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.

Journey's End, or Reflections As One Thing Passes Into Another

Sky passes into sea, Rose Harbour, Kunghit Island, Gwaii Hanaas

4:30 am Atlantic Daylight Savings Time Sunday 27 August, 2017  West Quoddy, Nova Scotia

Just a week ago we were in British Columbia, preparing for our last day on the boat for the year.  We'd moved into the launch slip, for the boat was to be hauled for some repairs, and eaten a quiet meal in the cockpit as darkness dropped over the Fraser River.  Overhead, dozens of airplanes streamed in on the same route: a sharp turn over the towers of the Alex Fraser Bridge, and then the lock onto a final approach over the river; they rumbled overhead to the airport, lights like a searching beam coming right at us. Our bags were half packed; the next morning I'd strip the bed, wash the sheets, defrost the freezer and scrub down the remainder of the living spaces on the boat, while Marike stowed lines and investigated the persistent and worrying flow of water over the top of the rudder, among dozens of other vital details. Cushions were clean and stacked in the salon, bedding and blankets bagged, charts rolled up, guidebooks put away. And just like that, the journey, which had unfolded gradually across time and space, embedding landscapes and experiences in our flesh and memories for months, rumpled closed; its urgencies began to dissipate.

Rising tide. Hakai Luxvabalis Recreation Area, Queen Charlotte Sound

Did it happen? Of course it did--finally, we'd made it to Haida Gwaii and back--but the marks the voyage left on our bodies, the habits of vigilance and care that it instilled in the rhythm of our days, had begun to disperse.  Before long we would be embedded in the life of the land again, unconscious of each fluctuation in barometric pressure, unconcerned about the exact times of the tides or the force and direction of the wind. Before long we'd be in another geography, on another coast, in our house. Then the question in the middle of the night would no longer be 'how strong is the wind? or 'does the anchor hold?' but something more diffuse and existential: 'who am I; where am I; and what must I do that matters next?' 

A lengthy and demanding voyage relieves us of such questions in many ways by giving us a trajectory and many clear parameters: the goal each day is to make good enough judgments about when, where and how to go a certain distance, that we may arrive safely. The consequences of failing to do this are fairly immediate and significant. Why one goes is not at issue: the meaning of life is to be alive and to stay alive, to become a resonating body, attuned to the wind and waves, other creatures, the landscape, the tides, and to the sounds of the boat. You ask, 'did we make the right call there?' 'is the raw water pump working?' not 'who am I and why do I exist?' You move from chart to chart, asking how best to get from here to there; such efforts, for the time one makes them, seem to preclude the feeling that one has gone astray--above all these days, for thanks to the extreme precision of Global Positioning Systems, it is almost never necessary, while underway, to puzzle out painstakingly where you are. 

Fog lifts and smoke remains. Entering Johnstone Sound from Blackney Passage.

But back on land, reinserted (however fitfully) into the news cycle and various pressing human concerns as we attend to the circuitry--the communications, the appliances, the vehicles, the yard work and habits of cleanliness and order--that sustains our carbon-rich lives, the absence of charts, of an evident trajectory across the repetitions that structure each day, makes existence itself feel heavy, tenuous, puzzling.  Without a map to mark the way, questions about the meaning of life surface: "why am I doing what I am doing? Is it worth it? What am I building as we move from day to day?" Bare existence seems never enough.

And it isn't--not for anyone, and certainly not as a meaningful narrative about living. Elaboration is crucial. So too, a sense of direction. Somehow, always, we want the sense and unfolding self-evidence of the journey, even if that can only be played, on the one hand, as risk, and on the other, as retrospection.

Stars spangle the night sky and a thick dew settles over every surface. Sometime in the day to come, it will rain and we will sit indoors at our computers, writing, searching, replying, seeking contact, affirmation, revelation. But for now, to look out at the Milky Way just might be enough. The dog curls at my feet. I drink a glass of water and go back to bed.  

Grey light of early morning rises, blotting out the stars. I know that another night soon, I'll be up again to weigh the anchor of my soul, and find it wanting.

Carved cedar mortuary pole returns to the earth, K'uuna Llnagaay (Skedans), Haida Gwaii.

Notes

All photographs were taken in British Columbia during the course of a voyage to Haida Gwaii aboard Quoddy's Run (June 3-20 August 2017).

On feeling blue (reflections on insomnia and melancholy)

Every year around this time, I lose my steam. It's not just that the days are shorter and colder and the wind more cutting, although these things are surely factors in any sense of diminished purpose; it's not just that so many of the plans packed into the early days of the autumn semester, with freshly sharpened pencils, and as-yet unread books--yes, we will get through it all!-- have somehow been undone by circumstance and scaled-back ambitions--let's just make it to the end of term in one piece, without too many tears; it's not just the stacks of papers mounting, the endless marking, the fatigue of one-too-many committee meetings, or the necessity of getting the snow tires on, although these things do take their toll. It's not even the lists of things undone from the end of the summer, the unprocessed photos and sound and video files (some not even yet downloaded!) from our latest summer sailing, the fact that the floor of my home office is covered in stacks of papers I don't have time to file, and that there are still gaping holes in the wall where two years ago the carpenter banged out chunks so that we could observe whether the window frames were leaking water inside the walls; it's not the cupboard full of partially completed manuscripts, or the printer I need to fix so that we can print photos at home again; it's not even the six cords of wood recently dumped by the wood racks that we must get up off of the ground this week, despite the fact that I wrenched my back last Friday while stacking wood, and for much of this week, could hardly bend down to tie my shoes, or the fact that our beloved boat blew down this autumn and is wrecked beyond repair. These are in the end, just things, annoyances, labours to be completed (albeit sometimes Herculean), rendered more difficult by the fact that all I seem to want to do is to huddle by the fire or hibernate, and that for half the week at least, while I am in town at work, I do not live at home.

In the end, what gnaws at me and wakes me in the night is something other than all of these things.

At first, of course, the source of my insomnia masquerades as one or another item on my infernal lists--all with a sticky sort of power, so that one item gets enchained to another in an endless midnight series. I lie in bed and unfold the list, accordion pleat by accordion pleat, not forgetting to add old sins or invent new ones--it is as if I am, now and forever, reciting the terms of the Lutheran confession that framed my childhood days:
Most holy and merciful God,
we confess to you and to one another,
and before the whole company of heaven,
that we have sinned by our fault,
by our own fault,
by our own most grievous fault,
in thought, word, and deed,
by what we have done and by what we have left undone.

As I child, I had thought it terribly unjust that "things undone" (something of which I am forever guilty) somehow weighed as much as things wrongly done. My wakeful night time adult self however understands utterly the scale of my own worthlessness as measured in things "left undone." We never can come to account; life is lived in arrears these days--financial, temporal, social, familial: the holes are everywhere. Darkness comes and you tumble into it, with all of the lists of your dead.

For this is the crisis, in the end, not the wrestling with earthly tasks, but letting go of the dead, (autumn seems to bring so many). Finding joy and purpose without them. Lists of chores aren't enough to bring on a full-blown existential crisis (although throwing your back out and then adding to the lists of things to do might assist); what creeps around the edges of the duvet on these cold nights are the winds of mortality.

There are so many I miss, gone, like the winking out of starlight; and the longer I live, the more people and creatures there are to miss. Why are we built thus, "so that," as Rilke writes in his Eighth Duino Elegy,
no matter what we do, we are in the posture
of someone going away? Just as, upon
the furthest hill, which shows him his whole valley
one last time, he turns, stops, lingers---,
so we live here, forever taking leave.

In these middle of the night agonies, I am, perhaps, despite my own feelings of worthlessness, doing the poet's bidding, even perhaps, hearing my own calling...

In the Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke writes, 
Be ahead of all parting as though it already were
behind you...
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.

Impossible task. And yet, which other one could I choose?

After all, most of those things that I do and don't do on my to do lists don't add up to much: they are but preoccupations--not exactly what one must do for life to have had meaning, for it to have been enough.

Here's the odd thing: we wake and churn and turn about inside, but what feels like enough is never much and never within. It is the white flash of gulls' wings in the sun, or the far flung spangle of the milky way. It is a ray of sun on my cheek or the cat's purr; it is a friend's laughter, a lover's breath, the aching arc of a melodic line, the first frost etching patterns on the pond. It is the boom of a wave and the smell of sea spray, the burst of red juice from a ripe pomegranate or the flicker--now you see them, now you don't--of surviving deer slipping into the woods.

Indecision

Who, if not you,
ever made a ritual of cinders?

Who, if not you,
loved the lost, last hopeless fix?

Who, if not you,
will care for an absolute?

Who salvages a dead wreck's timber,
or refuses her own goodbye?

At night, in darkness, in the grief of flight
we travel, we keep watch, our bleak eyes unblinking, while

over that hill, our hopes are burning.
Who, if not you,

bites sleeping fire and ruined salt?
What is the value you give your dreams?

Who carries on,
detained by shadows, among trembling wings?

Who knows how long and far these faint hopes
will carry us?

Every night we lie in wait, our stony thoughts
clattering in the waves,

confused as to estates and territories,
the lost science of tears, those ship's ruins we love too much.

Italicized lines are taken from Neruda's "Sonata and Destruction" and rearranged. Photos are taken from the deck of Quoddy's Run in British Columbia, from behind Russell Island, and from Queen Charlotte Strait.

We continue, uncertain about what to do with our quite seriously damaged boat, which blew over at the Canoe Cove yard during a storm in late September. Part of the surveyor's report is in. It doesn't look good. While it would be wiser to cut and run perhaps, what would it mean to give up on our vessel, the dreams she provoked or the places she has taken us? This poem is for her--and for skipper extraordinaire, my co-insomniac, Marike Finlay.

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.

The Sound of Snow

Why do we wake when we do?

Up at 3:30 (not yet midnight
in Vancouver) my head full of
chores.

Sleet spatters
the windows
snow blankets
the yard our
black roof 
goes white.

Snow slickens decks,
sifts through 
bright cord and
stone-weighted
lobster traps.

The dog
goes on 
sleeping.

Everything 
is quiet,

and then 
the wind
arrives. 

By daybreak,
freezing rain.

 

Notes

Photographs were taken on the West Quoddy dock this morning in a sudden, freezing downpour. The vertical stacks continue my first efforts, a few days ago, to "tear space open," as photographer David Hilliard puts it. Too windy for a tripod, but perhaps wind blows through some discontinuities rendered here.

In English, the word sound is itself, a cacaphony.  It carries four distinct and major meanings: 1) health; 2) "strait of the sea;" 3) a noise; and 4) to measure a depth of water.  The first of these meanings, health, stems from the Anglo-Saxon word sund, (related to Gesund in German), while other meanings stem from other roots.  "Sound" as a "strait of the sea"--Desolation Sound, for example, in BC--apparently emerges from a different Anglo Saxon word sund, perhaps derived from swum, Anglo-Saxon for "to swim."  In this case, a sound is 1) a swimming; 2) the power to swim; and thus, 3) a strait of the sea that could be swum across. "Noise," perhaps the most typical contemporary use of the word sound, comes to us from French (son), via Latin (sonum), but is also linked, speculatively, to the Anglo-Saxon word swin, or melody. Finally, the use of sound as a verb--"to measure a depth of water"--also emerges from the French sonder, to test or measure the depth of water.  This usage (sondar in Spanish and Portuguese), is thought to come from a marriage, in Latin, between sub- (under) and undare (from unda, a wave). But lexicographers also note the following Anglo-Saxon words: sund-gyrd (sounding rod), sund line (sounding line) and sund rap (sounding rope). Throw me a life-line--I'm not swimming today!

This poem was built of "12 true things," which is to say, a dozen small observations.

Always Waiting

Waiting to be let in
waiting to be let out--
what difference does it make?

I am always waiting
(if I feign sleep don't
let that fool you).

I am the watcher
a being-awake
sleepless, standing ground,

so you may dream.     

Notes

The word "wait," as a substantive, first indicated a watchman, a sentinel, someone awake in the night, even a night musician. Traceable to an Old High German word, wahta, or watchman, guard, a "being awake," the word is also related to the Gothic wakan, to be awake.

The first photo is of my cat, Dante, peering through the window at the yard. The second photo was taken last week on Vernon Street in Halifax, a black cat waiting.

Who Doesn't Love the Night?

What...person...doesn't love...the light...the waking day?
              Novalis, Hymns to the Night

1 December 2010  5:19 am

It's the first of December and so I am up before dawn making lists. The moon has just risen, late; it hangs in the southeast above the sea, a narrow crescent surrounded by stars.  A planet--but which one?--glitters brightly above the horizon like a spaceship or satellite.  The water is silver, a reflecting pool of light, the sky dark, the islands darker still, black mounds hunched against the water.  Wind whistles and pushes at the north wall of the house, making the wooden beams creak.


The wood stove crackles. Zero degrees outside, just freezing.  Damp.  I huddle in my housecoat and slippers--have to make this quick, these lists, then toss more wood on the fire so I can slip back into bed, beneath the eiderdown and the purring cat.


It's been weeks since I've written anything but emails--and notes and suggestions in the margins of student papers.  I realize I'm enjoying the sensation of the pen traversing the page, the satisfaction when the words gather and shift, then click into place, sentence by sentence. 

I wonder why I can't do this more often.  Chores, it seems, get in the way--laundry, cooking, correcting.  

But this too: pleasure in walking or drowsing in the light or before the fire, those moments of animal comfort we steal from the run of things to do, in order to keep ourselves flaring and flaming despite the coming season of ice and winter nights.

   Must the morning always return?
                 Novalis, Hymns to the Night

8 December 2010

5:30 am and it's pitch black but for a streak in the sky to the southeast, a break in the clouds.
Rain pours from the gutter and drums over the roof.
The dog sleeps on the couch, wakes, sighs.
The fires have all gone out, so I light them again, make a cup of tea, begin my enumeration.
Chores for the coming day.

Someday, perhaps, I'll simply rise at this hour and begin the day.  But now, given the hours we keep, it is simply the middle of the night, the time when I wake long enough to sort out a dozen miniature dilemmas, small dramas, manic schemes--anything to keep them from sieving sleep some other night.

No one knocks on the door at this hour--no one from the outside that is--which is why I can finally hear my inner rattle, the scrabble against the walls, the turn just before the moments before the coming of the light.

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.

Early Morning Insomnia

I awaken before sunrise.

The loon calls.

Light streaks the clouds.

A young sparrow lands on the porch and hops about, curious, nervy, but not really afraid.

Juncos have eaten all of the ants that were infesting the porch beams.

Gulls cry out; the young whine.

Last night as the moon was rising, coyote pups began yipping and yowling; it sounded as if they were racing through the woods at the back of the pond.  Bathsheba was jumpy; they'd been pursuing something.  Dante, the cat, was still out, hiding out, but at around midnight she let me pluck her from her usual perch near the mailbox.  I kissed her and kissed her and kissed her and she slept at my side all night.

Here comes the sun, casting orange light into the shallows.

I wonder now if I can go back to sleep.

Grey water, pinkish light.

Why do we wake in the night?

 Why do we wake in the middle of the night?

Is it so we have space to ponder, in the shadows and quiet?  Sometimes I waken already filled up--those nights I make lists or weep, scribble or rant.

Sometimes I stand at the door in the dark and look at the stars.  Or when I'm in the city, I'll gaze out at the lights of the Irving station--24-hour gas and an all-night convenience store illuminate the night.  Sometimes I'm awakened by a siren; sometimes it's the sound of the furnace switching on, fire roaring, then the pipes clattering with steam.  Now and then I'm awakened by a cat jumping or the dog moving about and sighing.

But if I awaken, it's because I'm not really asleep.  I get up then, get my book and pen and make my lists.  Sometimes a poem comes.  Sometimes it's an essay or a plan for an image or video.  More rarely I'll take some photographs or sketch in the lamplight falling over my shoulder.

As the dawn comes I stoke the fire and creep back into bed.  I'll wake later, sleepy and baffled, mind befuddled, in no wise as clear as I'd been in the night.

I tend to wake more often when my days and weeks are filled up with tasks and others' concerns.  When I'm teaching for example.  When there's less time (if any) to think my own thoughts or plot my own projects.  I wake when I'm anxious, excited or frightened.  I wake to keep watch, but also to lose my sense of time.

Waking in the middle of the night?  It's a way of stealing hours from the light and greedy day.

Images
Beaver Harbour at Dusk from Nolan's Head, NS
Quoddy Bay at Night--brief clearing during a storm
Clock, Halifax