Sentinel

Jobe and the old man sat and looked at each other for a while.  In the branches above them, a blue jay screeched its grievances against some intruder somewhere in the woods.  With a flitter of unseen wings, the sentinel and the insurgent both seemed to take flight and the air was quiet for a moment.  Almost in response to the blue jay’s alarm, a far-off monstrous rumble shivered in the air, thinned by distance.  Heavy plodding feet thumped into the earth behind everything, then faded away...

It’s A Bad Time, It’s A Good Time

It's a good time.  It’s a bad time.  Outside, sad and scary things are happening, yes.  All we have to do is stay home and the monster will pass us by.  Another plague that will pass over our closed doorways.  All we have to do is stay home.  Could anything be easier?

So it’s a good time.  It’s a good time to write that story that’s been sitting unfulfilled in your journals for so long.  Read that book that your friend keeps recommending to you.  Find out why Haruki Murakami is such an important writer.  Figure Ulysses out.

It’s a good time to get into that band that you keep hearing about, check out their albums, watch some of their concerts.  Phish.  Now that’s a great band hardly anyone’s ever explored.  What is Django Reinhardt all about?  Why does everyone talk about Lou Reed so much?  Who is Riit?

It’s a good time to watch North of 60 from beginning to end, including all the spinoff movies.  Revisit Battle of the Planets.  Are there any reruns of Get Smart on YouTube?
Now’s a good time to find out.

Is it hard to be alone?  If you can’t be alone with your thoughts, then you need to think some more.  Get to know yourself.  Think about what you want.  About where you want to be.  Think about who you would like to be and how you can get there.  Make a plan.  This is a good time to do that.  Time alone is time with the most important person in your life, who is often also the most neglected.  You should go good together.  You might be The One.  Nah, who are you kidding? You ARE The One.
So it’s a bad time out there, but it can be a good time in here.  Then when the shadow has passed, you can step out into the sun refreshed and maybe even enriched.
Definitely healthy.

All we have to do is stay home.  What could be easier?

Floating Down The Lyrical River: reviewing Catherine Owen's "Riven"

We have always been close to the river.  Even in prehistory, mankind has always settled along the riverside.  It’s there where the plants and trees are most lush, it’s where our food has always been most plentiful, and its waters have always been available for swift commute from community to community.  Perhaps this is why we have always had an affinity to bodies of water.  We have always been there.

The waters by which poet Catherine Owen has metaphysically settled are those of the Fraser River, which flows through the heart of Greater Vancouver where she was born and raised.  Though currently based in Edmonton, Owen’s time within walking distance of the Fraser has given her immeasurable solace and wrought this book of poetry, which she has entitled “Riven”.  As she says in “The River System”, the long poem on the last pages of the book:

                “if I were only staring out

upon land, I would be

heartbroken...”

In Riven she considers with keen observational depth the lessons that a river can offer about the brevity of life, the eternity of love, the continuity of survival and the futility of death.   With these rich descriptions, Owen brings you into the space that she occupied while on her morning stomps along the industrial rubble and eroded pebble at the water’s edge, using the river as a constant metaphor for life, death and their byproduct, which is memory.

In memory, her thoughts fall upon her deceased husband as she remains true to his legacy as her muse, the basis of much of her poetic thought. Much of her works has centered around that loss in previous works that she has made, but as Junot Diaz will tell you- “the half life of love is forever”, which is to say that love- even lost love- never fades. From the river, she considers the paradox of grieving in the collection’s first poem; “Thirty-Six Sentences on the Fraser River That Could Serve as a Very Small Nest”

                “The river is like your death; it just keeps moving away from me.”

She notes that the river is water that constantly passes us by yet remains a constant presence, illustrating the paradox of both the river and of death.

She touches on even more paradoxes during her morning walks along the Fraser, documenting the industrial constructs that have been erected on the waterfront as well as the natural insistences that grow between and beneath them. She doesn’t differentiate the artificial from the natural.  They all exist in the same environment, as she considers in the poem; “Beseech”

                “Their origins, stone, perhaps, or song.”

Her most frequent imagery, and the one that brings us alongside as she would “prolong along the estuary” is that of the “silver river”, especially in the series of aubade poems, which serves as the centerpiece of the book.  The imagery conjures up that magical phase of the early morning when the sun has just risen and the perspective of light gives the river a pristine metallic shine that cuts through any depression or dulling effect of the surroundings.  As she says in “The Last Aubade”:

               

“…silver you could say as scars, as age,

Or ashes – silver as what holds everything this morning…”

Throughout the book’s conception, the shining quicksilver of the Fraser has lit Owen’s solitary mornings and cut through the miasma of her grieving.  The river has also served well as a backdrop and starting point for her to create her ideas that form this beautiful tribute to the rivers that constantly flow through our lives as well as the beautiful man for which she grieves.  Riven presents some of the most descriptive and incisive poetry that Catherine Owen has ever offered, derived from a place of deep contemplation and raw emotive power, a place not unlike the river that flows through all of us, through time, love and memory.

In Context of the Moon in Perigee...

"On the night of October 4th and 5th, 1869, exactly 110 years ago today,  occurred the Saxby Gale,  to leave a legend that still provokes our wonder.    It swept up the Bay of Fundy  smashing wharves,  tossing vessels ashore,  and creating tides that may have set an all-time world record.  An account of it appeared in the AMHERST GAZETTE,  three days later,  which said that: "the tide must have been eight feet above the ordinary high-water level  and four feet above the dykes."
Oddly enough,  it hardly affected Nova Scotia's Atlantic coast - the South shore and the Eastern shore,  but confined itself to communities along  New Brunswick's Fundy coast  - and the inner reaches of Minas Basin  and Chignecto Bay.

No one really knows how many lives were lost in that gale.  In the churchyard at Hillsborough, in Albert County (N.B.)  is a whole section of tombstones  raised to the victims of the Saxby "tide", as some called it,  because it was the phenomenal tide  that accounted for most of the casualties.  Farmers had gone down to the marshes,  in an attempt to lead their livestock to safety,  and then  the dykes broke,  and they were swept away  by a great tidal wave.

It was called the Saxby gale because of a certain Lieutenant Saxby,  a young officer in the Royal Navy who was also an amateur astronomer.  Lieutenant Saxby had written a letter to the London  Times almost ten months before this happened  warning  that in October of the coming year,  the position of the moon  in relation to other heavenly bodies,  would cause a gale of immense and devastating force  He even fortold the day - October 5th.

Most of those who read Lieutenant Saxby's prediction - and it was widely reprinted in American and Canadian newspapers - dismissed the warning,  pointing out that gales often did occur in October.  It was almost a foregone conclusion that a gale would occur  somewhere in the world,  and Lieutenant Saxby hadn't said  where this one would strike.

But a gale did strike,  on the evening of October 4th, 1869.  The weather that afternoon  had given no cause for uneasiness.  The day dawned without the slightest sign of anything unsual,  or foreboding.  Along the New Brunswick coast, .from St.Stephen to Saint John,  water lapped gently against the wharf pilings,  under a blanket of fog, which later cleared, giving way to a warm sunny morning.  A perfect Autumn day.

Then, about noon,  at the entrance to Yarmough (N.S.) harbour,  whitecaps began to appear,  while a light  breeze from the southwest gathered strength.  As the afternoon advanced,  the breeze increased steadily,  while the heat became oppressive.  Out by Yarmouth lighthouse,  or at The Churn, on the way to Cape Forchu,  you could hear the waves beginning  to boom.  Soon  the michaelmas daisies were wet with drifting spray.  Toward the south,  the sky loomed dull and leaden,  growing darker as the afternoon wore on,  with the rising wind  riding the sky on a witches'-broom of scudding storm clouds.  By five o'clock  the wind reached hurricane force.  By six,  trees were falling,  as if felled by an axe.  By nine o'clock  the raging,  terrifying Saxby Gale  was at its height.

We, today, can have no idea  how frightening this gale must have seemed,  to people cut off and alone,  with no means of communicating with their neighbours - no telephone,  no radio,  no electric light to snap on.  Many homes without even a kerosene lamp  and hard enough to keep a candle burning in the drafty rooms.

One man described it like this: "The extreme darkness,  the constant roar and tumult of wind,  the lashing rain,  the groaning of great trees,  the hail of debris, shingles, branches, objects large and small, falling everywhere, roofs carried aloft, whole buildings collapsing,  all gave a paralyzing sense of insecurity and calamity."

At St. Andrews (N.B.)  123 vessels were tossed up onto the beach -- a barque named the Genii  was sunk at Lepreau with the loss of eleven lives  [note,  these men were from the area, among them was two McVicar brothers from Mascarene shore, the barque was  named GENIL, she smashed at Lepreau].    On Campobello Island  (Charlotte County),  wind and tide destroyed over 80 buildings -- the roof of the Volunteer Armoury in St. George (N.B.) was carried 100 yards by the wind.  In St. Stephen a man was picked up by the wind, carried across the street, and deposited on the other sidewalk.

As the gale raced up the Bay of Fundy  it swept the water on ahead and forced it into the inner bays and inlets - into Shepody Bay and Cumberland Basin and Minas Basin (N.S.).

In the town of Annapolis (N.S.),  water was knee-deep on Lower St.George Street.  At Grand Pre  (N.S.)  it breached the Great Horton Dyke, flooding 3,000 acres,  and drowning herds of cattle.  Windsor's Water Street  was like a canal in Venice,  and the Windsor Baptist Church had seven feet of water in the vestry.

At Moncton (N.B.),  at the foot of South King Street,  the tide rose nine feet over the Harris wharf  up onto the warehouses, destroying supplies of salt, flour and other perishables.  If you're driving through Moncton  you can see a marker at Boreview Park,  along with a plaque indicating the height of the tide,  just before midnight,  on that fateful 4th and 5th of October, 1869."

Marilyn Bonvie 1999 - The Saxby Gale of 1869

http://sites.rootsweb.com/~nbcharlo/saxby1.htm

from Work in Progress...

His mind was like a top that she would start spinning. It would stand, erect and balanced, and he would never want the conversation to end. He just wanted it to spin and spin, straight and strong, forever...

(from Waawaashkesh Ke)

Death comes mercifully for prey. The fear, the pain is all in the chase, the struggle. Peace comes with surrender. There’s such peace in surrender. I always feel it when my prey ceases to struggle, that wave of peace that comes over them. I feel for that certain moment when the breath stops and the body relaxes, so limp as to be water. At that moment, I envy them. I’ve never in my life been able to sleep that deep, to rest so completely. I don’t want to die, but only wish that I could feel that kind of serenity. I’ve been finding myself wishing that more and more in recent years. There’s a perfect completeness to death that is just so lacking in my life.

So that’s what she did. She exhaled no more and became like water. She wet my face as I ripped her open and bit by bit, she disappeared into my stomach.

I ate until I felt ill and sat down on my haunches,  tired and stupid, smarting from the wounds and contusions she’d inflicted on me, my muscles quivering from exhaustion. Someone could have come along and kicked me over and I would be too stupid to fight, too full to run. That’s when I’m at my weakest, after I’d gotten what I wanted. Such a quick descent isn’t it? To fall from the power to take a life to the impotence of being unable to save one’s own. There was nothing for me to do then but find a safe place to hide and get some sleep.

from o ánthropos

The thing I love the most about my house is the balcony. I had it made off of my bedroom on the second floor.  From there, I could rise in the morning to watch black squirrels and passerine birds as they chase each other through the network of forest limbs behind my property.  I would sit upon that narrow promontory o ánthropos into the natural world, sipping from my coffee.  I would reset and connect.

It is like a human isthmus of my dream world into the real world available just outside my door. The real world, because it’s not contrived from human hands.  It’s not artificial, so to speak. I think of the word artifice; the use of guile to deceive others out of what is rightfully theirs.  Can it be said that anything artificial has pulled a fast one on Mother Nature? Maybe.  I’m just glad to be here.