What am I doing with my life?

Stripes of sun on plaid. A scattering of clothespins in the yard, uncovered by melting snow.
What am I doing with my life?

Everything seems a chore in cold wind. The pond groans and snaps in the light. I listen to the the hum of the fridge and the screel of the clothesline pulley, tugged up and down by the wind.

I surf the textures and still pools of everyday life.  It is as if I am hibernating, waiting for something. Head down, trying to forestall dread: just keep the floor swept and the bed made. Your hair clean.

I am on call, but for what? And who will call? Which are the tasks for which we are preparing, squinting our eyes against the sun?

Setback

Trampled crocus,
half-green grass,
bitter wind:
spring stays at half mast,
requires more
firewood.

Notes
Pictures were taken under grey skies by a windy sea in West Quoddy this morning.  I wrote the poem--if we can call this ditty by such an elevated name--while sitting by the fire. Yes, it's that cold. Pity the lobstermen, who begin to haul their traps today.

Winter galls us

Who can bear how winter clings and stops us at the root?
Nothing in the house to burn save paper scraps and torn up box.
Colour is something memory finds, a gap, an aching loss,
for a world awash in weeviling greys and stinging damp:
mould's heaven, not ours.
We long for sun or a meteor shower,
for a sudden pressing bud, or
the arcs and angles of a swallow's flight.

Who could be content with last year's apples,
or the bitter dregs of yesterday's tea?
Leftover news in a fog-darkened sky.
Like business-as-usual, relentless winter galls us, excoriates hope.
Why live without promises of ripeness, without
a burst of juice between your teeth?

Notes
The echo here is Chaucer of course, the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.
When will "that Aprille, with hise shoures soote,/ the droghte of March hath perced to the roote"?

Photos were taken in West Quoddy in April 2010.

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.

Why is poetry an emergency?

10 April 2013

prose is a house
poetry a man in flames running quite fast through it
Anne Carson, Red Doc>

Why is poetry an emergency?
Why are some poems impossibly slow?

Imagine you are looking out to sea.
Every day for a year.

Some days the water rages. Other days
it chatters. Scatters. Freezes. Whispers.

Rarely is it silent. One vast silver mirror
dumping back a blanked-out sky.

Try a morning when the dog barks you up:
hungry geese are on the lawn.

  
Unmoored ice shards and founders, 
every grassblade dead and yellow.

How long must we
wait for the season to shift?

Slow spring, the kid 
at the filling station says. While gas guzzles 

snow gathers on the windscreen. 
You speed off, late for dinner.

Why is poetry an emergency?
Our hearts knock 
 

against a stubborn world. Inside,  
forever, the house is on fire.  
        

Notes
Pictures were taken on the West Quoddy dock. 
Nets and buoys are for fishing herring.  Commercial vessels and pleasure craft in Canada longer than 12 meters are required to carry two or more fire buckets.

Dreaming Sloth Leisure

Still mourning the passing of summer--the slippage from heat, light and leisure to frost, darkness and haste.  Once the semester starts I feel forever behind--in tatters, belated, in arrears.  Breathless.  I will never catch up.  So I hear, particularly loudly, Robert Lowell's lament to Elizabeth Bishop, when, in the full sweep of too much going on he writes: 

[C]an anything be well done that isn't accompanied by dreaming, sloth, contemplation, leisure?

In part, he's trying to make Bishop feel better about the painstaking slowness with which she writes--months and years may run out before she completes a poem.  Though at this writing, in late October 1963, revolution and a military coup are brewing in Brazil, where Bishop lives with Lota de Macedo Soares, and Kennedy will soon be assassinated--preoccupations that may slow even the speediest of poets.  And within weeks Lowell will be hospitalized by the onset of another manic episode--his own painful way of braking excessive speed.   

I just catch the flu--and then scramble on.  As Lowell writes, signing off, "Pardon this flurry.  It's just in the nerves."

Notes
Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, "Letter #285" (October 27, 1963). Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop.  Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton, eds. (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008): 513, 514.