Mourning

Full clear light, sunshine, sharply
etched colour, and I am
mired in fatigue.

Is this how sorrow feels,
slipping along your spine?
And whose sorrow?

Unjust that
I should open my eyes, should
look upon grey sea and implacable

isles (they break
the waves and are not
submerged)

when he won't rise
or see another
day.  By what

name or
reason comes such
undoing, such

cessation,
such unroping
loop of heart or life?

He stops
now;
forever slips

away.
Instant;
accident;

her world,
their world,
our world

unmade.

In memory of Steve Rowe.

As if trying to weep: El Salvador 2006

As if trying to weep: El Salvador 2006 by Karin Cope and Marike Finlay | Make Your Own Book

Hurt birds (on the politics of blame)

I wake from a dream in which small birds are fluttering into my hands.  They are the size of finches, but coloured in blues and rusts and creams, as if they were swallows. I place each bird on a scarred round wooden table beneath a tall window and they gather in a huddle. It is cold. We seem to be at one end of a large library: musty volumes line the walls and the space is hushed and dark. Outside, it is winter, and bare branches scratch at the window. One detail stays with me as I wake--just before setting down each bird, I pluck a few feathers from its wings.  This seems to frighten them, and hurt them; I do not know why I do it. Waking more fully, I realize that the cat is asleep on my chest. This has happened to me before--am I having her dreams again? She lifts her head and blinks at me.

No, let me own my own cruelty. I should not blame it on the cat.

When at first you set out

When at first you set out, your feet do not know where the road will go, or how.

The head thinks it knows, but it may not.

(After all, in the thick of winter, the leaves were supposed to have loosened, to have fallen. What then of such insubstantial strength, such golden light?)

Who can explain our brittlest survivals? Or the beauty of ice, in a broken space?
It befalls us: inessential, necessary, ordinary--as uncomfortable as prayer. 
What is the meaning of life?
Why are only some days full of light? 

For those of us already living, what matters in a new year is to perdure, to endure--there is no experience without an undergoing,  without perseverance, without suffering.

Lightening struck, we stagger, try to be like that tree that groaning, still stands.
Noble beyond reckoning. Beautiful in every cracked and shattered limb.

All hope is here: not in what is absolutely new, but in what there is to learn from those who carry on, blind as we all are, but abiding, open-hearted.

After the freeze

After the freeze, a thaw. Rain. Fog. Gusts of wind rattle the frost-bitten branches, toss chunks of ice to the ground. We crush them underfoot. And now another freeze, a breath-stopping chill that icicles your eyelashes. This is the way we will face the new year: swaddled in layers, our cheeks stinging with cold, breath turning to frost as soon as it strikes our scarves.

Last night I dream that everything in my office is burning; there is nothing we can do but get out before the roof collapses. All of my papers, my notebooks, the photos and the books are consumed by flames. In my dream, my only regret concerns the notebooks from last summer, from the trip to Alaska; I've not managed to make anything from them yet. I reach for them, and they whirl apart into cinders. We race from the building, dodge falling beams, and finally stand outside looking up into the night sky. Flames shoot through the roof; we are deafened by the blazing fire.

Suppose indeed, nothing were to be left?
Nothing? What of your memory?

Okay, nothing but my memory.
And the possibilities of imagination.

Yes, that too.
What then?

We'd start over again then, I guess.
Or tell new stories.

Yes.
And what if you were to begin anyway now?

Even without a conflagration?
Yes, even without a conflagration.

I don't know if I could.
You mean you don't know if you could want to.

Yes.
What is old is new again.

Fire and ice

Two nights after Christmas. We are somnolent and turkey-stuffed. The booming draws us to the windows, the flashing lights keep us there. Fireworks! With each explosion, the snow covering Lac Brome lights up. The colours are something out of Breughel, bonfires beyond the trees. The frozen world glitters in the sudden light.

These last dark days

Snow on ice the day after Christmas. We go for a walk and everything is quiet; just one car passes on the road. Our boots crunch against the cold snow; a spring burbles up out of the earth and rushes, ice free, beneath the trees. Silence: the snow has muffled the tinkling of the ice covered branches as the trees sway under their heavy loads. All day we are in twilight. And then night falls, and with it more snow.