How beautiful the snow blasted world

Snow falls quietly at twilight
gathering flakes whisper as they hit the window

How beautiful the snow blasted world. 

After dinner the snow stops falling and the dog and I go out to walk the territory. The moon glows faintly behind a scrim of clouds; clumps of snow cling to every branch and bush and the tops of the flattened grasses.  The apple trees thrust their branches at the sky like so many gnarled and knobby fists; there's a gaping hole where the barn door has blown off--better call for help to fix that one. 

We circle the gardens, step through the weeds to the pond's edge, where a fallen tree covered in snow casts strange shadows on the ice.  No footprints but ours anywhere to be seen. 

We walk along the dyke at the sea edge, each rose hip a huge ball of snow on a spindly branch. There's just enough wind that we can hear the water ripping and rushing into the shore and out again.

The wind is biting. It nips my cheek, hurries the dog to the door, slips through the stitching in my gloves to freeze my fingers. But I'm not ready to go in yet.

Clouds scud across the sky.  I look out over the grey water towards the islands, invisible in the darkness, then turn to scrape off the cars and clear the drive in front of the garage, savouring the sharpness of the air, stamping my feet to keep them warm.  Why must every pair of boots leak? Time to goop them up again.

I am remembering one night when I was about nine. The snow had been falling all evening. The streets were quiet and huge drifts covered the yard.  My siblings and I were sure that when our mother came into the room, she was going to tell us to get ready for bed. It's time, she said, pausing as we started to moan, then all in a rush--to get your coats on and go play in the snow! Shrieking with delight, we tumbled out into the darkness and the drifts, the world magical and thick with surprise and permission. 

It wasn't until I moved to Montreal and learned to cross-country ski twenty years after that--and more than twenty years ago--setting out across the fields of the Chateauguay Valley beneath a full moon, that falling snow occasioned such delight and anticipation again. But now it does.  

I watch the snow mount up higher and higher and hope the thermometer drops, rather than rises, so that I can ski across the bog, over top of the little lakes and streams, the sheepskill and the insect-eating pitcher plants onto the bushy ledges where the coyotes circle and sing.  There, I'll clamber up to a point where I can stand and look out at the sea rolling unimpeded over the horizon; from there, it rolls all the way to Spain. 

I can only ever get to that place on skis, when the bog is frozen and overlaid with deep snow.  How glorious it will be if that's what tomorrow brings.

Notes
Photos taken 3 January 2017 in West Quoddy, Nova Scotia

All the night flights to Europe

An array of contrails
overhead, like a child's
drawing of the sun. Here
where land and sea conmingle:
all the night flights to Europe.


Lately, because I have been reading them, I too have been trying to write some tankas, a 31-syllable form of Japanese "diary" or daily verse. Harryette Mullen, for example, in Urban Tumbleweed (2013), collects and reworks the contents of her "tanka diary," daily short poems, many built from observations made during walks in and around Los Angeles. Mullen invents her own three-line form of tanka, and here writes within the frame of what I would call "urban naturalism," an emerging genre, a space of metropolitan commonplaces readers tend to fall upon with rapture, recognizing just that sort of incident, or this view in Los Angeles, or a particular news item. Urban Tumbleweed seems an apt title, for the poems snag all sorts of detritus, and then pile up against odd walls, spaces you never thought to find them--and then also, at all of the usual fencerows and barriers--for example this one, all to familiar to so many African Americans:

"Visiting with us in Los Angeles, our friend
went out for a sunny walk, returned
with wrists bound, misapprehended by cops" (94).

Perhaps my favourite of Mullen's tankas is another visitor poem, but sweetly surprising, unbinding:

"My visitor from Nebraska buys
a sack of assorted seashells at a souvenir shop,
then scatters them along the beach" (22).

My own experiments with the genre have seemed far more leaden and fraught; like shot scattering, or an old bit of cotton cloth tearing suddenly in every direction, the words pull apart, leaving nothing. After weeks of trying I have just two or three poems, the one above, another half assembled, and this one, from early April:

Blue sea, bitter wind
snow foundering. New dog stands
in ditchwater, watches
chickadees pluck seeds
from our outstretched hands.

Who knew brevity could be so hard?

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.

Voice Memo. Night.

It is 4 in the morning.
You blink.
Now it is not any more. It is 4:12 or 4:14 or 4:16.
The present is always rolling away
like wind in the trees
like tears
like breath
like life.

Note
The photograph was taken at night, while anchored off of Nanaimo, BC.

The whales came again last night

The whales came again last night
bumping up against the hull, gurgling
at the through-holes, rocking gently rocking. Then
they began to sing--sounds of damp fingers
trailing mouths of goblets, slip-stick crystal music,
pure ethereal tones knitting voices in the night.

I dreamed we'd seen them singing, these after-
midnight whales; they were oddly jointed
giants, skins crayon-coloured in aquamarines
and rusty reds. In my dream
in the waking world, no one cared what
we had seen.  They went about their daily
lives, pumping gas and annotating
endnotes. But we had heard the whales sing.

Notes
Several times in the middle of the night, while we were on the boat in northern British Columbia last summer, we were wakened by a peculiar, ethereal singing, vibrating through the hull. It was often accompanied by a gentle rocking or bouncing in the water around us.  What we heard corresponds to no known whale songs, though portions of the pitch approach the songs of Southern Killer Whales, while the slow rhythms of what we heard resemble humpback songs,  albeit at a much higher pitch. I report on a dream I really did have here. We still do not know what creature we were hearing, but are profoundly attached to the idea that we've heard the whales singing. For more on that trip, see http://quoddysrun.wordpress.com/

Images are from Khutze Inlet, where we first heard the singing, and Bolin Bay, where we heard it again. The last image was taken not far from Malcolm Island, looking towards the mainland.

To hear recordings of various whale vocalizations, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_whale_vocalizations#Blue_Whale_.28Balaenoptera_musculus.29

Why do crystal glasses give off a sound when you rub them with a wet finger?  It has everything to do with vibration and what is called the "slip-stick" phenomenon. See http://www.ccmr.cornell.edu/education/ask/?quid=1143

Finally, just for the pure pleasure and virtuosity of it, see Brian Engel play Mozart's Adagio in C Major for Glass Armonica: http://vimeo.com/2073455

How to See in the Dark

Exercise: to see in the dark

Name some of the tongues that lick your ear
what the glass would see if it had eyes


where the flame leaps when it gutters
how the shadow lingers, draws a line


Note
See what the glass would see if it had eyes is a poetic imperative, a mode of thinking posed by George Oppen, who was a 20th century American poet, anti-militarist, sailor and, for a time, a cabinet-maker and expatriate in Mexico, where, as a one-time member of the Communist Party, he'd fled from persecution from the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities. He returned to the US and poetry later in his life; he maintained that writing poetry was a particularly acute form of phenomenological investigation.
A biography and links to some essays and poems may be found here:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/george-oppen#poet

See too, Forrest Gander, "Finding the Phenomenal Oppen."
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20761
and Peter Nicholls, "George Oppen in Exile: Mexico and Maritain." http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=6&fid=317818&jid=&volumeId=&issueId=01&aid=291582

Not Yet

We call Night the privation of relish in the appetite for all things.

 John of the Cross, quoted by Roland Barthes, Fragments d'un discours amoureux

She dreams of a soft boiled egg.

The inaudible tear the yellow flood the 

pouring tender not quite flesh on

crusty bread. The tang of cheese. Of

sourdough. Sharp scent of torn basil leaf. Creamy avocado

plucked from the tree that shatters its fruit

on the kitchen window.

Every possibility is in front of us then.

Every--

Thousands of days 
filled with sunshine. And the rushing 
sea.

And the wind, cool 
on the nape of the neck.

Strong coffee in the afternoon.

A girl in striped pants.  The sensation

of sand 

between 
your toes.

How can it be afternoon?

So soon blue 
.

She picks up her scarf.

Wait. 

Don't go.

Not yet.

(This can't go on. 
 This--)

Not yet.

They sit on a grassy hill by the side of the road.

Cliffs tumble to the sea.

She pulls a bottle from the hamper, 

breaks the crust of bread with her hands, her 
red lips black, the 
fading light.

Cool wind on the nape
of her neck.

She gathers her scarf.

(No. Who twisted 
you;

who

so that) I'll be leaving now

(who twists)

her posture

(someone is 
going

away)

Oh please, 
linger.

A thousand afternoons of light five

thousand ten:

twenty-eight years of days of

sand between your toes 

of cobble beaches and

(sucking sounds)  

rocks 
they tumble 

(what we call night

what we call)

endless oncoming 

(relish
what we call)

waves 

Here is my scallop bed,

here is my island.

Come

dive with me.

We paddle to the island; we 
stand in shallow water; we pluck

scallops, sucking out

flesh

(the inaudible tear the sudden 
flood the

pouring) 

salt bathes 
her tongue,

the afternoon shimmers
glimmers, tumbles--

oh,

the failing

light. 

Wait.

Don't (who has

who has
twisted
you around like

who has
)

Don't. Not yet. Not

(who

so that in part-

ing

)

While there is still 

light (while those,  
le

stelle) while those

stars still shine

still (lucevan

)

into 

night

She 

shines (seashells) she turns
(on the seashore) she 
stops (seashells) she 
lingers

she (seashells)

winds her scarf

she sings

(le 

stelle) in
her sleep

Notes
Quotations are distortions of phrases from:
St. John of the Cross via Roland Barthes, Fragments d'un discours amoureux
Rilke's Eighth Duino Elegy, trans. Stephen Mitchell in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, (New York: Vintage: 1984), 197 and
 Puccini, E lucevan le stelle, sung by Beniamino Gigli, 1938


Photos are from this album: "Taylor Head Barachois," http://www.flickr.com/photos/karincope/sets/72157629294954786/


This poem was my response to an exercise I set my Strategic Fictions class.  We read--and looked at--various love stories as models for our own writing.  I asked them to think about the following questions:


Why, when we think of love and writing, do we so often think of poetry?  Is it because poetry is a kind of writing where not simply each word, but each beat, each syllable, each space and line break count?  Poetry (and love) both call for precision it seems—and sometimes, though not always, an economy of gesture.  But perhaps we think of poetry and love together too, because what we wish of each is a delightful surprise of the ear.  And what do we reap? Often, too often, dissonance, boredom, waiting, rhythms utterly out of step…We also tend to repeat clichés, and others’ words, over and over. Is there a way, nevertheless, to make such suspensions, such repetitions, work?


I do not know if I have succeeded. But as I tell my students, what is most important is to try.