Poem trying to get in out of the rain

Autumn rattles at the windows of the night, rips
leaves from looping trees, punches
gustily against the wall.
I waken to creaking roofbeams, peer
sightless into blacklit night. Nothing
to see, but everything that is is sounding:
such a rush and crash of waves on rocks;
the clothesline sings a one-note samba,
the chimney turns to didgeridoo.
Only the dog sleeps, silent, beside me.
If I open the door to let the poem in,
it can sleep all night on the bench by the fire and
I'll return to bed then to wake you, slipping
frigid feet behind your knees.

Photos are of Usnea, or "Old man's beard" lichens in British Columbia and Nova Scotia.

Fire and ice

Two nights after Christmas. We are somnolent and turkey-stuffed. The booming draws us to the windows, the flashing lights keep us there. Fireworks! With each explosion, the snow covering Lac Brome lights up. The colours are something out of Breughel, bonfires beyond the trees. The frozen world glitters in the sudden light.

Mining old journals

Every season proposes itself anew; we think we've been here before, generally speaking, if not here exactly. Those of us who have the bad habit of keeping journals might, however, testify otherwise. How often I repeat myself, and then forget I've done so.

17 November is forever a melancholic day in my books, dark, sleepy, overwhelming, insomniac, filled up with too many tasks, and, across 30 years, rough stabs at poetry.

In 2012 I wrote:

  Once upon a time, or so it seemed, I forgot nothing. Now my memory flaps and comes unraveled like the clothing pegged to the line and whipping in the breeze. Everything tatters over time.

Weary.  A surge of sunshine would make a difference. So too would more sleep. A walk. The end of terms. It is coming. So much to do still: I shall never approach having done enough.

Outside, the pop pop of someone shooting. Duck hunting? Or chasing deer out over the peninsula: Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! I try to ignore it, but that doesn't work very well. Whatever is fine, we humans must kill. 

In 2011:

Rain in the night, and leaks of course....I am so tired, so deeply asleep, so immersed in dreams that are but tatters and shadows of colours now; I remember nothing but waking to find the cat curled into my side, her fur soft beneath my hand, sleep like a dark cowl upon my face....

Have to go for a long walk soon!

In 2008:

The fire burns, the dogs sigh and rearrange themselves nearby, adjusting both limbs and jowls.  I pour myself a glass of milk, drink, and try to settle myself so that I can go back to sleep.  The power went off just after dark--we'd fed the dogs and luckily, I'd made a vegetable caraway stew in the afternoon. It was done and and still warm. So we ate early by candlelight, stoked the fire, listened to the sudden eerie silence at the center of the storm, and then the rain and wind slamming into the walls and windows again. Finally, in darkness, we went early to bed.

And then I awoke. [A long list of tasks follows].

In 1996:

3 am. I wake up in a sweat, the water just pouring off of me. I've been in a deep sleep. I feel vulnerable, frightened, but I don't know why. I feel desolate, unable to protect myself.  I am afraid I won't have any time to myself. [A long list of tasks and social engagements follows.] I am afraid of leaving the idiotic safety net of my job, of indebtedness, of immobility, of temporal madness. Making time more elastic--something I have to learn.

In 1982:

I'm too tired to write a poem--it's about 2 am and I have to get up tomorrow morning for brunch with A's mother, but I still saw something:

Artificial feather roses and
old movie posters and
tattered postcards and
block party announcements and
old bead necklaces in 
small wooden boxes with
cough drop wrappers and a
button collection and 
the radio playing muzak-jazz

And I'm
thinking about how
the skin of my brain is stretching
and cracking
and there is a sharp pain
in the small of my back.

These beds may be too narrow,
but who cares?

Pictures were taken over the course of several autumns at various locations on the Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia--Sober Island, Taylor's Head Provincial Park, private lands near Malay Falls, and in West Quoddy.

Every day

Every day

I pull myself together;

every day,

I fall apart.

Cracked? --Or Cut?

What difference does it make when rot has set in?

Not even the birds are tempted.

Nightwatches

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.