(December: Pacific Rim National Park)
Full moon falling on Christmas eve: I wondered,
as we carried our supplies – wine, rain gear, gifts –
from the car to the cabin, whether everything was
about to get conscripted into either family life
or lunacy. We put
the perishables in the fridge,
walked out on the beach: in the east
the blacker blackness of the mountains, already backlit
by the moon, and lower down each cabin’s roof
outlined in lights, reminding everyone that this
was supposed to be the feast of homes
and homebodies, the time to bring a tree indoors
and charm its boreal heart with bric-a-brac,
to make ourselves so interesting its needles would forget
the roots they left behind. On the wet
corrugated sand the lights were smeared and
rippled, an elaborate film noir effect,
an opening sequence into which a cop car,
like an urban orca, should intrude. To the west
ocean was a far roar under its hush-hush
in the sand, a giant with a lisp.
I was thinking of the house we’d left
huddled darkly round its
turned-down furnace, one missing tooth
in the block’s electric smile. How much
we ask of them, that they articulate
the space around us into stanzas,
pauses in the flow which gather time,
or rather where time, slightly pregnant,
might gather if it chose; that they should be the bodies
of our bodies and the spirit’s husk
against the hypothermia which dogs it,
a.k.a. the dreads; that they be resolute yet intimate, insulated,
pest-free, dry, well-founded in the earth but airy,
fire in the belly and a good deep well attached to copper
plumbing, CSA approved; that they should be
possessed of character but not by ghosts, and not
the sort of character who wakes you
in the middle of the night and suddenly
needs money; that they should shed the rain and keep the wind
from blowing out the candle flame of talk, the bedtime stories,
murmurings, the small redundant phrases with which one voice
solaces another.
And when it goes awry – the cracks the bills the noise the
drains the silences the bugs – to take the blame and sit there,
stoically, on the market while new dreamers sniff the air
and poke their noses into closets,
hatching their improbable plots.
We walked through soft mist,
filling our ears with the ocean’s boom
and whisper. Is it the listening that loosens,
letting its knots go, or the voice,
saying those great unsayings to itself until
ovation on the inside equals ovation out? And rain forest,
I thought as we turned back at the cliff,
must be the way it gets translated into plants,
who remember water with each rounded,
downward gesture.
Then the moon. Over the mountain it hung
and roiled inside itself,
pure style which took the scene aslant, selecting
the bristle of frost on the drift logs, the patch
of duct tape on my boot, the whites of your eyes,
leaving whatever was not glimmering in deeper shadow,
uninhabited. Can you recall
those nights we spent learning from the wolves to be
the tooth and tongue of darkness, how to hunt
and howl? Me neither. Now that howl’s
inverted in us, the long o of alone. The wolves
are dogs. The sun says here, the moon says
nowhere, the nameless moon
that sheds the blunt domesticating myths
the way a mirror utterly forgets you
when you leave the bathroom, the empty moon
soliciting our ghosts, calling on them to leave home,
that gilded cage, that theme park of the human.
But the sea was gazing back, its look
rich with tumult and the possibility of huge hearts
sounding the depths. Between them
otherworldliness is quickened. One theory –
my favourite – goes that once the earth and moon were one,
spinning monthlessly in space, and somehow –
whether by asteroid
or apple, différance, tabu – they broke up and the moon,
newly fallen, risen, floated off into its orbit, while
into the crater of its absence flowed
the greater tear known as the Pacific Ocean.
So:
a story full of loss and eros, three-fifths
of the way to myth. Let’s leave it there – something human,
homespun, like a basket, a translation, or a loaf of bread –
beside the incandescent water. Our cabin sat
under its little party hat of lights, and to it,
wanting its warmth, and supper, and to give our gifts,
we went.