Today I will different

After a summer on the boat away from my desk and the internet, save speedy incursions into my email boxes from laundromats equipped with wifi, I've stockpiled quite a bit of work. I thought of back-dating and posting it all, but the organizational effort involved in that exercise of documentary fiction--"as if" I really were here, posting chronologically, all summer--made me miserable and hopeless. I felt as if I'd never be caught up. Add to that, the commencement of a new teaching semester, and I began to feel overwhelmed. Until some part of me--the better part of me--rebelled. Why begin a new term in arrears? Why not simply begin today, and see what happens? Sudden relief, as if I could breathe again.

Today's poem then, another sonnet (something about this form is haunting me, and bit by bit, creating its own shape), thematically apt.

You wake, you say
today will be different, today
I will do what I do what I must what I will
today I will      efficient      today
tasks completed     today    organized   today
desk in order.
Today I will   different.
Do today as if some one other
un-waylaid by wind or whim or
        : this is the song you sing when you're dancing with a ghost
when samba flings your solar plexus when
deepstep come shining across
your painted sill  waves at your feet suck
sand to sea  beckon you to swim.

Notes

Italicized lines quote Alice Notley (the song you sing) from Benediction (2000)--the version found in her Grave of Light: New and Selected Poetry and C.D. Wright (deepstep come shining), from, of course, her Deepstep Come Shining (1998).

The photo, of old, new and blasted trees rooted in the same spot, was taken in a provincial park on Keats Island in Howe Sound, BC.

What We’re Doing These Days To Keep Afloat

We’ve hired a plumber to saw the top shelves from the library.

We’ve changed our motto:

A good foundation is all anyone needs or

The rest will grow back.

Meanwhile, in the elevator shaft,

one who was supposed to fix the roof knits in the dark.

He calls it a sweater, but it has neither armholes nor space for the head.

As for the body that will wear it:

“A garment is to live in,” he says.

Some insist he’s composing our shroud,

but others call it a bridal veil or

a roadmap,  or even

an elevator.

We knock on the walls,

drop letters and petitions into the hole,

send a cat through a gap in the brick to unravel the garment by night.

No one will say it,

but she seems to be neglecting her duties.

I too have been wakened by mice burrowing in my navel.

A secret, more radical sect among us believe the garment will catch the wind.

Someday soon.

Our knitter will drift up from the shaft and rise into ether.

Who will need fifteen staircases then?

They call the garment a flight plan,

which in our language means

manifest or sometimes chequebook

or the dog must have his supper

or I’m sorry there is no more soup.

It’s no wonder we’re confused.

What to do?

The carpenter drills pin holes in all of the pipes:

messages in Braille for our blind knitter.

Little Fountains, he calls them.

It’s a critical success:

“If you can’t fly, try swimming.”

We like his work so much we’ve ordered up

another building.

With any luck, we’ll soon be underwater.

Singing.

Oh that will be the day;

all our worries will be over then.

Notes
Photos taken in 2010 in and around NSCAD U.
  

Impending Events

September first and the air is full of impending events.  School begins of course, and with it, for me, the fuller contours of a new job.  But what is preoccupying everyone here along the usually cooler shores of Nova Scotia is the heat--and the threat of hurricane Earle, swirling up the seaboard from the Caribbean. 

For now, the air is still, nearly windless; the sea calm, warm enough to entice us to stay in the water for abnormally long periods.  Whatever this is, this heat and stillness, it will not stay, that much is certain.  We look over our shoulders superstitiously--how must we pay for this slice of Paradise?  And then that worry subsides, worn away by the suck of water on sand, the joyous play of a dog with a stick and the cool prickling of salt on skin.

We are enthralled by the light.


Images
Psyche Beach, Taylor's Head Provincial Park, Nova Scotia
Bathsheba on the beach
Marike rescues a beached crab
Bathsheba buries a stick
Evening light