Today I live less than a five-minute walk to an eight-lane freeway,
and when I leave the house, I imagine an ocean—waves
crashing close, then washing back over a broad gravel beach.
When I reach the pedestrian overpass, my deception is overcome
by a sea of single-occupant cars and trucks competing for time
and small forgettable victories. A loneliness of freeways.
A forest of polyvinyl cages, understory of rubber and alloy, all
bathed in burnt gas—venomous photosynthesis—blaring speed,
contrails of asphalt, bands of pavement like blind pythons
winding over the humiliated foothills.

When I walk the same distance in the other direction, I drop down
a wooded bank of buffaloberry and red-osier dogwood, trembling aspen
and balsam poplar, an occasional white spruce. Flash sightings of flickers.
Songs of chickadees. Everlasting magpies and scavenging crows.
Snagged on a prickly rose, a tuft of fur tells of a red-tailed hawk.
At the coulee’s nadir, a creek with miniature waterfalls, still falling,
still running in late August. A cure for souls.
The root-studded path leads to a hillside meadow of yarrow,
a tunic of arnica, wild blue aster, subalpine fleabane, and harebell.
Fireweed stands among inveterate goat’s beard, a neutrality of shrubby
cinquefoil, and a solemnity of honeysuckle and service berry.

Stopping at the creek, where things speak of solitude, I gaze
myself into a trance. When I emerge, as I must, I pray,
in my own distrait way, that—Earth may [yet] outwit
the huge stupidity of its humans.*

---

“Surely our task
was to have been
to love the earth,
to dress and keep it like Eden’s garden.”  -Denise Levertov

---

* line from Denise Levertov’s poem, Almost-Island

 

 

I

Was I failing you, boring you? So you grabbed your Boho coat,
your Trilby hat, your sheaf of song sheets, and stole away, down
some sibylline road.

Or, is this how old goes? Onset of senescence. Like piranha, advancing.
Nibbling, invading, the delicate shallows of meiosis; the discreet beaches
of mitosis, indiscriminate of bone or brain, sinew or cerebrum.

O, fear-and-wonder body—intricately and seamlessly knit, twilled,
latticed and lit with mind and imagination, soul if you will—
you have seen a caravan of years, and now, well into your “carnival
of losses,” your verses are hearses and your songs are all dirges.

II

Today, a friend arrived. He spoke the language of quiet lakes
reflecting ancient mountains. A dialect of mile-deep blues
and greys that yet glitter.

And I lifted my face toward the August foothills, where
white spruce and paper birch, where even wizened tamarack,
make no assumptions of season’s turns.

And the grey alder said: Do not let your heart be troubled.
              It is not your province
              to compose your epilogue. Go, wade
through your restive weariness, rise to your twilight mind,
perhaps to collide again with bursts of clarity, accidents of light.

Poetry may yet have news for you, news
you can’t get any other way.

 

 

Through a phrase from Brahms…which ran through my head for an afternoon, I have suddenly come to see that there is a universality which is not of the conceptual order, that is the key to the idea of music. – Gabriel Marcel

We live on the beaches of Hornby Island. Cheap way to live. But money ebbs. We pick up the quickest employment possible. Port Alberni, and a MacMillan Bloedel sawmill answer the call.

I work the midnight shift. All night I rake up flayed tree flesh beneath the shark-toothed grinders of the debarker; sweep the sawdust from under the headrig and the huge circular bucking saw that slices and partitions each log like Wonder Bread. I shovel it all down a shoot, back into the Alberni Inlet, where the sidewinder boats nose logs toward the jack-ladder to lift them into the mill. I work alone.

Every morning after my shift I stop for breakfast at the Alberni Cafe. Waiting for easy-over eggs, bacon and toast, I step to the jukebox and punch in E11. It’s slow that time of morning and the cook, who prefers Tom T. Hall (especially the song about Clayton Delaney), nevertheless, lets me reach around back and turn it up.

A few seconds and the 45 drops, the turntable whirls to life, the tonearm falls and bounces, the needle finds the groove and the speaker crackles and I hear the B-flat piano chord and the base run that starts high and tumbles, then:

“I packed my bags last night, preflight, zero hour, nine a.m.”

And the coffee’s good. And beyond the grease-gauze windows the sky brightens and shimmers, and I think of home, and I think of being alone, and think of everyone at the Bird House, on Burde Street—friends, some waking up and going to the mill, others, scattered though the house, sleeping. And I feel the pull of solitude and Something beyond; and I feel the equally strong longing of being with friends, who have become family…

“I’m not the man they think I am at home, oh no, no, no, I’m a Rocket man…Rocket man burnin’ out his fuse up here alone.”

And I am. A Rocket Man. Free. Floating above the cracked linoleum and chipped Arborite table, above Port Alberni, high over Cathedral Grove, up over the gulf islands where there’s magic; where boats bob off shore at night and stars shoot the lights out of each other in late summer and streak and fall into the Pacific, sending luminous waves to phosphorescent shores.

It’s a song that’s seared a place inside me, and whenever I hear it, it sets me to long moments of wondering.

Fifty years ago, working alone through those graveyard shifts, the song kept me hinged and lucid—more than escape, it gave the nod to my experience, kept me integrated with the island rock, and connected to a universality beyond the conceptual order—the long view, borne of solitude and the yearning for belonging.

The best version is still from Honky Chateau (1972).

  

 

In the coral hours of late afternoon, we sit on a large driftwood log,
our feet grazing the sand, curls of cigar smoke rising
straight up in the windless air.

Looking out at the ocean, he says, “Unreal.”
Awe’s not uncommon with him: some scene settles,
then summons his sight, to see what’s otherwise unseen.

I look out over the water: one hapless sailboat, its sail furled around
the boom, and in the foreground, two bathers, and a spattering of gulls,
nearer still, a sweet-sour tangle of dry seaweed.

I’m not immune to whatever it is he’s seeing and I almost spout
some thought about Creation, which may not have been false,
only tedious—a fly in the ointment and anointment of the moment.

For wherever he looks, he sees an abundance. God,
spilling out over matter, although he wouldn’t call it God.
“How is it we don’t sense something more?” he asks, fully aware

that his life attests to the receptivity of lasting mystery.
“How can there be evil?” he asks, fully aware that evil lurks
in human hearts and flourishes in indolence.

Then, citing Christ, “Let the dead bury the dead,” says the man,
who’s never read a word of scripture. And I understand that verse
in a way I hadn’t before.

We sit quiet, talk, in that spacious, unclouded way of friendship—
the spiritual audacity and naked security of sinewy trust—
where the ear is not lonely and the eye is not starved.

Sundown, coming on, “Unreal,” he says again.