Against clarity (poem in praise of dirty windows)

 

Some bottles are not about the message, but a quality of light. 

Late afternoon :: December :: a dusty window :: a small dark room :: the pleasures of the camera's lens. 

On such a day, glass isn't what you see through, so much as what you see with: what throws the light back into your eyes.  

Be grateful then for dirty windows, for golden light, for winter :: that horizon of the present through which we cannot see.

Notes

Why write in praise of dirty windows? Because we are approaching the end of the year; consequently, from every media source, we are subjected to an unbearable stream of reviews, resolutions and prognostications.  Unlike reviews designed to help you learn from your mistakes, or real efforts to imagine another morrow, these lists of happenings and events to come are disingenuous, and anything but illuminating. They simply take up space, gagging the airwaves. Here's what I would prefer in these dark days: here and there, a spot of real light, something surprisingly lovely, one small thing, then another: never another list.

Post in praise of ice (did I just say that?) or an interval of time

Ice forms among the bulrushes (West Quoddy, NS)

I am forever startled by how quickly night falls as we approach December.  We are in full sunlight and then suddenly we are in darkness; the icy surface of the pond and the sea hold the light a little longer, but then they too must give it up. First the land goes dark, and then the islands; finally the water joins them, an inky pool, noisesome in the darkness.

I sit by the fire with the cat. She has taken up her odalisque pose on the bench beside me, both of us craving the warmth, letting it radiate into our bones. A high of zero degrees today; when Marike and I stepped into the light for a walk, it felt as if the north wind was squeezing my face, pinching my cheeks, thumping my forehead. It took several minutes to get used to it, to stop feeling as if I ought to turn around and huddle indoors. Underfoot, the crackle and shatter of puddles become brittle ice--all of the water of the last days' soakings transformed into glittering patterns in the ditches.

We finally remembered to shut the windows in the bedroom and the bath--I had to climb on the garage roof and then the oil tank and push while Marike ground the windows inward and locked them down; they are secured now for the winter. We dumped three buckets of ashes over the wall, and hung out and then brought in an icy load of laundry. In the interim, we walked around the headland, down to the water, then back again.

Today the chickadees were puffed up and greedy for seeds--one bird, the smallest one, sat repeatedly in my palm and crammed as many sunflower seeds as it could into its beak, perhaps four or five, before flying away to cache them in the trees. We startled a grouse or two, and one or two rabbits, their fawn colouring giving way to snow now--just this week white patches have begun to spread across their noses and up the backs of their legs.

Once I was out in the sun, despite the cold, I didn't want to come in. It was high tide when we set out, the beach underwater, so we picked our way along mossy deer paths in the forest to get from one cove to the next. Once in the lee of the wind, we stopped to sit with the sun on our faces, eyes closed, listening to the suck and drift of the water, to the almost silent fanning of the weeds at our feet.

Just here, like this, I said to Marike, and you can imagine that life on earth is truly good.

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.

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.

On Not Having One Without the Other

That's one pair. Here are others: no visible light without shade to frame its contours, no life worth living without the companionship of and consciousness of death, no love, as Vicki Hearne puts it in writing about animal training, "without teeth."

I am writing a poetic note here, one that would deserve philosophical elaboration. That too will come, given time enough. But soon.

For now I am musing on this line: "Horror stories are told to relieve the teller of the burden of judgment."  Also Vicki Hearne on dogs.  She seems, I'd say, utterly right.

How do you tell a hard story so as to put horror in its place, firmly, rather than running amuck in the world?
That will be my next job here.

Horror and cowardice.  They are also companion pieces.