How beautiful the snow blasted world

Snow falls quietly at twilight
gathering flakes whisper as they hit the window

How beautiful the snow blasted world. 

After dinner the snow stops falling and the dog and I go out to walk the territory. The moon glows faintly behind a scrim of clouds; clumps of snow cling to every branch and bush and the tops of the flattened grasses.  The apple trees thrust their branches at the sky like so many gnarled and knobby fists; there's a gaping hole where the barn door has blown off--better call for help to fix that one. 

We circle the gardens, step through the weeds to the pond's edge, where a fallen tree covered in snow casts strange shadows on the ice.  No footprints but ours anywhere to be seen. 

We walk along the dyke at the sea edge, each rose hip a huge ball of snow on a spindly branch. There's just enough wind that we can hear the water ripping and rushing into the shore and out again.

The wind is biting. It nips my cheek, hurries the dog to the door, slips through the stitching in my gloves to freeze my fingers. But I'm not ready to go in yet.

Clouds scud across the sky.  I look out over the grey water towards the islands, invisible in the darkness, then turn to scrape off the cars and clear the drive in front of the garage, savouring the sharpness of the air, stamping my feet to keep them warm.  Why must every pair of boots leak? Time to goop them up again.

I am remembering one night when I was about nine. The snow had been falling all evening. The streets were quiet and huge drifts covered the yard.  My siblings and I were sure that when our mother came into the room, she was going to tell us to get ready for bed. It's time, she said, pausing as we started to moan, then all in a rush--to get your coats on and go play in the snow! Shrieking with delight, we tumbled out into the darkness and the drifts, the world magical and thick with surprise and permission. 

It wasn't until I moved to Montreal and learned to cross-country ski twenty years after that--and more than twenty years ago--setting out across the fields of the Chateauguay Valley beneath a full moon, that falling snow occasioned such delight and anticipation again. But now it does.  

I watch the snow mount up higher and higher and hope the thermometer drops, rather than rises, so that I can ski across the bog, over top of the little lakes and streams, the sheepskill and the insect-eating pitcher plants onto the bushy ledges where the coyotes circle and sing.  There, I'll clamber up to a point where I can stand and look out at the sea rolling unimpeded over the horizon; from there, it rolls all the way to Spain. 

I can only ever get to that place on skis, when the bog is frozen and overlaid with deep snow.  How glorious it will be if that's what tomorrow brings.

Notes
Photos taken 3 January 2017 in West Quoddy, Nova Scotia

Where we tread

Fog. We are immersed in an unending fog that drifts in and out with the tides. Sometimes the air is warm and still and the water like glass, beaming back reflections of trees and stone with greater clarity and definition than the atmosphere. But then the wind blows, rifling and darkening the surface of the water.  

Dried grasses and lichens loom up out of the mist as if aglow; fiddleheads unfurl, swallows swoop in graceful arcs over the yard, Sometimes, when we're out walking, they bomb by so near and so quick, I feel the air around my face stir. 

The loon calls from an invisible space, and all around songbirds trill. A yellow finch gleams from the upper branches of an apple tree, then flutters away into the mist. Now you see it; now you don't, but the dip of its looping flight resounds in the air.

Water beads tender greens unfurling on every tree, drips from the pines, puddles in the centers of lupin leaves, illuminates spidery filaments webbing the grass. Everywhere the long view is obscured, but whatever is close, tiny, near to the ground, is magnified.

Here the sweet scent of spruce bud, flowering maple, smashed violets smeared where we tread.

June bug

Lichens grow on the porch chair

Fog obscures the islands

It speaks of rain Ramey says (meaning the radio, the sky or 
the loons). I heard them yelping yesterday in the other bay, I'd thought
they were coyotes. Floods in Texas but here a soft shower, which is more like 
a mist (a marine layer they call it in San Diego, as if 
fog were a stranger to them). 
Not like here, where it's intimate and
cellular, a semi permanent inhabitant of the pores. Throb 
of the lobster boats coming in to dock, gulls
screeling behind them, all of them invisible, almost 
imaginary. Soft hiss and thump as 
their wakes come ashore. Somewhere (not here)
the sun is high and hot and annoying
as a June bug.

Ferns unfurl

Reflection in rain

Drive-by warmth ( on reaching the end of a journal)

violet in the rain and grass

How quickly
time passes. Midnight, in
a damp season

(guaranteed
to help, no matter
your trouble)

pages ago
we sailed between
desert isles

(business,
sexual impotence
we fix all)

now violets
flock and scatter amid
greening grass

(envy or
headache or bad luck
or witchcraft)

pages ago,
we sought shade from heat,
too-bright sun

(there are those
who pay to do you
ill, you know)

now I curl
with dog and blanket
by the fire

 (her skin so
thin she feels your eyes):
drive-by warmth

(if you are
a victim of bad
luck or doubt)

scrounge bravely
before a Nova
Scotia spring

page from a journal (with ad for a tarot reading) February to May 2015

Notes:

This poem is another "flock of lunes," of course, or rather, my "mistaken" lunes, consisting of stanzas formed from lines of 3 syllables, 5 syllables and 3 again. It is literally my last entry in a particular notebook, interleaved with lines and translations from earlier pages.

Security. Lockdown.

If it rains enough you forget how it was before the rain.

You think it will never not rain.

It rains all day Wednesday, and then all night, the wind stacking waves, their tops curling, breaking white, throwing spray over every reef.  

Hard in this wind to hold the car door open: it slams on her cheek, leaves a cut, a blossoming bruise. The steps at school are slippery; the heel of my shoe keeps falling off. I press the nails back in place, but what I really need is glue.

What's it like out there? someone asks as I blow in on Thursday just before 11, rain in my hair.

Wet, I say, shaking my head. Windy. Not too cold.

No, I mean, she says, were the police out there? Someone said the square was full of police. 

I didn't see that. 

She tells me a story. Earlier this morning, just three blocks away, a man was spotted on the street carrying a gun wrapped in a blanket. The police have been searching for him. Then word came that they had caught him, right here, next door. But some people are claiming there were two people with guns, and the one they've caught isn't the one who was walking down the street earlier.

Here we go, we say, rolling our eyes. After the shootings on Parliament Hill yesterday, the whole country's gone crazy. Everyone turning paranoid. Turning American. One mentally ill too often homeless Libyan-Canadian kills a soldier, rushes Parliament with a long gun, and is killed, and all anyone wants to talk about is terrorism. International threats. Security. No one wants to discuss domestic problems, gun control, poverty, racism, or mental illness. These deaths are a warrant for war, not a mental health strategy.

We imagine what implement the guy sighted in Halifax might have been carrying: a pool cue, a roll of sketches, a bassoon.  Or perhaps he was a reenactor, headed for the latest costume drama on Citidel Hill, and stupid enough to carry his cardboard rifle on the street. Out of the rain, under a blanket.

I head to my office; a day full of meetings unspools.

Government offices are on lockdown. So are the banks. A nearby high school. No one may enter, even later, even long afterwards, after a young man who had run from a city bus and left behind his weapons was arrested and taken into custody.

In Halifax, no official says anything about terrorism. Nor do they mention mental illness. Instead, the doors remain locked, public offices closed to citizens, a gesture that speaks volumes. Today we are dangerous; today in our raincoats we might be a threat; today we cannot enter the archives to look at some photographs hanging there. Openness is risky.

Didn't you hear, another friend quips, today is International Long Gun Holiday? And then he apologizes: I'm sorry; that was in bad taste.

We drive home through the rain and the falling leaves. Once home, we remember to lock the doors. 

As if what is out there is sure to be more harmful than what lies within.

Notes

On the shootings in Ottawa: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ottawa-attack-5-questions-about-the-shootings-on-parliament-hill-1.2809703

On gunmen in Halifax: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/halifax-police-arrest-man-recover-firearm-on-city-bus-1.2810019

Pictures were taken in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia on 23 October 2014.

The Secret Lives of Trees

For my father, the very first tree hugger I knew

Born 50 years ago in the center of North America, I grew up in country that just 250 years earlier had been thick with trees. These were not the enormous redwoods, spruce and cedars of the northwest coast from California to British Columbia and Alaska, but they must have been spectacular mature hardwood forests, concatenations of varieties of maples, oaks, and buckeyes, as well as sycamores, black cherry trees, pawpaws, poplars, dogwoods, sumacs, sour gums and sassafras, alternating with grasslands and prairies. Wildcats, bears, deer, wolves and wild boars lived in those forests, as did many varieties of smaller mammals and birds, and fish filled the streams and rivers.

People have inhabited this region since 13,000BC; the landscape is strewn with human leavings, from burial mounds and religious items to networks of trails and evidence of land clearings, longhouses and palisades, and various sorts of agriculture and warfare. Near waterways, some first nations cleared fields and planted them with the "three sisters:" corn, and varieties of beans and squash, as well as turnips, cabbage, parsnips, sweet potatoes, yams, potatoes, onions, and leeks; maple sap was also harvested and boiled to make maple syrup; first people also survived by gathering the wild rice that grew near the great lakes, hunting game, stockpiling nuts and berries, and trading footstuffs and other materials.

According to environmental historians, before the mass clearings of the 19th and 20th centuries, the rivers were slow and deep and well sheltered--more conducive to passage by small boats than they are today. Despite the richness of the land--or perhaps because of it, these were not peaceful spaces: at least seventeen nations occupied the land of present day Ohio when European settlers began to arrive, and the histories of strife between one people and another seamed the landscape.

Older nations and newer settlers simply divided themselves up into new alliances as newer settlers arrived, but many of the older battles continued:between the Algonquin speaking Shawnee, the Iriquoian speaking Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat or Huron; between the English and the French; and between human bodies, smallpox and tuberculosis.* By the 1840s, in the wake of the the Indian Removal Act of 1830, white American settlers had compelled Native Americans to cede all of their Ohio land and move westward, to the plains of Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma, or as it was then known, "Indian territory." With this forced human migration of the last of its earlier inhabitants, the clearing of the land began in earnest.

By the time I was a child, in the 1960s and '70s, the once vast forests had long disappeared; so too had some of the farms that had supplanted them. Where there weren't significant concentrations of settlement, whole swathes of land were being strip-mined for coal and turned to dust.  Highways ribboned through this moonscape; enroute to my paternal grandfather's house, we passed through miles of mud, not a tree or even a blade of grass in sight.

But then the environmental movement gained traction. In the 1970s, new laws compelled strip-miners to remediate the land, to plant trees and grass, to ensure that the once fecund topsoil of the Ohio Valley didn't blow entirely away, leaving nothing behind but stony cracked earth. Plant life recolonized the ground; the rolling forms of the hills were once again visible beneath a carpet of green. Trees filled the medians, grew taller, and clustered in valleys, along streams, and at the borders of public and private land.

bird's nest lined with mosses and lichens

State parks, which then were often scrubby and bare, with newly planted saplings and sour-tasting sulfuric water, are now sanctuaries of spectacular bloom in the spring, and lush greenery in the summer. Streams and waterways clatter cleanly over stones and the trees fill with birds: owls, hawks, woodpeckers, sapsuckers, flickers, jays, chickadees, titmice, nuthatches, treecreepers, wrens, thrushes, warblers, cardinals, sparrows, grosbeaks, blackbirds and crows.

Sometimes in rural Ohio now, one could imagine that the gritty air of my strip-mine filled childhood, the polluted rivers slick enough with oil to catch fire, were nothing by an apocalytic fiction, a nightmare. But it really happened, just as in the nearby states of Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia and Tennessee, "mountaintop removal" is now a standard coal-mining technique: our greed for what is in the earth outstrips our care for what is on it.

I learned my love of trees from my parents, urban missionaries, who got out of the city and into the woods as often as possible.

Mom and sister Lisa at a state park, 1970s

I remember going with my father on a trip with a group of inner city children on their first walk through the trees.  Although we could see the houses in a nearby development though the sparse ground cover, and the trees were etched with the initials of lovers, many of the young people on that trip were terrified of what might be lurking in the shade.  They had only ever seen tv forests, and their own urban jungle was full of wolves of a distinctly human type.  To break through their fear, my father got all of us engaged in hugging trees. First he did it, then we all did it.  "I love trees!" he said, wrapping his arms around a burr oak. "Feel how strong this tree is. Touch the bark. Is it smooth or rough?"  He got us to collect leaves and to look at them.  In this way, Ohio's trees got under my skin.

I first planted a tree with my maternal grandfather. At the time we planted the maple sapling in his front yard, the tree and I were the same age--four or five years old.  It was was a bit larger than I was. But by the time I was an adult, its branches rose high into the sky.  When my sister Lisa, my brother Les, and I were all our 20s, my grandfather took pictures of us in front of that tree.  It was as he had told me it would be: we and the tree had grown up together.

Brother Leslie and sister Lisa beneath grandparents' tree, 1993.

Me beneath the same tree, 1993. I am 29.

Strange then that several years ago, after I had been living by the sea in Nova Scotia for a number of years, where hardwoods are scarce, but the black spruce grow to the water's edge, on a visit to Ohio I did not recognize the sound of the wind in the leaves of the maple outside of the window of my parents' house. How could I have lost this sound from my aural repertoire? Forgetting it was like forgetting some part of my own name. As I had longed for trees when my family had moved from the leafy suburbs to the stricken scrub and concrete of the inner city, I realized that seaside, I longed for the company of hardwoods, the sound of wind in the branches and the scent of fallen leaves crackling underfoot.

Remnant of old black spruce in salt-wrecked juniper on a Nova Scotia headland

I began to photograph trees then, in part because once again I was living in a place where another sort of industrial stripping, clearcutting, was popular and permitted; it is even of late officially redescribed, particularly when that wood and all of its leavings are destined for pulp mill boilers, as a green practice: thus the stripping and burning of "biomass" counts as a provincial effort to get more of power from an ostensibly renewable resource.   Never mind that it takes many more years to grow trees here in this rocky maritime spot than to harvest and burn them, or that nothing can grow when all of the cover and leavings have been removed from the land.

Nova Scotia clearcut, near Malay Falls

Where I live now, hardwoods once covered the hillsides, or so some of the older people say. In their lifetimes, lynx, bear, deer, moose, mink, otter, wolves and coyote were plentiful and the sea was full of cod. No longer. We have harvested many of the fruits of the earth into extinction; most, so long as we are here, cannot hope to recolonize the earth.

The trees perhaps are an exception, and so we have planted many.  Maples again redden the yard.

Why are trees so compelling? There are many reasons. Like us, they struggle and grow and flower, then wither and tumble; older trees in a mature forest provide canopy for younger trees (sugar maples, for example, cannot survive without this canopy). When trees fall (if they're not scooped up in a "biomass" burning project), the rotting logs become nutrient rich nurseries for all sorts of life, including younger trees. Too we may find shelter or comfort in trees; climb into a tree and you sway in the wind, listen to the birds, drowse against a living body larger than your own.

Brother Leslie in redbud tree

But perhaps we ought to find trees compelling because we are so utterly dependent upon them: in the vast forests of the northwest, historically the highest concentrations of biomass on the planet, nutrients from decayed salmon carried deep into the forest by feeding bears or eagles are found in the cellular structure of the trees. The richest forest growth is found in those spaces thus fertilized. These, too, were frequently the first zones inhabited by people on this continent, where food and shelter were ready to hand and plentiful.  The lifecycles of trees are thus not just metaphors for human growth and development; our past and our future are also written there; if we fail to care for trees, we have sealed our own fates on many parts of the planet.

Cortes Island, British Columbia

It is hard for city dwellers to see and understand this: they think that life is built from concrete and commerce, but every piece of our contemporary existence--even in places where there aren't any trees-- unfolds thanks to trees and the fossilized remains of trees. No aspect of our lives is sustainable without them: not shelter, not warmth, not refrigeration or air conditioning, not air travel, not cooking, not the paper and power and plastics that make up the hardware and software and networks upon which I write and publish this piece or any other.  Let us not forget then to plant and praise and care for trees and the earth and the creatures which they shelter. Without their sanctuary, we would not long survive.

* For a vivid account of what life in the these forests and clearings may have been like several centuries ago, see Joseph Boyden's novel The Orenda. Set in the 17th century, and tracing the struggles for territory and trade networks between Iroquois and Huron nations, The Orenda makes plain that settlement of this continent was, from the outset, a complex and international affair, with many unintended consequences.  See Charles Foran's review in The Globe and Mail here: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/joseph-boyden-mines-canadas-bloody-past-for-surprising-spirituality/article14169831/

Pictures were taken in Nova Scotia, Ohio, and British Columbia.

Melt

Melt water gathers beneath the ice, runs out down the rock face and pools at the bottom of the hill. Freshets everywhere.  

To watch on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niu7Q5xPgVI&feature=share&list=UUgWDhn2jpndC4hdPd8vb0zg

Night-dark day

Night-
dark day,
dismal drizzle
crying gulls. One boat plows
through mist, hauls weighted
traps, throws star-
fish back.

Notes
This poem is a modified English form of a cinquain,  a form  of syllabic verse in which each line consists of a strict number of syllables (like Haiku, with its 5/7/5 formula).  Initially, in French, cinquains were poems built of five-line stanzas. In English, however, the cinquain developed a specific formula, so that the first and last lines consisted of two syllables, the second four, the third six, and the fourth eight. I added an extra first line here (making a sextain?) for sense and sound.

So foggy today that the day is both dark and blind. The sea star picture was taken on Hakai Beach in Central BC in full sun. We don't have such wildly brilliant starfish on the east coast. But the five points make their point, and add desperately needed light to the day.

Spring is the slowest season

8 April 2013

Nights I listen
for the peepers. They have
not wakened yet.

But sparrows sing and
robins peck at hardened earth: 
rime of ice on stone.

Cold wind, colder sea:
spring is the slowest season.
Thick clouds disgorge rain.    

Notes
Photographs were taken at Taylors Head Park, on Psyche Beach. They are part of a series I am calling "Landweaves"--found knittings of various sorts.  For more images of this sort, see http://pinterest.com/karincope/landweaves/  

Time Changes

Another clear cold day. The sea is frozen out to the headland; a skim of brittle, pockmarked ice creeps up the beach with the tide, and the pond is solid again.  It snaps and groans and echoes in the cove, stretching and shifting beneath its closed skin.

The sun is high and bright and warm as it streams through the windows.  A time change today.  So early? I think. Already? 

I remember when it happened in May, the second Sunday in May, which was--or is my memory failing  me now?--also, often, Mother's Day. White or red carnations on everyone's breasts in church; white for those whose mothers had died, red for those whose mothers were still alive. Why then do I remember my own mother wearing a white carnation?

It couldn't have been so; her mother was still vibrant, active, a nearly daily force in our lives. We'd go see her later that day for a big supper, and play badminton in her back yard, careful not to trample her garden, the petunias velvety, nodding, colourful, like playful tiny faces. I always wanted to touch them.

May in Columbus, Ohio was sometimes cool, cooler than April--too cold for short skirts and knee socks--but spring was out full blast by then, the trees leafy, gardens in full bloom. And now and then it could even be hot.

I catch a whiff of the smell of freshly mown grass (a Saturday job in those days, not a Sunday one); I recall the wood stacked neatly in a sparse pile along one edge of our grandparents' backyard, everything clean and in good working order, neatly organized--not like at our house.  A sudden downpour, notes of spice and musk in the perfumes on my grandmother's dresser, bottles ranged and doubled on a mirrored tray.  Perhaps this is why I treasure the scent and colour of amber?  The ticking of the clocks; the cardinals at the birdfeeder; the large dial thermometer nailed to the maple tree.

Marike comes downstairs and opens the door.  Cool air streams into the house and I am suddenly back in Nova Scotia. Still, even here, the birds have begun to call and sing from the trees.  The last couple of days have been mild and everyone is expectant.  Spring will be here soon they say.

I find this funny.  I'm going on my nineteenth year in Canada, and I've grown used to waiting so long for the spring to come, that I hardly believe any of these signs.  I'm not sure winter has truly arrived yet--I keep waiting for it to get worse, for here, on the shore, March is the bitterest month; the time when the surface temperature of the sea reaches its nadir.

But perhaps, this year, we are already there.  Is this false hope brought about by an exceedingly early time change? What happened to bring it on so early? Or are my memories of my childhood faulty?  Even here the animals are already shedding, the birds singing, the ground muddy and earthy smelling. Two days ago we startled an otter in the marsh at high tide; it watched us through a hole in the ice, and then swam to another hole and popped up again and again, growling a little each time, before swimming out through the culvert and into the bay.

Perhaps the earth and these creatures know something I don't.  All along the shore streams rush and tumble into the water, sweeping away ice and stones and mud. The sap has been flowing all week too--a friend in Cape Breton is sugaring off.

I count the weeks: a bit more than a month of this term left.  I take a deep breath: relief--or oxygen--reaches all the way to my toes. Just then the ice on the pond flexes, hisses, growls; it sounds just like an enormous outdoor belly.  Hungry.  I am, too.

Images:


Birthday tulips--March 2012.


My mother sends me a snapshot of a vase of forsythia she's brought indoors and forced. An early March practice in Ohio, early May in Nova Scotia. Photo by Marcia Cope, St. Paris Ohio.

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

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.