SEA-SIGHT: DAY NINETEEN
northward the vancouver island coast in an effort to honour the landscape with poetry
I am not to be trusted with my own objects, so in the morning (which is still relieved from the burdens of electricity), we head back to port alice to retrieve my cell phone, which I had left in a flower pot outside a public bathroom. this corrupt flaw is something that I will likely never be able to fix, and my helplessness lends me a certain levity. L, however, is justifiably horrified.
after the laughably long detour (port alice and port hardy are about ninety minutes apart), we drive the most treacherous roads thus far to the southwestern end of cape scott park, a land of lingering wildness chat spans the north island, apprehensive for even advanced hikers. luckily, the path to san juan bay is maintained forgivably for those—such as us—who have no such craving for adventure, and the waters that lie beyond the forest is an unreal chronicle of dazzling seascape.
emerging from the unrestrained treeline, the pristine sands dissolve long into the magnificent waft of tide-crash. thin sheets of water grasping at the vivid land. its violence is not mysterious, it fills all the space there is, in that culpable invisible invasion of sound and sight and fragrance. the water always as something to sink deeply into. sitting on the ground it the coastline is somehow behind me. measured in the length of travel, the perceptions of encounter, the private objects of the past.
meanwhile the wind stirs from the water a melange of tangled mist, which proceeds with shocking speed to enwrap the daedalian formations of shoreline. in extraterrestrial cotton it overwhelms sight (one believes sight to be inexhaustible until…), and without counting I am cocooned in the floating world, in-between air and water, simple in the way it lands and touches, hosting invisibility by way of its quiet power. all around is white. the figures walking in the distance are malickian ghosts. the sand at my feet the only certainty. I have never seen such a vivid, striking image of emptiness.
wind does not hold, so the fog eventually disperses its temper, sending cloud-tendrils listless into a floating world. apparelled in celestial light. if we are bound, as wordsworth alludes, to wander always in adulthood in search of the same intimations of immortality that we had discovered, in childhood, amidst all the ordinariness of daily things, I am always glad in my sureness that the task is not an impossible one. the gleams that occasionally report to the vision will always come from afar. perhaps a poet is more susceptible to them—for she is searching—but it is not even that the pursuit of poetry has brought me in body to this place, but some irrational wonderment that pushes diagonally through the cracks of daily methods. the sense that sublimity can always be coaxed from the beyond—even if we are not always the ones looking. I write poems . . . to say grace.
the abstract, light figures written with the wind as instrument is language. wordsworth, rilke, harjo. in winding curves something disappears, but is never erased. because we can never once think again of the truly forgotten—the mind holds in itself all the possibilities of the real.
at sunset the clouds are in soft bunches of altocumulus, long having morphed from the resonances of the day’s story. tomorrow is the last day. in john koethe’s collected poems I flip to one entitled “when there was time”.
