Not Yet

We call Night the privation of relish in the appetite for all things.

 John of the Cross, quoted by Roland Barthes, Fragments d'un discours amoureux

She dreams of a soft boiled egg.

The inaudible tear the yellow flood the 

pouring tender not quite flesh on

crusty bread. The tang of cheese. Of

sourdough. Sharp scent of torn basil leaf. Creamy avocado

plucked from the tree that shatters its fruit

on the kitchen window.

Every possibility is in front of us then.

Every--

Thousands of days 
filled with sunshine. And the rushing 
sea.

And the wind, cool 
on the nape of the neck.

Strong coffee in the afternoon.

A girl in striped pants.  The sensation

of sand 

between 
your toes.

How can it be afternoon?

So soon blue 
.

She picks up her scarf.

Wait. 

Don't go.

Not yet.

(This can't go on. 
 This--)

Not yet.

They sit on a grassy hill by the side of the road.

Cliffs tumble to the sea.

She pulls a bottle from the hamper, 

breaks the crust of bread with her hands, her 
red lips black, the 
fading light.

Cool wind on the nape
of her neck.

She gathers her scarf.

(No. Who twisted 
you;

who

so that) I'll be leaving now

(who twists)

her posture

(someone is 
going

away)

Oh please, 
linger.

A thousand afternoons of light five

thousand ten:

twenty-eight years of days of

sand between your toes 

of cobble beaches and

(sucking sounds)  

rocks 
they tumble 

(what we call night

what we call)

endless oncoming 

(relish
what we call)

waves 

Here is my scallop bed,

here is my island.

Come

dive with me.

We paddle to the island; we 
stand in shallow water; we pluck

scallops, sucking out

flesh

(the inaudible tear the sudden 
flood the

pouring) 

salt bathes 
her tongue,

the afternoon shimmers
glimmers, tumbles--

oh,

the failing

light. 

Wait.

Don't (who has

who has
twisted
you around like

who has
)

Don't. Not yet. Not

(who

so that in part-

ing

)

While there is still 

light (while those,  
le

stelle) while those

stars still shine

still (lucevan

)

into 

night

She 

shines (seashells) she turns
(on the seashore) she 
stops (seashells) she 
lingers

she (seashells)

winds her scarf

she sings

(le 

stelle) in
her sleep

Notes
Quotations are distortions of phrases from:
St. John of the Cross via Roland Barthes, Fragments d'un discours amoureux
Rilke's Eighth Duino Elegy, trans. Stephen Mitchell in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, (New York: Vintage: 1984), 197 and
 Puccini, E lucevan le stelle, sung by Beniamino Gigli, 1938


Photos are from this album: "Taylor Head Barachois," http://www.flickr.com/photos/karincope/sets/72157629294954786/


This poem was my response to an exercise I set my Strategic Fictions class.  We read--and looked at--various love stories as models for our own writing.  I asked them to think about the following questions:


Why, when we think of love and writing, do we so often think of poetry?  Is it because poetry is a kind of writing where not simply each word, but each beat, each syllable, each space and line break count?  Poetry (and love) both call for precision it seems—and sometimes, though not always, an economy of gesture.  But perhaps we think of poetry and love together too, because what we wish of each is a delightful surprise of the ear.  And what do we reap? Often, too often, dissonance, boredom, waiting, rhythms utterly out of step…We also tend to repeat clichés, and others’ words, over and over. Is there a way, nevertheless, to make such suspensions, such repetitions, work?


I do not know if I have succeeded. But as I tell my students, what is most important is to try.

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.
  

Time Changes

Another clear cold day. The sea is frozen out to the headland; a skim of brittle, pockmarked ice creeps up the beach with the tide, and the pond is solid again.  It snaps and groans and echoes in the cove, stretching and shifting beneath its closed skin.

The sun is high and bright and warm as it streams through the windows.  A time change today.  So early? I think. Already? 

I remember when it happened in May, the second Sunday in May, which was--or is my memory failing  me now?--also, often, Mother's Day. White or red carnations on everyone's breasts in church; white for those whose mothers had died, red for those whose mothers were still alive. Why then do I remember my own mother wearing a white carnation?

It couldn't have been so; her mother was still vibrant, active, a nearly daily force in our lives. We'd go see her later that day for a big supper, and play badminton in her back yard, careful not to trample her garden, the petunias velvety, nodding, colourful, like playful tiny faces. I always wanted to touch them.

May in Columbus, Ohio was sometimes cool, cooler than April--too cold for short skirts and knee socks--but spring was out full blast by then, the trees leafy, gardens in full bloom. And now and then it could even be hot.

I catch a whiff of the smell of freshly mown grass (a Saturday job in those days, not a Sunday one); I recall the wood stacked neatly in a sparse pile along one edge of our grandparents' backyard, everything clean and in good working order, neatly organized--not like at our house.  A sudden downpour, notes of spice and musk in the perfumes on my grandmother's dresser, bottles ranged and doubled on a mirrored tray.  Perhaps this is why I treasure the scent and colour of amber?  The ticking of the clocks; the cardinals at the birdfeeder; the large dial thermometer nailed to the maple tree.

Marike comes downstairs and opens the door.  Cool air streams into the house and I am suddenly back in Nova Scotia. Still, even here, the birds have begun to call and sing from the trees.  The last couple of days have been mild and everyone is expectant.  Spring will be here soon they say.

I find this funny.  I'm going on my nineteenth year in Canada, and I've grown used to waiting so long for the spring to come, that I hardly believe any of these signs.  I'm not sure winter has truly arrived yet--I keep waiting for it to get worse, for here, on the shore, March is the bitterest month; the time when the surface temperature of the sea reaches its nadir.

But perhaps, this year, we are already there.  Is this false hope brought about by an exceedingly early time change? What happened to bring it on so early? Or are my memories of my childhood faulty?  Even here the animals are already shedding, the birds singing, the ground muddy and earthy smelling. Two days ago we startled an otter in the marsh at high tide; it watched us through a hole in the ice, and then swam to another hole and popped up again and again, growling a little each time, before swimming out through the culvert and into the bay.

Perhaps the earth and these creatures know something I don't.  All along the shore streams rush and tumble into the water, sweeping away ice and stones and mud. The sap has been flowing all week too--a friend in Cape Breton is sugaring off.

I count the weeks: a bit more than a month of this term left.  I take a deep breath: relief--or oxygen--reaches all the way to my toes. Just then the ice on the pond flexes, hisses, growls; it sounds just like an enormous outdoor belly.  Hungry.  I am, too.

Images:


Birthday tulips--March 2012.


My mother sends me a snapshot of a vase of forsythia she's brought indoors and forced. An early March practice in Ohio, early May in Nova Scotia. Photo by Marcia Cope, St. Paris Ohio.

She Puts Her Hands to the Flames and Yet She Is Not Burned

Redhot Photo with Marike Finlay-de Monchy

Caspar David Friedrich freezes up on our shore

I have to admit, it was Bree Zorel's hilarious photographs of mini-bergs--tiny accumulations of snow around Halifax, each one resembling a minor iceberg--that started me wondering, "and what do the pans of ice that stack up on our shore look like?"

Because I'm much more serious than Bree is (well, in demeanor only; a comedic artist is really about as serious as one can get, and that's what she is), my thoughts turned instantly to romantic images of ships stuck fast in the ice. (Ah, the tragedy, the mockery of human ambition, the dashing of the well-laid plan! You see how German philosophy fits me like a glove. I'm steeped in it and cannot get these tea stains out of my head.)

In particular, I thought of Caspar David Friedrich (a Swede by birth, a fact that did not exempt him from darkening romantic thoughts; he too received German training and is usually considered German), and of that painting known variously as The Wreck of the Hope, The Polar Sea, and The Sea of Ice.  Completed in 1824, during a period of great despair in the painter's life, the work was not particularly well-received.  Even contemporary commentators have described it as overwrought--a work that "goes beyond documentary into allegory: the frail bark of human aspiration crushed by the world's immense and glacial indifference." (This is, itself, quite dramatic wringing commentary--was the painter ever particularly "documentary" in ambition or execution? Really?)

But there we are. I have my model, such as it is, for what this ice resembles, and what--perhaps--it means.

Do you see the Hope there, a dark shape, a crushed and splintered ship to the right of the largest stack-up of slabs of ice? That it will founder is a conclusion we cannot avoid. Still, how beautiful the ice!

Caspar David Friedrich, Wreck of the Hope, 1823-4, Kunsthalle, Hamburg

Caspar David Friedrich freezes up on our shore, a set on Flickr. To see enlargements of the photographs, click on each one.

Quote about Friedrich's painting comes from "Art: the Awe-Struck Witness," Time, October 28, 1974.

Sea Ice Breaks On the Shore

It begins, slowly, the ice-up.

Freshwater freezes first, and near the shore, skims and plaques of ice form on the surface. They float in on the high tide and, then, as the water sucks back out, the ice is left behind to crack over rocks and barrels and tree limbs and other detritus.

At first the ice is very thin, and because it contains some salt, brittle, like shattered glass. Then it thickens, breaks, forms again, breaks, thickens, until huge boulders and pans of ice lie scattered across the beaches, an impassible wreckage, the sea a solid frozen mass without colour or visible movement.

Then the seals come deep into the bays to pup; we see them out on the ice, moving first one flipper, then another.

But we're not at that point yet. The icing up is just beginning here....Breaking, reforming, thicker than before.

Click on each small photograph to see a larger image in Flickr.

Fata Morganas Studied, Seen and Found

FATA MORGANA STUDIED

Q: What is a fata morgana?

A: A fata morgana is an elevated, distorting mirage that usually appears over large bodies of water, grass or sand, though apparently it can be seen anywhere, even in the air from an airplane if the conditions are right. In a fata morgana mirage, islands or ships at sea appear to lift off of the water or to be stretched and stacked upon the water, typically in great layercakes alternating right-side up and upside-down forms.

Sometimes, fata morganas make objects appear where none are. One day off of the west coast of Greenland, for example, we saw, in the distance, what seemed to be a large modern city rising out of the sea. It looked as if Panama City had suddenly sprung up north of the arctic circle. No such thing was there of course; nothing at all was, although for a time, it looked as if numerous glass and steel towers clustered on some edge of land to our east.

This was not the first time sailors in the far north thought they saw things where there were none: in 1818, while hunting for the Northwest Passage, Sir John Ross arrived in Lancaster Sound and thought he saw a mountainous mass of land.  Several of his officers argued that he was seeing a mirage, but he would not heed them,  and because he thought he could not pass, turned around and sailed back to England. He named his vision Crocker Mountains, after a man who was then First Secretary of the Navy. A year later his first mate, William Edward Parry sailed through those mountains and further west, into the Northwest Passage, leaving the reputation of Sir John Ross in tatters.

Nearly a century later, in 1906, Robert Peary sighted what he believed was a land mass, which he placed at about 83 degrees north latitude and 100 degrees west longitude. Ironically enough, he called his vision "Crocker Land," though his Crocker was not the same Crocker, but a fellow in the Peary Arctic Club. Seven years later,  in 1913, at great expense, Donald Baxter MacMillan launched the "Crocker Land Expedition," to find and chart Peary's imaginary landmass. They thought they found it; according to MacMillan's notes they saw "hills, valleys, snow-capped peaks extending through at least one hundred and twenty degrees of the horizon.” Piugaattoq, an Inuit hunter traveling with the expedition told the explorers that what they were seeing was "mist," an illusion, but, naturally, in typical arctic explorer fashion, they didn't believe him and pressed on for days through dangerous breaking sea ice. Finally they gave up, admitted Piugaattoq was right, and turned around.

Q: What causes a fata morgana?

A: Typically, warm air lies in a layer over the earth, while cooler air rises into the atmosphere.  But sometimes, in calm weather, this order is inverted, and a layer of warm air lies above a significantly cooler surface layer.  The sharp temperature gradient between these two layers may create conditions where what is called an atmospheric duct, a zone of refraction between the two layers, functions like a lens, bending light rays more strongly than the curvature of the earth.  When this happens, you get fata morgana effects, in which reflections from the water or ice or land or air are refracted upward, from denser cool air towards less dense warmer air and stacked on top of one another or otherwise distorted.  These can be photographed because they are not simply optical illusions, but real atmospheric effects.

Q: Where does that name, fata morgana, come from? What does it mean?

A: According to writer Morgen Jahnke, "Fata Morgana is the Italian name for Morgan le Fay, the half-sister of King Arthur in Arthurian legend. Reputedly a sorceress and able to change shape at will, Morgan le Fay was sometimes said to live below the sea in a crystal palace that could also rise above the surface. The fata morgana effect was so named for the superstitious belief among sailors that she created illusory visions to lure men into a false port and to their death."  

The term was in usage in English in 1818, to describe a "peculiar mirage" that appeared in the Strait of Messina, a narrow body of water between Sicily and the southern Italian region of Calabria, and was locally ascribed to "a fay Morgana."  Soon however, the use of the term was more widespread.  Thus, for example, in 1873, in his poem, "Fata Morgana," a tiny fragment of a much longer work entitled Birds of Passage, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow writes:


The weary traveler sees
In desert or prairie vast,
Blue lakes, overhung with trees
That a pleasant shadow cast;

Fair towns with turrets high,
And shining roofs of gold,
That vanish as he draws nigh...

FATA MORGANA SEEN--Look, that island is standing on its head!

8 February 2012

Glittering sunshine, cold blue air.  An edge of Ship Island lifts up off of the water like the sole of a shoe coming unglued. Not yet a fata morgana, but when the water gets colder, it will be. Funny how light shimmers in the heat or mimics water, tossing illusory puddles in the road, but elevates in the cold and mimics air, building fantasy castles and other odd forms.

I wonder if we find ourselves fascinated by mirages because they fight against the notion that our senses impart truths to us about the world.  But when our senses show us things that aren't "really true," or "really just as they seem," it is perhaps not our senses that are out of order, but our interpretive capacities.

The positional information we receive from our senses rarely designates "true points," as any navigator knows. Everything is perspectival; everything lies in parallax. As you approach any object or island or land mass, shortening the angle of your view, the object's position seems to shift.

This is one of the pleasures and wonders and dangers of seeing. And drawing. What you see or what you sense is not as you think it should be, but as it is, elsewhere, according to some other logic, which is what you must then discover.  Such labour of discovery is ultimately the work of living. Truly. Deeply. And yes madly.  Who would want it any other way?



FATA MORGANA FOUND

Because it's shifting.  And enchanting.

Werner Herzog, Fata Morgana, 1970 (http://youtu.be/pZX45lVaGu8)

Notes

Photo: Beaver Harbour Light, Harbour Islands seen from Sober Island. January 2012

Andy Young, "An Introduction to Mirages," http://mintaka.sdsu.edu/GF/mirages/mirintro.html

Morgen Jahnke, "The Fata Morgana Effect" Interesting Thing of the Day, July 24, 2006, http://itotd.com/articles/583/the-fata-morgana-effect/
http://www.athropolis.com/arctic-facts/fact-mirage.htm
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "Fata Morgana," 1873, http://www.hwlongfellow.org/poems_poem.php?pid=147