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.

How cold my knees are/ heartwreck/ a love poem

Early morning. Pink light at the window. The cat, curled on the pillow beside me wakes when I do, gently taps my face with her paw.  The furnace cycles on again. I must get up and put wood on the fire. The walls of the house creak with cold.

I draw the curtains, let in the sun, build up the fire, sweep ash and wood fragments into the boiler, turn up the thermostats. Time for coffee. An eagle, carried on an air current, dashes across the sky.

How lovely the light is, how cold my knees are. How age or winter undoes me, piercing my bones. It wrecks my heart to wake here without you.

After the freeze

After the freeze, a thaw. Rain. Fog. Gusts of wind rattle the frost-bitten branches, toss chunks of ice to the ground. We crush them underfoot. And now another freeze, a breath-stopping chill that icicles your eyelashes. This is the way we will face the new year: swaddled in layers, our cheeks stinging with cold, breath turning to frost as soon as it strikes our scarves.

Last night I dream that everything in my office is burning; there is nothing we can do but get out before the roof collapses. All of my papers, my notebooks, the photos and the books are consumed by flames. In my dream, my only regret concerns the notebooks from last summer, from the trip to Alaska; I've not managed to make anything from them yet. I reach for them, and they whirl apart into cinders. We race from the building, dodge falling beams, and finally stand outside looking up into the night sky. Flames shoot through the roof; we are deafened by the blazing fire.

Suppose indeed, nothing were to be left?
Nothing? What of your memory?

Okay, nothing but my memory.
And the possibilities of imagination.

Yes, that too.
What then?

We'd start over again then, I guess.
Or tell new stories.

Yes.
And what if you were to begin anyway now?

Even without a conflagration?
Yes, even without a conflagration.

I don't know if I could.
You mean you don't know if you could want to.

Yes.
What is old is new again.

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.

Tomorrow there will be ice

 

After an autumn of flat seas, the storm arrives at night. 

Rain stutters against the windows, billows in blowsy curtains 

past the light at the dock. At first the wind sings, a long slow whistle from

afar; it fingers through the cracks in the sash and

moans at the door. A light wind. By midnight 

it's roaring up like a train, slamming not again!

into the south wall. The house beams crack and 

whinge; we put out towels to sop up the water streaming

in: oh please move the pears; it does them no good

to be so damp.

Who sleeps in the midst of so much noise, and yet we do,

waking to ceaseless seas big as houses, water

roiling and tossing, beaches cluttered with 

spindrift and seaspray, the path puddled and filled

by twisted strands of seaweed and splintered 

lobster traps. Scrappy ancient spruces crouch 

close to the earth, turn 

away from the water: stones 

gather at their roots.

The cold hunkers in. We light the furnace;

tomorrow there will be ice.

Setback

Trampled crocus,
half-green grass,
bitter wind:
spring stays at half mast,
requires more
firewood.

Notes
Pictures were taken under grey skies by a windy sea in West Quoddy this morning.  I wrote the poem--if we can call this ditty by such an elevated name--while sitting by the fire. Yes, it's that cold. Pity the lobstermen, who begin to haul their traps today.

Winter galls us

Who can bear how winter clings and stops us at the root?
Nothing in the house to burn save paper scraps and torn up box.
Colour is something memory finds, a gap, an aching loss,
for a world awash in weeviling greys and stinging damp:
mould's heaven, not ours.
We long for sun or a meteor shower,
for a sudden pressing bud, or
the arcs and angles of a swallow's flight.

Who could be content with last year's apples,
or the bitter dregs of yesterday's tea?
Leftover news in a fog-darkened sky.
Like business-as-usual, relentless winter galls us, excoriates hope.
Why live without promises of ripeness, without
a burst of juice between your teeth?

Notes
The echo here is Chaucer of course, the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.
When will "that Aprille, with hise shoures soote,/ the droghte of March hath perced to the roote"?

Photos were taken in West Quoddy in April 2010.