The day has begun.
Across the ink-dark bay, the barest hints of light.
Pale pinks and a suggestion of peach, etch
an outline of Salt Spring Island.

A dark-eyed junco is the first to sing. Now,
the breeze-less morning gathers its long shadows,
and the sun slowly explodes above the island’s crown.

In my place at the window, it is good to feel my smallness
and my brevity, like the pale flame of a match, against
the sky’s red blaze and wordless horizon.

I can’t trace the time, exactly, but my gratitude
has become corroded; my instinct for praise
has been dulled by the din of topical news,
its noise, like the seventh circle of hell.

I’ve learned that the first birds to sing in the dawn chorus
are those with the biggest eyes. So here I am,
doing a kind of mind-eye tai chi, to get my soul back.

Me and the dark-eyed junco, reading the light,
analyzing the alchemy of mist on the bay,
studying the vague sway of a looming hemlock,
the incarnadine storyline of a neighbour’s magnolias.

I never made it through Dante, but one thing stuck:
that dawn should open my mouth in song,
and to will to refuse is hell.

I have called a friend who says he is sitting on his front step
watching a bald eagle who is watching him, carefully,
from the crown of a Sitka spruce. I tell him it is an omen for good.

He is labouring under a sentence, lodged in the linings of a lung,
                                                   brittle fascicles of worry,
like stiff dry grass thrust through February snow.

I have called the sea-fogged hills and the big-leaf maples
and have asked them why, on this planet shrouded in soft
hallowed light, our souls, like raptors, remain restless,
                                                                          for illumination.

I have seen cities, with grieving houses, where
somewhere, in a seldom-used kitchen, a sixties song
is breaking the heart of an aging woman, somewhere,
in a lonesome bedroom, a boy is trained by a slim screen.
somewhere, a girl in high school is in the back of a police car,
                                                              somewhere, more sirens.

I have called to the rain. I said, “Add my tears to your flask.”
I have called to my parents, and friends, who have passed,
who, like mute doves in distant places,
echo my long silent mourning, and still,
I hear the cantering beauty of their voices.

I turned to God and shouted, “Does being have a meaning?”
and round some parabolic room, came Mystery’s whisper,
“Ask instead, does meaning have a Being?”

And I thought of the risen Christ, and I called
to the Easter moon that rose above the paschal sky,
and in the light of morning, I saw the eagle and the rain
and the boy and the sea-fogged hills and the city of sorrow,
with its cemetery at the limits, and I asked,
“Who are in these graves?” And Christ said,
                                                                  “No one!”

And suddenly I heard, as though above the hem of time, all beings 
of earth, mothers and fathers, companions and partners,
                                              cry out with love.

It’s that time at the close of the afternoon, when you rise
to the evening, go down the spiral stairs to the glass-walled bar
overlooking the swimming pool and order a cerveja,
where a small crowd of vacationers, smelling faintly
of suntan lotion, sit and tell stories, of getting the best deal
on a pair of cork sandals, of standing, mute, at the sight
of Montserrat Monastery, of heart operations, with complications,
of a drill-sergeant yoga instructor, of a mother, cursing her nursing home,
of grandchildren, turning out right, of a daughter who sojourns to Ashrams,
of the tastiest monkfish in old town, of walking,
at 70, the Camino de Santiago…

The comfortable hum of humans telling stories,
like glad frogs throat-singing our way into the night,
and like those frogs, we stay mostly below the surface;
almost always keeping nine-tenths of us out of sight —
like icebergs, only warmer.

And occasionally, perhaps because of that warmth,
there’s a crack beneath the surface
that exposes more of you than you’d intended,
but is received with openness, and understanding,
and even if you’ll never see these people again,
it doesn’t cancel out the surge of hope that washes through you,
restoring to flight, the bird of your worth,
charging the sails of your courage,
making you feel you’ll weather the creeping indignities of aging,
the squalls of dying.

What’s the word? There should be a word for the wave of yearning,
the lake of thanksgiving, you feel for all the people
that pass through your life,
that have added to your life.

And even as the gaps of time and place between our lives
grow wider, like rowboats drifting away from a dock,
never count it as loss!

Here’s the headline:
The human spirit has risen above the human condition.
To sustain it, is a grand hope, but not out of reach.
It happens all the time; it can happen anywhere;
as it happens every day, during happy hour,
at the Luna Solaqua in Albufeira.