Photograph

She wants a picture, but
when we meet she
flees. I clutch at air, at
bone or shadow and flare of light.
Heart's rattle, eye crease, pink
acrylic streak. Dust motes at
the window.  She slips into 
a sunlit draft. Stillness. The shutter
clatters. Don't look.  How then
can I--?       Shots 
frame the afternoon. At
lunch her slender finger taps
the knife edge (gesture not
pressure please understand).
Sometimes I'd like to 
[finger tapping].       O
don't. Blood pools another
letter, another sort of
shutter.

Notes
We're packing today for a summer on the boat. Tomorrow, early, we fly to British Columbia. Soon we'll be headed for Alaska. Here, in Nova Scotia, it is pouring rain. The ceiling leaks again.  Where to find a poem in all the stacks and piles of clothing, packets of dried peppers, oil filters, piles of sketchbooks and rolls of brushes? (Now that I write the list, I see a poem might be found there. Tomorrow perhaps.)  I recalled a poem I'd drafted in April two years ago, while on the boat in Mexico, but never completed, about a portrait commission with a reluctant subject. Or perhaps I was a too hesitant photographer; I didn't know how to draw her out. This is that poem, recomposed and completed from my notes of 23 April 2011. Sometimes those old journals and sketchbooks are pretty handy. (Quick, copy this one, before you leave it behind!)

Photos are of coltsfoot blooming from dead leaves (the first flower, if you can call it that) and broken bits of wharf and barn in West Quoddy and Beaver Harbour.

Blue odour of iodine

Strange and complicated morning. A skim of ice
calms the sea; sudden colour scours your eyes.
Bright light white heat flood the house. 
Throw open the windows! Fling wide the door!
Flash of kingfisher wing and peaked blue crest
(you're back! we're so glad to see you!). Sparrows sing.

Scent of---    open water. Salt, of course. Blue
odour of iodine, knotted rotting bladderwrack,
sunwarmed grey stone steeped in cold mud:
each element bound to its proximate. Life
on the strand, lived at an edge, wind-tumbled,
cloud-driven. Unstable. Chance-riven.
What peculiar mercy makes us forget that
with heat, comes fog?

Notes
I am thinking of Boston this morning, and the two explosions at the marathon finish line yesterday. (Who in North America isn't riveted and horrified by such wreckage of runners and their families and friends?) But to write a poem about that seems impossible.  I judged a poetry competition once not long after 9/11, and the poems that commemorated that event were, without exception, awful. Mawkish versions of catastrophe miniaturized in dancing rhyme. An occasion for falling flat on your face, poetically speaking.  Still, as I finished this poem I realized something about yesterday's news was working me--that what one finds at the edge of a sudden change is not a clash of civilisations (that appalling phrase and idea authored by Samuel Huntington), but one thing slowly shifting into another, "each element bound to its proximate." And this too, of course: what draws us--heat, say, or celebratory events full of oblivious affluence, also draws other things we think we love far less, like fog--or anger and targeted destruction. We forget at our own peril our own angers, our own targets, how closely interleaved rage and righteousness are.

Pictures, more land-weaves and tumbling structures, natural and not, taken on Nova Scotia's Eastern Shore.

Nothing lasts

12 April 2013

Bare branches sweep the sky
sunlight scatters shadow
the radio speaks of snow

Yellow coltsfoot splits a stone
blasted wood slivers, rots
nothing stays, nothing lasts

not 
this cold, not 
this wind, not
that streak of cloud.   

Notes

Photos were taken in Beaver Harbour and Port Dufferin today, before the clouds moved in. The overnight forecast is for 15 centimeters of snow.