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.

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

Tea steeped sunrise (inventing a flock of lunes)

Just before

dawn, rain. The peepers

stop singing.

Wan light seeps

through the window, shakes

me awake.

Cold air on

my toes. I toss logs

on the fire,

open blinds, set

water to boil. Tea

steeped sunrise,

loon calling.

How do they know how

soon the rain?

Notes: (inventing a flock of lunes) 

Anyone who knows much about loons, the birds, as opposed to lunes, the poetic form (more on that in a moment), knows that loons rarely flock; they tend to appear as loners. Still, we have sometimes seen them gather on the open water off of Quoddy, out among the islands, as the seals do. And in the summer now and then, we hear them playing call and response with the coyotes on the hill. The lune, on the other hand, a poetic form also known as "American Haiku," can be multiplied and assembled in what poet Craig Santos Perez calls "flocks of lunes." He stretches his out sideways, as if in flight; my lunes, on the other hand, float, as if isolated on the water, rather more like loons.  Here, in Nova Scotia, it is said that the loons' cries predict a change in weather: rain, or the end of rain. 

Typically, lunes come in two forms. One, invented by the poet Robert Kelly, consists of a 13 syllable verse, divided into three lines thus: 5 syllables/ 3 syllables/ 5 syllables. The other form, invented by poet Jack Collum, is composed of 13 words, divided similarly into three lines: 3 words/ 5 words/ 3 words.  While lying awake two nights ago, and thinking about Craig Santos Perez's flocks of lunes, (which work on the Kelly syllable system), I began to compose the poem above in my head. Perhaps because it was the middle of the night, I scrambled the organization of the syllables, and composed instead according to a schema that runs 3 syllables/ 5 syllables/ 3 syllables. When I realized my error, I tried out a number of revisions, but in the end, preferred the simplicity and spareness that my stripped down version of the lune gave me. Who says mistakes aren't generative? And why can't we invent novel forms of lunes? What is poetry for, if not such small, but sublime, pleasures?

Image note: The photograph is of the view from my front windows, overlooking West Quoddy Bay.

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.

A loon, a wolf, the loneliest sound

Why does the cry of a loon affect us so? Why does a wolf's howl, even while it raises hairs on the back of your neck, curl into your heart, slide into your bones and organs and resonate, as if an extension of your own loneliest wail?  Do such cries seem metaphors for our sense of aloneness because we tend to hear them, if we do, in isolated wilderness locations--a cold wind blowing across the water, no one else in sight? Or is there some other reason for the way these calls seem to vibrate in your chest and threaten to carry you away?

This summer, while sailing in Alaska, I began to read a thoughtful, beautiful book entitled The Pine Island Paradox, having met its author, environmental philosopher, Kathleen Dean Moore, in the bathhouse at Tenakee Springs, on Chichagof Island.  Two weeks earlier, I had been listening to and attempting to record the sounds of wolves howling back and forth across a great distance, so I was struck to find Dean Moore had a musical name for the particular haunting quality of a wolf's cry. She writes:

"I [know] the song the wolf [sings]. The first two tones [make] an augmented fourth, a dissonant interval, like the first two notes of 'Maria' in Westside Story. It's an interval of yearning, of hope--the sound of human longing."

Dean Moore writes about going to consult with a colleague who was a musician, a concert pianist. As they are speaking about this sound, her colleague makes a gesture: "both hands together in front of her body, palms skyward, fingers spread, [lifting] the air...'This is a sound that floods the soul,' she said."

Dean Moore recounts something else that her pianist colleague has told her, that in medieval Europe Christians did not sing the augmented fourth. It was considered the "diabolus in musica, the devil's chord--so powerful it could grab a parishioner, drag him to his knees and pull him, scraping on the paving stones, straight to hell."

A wolf's cry feels like this, and so does a loon's. Not the devil's music, but an utterly sorrowful heart-wrenching soul sound; it sings the anxiety of our lonesomeness at the same time as it can fill us with wonder or joy, even peace. Perhaps this is because we live in a time of great dissonance (although we might ask, which time is not?): we prefer the incompletion, the break of the augmented fourth to the harmonic fifth.

The augmented fourth somehow says, without you, I am nowhere, which is, often enough, how existing feels. It is the question posed by Rilke's First Duino Elegy: "If I cry out, who among the company of angels will hear me?"

It is the wail, addressed to the world in the absence of another beside you, of brokenness, of coming undone: myself, I am never enough; I will never add up to anything on my own.

Photo of the loon was taken in northern British Columbia, near Grenville Channel.