In a late fall morning, in my upper room,
settling into my armchair, which once belonged to Deb’s dad,
I take sips of coffee while slowly inhaling a Psalm
          (a habit I can’t break),
               and just like that, time slips a cog
and I fall into a permanent notch of astronomical twilight;
you know, that phase where the sky is bleeding out its black
and the stars are brushing their teeth, preparing for bed.

It’s been happening more lately, the slipping I mean,
          not without me tilting at omens,
or shuddering at the gothic crow near my window,
          but then, after the inner shivers, I see,
it’s not a dark alley so much as a gluey predawn warmth,
like being blanketed in the back of a horse-drawn carriage,
clopping along through a viscous mist,
          enveloped, like lying in some angelic float tank,
          enwrapped, like being held in the arms
of that anonymous monk who wrote the Cloud of Unknowing.
     And I, a happy water strider,
          a rollicking otter,
               a halcyon loon,
take to the thick silence like a March crocus—
no warning of my heart’s thaw,
no accounting for the blaze of predawn that pierces
my inflated aspirations,
     amputates my sad little deceptions,
          a quick scalpel to my sly envy,
               a major excision on my delicate ego.

          O, this surgical mercy,
          this brooding Love,
so quiet it rings a thousand bells,
so electric it stuns my donkey soul,
and readies us for a wilderness sojourn
          far into enemy territory,
just me, my donkey, and this big
          bindle-bag full of love.

At Base Camp he pitched his pillow tent,
drew flags with crayon and hung them on his tricycle.
He loved the stars stuck to his ceiling, and loved the clever,
silver light that came through the window and turned
his room into a starship. He felt sad and misunderstood
when told to pick up his toys; he made up his mind never
to become a grown-up, then one morning he made his bed
and left. Some bruising but full of good training and wearing
white sneakers and a denim jacket, he good as loped
to Camp Two, where he gathered up his spent passions,
his lessons-learned, rehearsed his self-talk and set out
with his trail map of remedial wisdom to reach Camp Three.
Mounting responsibilities, constant equipment checks,
increasing edema and demands for dwindling supplies,
still, he stowed his happy memories, laced up his sorrows,
cares, steadied himself and laboured on. Camp Four.
The summit, now in sight. Breathing comes harder.
No return to Base (amusing that he ever thought there was).
With what strength remains, he climbs higher.
The stars float in the pressing ether, the white peak looms larger,
he drops more and more gear, feels less weight,
there’s more and more light!

Sometimes, words fall through space
out of sheer loneliness; pine for connection.
Take any noun, on its own,
vagrant, indigent, languishing in isolation.
But should a willing adjective stop by, noun
is changed, charged, coloured, like a scarlet macaw.

And see the verb that glances,
how it’s struck by the painted preposition,
enticed into a syntactical ménage à trois
to create the tight triadic world of a sentence.

Forging fact or fantasy, mask or vulnerability,
able to convey beauty or blight, hate or light,
or this singular thought: Go on gorgeous,
get over yourself,
come on down to the water’s edge,
join our ragged tide of loss, hope, and clumsy love.

I know a poet who bends low
to listen to the spaces between words.
Labours to narrow the gap of these small cracks
through which meaning falls.
Resists the temptation
to choose the better sounding word
rather than the right one.
Waits for 20 years
until the better sounding word
becomes the right one.

For language is a river,
its headwater unscalable, unseen;
gathers a lexicon from the great glossal basin
of branches, feeders, rills;
and the dialectic silt from distant rains.

The river flows toward fluent confluences
of meaning; meaning shared,
then sundered by rocks and rapids;
languishes in argot eddies, reconstitutes
in quiet currents.

Sediment, marl, alluvial sleep, force
the lingual bends into overstated loops
until the banks are breached and the bend
cut off, leaving behind an oxbow lake,
stagnant as Latin.

And still the river flows, courses
toward some grand delta: is it not our deep, spreading desire,
for the reversal of Babel? categories undone, borders overrun
by raids of goodwill, people listening, not shouting,
blind biases burned away, kindness raining.

Out on the eastern terminus of Suturna Island, I crept
past tide pools and reams of seaweed and knelt
on the jagged basalt; knelt at the blue foot
of Mount Baker, before the spirit of heron,
under the eye of a sailing osprey:

and all my cursory science and measly philosophies:
exposed, like the rust on these rocks;
all my anthropocentric chuffs,
washed out to sea.

For what do I know about the consciousness of a sea hawk—
riding the sway of wind above a wake, or following
a spirant current from a great height.

And what do I know about the inner life of a heron,
its imperial reflection upon a hemisphere of water,
her patience absorbing the arc of morning,
a contemplation unfathomed by a Merton.

Or what do I know of the animacy, or even
the awareness of a mountain,
its powers of understanding, telling of glory,
its eons-old atoms, the same as my own.

I have so much to unlearn.