How rocks age

for Marie-Therese

Rocks birth and break like we do;
anaclitic, unbalanced,
each tumbles from another in sudden parturition.
Pressed into form
by torsion or catastrophe,
the shattering goes on.
Ice shears them, cracks
new lines, peels and reveals new
facings. Rivulets run through
them, gash deep canyons, drill
troughs and holes and secret
caves where darkness flies and
echoes. Steady dripping wears them down, they
fracture, hole and pebble, crumble into sand.

Note
Photos were taken in West Quoddy and at Taylors Head Provincial Park.

A poem about

"Can we put in orders, can we be patrons? 
I would like a poem about--
where was the line I
crossed but didn't notice? Your 
first botany notebook.  
Hot taste of homemade raspberry 
pie; picking berries in the
summer sun. How 
rocks get old. The hum
ming of Glenn Gould. World in
black and white. Molecules of 
chocolate.
Do we all have a wall of 
prayer? Where?"

Notes
These lines adapted from a letter from my friend and demonic patron saint, Marie-Therese Blanc. I will answer her orders. Somehow. In the days to come. I am grateful for them, and all of the strange dreams they invite. But first, her requests seemed to me to constitute a poem themselves, so here they are.

Images were taken on the West Quoddy dock yesterday; lobster season opens soon.

The Solace of Colour

Grief. And Grace. II

After Linus died, and the bees came--and the wind, pinning us into one harbour after another--I began to dream in colour.  Marike and I would pack a lunch, bottles of water and gatorade, our swimsuits and snorkeling gear, and paper, brushes and boxes of paint, and head to shore.  We walked, swam, looked out to sea, and painted.  What mattered, to me anyway, was not so much the quality of the final product, but the fact of making something, the layering of colour, like a laying on of hands in our hearts.  Not healing exactly, but solar solace, a bouncing of light beams, a rendering of the world which rent us, at once awful and beautiful and more vast than we could tell.

Broken rocks for broken hearts.

 
Images
Watercolour sketches, San Juanico, BCS, Mexico, 18 March 2010

Low Tide (which is to say, full moon)