It’s the same one over and over.
I learned to speak like you
as long as I wouldn’t understand —
Untranslatable as music
so that when you spoke,
the silent rooms of trees
would hear you.
The same way they say a lake
is a song about a breeze.
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.
Beautiful Cellar
- for Thomas Merton
Write in the cellar.
Pens, frozen pipes
and roots,
to be something
winter-planted,
a hand-full, like
the weight of
that falled-apart Finch
you picked-up, late summer,
so surprised,
a delicate word
so airy in your hand
that one would write
all night to fall to
be grasped again
by flight.
Northwest Passage
Stepping into a room
And seeing its light
I remember the window.
Placed, set, squared.
And on walls and floor
Phosphorescences of
What could be, shards
Of water jars, sea phrases.
I breathe,
Not exactly what belongs
But what is there.
Not belief, not knowledge.
An opening.
Ghazal #2
With them, I break my animal trail,
Canoe scrapes treelight for creeks.
Words dam rivers,
Comets rise to feed.
I breathe like them,
Airholes stars have pricked.
Having passed under it all,
A world’s run over with me,
Migrant island boats steeped with spruce,
My boots choke on the taste of clay.
Blazes are the eyes of steppingstones.
I see perfectly when they come to me.
Umbrella
Here the wind is a country.
Rain flags hills.
Trees refugee
the borders of their creeks.
The wind’s air
the body doesn’t breathe,
The body that’s not the body,
the you that cannot be
Just a window, more or less a door
a storm left opened
As if you were never here,
returning to the you who left
Her umbrella here,
the favourite one I can’t find.
Today
A drive to another city.
Getting lost in a forest.
Your stillness
in the grass.
Birds again.
Sumac
in your
hair.
A River Passing
This is the way
you must look to birds,
nothing but a breeze.
Which rounds the hand,
loosens fingers’ memory,
how in your hair they digress.
To the other life
behind the trees,
overhead, a river passing.
53
On this hill that sails tamarack woods,
my shoulders are a clove-hitch ache.
Thirst overflows our calves,
we portage the camel bone it’s made
that slowly says, along the way, this
is a rough bowl
hand-sewn by hands
that still would like
to drink.
Like everything at 53, even the thirst
is heavier, the creek in the palm
of the valley,
as I climb,
overflowing with leaves of air,
a little stonier, the darkness of it
shouldering creases of light.
How much simpler to disbelieve uncertainty
How much simpler to disbelieve uncertainty
Than to trust its unfaithfulness.
To believe a plainness,
I miss you,
You, a strikethrough of your absence
Blurry because I cannot comprehend
Only hold beyond my reach
The expanse of your closeness.
Poem to a deer
There is an apple orchard that leans against a crest,
A shadow of a road
The horses from the barn sometimes wander there,
Scenting fruit
Breaking branches on the dull horizons of their backs,
The chase of scrub light
Mixing with you,
Loving where you take us
Wading into trees, marvellous in the thickets of wind,
To bring back
The appetite of anger
The hunger for forgiveness
To love as these crabbed branches, their clenched dark fists,
Ached in compositions of lightning
We long to join you
Your likeness to us
Though we wary of your appearances,
Vanishing in all your countless directions,
Tear-aways between the thrashed exits apple trees make
Grown too heavy, our lives unpicked in the divots of your poems,
The sky urging branches to be its roots
To go further, to leap back
And land, momentless, upon an untouchable earth.
Isle of Hoy 