Photograph

She wants a picture, but
when we meet she
flees. I clutch at air, at
bone or shadow and flare of light.
Heart's rattle, eye crease, pink
acrylic streak. Dust motes at
the window.  She slips into 
a sunlit draft. Stillness. The shutter
clatters. Don't look.  How then
can I--?       Shots 
frame the afternoon. At
lunch her slender finger taps
the knife edge (gesture not
pressure please understand).
Sometimes I'd like to 
[finger tapping].       O
don't. Blood pools another
letter, another sort of
shutter.

Notes
We're packing today for a summer on the boat. Tomorrow, early, we fly to British Columbia. Soon we'll be headed for Alaska. Here, in Nova Scotia, it is pouring rain. The ceiling leaks again.  Where to find a poem in all the stacks and piles of clothing, packets of dried peppers, oil filters, piles of sketchbooks and rolls of brushes? (Now that I write the list, I see a poem might be found there. Tomorrow perhaps.)  I recalled a poem I'd drafted in April two years ago, while on the boat in Mexico, but never completed, about a portrait commission with a reluctant subject. Or perhaps I was a too hesitant photographer; I didn't know how to draw her out. This is that poem, recomposed and completed from my notes of 23 April 2011. Sometimes those old journals and sketchbooks are pretty handy. (Quick, copy this one, before you leave it behind!)

Photos are of coltsfoot blooming from dead leaves (the first flower, if you can call it that) and broken bits of wharf and barn in West Quoddy and Beaver Harbour.

Adrift in Paradise

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.