for Monica
She asks which aspect of the view I like best,
the pines on the foreshore, the point
of rock across the bay, or the
mountains, rain-hidden all day.
She asks this at night when all is dark.
Waves assault the sandstone beach,
wind boxes the trees.
Glass doors retain this lamp-lit room
and two friends at peace.
The rest of the world
beyond me.
I went east and south but never greenward, I went in and out but there was no road homeward. —Gwendolyn MacEwen, “Reviresco: In Memory of Padraig O’Broin”
Gwen, I wish you’d visit me even though it’s Thursday and Thursdays you reserved for going mad. I’ve been reading the entrails of Magic Animals. I always thought you told your story well, if too briefly. If you’d drop by I’d break open the scotch I’ve been hoarding, get a fire going, bring two chairs to the window. Small white ferries will pass with their loads of mortal men. Island to island. We’ll talk about those who drive us to the limits of love and compare our shades of loneliness. Tell me again about the parameters of grace. Or let’s be silent and consider how words have let us down.
She brings red wine and a photograph album
of aerial views taken from
a two-seater,
Desolation Sound
down to Oregon, snowy
mountains, blue-green coves.
It makes me want to distance myself
even more than I do by coming here
to stay in a house built high on a hill
with a view to die for. And later,
when she’s gone off to navigate the
Celtic knot of roads from Galleon to Gunwhale,
I stay up
in the darkness imagining a cluster of lights
in the distance as a place to land. Black water
between me and a place with no pain.
We’d gone ahead in the
stupid hope spring brings.
Now, spent by summer’s
searing heat,
worn-out snapdragons
look ashamed at the
mess around them. The rest
never did
measure up. It was all
wrong; choice of plants,
places for them,
the poor soil,
lack of sun.
And it’s too late to start over
(though leggy delphiniums are
on sale), too hot to bother.
Black aphids have won.
We sit with a catalogue
of latin names and a view
of the last geranium.
for Raymond Carver
Within the whiteness of its globe,
glowing whiter still, curled inward
like the spine of a child
in the womb,
the graceful arc,
an x-ray view
of the backbone of the moon.
When I described this to friends
they said
what a beautiful thing, and that much I thought I knew.
But this hot afternoon,
the summer solstice and
A New Path to the Waterfall, a cat cuts through the shade of orange day lilies, white gulls steady over us. My wine glass half full and not what I’d thought. From this comes a kind and generous answer.
The earth rolled over.
Between the sun and moon
our shadow fell.
On the next hilltop
people gathered,
upright silhouettes.
The lunar show was lengthy
so we turned
our binoculars on the sunset.
Fire engines flashed
along the waterfront.
Saturn appeared; a boy
on a wire fence swore
his naked eyes
could see its rings.
We could barely make
our way back down
the rocky trail. It was
dark and all
the familiar contours
fallen away.
Dogs ran about barking, rolling over
on the back of the still-warm earth.
From my borrowed bit of paradise, the flight paths
of dragonflies, bright aqua, and the sky,
this most excellent canopy, a route for gulls and crows to chase down through a corridor of trees toward a distance of blue sea with black islands dilating at sunset.
Our daughter’s eyes. Our son’s.
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