent of flowers in bloom. Even in the middle of the night, beneath the full moon, when we got up to haul the dinghy, to stop it from banging against the hull as we rocked in the swell, the scent was still there, billowing out from the land and perfuming the cove.

Today the bees send out messengers to investigate us: they are looking for water but sip remnants of yoghurt; they cling to the rims of our breakfast dishes, buzzing, wings aflutter.

The water is clear and light green today, each ripple reflects the red rock of the mountains, so the whole looks like a weaving of red and green strands glittering in the sunlight. Wind catches the flag and slaps the halyards against the mast; we turn to the north, nose into the wind.

Emotions wash over me out here when we are afloat--yesterday, for example, we spoke about my poor dead wolf dog Binky, and then I found myself weeping, missing her, feeling sad for all of the times I'd misunderstood her. I think often of my grandmother too. It seems strange to do so, to remember the orderly stones bordering her garden, the rows the petunias, the passion flower--a single vine--she trained up the side of the house. Everything so genteel, so well-ordered, at times, so ersatz-- at all like this wild environment where nature (sun, desert, dust, heat, sea, wind, creeping vines) overtakes signs of culture within weeks and months, breaking apart most human endeavours, rendering them transient, decomposng their order almost immediately. Why here, then, do I think of her?

Why do I carry a sense of her with me like a comfort, a guardian angel? Perhaps because she, of all of my nearest ancestors--grandfather, father and mother--was not a worrier, but had an adventuresome soul. A weak heart, but little or no paranoia.

Perhaps I hold her to me here as the ancestor best to travel with, the one who would let me be, and not plague me with too much fearfulness. Those others, they're installed in my body, in my shortness of breath, in my nausea and mild seasickness, in the anxiety that grips we when we're away from the boat: what if it's drifted off of its anchor; what if we encounter an uncharted rock; what if something we don't know how to fix breaks down? These are the worries that make me leap up in the middle of the night to look around or to stow the breakables as we rock gently side to side in the swell.

Nothing really moves at such moments: the bowls and cups are all stuck fast with inertia. But I move perhaps so I will not be, and pay the price with anxiety, with fear.

How to find the balance between these emotions, these bodily sensations, that's the struggle, every day. Most days, that's nothing more than a very rough sketch. If that.

Arroyo Walk

2010-04-10T11:39:00.000-07:00

1 March 2010
Puerto Ballandra
26 01.106 N
111 09.895 W

Today we are in Ballandra Cove on Isla Carmen, one of the Marine Park Islands off of Loreto, Baja California Sur. We can see the lights of Loreto at night to the west, strung along the sea, below the steep mountains of the Sierra de la Giganta.

Ballandra is enclosed on three sides by mountains covered in cacti and desert vegetation; the cove is really a steep underwater canyon, with reefs formed of lava flow from an ancient volcano. Sea birds colonize the cliffs--the gulls trade commentaries that form a sort of continuous laugh track to life in the cove, and boobies and pelicans swoop through repeatedly. A shack, a rough sort of lean-to for the fishermen sits at one end of the beach, and behind that is a pool of brackish water, all that remains, we discovered today, of what must be a pretty fierce run of water during the rainy season.

We've meant to hike up that arroyo seco for years now--we saw on a chart that you can hike all the way across the island to Salinas--once a great saltworks known worldwide, but now a ghost-town/museum with a caretaker. This year, the days are cool enough to bear such long inland walks, so this morning we set out with our hiking boots and straw hats and sunglasses and each with her liter of gatorade. Marike rowed us to the beach, we hauled the dinghy above the tide line and tied her painter to a bush and skirted the muddy watering hole, crossing salty flats towards a narrow gap between the mountains.

A grassy trail led to the dry river bed, which was sandy, then gravelly, then, in its upper reaches--well the reaches as far as we got--filled with stones and water-carved rocks and steep banks and clusters of deadwood and roots and plants wound round one another when water once rushed past.

As we walked I remembered--or half remembered --a fragment of one of poet Jose Marti's Versos Sencillos: " El arroyo de la sierra/Me complace más que el mar"--loosely translated, "a mountain stream pleases me more than the sea." (While we'd be hard pressed here, of all places, to agree utterly, the line is beautiful, as is the sentiment it expresses within the metaphorics of Marti's verse, where the line completes a thought which begins "Con los pobres de la tierra/ Quiero yo mi suerte echar // With the poor of the earth, I cast my lot." In this arroyo, this wrinkle in the earth, I find my destiny, which is at once small, common and uncommon.)

Plants all around us were in bloom and the scent was haunting, crushing--tiny purple flowers like violets, pale pink bells growing out of grasses, complex white flowers, rather like a passion flower with prominent stamens and a powerful attractiveness to bees--at first these clustered on low bushes, but soon the bushes twined with trees and became the size of trees....Something like spirea with cloying bundles of white blossoms with tiny purple tips, and flitting all around, butterflies of every colour and description...

Lezartijas skittered under every bush or ran ahead of us as we hiked along. The arroyo wound through the narrow pass, and birds sang and called and flitted by--Marike even saw a cardinal on our return. We also saw hummingbirds and dove-like birds--all kinds of creatures we did not know how to identify.

At times, the river bed narrowed and we clambered over stones and roots; trees grew alongside the banks, and in the shade, we could feel the coolness of nearby water, even smell it, but we never saw it. Our boots filled with stones and sand; we had to stop several times to shake them out. And above us, on the mountains and along the higher banks, cacti grew, along with yellowed and dying grasses. We walked beneath red cliffs, stopped below trees that smelled like juniper, carry red-purple fruits and light yellow peeling bark. Marike crushed and rolled some of the bark in her hands--hours later her fingers still smelled like bitter oranges.

At one point, above the bank of the riverbed, we came across a building of handhewn stone. A few rotten roof beams had fallen into a chasm in the centre of the building. Beside it was a rounded concrete cistern of some sort, with a trough low enough for cattle or horses to drink, and a single chain, anchored to the ground. Marike thought the building was perhaps the remains of a pumping station of some sort, the ensemble what was left of some effort to keep livestock on the island.

We walked up the riverbed for more than three hours, climbing higher into the mountains, and over steeper stones, following switchbacks as the water carved a shallow canyon in the rock. Finally, stopping for a sip of gatorade, we decided to turn around, since another hour forward would also mean another hour back. Altogether, we walked for nearly six hours in the heat of the sun.

We never made it to Salinas, but we discovered a whole world in these mountains back of the sea, these desert mountains that, when we first looked up at them years ago, appeared like so much "disorganized dirt" as Marike used to say. We're scratched up by our encounters with desert thorns and spines (everything in this environment must be able to defend itself and its water-supply--I was carrying burrs so needle-ish they drew blood, and narrowly avoided one half the size of my knee) but we are deliriously happy, utterly transported by sound and scent and sight.

Notes

For more photos of this walk see http://picasaweb.google.ca/karin.cope/WeTryToWalkToSalinasInARiverbed?feat=directlink

For more on Marti, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Mart%C3%AD
http://www.literatura.us/marti/sencillos.html and
http://jose-marti.org/jose_marti/obras/poesia/versossencillos/11quieroalasombradeunala.htm

Adapted by Spanish composer, Julián Orbón, who lived in Cuba between 1940 and 1960 to the popular early twentieth-century tune "Guantamera", these famous lines from Marti's 1891 versos have since become the best known version of "Guantanamera." See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamera.

For a version of this song contained Marti's words and performed by Compay Segundo, see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ4NOXz3gjA

Little Tsunamis

2010-04-09T12:50:00.000-07:00

27 February 2010

We've been in San Juanico a week now, and every day I think it grows more beautiful. It is as if we must settle into the landscape, enter its rhythms in order, truly, to see it.

Today we hiked over the hill on a stony trail and then along a sandy road to La Ramada, a little inlet on the north side of the hills that form Caleta San Juanico. Here, surf crashes on a crescent of sand beach; green water gradually gives way to blue depths, cliffs tumble to the shore and Punta Pulpito rises in the distance, a purple and pink stony face, sheer against the sea. Songbirds flit among the cacti on the dry hillsides, egrets stand on outcroppings and peer, unmoving, into the water, while buzzards cast dark silhouettes against the hills. They seem to follow us up the dusty road, so that when they rise into the sky, their shadows drop behind them and pass over us--poor trudging mortals, ignorant of our fates.

Worry dogs us this trip and I am not quite sure why. In truth it accompanies us on most trips, but this year I feel almost dangerously distracted. Is there something I'm forgetting? What if? What if --I don't even know which what to feel iffy about. A sense of my own fragility follows me; I am less supple, more tired; I feel the weariness of days as in no other year. I am afraid for my heart. Afraid of some hurt. Am I being complacent if I don't carry with me a constant sense of dread? I feel too brittle some days to handle all of the things I think must be done.

And. But. Then. We've begun a practice of getting up and heading off in the mornings while it is still calm. Walking. Drawing. Marike is nearby on the beach, painting. For some reason I can't fathom, but related to my impatience with myself in other endeavours, I can't seem to muster any enthusiasm for my own drawing or painting. There are the camera images, there are words: these I can handle, but exercising myself, putting myself through the stretches that have kept me well, drawing, letting myself relax into a delicious langour on the beach, these things I find hard, if not impossible to do.

The water breaks further and further out; several lines of surf roll into shore, moving against the wind. Now and then a gust throws sand into my face.

I wonder if now, having said I can not, I might be able to draw something....

Later

A strange thing happens this afternoon in La Ramada--perhaps it's related to the earthquake and its aftershocks in Chile. The water seems to receded in the inlet, sand flats emerge, and rows upon rows of waves break, quite far out. Then suddenly, within just two or three minutes, the water rushes in, east to west, running into every little gully and depression. The waves settle, flatten, then, bit by bit the water recedes and the whole process begins again. It's curious--we've watched it for several hours--and waded across the flats to a nearby spit before deciding to swim out beyond where the water was breaking.

The swim was cold but refreshing. We've dried now, and changed our clothing. Marike has gone back to painting and I'm sitting in the sun watching the water ebb and flow and listening to a yellow finch call and sing in a nearby bush. A seagull waddles to the edge of one of the tidal flats and runs along the water, bending, stooping, plucking. I imagine he's clamming. Then the water rushes back in and the circle around him narrows....Now he wades and cries out.

How weirdly alike our two species are!

Notes

For information on the 8.8 magnitude earthquake that occurred off of the coast of Chile at 3:34 am on 27 February 2010, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Chile_earthquake

Non-dangerous peculiar wave effects of the sort we observed at La Ramada were also observed in Hawaii and other parts of western Mexico.

For more photos of San Juanico and La Ramada see
http://picasaweb.google.ca/karin.cope/LaRamadaPaintingMoonlightWhale?feat=directlink

Our Lady of the Tides (Not Me)

2010-04-08T15:07:00.001-07:00

Lost and Found on Land

2010-04-08T14:49:00.000-07:00

25 February 2010
San Juanico, Baja California Sur, Mexico

Northerlies, northerlies, northerlies. Fierce winds blow every day, all day. We sit on the boat and ride up and down, watching, watching. Will our anchor hold? Will the 17 other boats here also hold fast? Yes, and yes, to everyone's relief.

Today the wind died down a bit and we went ashore. We hauled the dinghy way up the beach and went for a long walk up dry creek beds and down dusty roads....Saw wild fossils, volcanic rock, all kinds of cacti living and dead, the desert in flower, birds of every sort, tracks of horse and cattle, even the dried skull of a cow of some sort, rotten hide tossed beside it, by a brackish waterhole. I took pictures of everything, all in black and white so they have the flavour of an old Mexican movie from the 50s.

In fact, I got so busy taking those pictures (especially of the skull) that Marike got really far ahead of me and I lost her! And the trail. It led beside the brackish waterhole to the beach, and then along a ridge. But I was far enough behind that all I was really following was Marike's hat. I thought.

Turns out when I got to the beach--certain that she was WAY down the beach ahead of me talking to someone--that the hat-wearer wasn't her at all, but another sailor in a wide-brimmed floppy hat. And a beard.

It was hot, the sun high, I couldn't find the trail, and I was thirsty. Marike had the gatorade.

I started to get worried. I looked way up on the ridge, along the road there, where I expected to see her, a dusty figure trudging uphill, white shorts flashing in the light. Nada.

I used the camera to zoom in on spots at one end of the beach or another. Yes, a flash of white, a flutter. She's waving to me!

Oops, no. Pelicans, not Marike.

Where was she? How could she have disappeared? How could I have lost her? What if she were on the trail somewhere and met up with a rattler or tripped and fell? What if that happened to me while I was looking for her? Or what if I got lost? What if........?

Finally, I regained my reason and began to look for signs of the trail BEFORE the beach, between the brackish water and the last line of hills. The beach, I reasoned, was what had distracted me; I'd been too seduced by the sea and that floppy hat, so that I missed both trail and girl.

Yes, there it was! And there were her tracks. I followed them along, through a fence, and soon there she was, coming back from the top of the hill. Turns out she'd seen me on the beach. Or, thought she'd seen me, but it was a mer-lady built of driftwood. Then she did see me--I was looking right at her, she said--and she motioned for me to come. But I never saw that.

Still, when we finally did meet up (I stowed my worry immediately, feeling silly, feeling embarrassed) that yicchy green gatorade she was carrying was pretty delicious....

Seasick

2010-03-04T12:19:00.000-08:00

20 February 2010
16 hour crossing from Bahia San Carlos, Sonora to Caleta San Juanico, Baja California Sur

There aren't really any pictures for this story--and if there were, you wouldn't want to see them.

I have a confession to make: even after all these years, I still get seasick. To hear others tell about it, I'm blessed (cursed) with only the mildest version of the affliction, a vague and generalized nausea resulting in an inability to eat--probably caused more by anxiety and excessive gripping of stomach muscles as we leap from wave to wave than true motion sickness. Small doses of Gravol help, and time cures the problem--not so apparently with more violent forms of sea sickeness.

It's frustrating. There's the boat, doing what she's meant to do, and Marike grinning and whooping and riding the waves like a cowboy. I have utter confidence in both of them; both handle the seas far better than I can or ever will. Indeed, they are in their element there, sails taut, wind singing through the rigging, boat plunging through the waves. I'M the problem, and I know it. Setting off into large seas, I'm like an ungainly dancer, a figure who knows no rhythm and clumps about in poor shoes, awkward, dropping on the downbeat, missing the upbeat, swinging forever the wrong way. And I know if I can just relax, just settle into or find the rhythm of the boat's motion, I'll be fine. But somehow, for a time, no matter what I do, I can't. I'm like a polka dancer at a samba party, stomping when I should be flying.

Sometimes sleep helps--to lie down, let go--holding myself up in all that plunging is hard work--always one hand for the task, one for myself. Then, as I dream, the music of the boat slips into my bones. I breathe--though sometimes this takes hours--deeply. There. Finally, the dance; the pleasure of the blue blue sea and the force of the wind and this rollicking motion hour after hour and into the night, whirl of stars above and dolphins leaping alongside us.