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.

Where we tread

Fog. We are immersed in an unending fog that drifts in and out with the tides. Sometimes the air is warm and still and the water like glass, beaming back reflections of trees and stone with greater clarity and definition than the atmosphere. But then the wind blows, rifling and darkening the surface of the water.  

Dried grasses and lichens loom up out of the mist as if aglow; fiddleheads unfurl, swallows swoop in graceful arcs over the yard, Sometimes, when we're out walking, they bomb by so near and so quick, I feel the air around my face stir. 

The loon calls from an invisible space, and all around songbirds trill. A yellow finch gleams from the upper branches of an apple tree, then flutters away into the mist. Now you see it; now you don't, but the dip of its looping flight resounds in the air.

Water beads tender greens unfurling on every tree, drips from the pines, puddles in the centers of lupin leaves, illuminates spidery filaments webbing the grass. Everywhere the long view is obscured, but whatever is close, tiny, near to the ground, is magnified.

Here the sweet scent of spruce bud, flowering maple, smashed violets smeared where we tread.

Sun salutations don't make the sun emerge

Enya in bladderwrack with her stick

An island obscuring fog
drapes mist over every
surface, beading window
panes dog's belly pine needles
and the arms of my sweater
when I step on the porch to watch
an acrobatic crow draw lines in air.
Water boiled:: tea steeped:: dog fed.
Permutations of downward facing dog
(enhanced with growling): sun
salutations don't make the sun emerge.
Head stand; I land; still this damp
shroud.

Fog snared spiderweb

Notes:

The daily not-quite sonnet: 13x I'm calling it, my private little experiment with writing poems that are just 13 lines long.  It's strange, this practice of writing a poem of a defined length. Each poem becomes like a puzzle, a box of a defined size into which you must fit odd heterogeneous items so that when you're done the box has become a drawer full of interesting oddities and meaningful content.

Each length exacts its own pressure and creates its own surprises. What happens when you cheat a sonnet by one line? In my case--I think--the poem wakes up, becomes stranger, more colloquial. Is this my imagination, or is there really so much difference between one line count and another? I will have to continue with my experiment to see.  Are 13 lines really more light-hearted than 14? Is it habit or a subtle interruption of habit that makes me think so?

All photos taken today in West Quoddy in the fog. 

Leaf captured fog

What's the news?

What's the news? I don't know
I haven't been listening to the radio,
but the daffodils are blaring. Meanwhile
morning and evening the peepers are
chanting.  Deer clatter along the breakwater and
into the garden--not a tulip to be found. We've caged the
anemone pulsatilla: still the bees gather.
Hummingbirds buzz our heads; swallows
nest again above the door.
I saw whitecaps in Dufferin Harbour today
on my way to get my hair cut, but here
it's almost still. Fog overtakes the islands,
draws up its noose.

Anemone pulsatilla

Drive-by warmth ( on reaching the end of a journal)

violet in the rain and grass

How quickly
time passes. Midnight, in
a damp season

(guaranteed
to help, no matter
your trouble)

pages ago
we sailed between
desert isles

(business,
sexual impotence
we fix all)

now violets
flock and scatter amid
greening grass

(envy or
headache or bad luck
or witchcraft)

pages ago,
we sought shade from heat,
too-bright sun

(there are those
who pay to do you
ill, you know)

now I curl
with dog and blanket
by the fire

 (her skin so
thin she feels your eyes):
drive-by warmth

(if you are
a victim of bad
luck or doubt)

scrounge bravely
before a Nova
Scotia spring

page from a journal (with ad for a tarot reading) February to May 2015

Notes:

This poem is another "flock of lunes," of course, or rather, my "mistaken" lunes, consisting of stanzas formed from lines of 3 syllables, 5 syllables and 3 again. It is literally my last entry in a particular notebook, interleaved with lines and translations from earlier pages.

Green (ditch flood)

Trapped Stick Open Water

Soon Time Spring (melt haiku)

Soon Time Spring

What is the sound of melting?

Sound of Running Water (encore)

Antics of several species lately observed on Vancouver Island

                   i
Everything aggregates
in the spring:
boats docks anenomes
blossoms shades of blue
shades of green

starfish gather under pilings
lines tangle on decks and wharves
raccoon paws trail water
from cedar board
to cedar board.

                 ii

Everything proliferates
in the spring:
jackstands bicycles wheel barrows

waste diesel waste oil new signs
white paint a rowing punt
a house for sale ripples
of refracted sun.

                 iii
Everything is prodigal
in the spring.

Like Feather Dusters (subclass sedentaria), but
profligate,
wavering heads full of wanderlust
we root ourselves in water waste and
light; we hymn
the margin,
love the strand.

Notes

Photos were all taken yesterday, 29 April, in the work yards and on the dock--or beneath them--at Canoe Cove, Vancouver Island, British Columbia.
Wheelbarrows help to carry heavy loads down the docks to the boats; it's a steep roll at high tide.
The Troschel's Sea Star has five points and white spots, and lives just below the low-tide line of protected coastal regions from Alaska to Northern California.
Raccoon prints are, well, just that.
Jackstands are stands of various and variable heights, used to support boats that have been hauled out on the land.
All solvents and poisons used in the yard must be disposed of properly.
A rowing punt with a new coat of paint and varnish shines in the sun.
Light bounces from the tops of small waves onto the hull of a boat at the dock.
Banded Feather Dusters (Sabella crassicornis, Subclass Sendentaria), found the length of the Pacific coast,  are a sea creature described in the taxonomies as a "flowerlike animal."  Like anenomes, they fasten themselves to a dock or piling with a tube-like foot, then sweep nutrition into their bodies with their feathers. Feather dusters must also excrete fecal matter through this same tube: a "ciliated groove" runs the length of this tube-body, and permits the animal to dump out its waste.
Bicycle, stored between dock sections. "It seems to work," says its owner, a ferry captain.
Anenomes come in many varieties--"aggregating anenomes," "proliferating anenomes"--as below, and "frilled anenomes." This particular anenome kept company with a Red Sea Cucumber.  All of these animals tend, like plants, to root themselves to particular spots, then colonize--rather as we do.  Glorious but difficult to uproot yourself. Do we ever really succeed?

                

Every spring, hope

I am
thinking of my
mother sliding through the
dappled light, on her way to
market.

She stops
at the pond to
listen to the frogs sing.
Every spring the same story, every
spring, hope.

Notes

This poem is composed in cinquains, five line syllabic stanzas that follow a rule in which the first line has two syllables; the second, four; the third, six; the fourth, eight; and the final line has, again, two syllables.

The poem was written while enroute from Halifax to Calgary, over Saskatchewan, then posted in Calgary, while waiting for a flight to Victoria. (Kudos to free wifi services in airports. Thank you!)

Photos were taken in or near St. Paris, Ohio, where my parents live.

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.

The Beauty of the lobster trap

First flowers of the spring
they'll soon be sunk
and other breeds
waylaying

Notes

All photos taken April 18 2013 on the West Quoddy dock.  Lobster fishermen were supposed to set their traps on the 19th, and haul today, but bad weather and high winds delayed the start of the lobster fishing season for several days. The traps still sit on the docks in the fog and drizzle and the boats are all moored.

Pond scum wakes up

I did not expect sun today, nor 
the greening of the grass.  First heat. 
Wet dog.
We shed our coats along the path,
toss sticks in every ditch and pond,
turn inland. Hear silly frog songs:
stuck
broke
wet
cold
pond scum
wakes up           look  out
nude 
girl

Notes
The photo is of our pond, where the frogs are not yet singing; the air is still cool so close to the sea.

When we stopped to listen to the first frogs emerging from the black pools alongside the road, Marike asked me if I thought I could write a poem that would mimic their sounds.  I imagine the frogs as ironic, laconic monosyllabic voices. Aural graffiti.

A shout out to poet Brian Bartlett, who reminds me that Thoreau writes about the language of the frogs in the "Sounds" chapter of Walden. Conveniently, the whole is online. I see as soon as I read it, that I've heard (or imagined) the frogs in an earlier state of debauchery; they are still testing their cups, not yet bragging into them.

Thoreau then:   "In the mean-while all the shore rang with the trump of bullfrogs, the sturdy spirits of ancient wine-bibbers and wassailers, still unrepentant, trying to sing a catch in their Stygian lake — if the Walden nymphs will pardon the comparison, for though there are almost no weeds, there are frogs there — who would fain keep up the hilarious rules of their old festal tables, though their voices have waxed hoarse and solemnly grave, mocking at mirth, and the wine has lost its flavor, and become only liquor to distend their paunches, and sweet intoxication never comes to drown the memory of the past, but mere saturation and waterloggedness and distention. The most aldermanic, with his chin upon a heart-leaf, which serves for a napkin to his drooling chaps, under this northern shore quaffs a deep draught of the once scorned water, and passes round the cup with the ejaculation tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r — oonk, tr-r-r-oonk! and straightway comes over the water from some distant cove the same password repeated, where the next in seniority and girth has gulped down to his mark; and when this observance has made the circuit of the shores, then ejaculates the master of ceremonies, with satisfaction, tr-r-r-oonk! and each in his turn repeats the same down to the least distended, leakiest, and flabbiest paunched, that there be no mistake; and then the howl goes round again and again, until the sun disperses the morning mist, and only the patriarch is not under the pond, but vainly bellowing troonk from time to time, and pausing for a reply." http://thoreau.eserver.org/walden04.html

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.