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.

If you had wings

If you had wings, what would you do with them?

I would fly out to the ice edge and see who passes there, what the hooded mergansers fish.
I would watch snow melt in the sea.
I would fly to the hilltop and watch the sun rise over all 72 islands in the Baie des Isles.
The eagle and I would meet in an updraft and I would stare him down:
         my current, my space; I'm here: don't bother me now.
         Go find your own air.
That settled, I would carry on.

Notes
This poem, if it is a poem (perhaps it is a draft for a poem), emerged out of an exercise that I gave a writing class a couple of years ago; it is based on a poem entitled "Wings" by Susan Stewart. One of my favourite poems--up there with Neruda's Estravagario and his Book of Questions, Stewart's poem is an interview based upon the question, "if you could have wings would you want them?"  I changed the question slightly, and then, of course, had to try to answer it myself.

(For some English translations of some of Neruda's poems see http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Spanish/Neruda.htm)

Too Windy for the Birds

3 April 2013

Backlit clouds of morning blare.
Behind the huddled islands,
it's raining out to sea.

Silver spray flies
over dark and stunted trees--
too windy for the birds.

That rock in the bay looks like a boat again:
a fisherman bound home and

forever missing shore. 

Notes

I took these photos this morning, the view from inside looking out to sea, and then reflections of the clouds and water in the window, seen from the outside looking in.

I am enjoying the exercise of trying to write a (short!) poem each day.  It is a bit like labouring over a puzzle, although, for me--puzzles make me impatient--far more satisfying. For poetry is a habit of thinking, or perhaps of arranging, a way, like drawing, of resting here where I am for a time, and rendering what I see. Such rendering is never, in any medium, a simple act of description; it is always layered with memories and speculations, musing, fantasies, sorrow, bad jokes and snatches of dreams.

Find the poetry in every day: that could be an injunction to meditation or some sort of healing. For when I do this, the anxieties, the lists and preoccupations, the physical pains incurred in daily living drain away. And although I am touched by sorrow--today, meditating on several tales of ships lost at sea (the Miss Ally, for example, and the Bounty, as well as the man who drove off the ferry last week in Cape Breton; he and his car sank immediately, and then were inaccessible under the ice that drifted into the harbour)--I am also utterly joyful.  Here, in the act of making something while looking carefully at what is before me, is an acquaintance with rhythm, with precision, heart's pulse and peace.