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.

Supper or wisdom (spring poem)

The days warm in minor increments now
rain hisses on the pavement, spatters darkened windows,
runs through the gutters at night.

By day I dream I walk through the park,
sit for a moment, my face turned
toward the sun.

In my dream I remember how
last autumn I sat there,
in that red chair

(said as if I were pointing)
rereading Plato's Symposium, city
buses coughing exhaust on my feet.

Were the birds singing?
I don't recall.
Just the clamour of voices

arguing supper or wisdom, and really
who cares? We go on forever
searching for both.


Notes:

Another "found" draft poem, scribbled out and hidden in my journal, this one dated 2 May 2016.

The photograph of the armchair was not taken in any park, of course, but in the Shelter Island Boat Yard in Richmond, BC in July 2014. Where had it come from? Who knows? But there it was, incongruous, settled in the shade of an old wooden trawler.

One horizon always hides another

I am speaking to my parents on Christmas day. It is unseasonably warm across much of the continent; storms brew over southern coasts.  My father wants my mother to tell me a story.  My mother has had a bad cold; such heat makes everyone sick my father says. And so my mother begins.  At the farmer's market she met an elderly African American woman.  They chewed over the weather, as everyone does, and how many were ill.  The woman told her how her grandmother used to say that a green winter brings many more stones to the graveyard. We hold this line as if it were a stone; we run it in and out of our mouths; we keep it, not as solace, but sooth, a telling insight.

One horizon always hides another--this too is not my line, but Kim Thuy's, from Ru. I like it because it reminds me of another, the title and key insight of a Kenneth Koch poem: One Train May Hide Another, a title inspired by a sign at a railroad crossing. Wise words from a fellow Ohioan at the cusp of the new year, when rain obscures our sense of winter, and passing events hide the days to come, the approaching trains we cannot yet see.  In his poem Koch advises watching, stillness, patience--good to remember on those days in between, when it sometimes feels as if nothing is happening:

It can be important
To have waited at least a moment to see what was already there.

The full poem below. 

One Train May Hide Another

Kenneth Koch, 1925 - 2002

(sign at a railroad crossing in Kenya)

In a poem, one line may hide another line,
As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.
That is, if you are waiting to cross
The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at
Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read
Wait until you have read the next line--
Then it is safe to go on reading.
In a family one sister may conceal another,
So, when you are courting, it’s best to have them all in view
Otherwise in coming to find one you may love another.
One father or one brother may hide the man,
If you are a woman, whom you have been waiting to love.
So always standing in front of something the other
As words stand in front of objects, feelings, and ideas.
One wish may hide another. And one person’s reputation may hide
The reputation of another. One dog may conceal another
On a lawn, so if you escape the first one you’re not necessarily safe;
One lilac may hide another and then a lot of lilacs and on the Appia
     Antica one tomb
May hide a number of other tombs. In love, one reproach may hide another,
One small complaint may hide a great one.
One injustice may hide another--one colonial may hide another,
One blaring red uniform another, and another, a whole column. One bath
     may hide another bath
As when, after bathing, one walks out into the rain.
One idea may hide another: Life is simple
Hide Life is incredibly complex, as in the prose of Gertrude Stein
One sentence hides another and is another as well. And in the laboratory
One invention may hide another invention,
One evening may hide another, one shadow, a nest of shadows.
One dark red, or one blue, or one purple--this is a painting
By someone after Matisse. One waits at the tracks until they pass,
These hidden doubles or, sometimes, likenesses. One identical twin
May hide the other. And there may be even more in there! The obstetrician
Gazes at the Valley of the Var. We used to live there, my wife and I, but
One life hid another life. And now she is gone and I am here.
A vivacious mother hides a gawky daughter. The daughter hides
Her own vivacious daughter in turn. They are in
A railway station and the daughter is holding a bag
Bigger than her mother’s bag and successfully hides it.
In offering to pick up the daughter’s bag one finds oneself confronted by
     the mother’s
And has to carry that one, too. So one hitchhiker
May deliberately hide another and one cup of coffee
Another, too, until one is over-excited. One love may hide another love
     or the same love
As when “I love you” suddenly rings false and one discovers
The better love lingering behind, as when “I’m full of doubts”
Hides “I’m certain about something and it is that”
And one dream may hide another as is well known, always, too. In the
     Garden of Eden
Adam and Eve may hide the real Adam and Eve.
Jerusalem may hide another Jerusalem.
When you come to something, stop to let it pass
So you can see what else is there. At home, no matter where,
Internal tracks pose dangers, too: one memory
Certainly hides another, that being what memory is all about,
The eternal reverse succession of contemplated entities. Reading 
    A Sentimental Journey look around
When you have finished, for Tristram Shandy, to see
If it is standing there, it should be, stronger
And more profound and theretofore hidden as Santa Maria Maggiore
May be hidden by similar churches inside Rome. One sidewalk
May hide another, as when you’re asleep there, and
One song hide another song; a pounding upstairs
Hide the beating of drums. One friend may hide another, you sit at the
     foot of a tree
With one and when you get up to leave there is another
Whom you’d have preferred to talk to all along. One teacher,
One doctor, one ecstasy, one illness, one woman, one man
May hide another. Pause to let the first one pass.
You think, Now it is safe to cross and you are hit by the next one. It 
     can be important
To have waited at least a moment to see what was already there.

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.

Lost objects

Suppose, instead of finding yourself, you were to take as a goal to lose yourself, to wander, to immerse yourself, to get lost? 

Losing things is easy; really getting lost in a familiar space, if you are not already, can be harder than it seems. Let me be clear: I don't mean you should set out to lose your place in the world--that's painfully, mournfully easy.  All it takes is a slip in memory, an argument, a falling out of love, death. Although perhaps the line between these two sorts of loss isn't as stark as I would wish.

Here now, I've barely gotten started, and already I'm tangled up. Let me begin again, and unravel my theme as if we were going on a walk and the path was opening at our feet.

Long ago, I had a friend with whom I played this game: we set out, on foot or in her car, and wandered aimlessly, without a map. The point was to get lost if we could, to baffle ourselves, to have a hard time making out way back home to our apartments, our respective partners, our schoolwork.

We took lostness as a sort of holiday, or tried to. But getting truly lost in a small city you know well, bounded on one side by the water, with familiar hills rising in the distance--this is not so simple. Not to know the name of the road you traveled on, or where it led was one thing, but was that really being lost? Not to be able to pick your way back, to be stumped or puzzled, panicked even--that was something we never really experienced on our little voyages.  Not then anyway. 

Of course, we had each other and we had time--or rather, we took it, along with a longing for adventure in weeks seamed with obligations and deadlines. Every time we set out, we circled back, unwittingly, and were surprised to find ourselves on familiar streets.

Once we set out just after a rainstorm. The gutters were charged with water, each street a roaring stream. It was summer; the leaves drained water on our heads. Just before dusk we came across a trunk set out along the curb. We opened it. Inside: notebook and a small woman's garments. Handwriting in Chinese.

We kept the trunk. My friend's husband, who was ethical and meticulous in this way, tried to find the owner, but whoever had packed this trunk really was lost--to us anyway. After awhile, we scattered the trunk's contents.  I do not know what happened to the notebooks, but I took and sometimes wore one of the garments, a long high-collared sleeveless red silk brocaded vest; it buttoned over my chest and fell all the way to my feet. 

I left it later at a girlfriend's house in New York. We'd gotten into a bitter fight and I fled for Canada with most of my stuff, leaving just the cape folded on the shelf, as if I were a snake, shucking a past skin, a past life.  Who knows, perhaps that's how the red vest came to me. It was, surely, an immigrant object.

Now, more than twenty years later, I have no idea where it is, or who has it, or where it's traveled, if anywhere. Perhaps it's in a landfill, its silk threads rotting, the red dye leaching, slowly entering the earth and groundwater. 

Or perhaps someone else wears it, and dances in the night, hair wild, vest trailing behind her, as I did. My friend with whom I tried to get lost? I do not know where she is either.

Notes
The red silk window-covering was hung by Gary Markle.
Windows were photographed in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, in December 2014.

Running out into the rain: Remembering Bill Readings (1960-1994)

It has been twenty years since my friend Bill Readings died in an iced-up airplane that plummeted to earth in an Indiana soybean field. Twenty years since a phone call that Halloween night cancelled dinner plans, and turned our Montreal party into mourning. Twenty years since the world changed.

Twenty years is a lifetime, and no time at all. Enormous sorrow, but also every subsequent gift seems to flow from that catastrophic event; the finality of it has figured, one way or another in most of the major moves of my adult life, from the onset of an acute depression, to quitting my job, and an eventual recovery by and on the sea. I can trace back to that accident the fact that I've built an unusual but deeply rooted and sustaining family life, here, at the edge of my adopted country. I do not know if I would be a storyteller now, one who makes things with others, if that event had not interrupted the narrowing focus of my academic life and career, and derailed them. Now my life is filled with teaching, sure, but also with shared days and nights, fresh air, clouds or stars, frogs and owls, cats, dogs, poems, photographs, sailboats, sketches, videos, voyages, berry crisps, time to love, time to breathe, and walks with chickadees, who flutter by to feed from our hands.

Bill, I do not know if I would have had the courage to make those changes without the fact of your death before me, the stupidity of it, in a plane that had already been designated a "grave," on the return leg of an international academic commute, when what is routine turns suddenly deadly, and no fragment of you is ever recovered. How peculiar still to be thus suspended: we prepare for a meal to which you never arrive.

At first we waited. We thought you'd change your mind, come back from the dead. We thought we'd sit in your kitchen again while you pulled espressos and steamed milk from that machine that made you so proud, a salvaged restaurant-grade cappuccino machine you'd had plumbed in beside your kitchen sink. We thought we'd gather around your big glass table again, and drink and argue and eat exquisite meals (risotto with black truffles, seared squid, perfect greens), listen to tango, talk about politics and soccer, you with your slow deliberate French--your third or fourth language--carving enough room for all of us, no matter what or how we spoke. We thought we'd hear your reliable advice again, your homespun scholarly wisdom: the best way to pull down a grant, plan a trip, bend back the pages of a book so that it looked as if you'd read it.  You were expert at the rhetorics of the university, but you never let them master your zest for living. Until you died.

I remember one late meal on a cool fall night. Your house was full of visiting artists and scholars. One from Japan, two from Brazil, a friend from Switzerland, where you'd once taught, a scattering of friends from Montreal. I'd helped you cook dinner. You were telling stories about the first time you'd come to North America, on an open ticket that let you fly around the world. For a moment you were sober: I've taken so many flights in my life, you said, that sometimes I wonder if I've flown my number.

We all shouted you down: no, don't be silly! You're joking, right?

Two weeks later you were dead. And your comment haunted all of us who were there.

Would you have gone anyway if you had known how it would end? I know you hadn't planned to die; you'd come to see me just before you left. I'm sorry I can't stay longer, you'd said, but I'll be back next week. You were worried about your recent weight gain; we'd made a date to repot some houseplants, and to talk about something serious,  but what that was I no longer remember. How to survive the pressures of a long-distance relationship? Perhaps. Both of us had partners in the US and insanely large phone bills; we knew and shared those vicissitudes, the miscommunications and the loneliness of long-distance loves.

I remember one of the last nights I saw you. As I prepared to go and you hugged me goodbye, you clung to me, tearing, as if I were a life raft.

But that's what you had been--and continue to be in some respects--for me: the one who saved me from drowning, even as the storm of year death nearly sank me. Surviving that and the storms that have followed it have taught me what I know about strength and weakness, sadness and joy, living while and as you can.

Sometimes I still think I see you, tall form striding down a damp autumn street in your lemon yellow raincoat. You emerge from the crowd then slip back into it: ghost, old friend, guardian angel. Choose how you want to live, I hear you say; don't simply withstand. Reach out if you're unhappy; do something. Raincoats are so you'll run out into the rain.

I still miss you Bill; I always will. But now I'm putting on my coat and going out into the rain.

Notes
The first two pictures are copies of photos taken in 1994--of Bill's last birthday party, on a ski holiday with his wife, Diane Elam, and friends Annie and Carolyn, as well as me and my partner then, Kristin Bergen.

The last photo is from a collage of images of an early snowstorm in La Fontaine Park, which was near my house in Montreal.

Security. Lockdown.

If it rains enough you forget how it was before the rain.

You think it will never not rain.

It rains all day Wednesday, and then all night, the wind stacking waves, their tops curling, breaking white, throwing spray over every reef.  

Hard in this wind to hold the car door open: it slams on her cheek, leaves a cut, a blossoming bruise. The steps at school are slippery; the heel of my shoe keeps falling off. I press the nails back in place, but what I really need is glue.

What's it like out there? someone asks as I blow in on Thursday just before 11, rain in my hair.

Wet, I say, shaking my head. Windy. Not too cold.

No, I mean, she says, were the police out there? Someone said the square was full of police. 

I didn't see that. 

She tells me a story. Earlier this morning, just three blocks away, a man was spotted on the street carrying a gun wrapped in a blanket. The police have been searching for him. Then word came that they had caught him, right here, next door. But some people are claiming there were two people with guns, and the one they've caught isn't the one who was walking down the street earlier.

Here we go, we say, rolling our eyes. After the shootings on Parliament Hill yesterday, the whole country's gone crazy. Everyone turning paranoid. Turning American. One mentally ill too often homeless Libyan-Canadian kills a soldier, rushes Parliament with a long gun, and is killed, and all anyone wants to talk about is terrorism. International threats. Security. No one wants to discuss domestic problems, gun control, poverty, racism, or mental illness. These deaths are a warrant for war, not a mental health strategy.

We imagine what implement the guy sighted in Halifax might have been carrying: a pool cue, a roll of sketches, a bassoon.  Or perhaps he was a reenactor, headed for the latest costume drama on Citidel Hill, and stupid enough to carry his cardboard rifle on the street. Out of the rain, under a blanket.

I head to my office; a day full of meetings unspools.

Government offices are on lockdown. So are the banks. A nearby high school. No one may enter, even later, even long afterwards, after a young man who had run from a city bus and left behind his weapons was arrested and taken into custody.

In Halifax, no official says anything about terrorism. Nor do they mention mental illness. Instead, the doors remain locked, public offices closed to citizens, a gesture that speaks volumes. Today we are dangerous; today in our raincoats we might be a threat; today we cannot enter the archives to look at some photographs hanging there. Openness is risky.

Didn't you hear, another friend quips, today is International Long Gun Holiday? And then he apologizes: I'm sorry; that was in bad taste.

We drive home through the rain and the falling leaves. Once home, we remember to lock the doors. 

As if what is out there is sure to be more harmful than what lies within.

Notes

On the shootings in Ottawa: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ottawa-attack-5-questions-about-the-shootings-on-parliament-hill-1.2809703

On gunmen in Halifax: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/halifax-police-arrest-man-recover-firearm-on-city-bus-1.2810019

Pictures were taken in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia on 23 October 2014.

You'll be added at this scourge

 

Waiting out a fire but oh, what lightness it brings!

Working on an example (hurry up and)--

First entry. Going quickly in Aug 2008.

Go to shrink already.

Now waiting for a drive--

we wanted Philly, thunderstorms and you--

What sounds of my arm?

What makes us again and/ only liquor?

The house filled with dogs and girth, 

so we survived.

Instructions for the smaller trees didn't thrive until

(in the boat

impending snow).

Yes, this afternoon.

History

(that compulsive habit),

some window into,

where a chain of used to be. 

 

  

Now of course nicely waited

I'd warmed dinner & we were looking

(good for lobsters, good for sea)

Don't you think

all's well?  We can't wait;

doing extensive repairs and sailing.

How close to horde quarters for shower and quiet?

That has its virtues--getting the laundry flapping.

Exactly. Weird tides is all.

With eucalyptus oil.

We made the cake to see this story?

This blurry zone, this loosened, fallen state?

My mind was missing.

We made the New Year ahead of me.

 

What did you?

#24 It's a rainy night (this was delicious, too).

How great is perfumed.

We had a happy stroll in the year here

(aw shucks guys, thanks so much for

cloud cover).

Now I long for sunlight, for blue sky, and for

love right back to a sabbatical and yes

lettuce,

still, enough, to feel sharp & happy!

It's up and back yesterday

the water is very far.

Did we feel as clear as spies in the garage?

(I'm home!)

Bring it in the new front window. Rain.

You'll be added at this scourge--

breakfast on the windowsills, waves shooting up

Funny, that's how far out to sea?

 

Phrases in this piece were generated by the Karinbot in What Would I Say, a program developed by a group of graduate students at the Princeton Hackathon last weekend.  Designed to pick up and regurgitate randomized bits of one's facebook posts, What Would I Say indexes one's major preoccupations--mine, unsurprisingly, include rain, the boat, the sea, food, psychology and politics. To develop this poem, I used What Would I Say to generate approximately 40 "posts," which I then stripped of excess verbiage and political content, and ordered (more or less as they emerged) in these conversational couplets. To try this program yourself, go to http://what-would-i-say.com/
 

For more information on the What Would I Say phenomenon, see Ian Crouch's New Yorker post: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/11/the-story-behind-what-would-i-say.html

Photos are from my archives; they were taken in 2009 or 2010 in West Quoddy, Halifax, Spry Bay and Mexico.

Waiting

Waiting.
When will your letter arrive?

In Desolation Sound (Bathsheba's Poem)

Sharp rattle of relief:
rain patters in a dry place, gives a sense
of letting go.  --Or sudden terror:
the sodden suck, the lack of
air, as if you're drowning.
Too much, too soon, a flood
of missing: blasted. Echoless. O grief.

Rain drums against taut canvas
sighs joy and lamentation, signs
pinpricks heart's ease fur furrows ear flaps dog's paws
sings the scent of grass upon her feet.

We tumble into fog into
seal's slap and wolfish wail, blind
to what they see or know. So near,
so far; too late to bring you home.

Teakerne Arm, 14 August 2013

Bathsheba b. 16 August 2002 d. 12 August 2013

Photos are of Bathsheba swimming at Psyche Beach, Taylor's Head Provincial Park, Nova Scotia, one of her favourite places on earth.

Bathsheba suffered the rupture of a bloody tumor in her lungs on August 12 and had to be put down....just days before we got home to be with her. We are very very sad. Don't really believe we will return to a dog-empty house. Life. Feel....remiss. Lost. Missing. Enormous thanks to our friend Paulette, who loved Sheba profoundly, and was with her at the end.

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.

Spring is the slowest season

8 April 2013

Nights I listen
for the peepers. They have
not wakened yet.

But sparrows sing and
robins peck at hardened earth: 
rime of ice on stone.

Cold wind, colder sea:
spring is the slowest season.
Thick clouds disgorge rain.    

Notes
Photographs were taken at Taylors Head Park, on Psyche Beach. They are part of a series I am calling "Landweaves"--found knittings of various sorts.  For more images of this sort, see http://pinterest.com/karincope/landweaves/  

You Can Call It Spring If You Want To

Nova Scotia 1 April 2013

March blusters,
shoves about its blocks of ice and melt and
sudden drifts of snow.

Now: mud and
seeping colour, blinding light,
rain.

Black ducks sleep at the rim of the pond.
Geese startle and

rise up honking.
Scent of earth, of
rotting kelp.

Fog wraiths
silently
through the trees, slips
cove to cove, as if by stealth.

I hear it coming:

before the stars disappear,
the Beaver Light blares.

NOTES
My photographs span the month of March on the Eastern Shore in Nova Scotia.

It's National Poetry Writing Month in the US, and I'm going to take that as an excuse to post more poems, more often. This one was, in fact, written today, no April foolin'. To join a poem-a-day challenge this month, check out this site: http://www.napowrimo.net/

And for inspiration, try this on: Ellis Avery has written a haiku a day for 14 years! She gives an account of that project, and the history of the form in a beautiful and inspiring article here: http://www.themillions.com/2013/03/21st-century-butterfly-19th-century-net-fourteen-years-in-haiku.html