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.

Leaf, bloom, water

Wild strawberry blossoms

In fog again, world
without horizon; you are seized
by the smallest things.

Sun salutations don't make the sun emerge

Enya in bladderwrack with her stick

An island obscuring fog
drapes mist over every
surface, beading window
panes dog's belly pine needles
and the arms of my sweater
when I step on the porch to watch
an acrobatic crow draw lines in air.
Water boiled:: tea steeped:: dog fed.
Permutations of downward facing dog
(enhanced with growling): sun
salutations don't make the sun emerge.
Head stand; I land; still this damp
shroud.

Fog snared spiderweb

Notes:

The daily not-quite sonnet: 13x I'm calling it, my private little experiment with writing poems that are just 13 lines long.  It's strange, this practice of writing a poem of a defined length. Each poem becomes like a puzzle, a box of a defined size into which you must fit odd heterogeneous items so that when you're done the box has become a drawer full of interesting oddities and meaningful content.

Each length exacts its own pressure and creates its own surprises. What happens when you cheat a sonnet by one line? In my case--I think--the poem wakes up, becomes stranger, more colloquial. Is this my imagination, or is there really so much difference between one line count and another? I will have to continue with my experiment to see.  Are 13 lines really more light-hearted than 14? Is it habit or a subtle interruption of habit that makes me think so?

All photos taken today in West Quoddy in the fog. 

Leaf captured fog

What's the news?

What's the news? I don't know
I haven't been listening to the radio,
but the daffodils are blaring. Meanwhile
morning and evening the peepers are
chanting.  Deer clatter along the breakwater and
into the garden--not a tulip to be found. We've caged the
anemone pulsatilla: still the bees gather.
Hummingbirds buzz our heads; swallows
nest again above the door.
I saw whitecaps in Dufferin Harbour today
on my way to get my hair cut, but here
it's almost still. Fog overtakes the islands,
draws up its noose.

Anemone pulsatilla

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

How beautiful the half-obscured world (video)

Simple pleasures: to watch how the fog shifts and moves, the light rises and falls. I make a minestrone soup, do the laundry, make a pot of tea--with every gesture relishing the quiet, the calm air, the mirrored surface of the sea. A loon floats in the cove at the front of the house and dives in the shallows. Lines of current zigzag outward, carrying the tide out past the islands. Blue clouds, bluer hills--how beautiful the half-obscured world.

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.

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.

Do we know what we see?

Rain overnight. Wet spatters the windows in howling wind.
Insomniac, I drop logs on the fire, scribble notes
in the dark, wake in fog. Now
sunshine. Sharp shadows cross the lawn, grass
imperceptibly greening.  Everything changes. Nothing
does. Do we know what we see?

Afternoon. A bat appears on the porch floor
trembling, a mouse brown thing, with
tiny feet, awkward in the light.
I watch it breathing-- Is it sick? Is it rabid?--
carry it by towel to a rock by the pond. The bat looks
at me. Sun shines through flared wings. It bares
its teeth, bites a rose thorn: small
mouth blooms blood red.

Notes
Pictures are of clearing clouds today and the crumpled bat, now dead.

Blue odour of iodine

Strange and complicated morning. A skim of ice
calms the sea; sudden colour scours your eyes.
Bright light white heat flood the house. 
Throw open the windows! Fling wide the door!
Flash of kingfisher wing and peaked blue crest
(you're back! we're so glad to see you!). Sparrows sing.

Scent of---    open water. Salt, of course. Blue
odour of iodine, knotted rotting bladderwrack,
sunwarmed grey stone steeped in cold mud:
each element bound to its proximate. Life
on the strand, lived at an edge, wind-tumbled,
cloud-driven. Unstable. Chance-riven.
What peculiar mercy makes us forget that
with heat, comes fog?

Notes
I am thinking of Boston this morning, and the two explosions at the marathon finish line yesterday. (Who in North America isn't riveted and horrified by such wreckage of runners and their families and friends?) But to write a poem about that seems impossible.  I judged a poetry competition once not long after 9/11, and the poems that commemorated that event were, without exception, awful. Mawkish versions of catastrophe miniaturized in dancing rhyme. An occasion for falling flat on your face, poetically speaking.  Still, as I finished this poem I realized something about yesterday's news was working me--that what one finds at the edge of a sudden change is not a clash of civilisations (that appalling phrase and idea authored by Samuel Huntington), but one thing slowly shifting into another, "each element bound to its proximate." And this too, of course: what draws us--heat, say, or celebratory events full of oblivious affluence, also draws other things we think we love far less, like fog--or anger and targeted destruction. We forget at our own peril our own angers, our own targets, how closely interleaved rage and righteousness are.

Pictures, more land-weaves and tumbling structures, natural and not, taken on Nova Scotia's Eastern Shore.

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.

You Can Call It Spring If You Want To

Nova Scotia 1 April 2013

March blusters,
shoves about its blocks of ice and melt and
sudden drifts of snow.

Now: mud and
seeping colour, blinding light,
rain.

Black ducks sleep at the rim of the pond.
Geese startle and

rise up honking.
Scent of earth, of
rotting kelp.

Fog wraiths
silently
through the trees, slips
cove to cove, as if by stealth.

I hear it coming:

before the stars disappear,
the Beaver Light blares.

NOTES
My photographs span the month of March on the Eastern Shore in Nova Scotia.

It's National Poetry Writing Month in the US, and I'm going to take that as an excuse to post more poems, more often. This one was, in fact, written today, no April foolin'. To join a poem-a-day challenge this month, check out this site: http://www.napowrimo.net/

And for inspiration, try this on: Ellis Avery has written a haiku a day for 14 years! She gives an account of that project, and the history of the form in a beautiful and inspiring article here: http://www.themillions.com/2013/03/21st-century-butterfly-19th-century-net-fourteen-years-in-haiku.html 

Ambivalence

In a way, my favourite kind of day: warm, gentle rain, swift-moving clouds, the sea rolling but mild, birds fishing on the points, the sun not too far away--just behind those clouds there.

In way, my favourite kind of day, summer calm; rain, hush, relief.

In a way...

Still, I chafe against the darkness, the way that my eyesight is shrouded; in the rain, I feel bounded and too contained. As if getting wet were something to be avoided, at all costs.

Ambivalence then.

I sway in the wind like the trees, rooted despite my legs.

Images
Rain on the pond
Rain and fog over the pond
Rainy self portrait

Strawberries and Hot Spice

We're winding up the second week of a weather phenomenon Marike calls "fogstorms": fog so thick and wet that it beads every surface with moisture, spatters the windows, rolls down the gutters. It is twilight all day long, blank damp greyness. Everyone is depressed. It is as if we've all suddenly been striken blind. There's no escape from the looming gloomy gloaming, the isolation, the blankness. We light candles at breakfast, candles at lunch, candles at dinner, a fire at night. We play music, make up goofy dances, force ourselves to go for walks. Our shoes are never dry. In such a season one craves fine sharp sunshiny tastes, exquisite surprises, anything that will break through the batting that smothers us. Enter: the spicy strawberry!

Last week, already bored with the fog, I experimented with making a ginger syrup I read about on composer Nico Muhly's blog. Usually such syrups are added to cocktails to juice them up--drinking is of course a time-honoured Maritime solution to bad weather....or anything really. Then I realized I could candy ginger at the same time--AND that I could use the syrup in all kinds of other ways as well: to flavour salmon filets, salsas, strawberries, ice cream....you get the picture. So--

Double Recipe for Ginger Spicy Syrup and Candied Ginger

2.5 cups water
1 cup sugar
2 whole ancho peppers
a chunk of ginger root the size of your hand or larger
2 teaspoons anise seeds (star anise would surely work too, but more than 1 tsp!)
2 tsps black pepper corns
6-8 whole cloves
1 tablespoon allspice berries

1. If you're making candied ginger with this recipe, then peel the ginger and slice thinly. If not, don't bother to peel it, just chop it up and drop it in a heavy saucepan.

2. Add the rest of the ingredients and bring the contents of the pot to a boil. Let boil vigorously, stirring frequently, until the liquid is syrupy--usually a reduction to a quarter or less of its volume. You may have to modulate the heat to prevent the mixture from burning or sticking.

3. When your syrup has reached a suitable consistency (if you're using a candy thermometer, it will get above boil but below "jelly"), turn off the heat. Let sit overnight, so that the flavours steep and the ginger soaks up some sugar.

4. The next day, bring quickly to a boil, then turn off the heat. Once the syrup has cooled a bit, strain it through a tight-meshed sieve--syrup will store well in the fridge in a glass jar.

5. If you want a bit more syrup and/or candied ginger, return the berries/spices/ginger mess to the saucepan. Add, again, 2.5 cups of water and 1 cup of sugar and, again, bring to a vigorous boil. Reduce, again, until the liquid is a nice thick syrup and the ginger is soft and sweet and not too chewy or fibrous. If it is, repeat steps 3-5 again. When everything seems to your taste, strain the syrup into your glass jar and pick out the ginger pieces--a wide-mouthed glass jar will work well to store them, too. Discard the rest of the spices--mine go right into the compost bin.

The day my syrup was done, Elisabeth came home with an enormous salmon filet. I thought the syrup might help make a tasty marinade/sauce for the fish, which it did.

Marinade and Sauce for Barbecued Salmon
2-3 T. spicy ginger syrup
2 T olive oil 1 T mustard (Dijon, of course!)
2 cloves of garlic finely minced with 1/2 of a seeded, reconstituted chipotle pepper
1/4 c. + orange juice or orange and lemon juice mixed
1 tsp roasted cumin seeds, finely ground

1. Mix ingredients together (add more orange or lemon juice if you want more liquid). Brush over salmon filet.

2. Marike started to cook our salmon on a wetted cedar plank--kept it there until it seized. Then she slipped the fish onto the grill skin side down and cooked it, basting it with the sauce, for 7 minutes or so--until it was quite hot through, but still very pink inside. Then she flipped it over to grill the top for a minute or so.

3. Serve with sauce and extra lemon. A pinch of salt perhaps.

We ate our salmon with grilled asparagus (olive oil salt pepper wrap them in foil and put them on the grill, flip them). Desert was fresh strawberries with a drizzle of syrup, candied ginger and dark dark chocolate. Mmm. By the time we were finished it was dark and we'd forgotten the fog.


But the fog had not forgotten us. It stayed and greyed and greyed and stayed. Our chins sank, so too our spirits--it's like being buried alive, nuclear winter. Here we are in the lightest brightest time of the year in the north and we are smothered in gloom. I decided I'd start to photograph small things--if you get close enough to the wild strawberries (half the size of your smallest thumbnail) you can capture all sorts of colours. Myopia, in such weather, is perhaps a blessing.

Just before Canada Day (July 1), Marike and Elisabeth came home from a trip to the hardware store with a flat of strawberries. Someone had been selling berries, picked near Truro, at the side of the road. Suddenly we had a dozen quarts or more, so we all got busy.

Elisabeth washed and stemmed several quarts then spread the berries on cookie sheets, covered them in wax paper and put them in the freezer. As soon as they were frozen she packed the berries in bags--these we'll pull out later or throw into smoothies or crisps or pies.

Then Marike and I started ice cream production. Here's Marike's recipe, which was really her mother, Marguerite's:

Marguerite's Easy No Machine Strawberry Ice Cream
1.5 litres (3 pints) of heavy cream
2 tsp. vanilla
3-4 quarts of strawberries
1 cup sugar (or more if you crave sweetness)
optional: nutmeg, black pepper

1. Whip the cream and vanilla together in a large bowl. If you like nutmeg, grate some in; it's always good with cream. (Besides, in large enough quanitites, it's a hallucinogin--a detail that can feel as if it's worth contemplating when you can't SEE anything in the external world...)

2. Using a cuisinart or similar implement, grind up the strawberries. No need to puree them--they should hover between liquid and solid with many elements of each. Add the sugar. You can add lots of ground black pepper here if you like, too.

3. Mix whipped cream and berries together in a large bowl. Spoon into smaller containers with tight lids & wide mouths. Be sure to leave a bit of space for the mixture to expand when it freezes. Freeze.

4. Bcause you haven't used an ice cream maker, your ice cream will be very hard (but it was also really easy, wasn't it?) You might want to take it out of the freezer for 10 minutes so that it can soften before you try to spoon it out.


We'd frozen, in one fashion or another, half of our berries, but there were still half a dozen quarts to contend with. Elisabeth made straberry jam (add water and sugar and boil; can); we had sliced strawberries on toast with anise flavoured powdered sugar (a Dutch treat, called Gestampte muisjes or, in our house, because muisjes souds a bit like "mouses--moushes--"stamped mice"). We contemplated strawberry soup (with my ginger syrup of course, and cream), strawberry souffle, strawberries on salad with goat's feta and pepper, and, of course, strawberry shortcake--which is really just strawberries on fancied up biscuits. Here's my latest greatest modification:

Strawberry Shortcake with Spicy Ginger Syrup Sauce and Whipped Cream
1 scant cup unbleached all-purpose flour
1 scant cup whole wheat flour
2T granulated sugar
1T baking powder
4 T (that's 1/8 of a pound or half a stick) sweet butter (chilled)
3/4 to 1 cup light cream
optional 1/4 cup ground roasted almonds or pecans
1 qt of stemmed sliced strawberries, sprinkled with sugar
1 c. heavy cream whipped with vanilla and nutmeg
spicy ginger syrup sauce

Preheat the oven to 450 F.

1. Using a cuisinart or similar implement with a sharp blade, blend together dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, sugar, ground nuts if you're using them).

2. Cut butter into cubes and drop it into the flour mixture. Pulse it in (don't over-mix)--you're looking for a coarse cornmeal-like texture here.

3. Add 1/2 c. cream. Mix. With machine running, add remaining 1/4 cup--or more, as necessary to create a fairly thick well-mixed batter.

4. Spoon the batter in large spoonfuls onto a buttered cookie sheet. Flatten each spoonful. You should have about 9 biscuits staggered across your sheet.

5. Bake in the middle of the oven for 10 minutes. Your shortcakes should be puffed up and just a little bit browned.

6. Let cool on a rack.

7. To serve, slice the shortcakes in half. Pour syrup over each half. Cover in strawberries. Top with cream. Keep a pitcher of syrup nearby to add as necessary. If you're feeling really extravagant, shave dark chocolate over each serving.

Now, if only the fog would lift!

Images
Nova Scotia strawberries
Ginger Spicy Syrup
Wild strawberries on stones, in the grass