At noon
you slept in your car with the heater running.
At noon I wrote something in a coffee shop
and burned my lips.
Like this, let’s say we
are together.
Let’s say you drove here, the ice
not so terrible as it looks,
melting.
Author: Paul Hoy
I enjoy poetry, art, film, and wilderness tripping.
I enjoy wilderness tripping in Canada's mid to far north, with my boys or solo. Up there, you are surrounded by a great solitude, a singular, omnipresent, and indifferent beauty, not a silence but only what I can describe as a kind of hum of mystery (and I'm not trying to sound poetic). The pursuit is also physically demanding - and dangerous: I've lost up to twenty-five pounds on some; I've capsized in a freezing Yukon river; I've survived hypothermia; I've received third degree burns; and I've encountered bears, one which I can only describe as a transcendent experience, an epiphany. So, wilderness canoe tripping, for me, merges the physical and the spiritual, the material and the unseen. It becomes a relationship between the inner and the outer landscapes. For me, it's a redemptive journey into what it means to be human. And because I'm so intense about these things (as you can see), I love to canoe with my son, Breanndan, as he lightens things up (not excluding the load) with his out-there humour and his much-needed navigational skills.
Daily Deal
I punch in, “love,”
let Google search for it,
between the lines of cached results
and feel-luckys.
I’ll stay right here, instead,
talk to Dominos,
let Amazon listen in: “this is
who I am, as if
you never new.
Here’s my password, how
can you forget?”
Drain
It’s October and I have not
used a word in two weeks.
I don’t count the tiny clouds of Bashō.
So, I’m beginning to pick up
a few lines of silence,
sitting on the old sofa,
listening to the sound of orange
in the rain, the sidewalk
composing pretty, rotten leaves
on a bright yellow page, flooding
with chamber music from
the sewer drains.
Perhaps
Perhaps if I start by telling you,
your face is another moon, a rock, bright,
defying all, gravity, most of all,
carving paths of a billion worlds
across the outskirts of this lake,
you would see how far darkness travels
to find light. Perhaps if I drew your hands on my back,
you would understand how birds,
touching down, make stillness out of tumult.
And, have you heard that words are stones,
chipped away from fault lines we cannot read,
but which whisper, write me? Can you understand
that when you lean into my arms
all that you are is a root, curled and naked,
climbing from the boulder split,
which cannot drink the rain it feels,
or see, in spite of sun that pours on it,
cannot understand, only witness, the scent of its silence,
the magnitude of its flower?
Yellow hair
This morning I heard from you.
I watched the window, wind possess
the bodies of trees,
comb the yellow hair of stripped cornfields.
I opened every window to let it come
and steal what it could,
rub out the things inside.
It’s evening now, and the cold the day’s left
sleeps in the chair beside me.
It breathes quietly as I write.
We never see ghosts, we only feel them.
Transcendence
You say, abandon,
like the word to
a foreign place.
But, because we call this,
this wilderness, this garden
of our loneliness,
let us both settle for
the lives of smaller gods
who befriend the places
which keep themselves lost.
Mid-October
Mid-October, now I wear my sweater,
blue as the morning, that dreamt-of one
before she knew me. She does not explain this,
only jokes about the “gossiping trees.”
She knows there is no word for beauty
or, yesterday, the armful of yellow leaves
that burst all at once on the road
as she laughed and laughed.
Old Growth
I always felt it was in the looking,
though waiting seems better now
that time has narrowed, like the trail
I’ve been following that goes through
the old growth pine of Shish-Kong Lake.
I’ve been here a thousand times,
but the path keeps changing.
The lake below spins faster than ever.
The trees seem to root into blue above,
as if the water could be desperate for sun.
And the birds climb their branches,
leaping southward, though more and more
I notice the ones that stay
as though, for some reason,
the best way to save their lives
is by not returning.
The lowlands
I think of the fog in the lowlands this morning,
the low, long, gradual barges
of thought, how that place you see imperfectly,
beautiful, you say, or must be,
becomes the grey
you let slip, its hold you let go of.
It’s strange thinking
you forget,
but, I understand
you, always imagining what I was,
your hand sweeping your hair
away from your eyes
the yellow cornfields left trembling.
…
I see myself writing you in time,
to tell you everything
that’s happened without you,
that life went on, as they say,
but without the light.
