Mourning

Full clear light, sunshine, sharply
etched colour, and I am
mired in fatigue.

Is this how sorrow feels,
slipping along your spine?
And whose sorrow?

Unjust that
I should open my eyes, should
look upon grey sea and implacable

isles (they break
the waves and are not
submerged)

when he won't rise
or see another
day.  By what

name or
reason comes such
undoing, such

cessation,
such unroping
loop of heart or life?

He stops
now;
forever slips

away.
Instant;
accident;

her world,
their world,
our world

unmade.

In memory of Steve Rowe.

Fragments for a windowpane (First Act)

I. Did we who did and were and not

In the beginning,                          

no thing.

A slip of light divides the darkness.

I emerge                                           

you do.

There would be a dog,

a third,

a fourth,                        

death                                     and water. 

Everything  invented.

Everything                                                                        

                                                                                                            lost.

II.  (One is not one for one but two)

Of course it was a love story.  They always are.

On her demise

You must let me go first because I live in the sea
always now, and know the road.
                  Emily Dickinson

No matter which way you slice it,
the story doesn't change.

Disastrous.
Forever miserable, my blasted flower

your petals all are blown.

Photos were taken in West Quoddy, Nova Scotia.

What We're Here For

17 February 2010
San Carlos, Sonora, Mexico

Wind blows the dust out of the hills, off of the roadways, from dusty parking lots.  I eat a fish taco and drink a limonada and wait for Marike to come back to land.  She's on the boat with Salvador, the electrician, doing repairs.  I've been online all day trying to figure out how to get the computer to stop thinking the gps feed is another mouse or pointing system.  No luck.  Next to me a couple speaks urgently, quietly, into a telephone.  There has been an acidente grave.  They seem to be everywhere these accidents.  We've had word from home that our doctor's daughter was thrown from a car and hangs between life and death; her pelvis shattered, she's in an induced coma in the hospital. 

Inside the bar, Cesaria Evoria sings and men drink alone, so I've come out to sit in the sun and watch the street--and the dust--blow by.  The couple next to me goes on speaking softly, anxiously, in Spanish, reviewing the details--four young people in the car; one girl--the woman's neice, and three young men. Suddenly the man breaks out into English, his accent pure LA--SH I I I T!  How'd that happen?  Nothin'
 moves fast here, not even a burnin' bar.  What you got to be in a hurry for?

So I eat slowly and watch the palms bend in the wind.