Tag: landscape

Map of Wilderness

This map flows river after river,
creeks popping through them, like bent nails.
I read its mind on Evelyn again,
wind stealing it from your hand,
stuffing it down its pocket of rapids.

I’d go to those rivers once.
It didn’t matter,
you’d never stop finding me.
So, I believed that what the tongues
and grooves of water had to say
was true,
that you loved a wilderness
more than I could ever.

You’d just come to me,
you, your invisible map,
the one
only I could see,
so that nothing, I thought,
would steal it.

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Winter Field

This funny place,
every place somewhere else.

How, I love you, turns a face,
changes minds, becomes a back.

Mine, too,
into this river spine of loneliness

up freezing ground,
snow-warmed, underneath.

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Rain Lake

All night it rains morse code on the dome of the tent.
It is a vase of air, a lander in search of life,
transmitting this, “here I am, speak.”

For hours, I sleep, curled into a shape of a lake,
until I wake, turn into another, and because I am cold,
a lake more southerly than the last.

I wear my dark blue Toronto Maple Leafs toque,
reminiscent of the liners astronauts wear,
and divers also, which they fit beneath their helmets,
but the cold, another body now, embraces me.

Perhaps she can sniff a damp animal.
With my pores wide, I might admit
she can enter my skin,
divide, leave again

because this is her route,
bodies of rain traversing
lake after lake, letting mist
become dreams

of another planet,
the warmth of the island
I once discovered at
its very centre.

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Leaves

One feels nothing
when the first days of November
arrive to fill in the wind-scoured constellations of geese
or to carry away
the sour mounds of apricot,
October peeled away.
One wonders,
where do the deer sleep here,
in November,
wake, cut away
under the grey trance of sky
when the blind car unzips its haste down
the threadbare road revealing
crops of still life too ingrown for
decay and that crisscross beneath
the unspoken snow,
yet to make landfall.

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Northerly

Northerly,

circling

the windshield

its

hand prints of leaves,

giving in to

their brief flight,

and their glassy

question marks

that say,

why

does it rain

in the desert?

So

much

of

you,

stripped

from your bones,

old rivers that scented trees,

their nakedness pointing you

to the sky,

cathedrals that

do not ring.

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Birds From the Garden

I believe now,

their faith,

growing absent in the garden,

skin-and-bones behind

cold stones,

and in creases of soil

they shed nettles,

almost

by hand,

in them admonishing their

preparations for regret,

seeing that

they take

from the windows

their lessening reflections,

then bear them,

because winter is the garden

of the desert,

because winter breathes the dead

into light.

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Firepit on Lac Dragon Island

I find the old firepit
that looks ancient.

It’s fifty at most,
a broken bobbin of weed

and blueberry.
Moldy blisters from fire

are spooned away
in a broken bowl

of a skull, fingers sucked
to their stone seeds.

The wind seems to find me.
It circles my arms,

then confuses them with cedars,
it seems, coaling their bitterness,

orange gruel, and crab water
crawling in

the salty beard, spreading
the unnameable colour of lichen.

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Here in the Lowland

I think of the fog in the lowlands this morning.
How something that can’t be perfectly seen

is the thing you want to reach for,
you say is beautiful –

becomes the very thing
you constantly lose, never quite having.

It’s strange thinking you forget.
But, I can’t grasp you, either,

you, pretending to be blinded by your hair
before I sweep it from your eyes

seeing, then,
the yellow cornfields left trembling.

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Photography & A Sense of Place

place

“You can find good composition in any shit-shop tourist calendar. Want my opinion? I think photography is a much arty’er art than most people believe. It’s logical to think that if you got an eye for composition, plus a few technical skills, you can learn at any photography class. One pretty place should photograph as well as any other, especially if you’re just into landscapes. Just make sure you’ve got the right filter, then point and shoot. Only, it’s not like that. Place matters in photography, just like it does in painting or writing stories or poetry. I don’t know why it does … actually, I do… because an artist puts his soul into the things he creates. For some people, ones with a vagabond spirit, I imagine, the soul is portable.”
—Stephen King from his short story, ‘N’.

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