Shorelight
It’s shorelight you’re seeing,
the sky performs a metaphor
for you
(like Chaplin putting his bowler hat
under the bed at bedtime)
the riverrun of sky this time (every time) being
our life lived, with banks or berges
in need of shearing. Did you know
shore comes from shearing?
Imagine.
Dawn’s twilight sees us
shorn of our matted dreams
disembarrassed of our shag by our bergers
and shivering with expectation
at the fringe of the day
like sheep
or else sheep waiting to be driven
into the flood to wash their wool wool-white
after the treatment —
liminal
Hebridean for now, and blinking at it all.
So that great band of orange in the sky
is a sandbank and seems to bank
the choppily skidding sky
but it’s your life it’s banking on.
Really.
And all our life we’re just part
of a shore people who were born to this,
for this.
We grew up here aquatic apes,
youngster apelets each of us once
hanging onto our mother’s every hair
and she weaving the shallows, the littoral
a few million years ago.
Seems like yesterday.
Hope
so they say springs eternal but I say
hope is solid, factive
it is our all-season all-terrain our
home and native
shore
dawn is the land we thrive in, that’s
our song its
theme, shored up here for something
we know nothing about
far out and away beyond.
Dawn
counts for a lot
with us, and accounts for a lot
or so I think I know —
Shoreline
Ashes to ashes, snow to snow.
The ash is a species threatened by the emerald ash borer.
Ottawa is soon to be denuded of trees by 50%. Ash-bound ourselves
we are ‘bracing for massive destruction of forests in Ontario and Québec
in the next fifteen years.’
Imagine this shoreline without Isolde
Imogen
Morgan and
Beatrice Tristan
Anselm
Seraphim and Gregory
home-brew christenings for ash trees whose arabesques chisel mosaic chips
into the cloisonné of sky against the bit of fleuve we call home.
How do without? How not this
mosaic air on a G string, this gut-bark and blank?
its seeds of snow horizontal on the vector of wind
orient express pit-stopped by ash? this kind of
morning light ‘new every morning’ with ‘the love our wakening
and uprising prove’?
What has Love got to do with it
the blinking out of another of Love’s species?
Did he who made the lamb make thee? Or did we make the emerald threat?
The maker of alle thing
sees with a bigger scan than I can pretend to.
Take off your sandals, this is holy ground.
The Church is its members future and past, with the present :
the communion of saints.
The Earth is its members future and past, with the present :
the communion of species.
Does the Head of the Body have a choice? Or does he,
did he, give it to us?
Is it something we said? We apologize.
Where do we sit at ease — if ease is allowed — in the present; where
is the still small voice, the true north of this turning, this
world, your cell that teaches you everything?
How put the rest back into the rest of it? Bared of limbs
whose amputation from Love’s body bares our souls’ grievance, how
best comport the limbs left us?
How bear it
unbearing them?
What
