Post in praise of ice (did I just say that?) or an interval of time

Ice forms among the bulrushes (West Quoddy, NS)

I am forever startled by how quickly night falls as we approach December.  We are in full sunlight and then suddenly we are in darkness; the icy surface of the pond and the sea hold the light a little longer, but then they too must give it up. First the land goes dark, and then the islands; finally the water joins them, an inky pool, noisesome in the darkness.

I sit by the fire with the cat. She has taken up her odalisque pose on the bench beside me, both of us craving the warmth, letting it radiate into our bones. A high of zero degrees today; when Marike and I stepped into the light for a walk, it felt as if the north wind was squeezing my face, pinching my cheeks, thumping my forehead. It took several minutes to get used to it, to stop feeling as if I ought to turn around and huddle indoors. Underfoot, the crackle and shatter of puddles become brittle ice--all of the water of the last days' soakings transformed into glittering patterns in the ditches.

We finally remembered to shut the windows in the bedroom and the bath--I had to climb on the garage roof and then the oil tank and push while Marike ground the windows inward and locked them down; they are secured now for the winter. We dumped three buckets of ashes over the wall, and hung out and then brought in an icy load of laundry. In the interim, we walked around the headland, down to the water, then back again.

Today the chickadees were puffed up and greedy for seeds--one bird, the smallest one, sat repeatedly in my palm and crammed as many sunflower seeds as it could into its beak, perhaps four or five, before flying away to cache them in the trees. We startled a grouse or two, and one or two rabbits, their fawn colouring giving way to snow now--just this week white patches have begun to spread across their noses and up the backs of their legs.

Once I was out in the sun, despite the cold, I didn't want to come in. It was high tide when we set out, the beach underwater, so we picked our way along mossy deer paths in the forest to get from one cove to the next. Once in the lee of the wind, we stopped to sit with the sun on our faces, eyes closed, listening to the suck and drift of the water, to the almost silent fanning of the weeds at our feet.

Just here, like this, I said to Marike, and you can imagine that life on earth is truly good.

Stay the bloom: five variations in afternoon light

Do we know what we see?

Rain overnight. Wet spatters the windows in howling wind.
Insomniac, I drop logs on the fire, scribble notes
in the dark, wake in fog. Now
sunshine. Sharp shadows cross the lawn, grass
imperceptibly greening.  Everything changes. Nothing
does. Do we know what we see?

Afternoon. A bat appears on the porch floor
trembling, a mouse brown thing, with
tiny feet, awkward in the light.
I watch it breathing-- Is it sick? Is it rabid?--
carry it by towel to a rock by the pond. The bat looks
at me. Sun shines through flared wings. It bares
its teeth, bites a rose thorn: small
mouth blooms blood red.

Notes
Pictures are of clearing clouds today and the crumpled bat, now dead.

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.

Bog Walk

Finally, a day of light.

It is sunny, bright, cold; the frozen sea glitters and the snow-covered pond lies in blue shadows. Our salt-caked windows refract and soften the light, turn it golden as the tones in an old photograph.

We decide to walk across the barrens, as the spruce bog that stretches between Port Dufferin and West Quoddy is called here. Impassable to humans in all but a deep freeze, the barrens are anything but empty land. Coyotes live and hunt and pup in the bog; we've come across the remains of downed deer while skiing, and stood at the edge of the tamped down ring from whence the coyotes howl. And twice we've followed the tracks of a black bear through the snow. The barrens are not a place to be at night, but they're fine to explore in the midday sun, the dog trotting sniffing happily beside us.

Deep ponds extend beneath the roots of the spruces and other arctic succulents native to the bog. This is really a rough and brushy northern desert, a place that stores water and nurtures plants with hardy, spiny, even carnivorous properties, like the rare--though not here--pitcher plant, which lures insects with its flower, and then, when they tumble into the waiting tubular stem, digests them. Hillocks of juniper shelter tiny sheepskill bushes, and short trees, no higher than my waist, gnarl in the wind.

Lichen and moss-covered ridges of slatey stone run at odd angles across the landscape; taller spruce forests grow up in their lee, and are quite impenetrable, forcing us, and the deer, to meander in circles on the perimeters of the barrens. Now and then, despite the cold snap these last few days, we break through the ice to the black water below. Ice gathers on our boots.

It is easy to get deranged in this landscape.  The bog appears to be a vast bowl surrounded by trees, though there are higher and lower sections, bounded--and thus hidden from view--by the ridges.  The landscape can look the same as itself from any direction; often you cannot quite see where you are going, or where you have come from.

It is warm on the barrens; here, in this bowl, we are sheltered from the bitter northeast wind blowing across the water, and we stop now and then to turn our faces to light. We take the sun as our guide and listen for the sound of the road so that we know which way to turn as we wander from one deer trail to another.  In this way we orient ourselves until we come to the edge of the barrens and see the backs of shut up summer cottages and an old barn, dripping icicles in the sun.

Elisabeth has been here before us; we see her tracks.  With the dog in the lead, we follow her footsteps back to the house, and Marike heats up squash soup for lunch.

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