Stay the bloom: five variations in afternoon light

Sounds of things you cannot hear

Snow falling on a doe's nose;
twitch of the hairs that line her ears; how
our nervous eyebeams cross and stutter; when
spindrift flurries smash and drop.

Otter prints at the water's edge;
taste of grass beneath the pines;
flank's quiver, heart's thump, and the
sudden savour of coyote paws.

Hunger marches across the pond, by
rabbit trails and pheasant scratchings
crouches near the slouching rushes, where
come night, some creature sleeps.

Somewhere a doe is always watching--
fluttering startle, tail flicker, flattened grass and trampled snow.

This poem--really an exercise--was suggested by what seemed to me to be a found poem in Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods (2008).  In explaining "why the young (and the rest of us) need nature," and what he means by "coming to our senses," Louv recounts a game played by Janet Fout, an environmental activist, with her daughter Julia. "As they wandered through the woods, they would listen for 'the sounds they could not hear:'

sap rising
snowflakes forming and falling
sunrise
moonrise
dew on the grass
a seed germinating
an earthworm moving through the soil
cactus baking in the sun
mitosis
an apple ripening
feathers
wood petrifying
a tooth decaying
a spider weaving its web
a fly being caught in the web
a leaf changing colors
a salmon spawning"

even, "after the conductor's baton ceases to rise" (76-7).

It seemed to me that certain emotions or states, too, like love, fear,  hope, hunger, desire, sleepiness, sadness, wariness and even joy were very often first seen or experienced as if without or below the threshold of audible sound. Likewise, we tend to treat vision, taste and touch as more or less silent sensuous attributes. Still, as my experience of being eye to eye with deer through a pane of glass testifies, looking is not really noiseless, even if we cannot hear one another. It is rather, like so many other things, comprised of sounds we cannot or can hardly hear. What for example is the sound of feeling nervous? Or the impossibly slow trickling onset of spring?

Unfreeze (not quite a valentine)

What we did and would and could
What we should
What we did not and why
Which we couldn't
What she said  What I said
What we did
How some words flick open, slip sharpened steel beneath the breastbone
How others encyst themselves and grow tumorous, stopping up the lungs
How what was fluid became solid
How the sea was covered in ice and the rain needled down, encasing the cars in brittleness
How a gesture incompleted never--
How stillness shattered
How the leg of a chair flung down
bounces but does not break

Notes
Images are of the West River in Sheet Harbour today as it roars between freeze and melt; the poem, a rough sort of sonnet, inspired by one of several exercises my students did several weeks ago, to "write out an argument." Here I was reaching for something that might, as a horoscope said a few weeks ago, "bless the messiness and largeness of desire." Love is never without its hard edges; what matters is that we survive (literally) our madness.

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.