The monks say we’re merely thoughts,
highs and lows only passing clouds,
do not cling to either. But this morning,
winter was nearly spring, and I saw
what looked like clouds of ice evaporating
to make a breathing space for sun.
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.
The Story
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.
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.
Isle of Hoy 