SEA-SIGHT: DAY ELEVEN
northward the vancouver island coast in an effort to honour the landscape with poetry
I wasn’t sure how to begin again, in this place complicated with the waking constellations of memory, the sense of having been grown from something very small, the strange and fierce alternations between legend, recollection, narrative, and knowledge. the island is an imaginary construction of home and foreign territory; it strides the unspoken barriers between what is wild, and what can be called ours.
the sea brings comfort to those who can trust its presence, its relation to a largeness, an illegibility. under the radiant yellow sounds of evening sun we balance gently on the fist-sized pebbles of french beach, settling to face the wild ranges of this pacific, dwelling within an arc of sand, stone, and bone-bleached wood, seen from above like a collapse of two bodies against and needing one another. I feel the same terror at the blank page that I always feel; as if what happened before—that seemingly impossible cumulation of structure, moment, event, and me—was nothing but a cruel accident that glimpsed out only briefly at what’s possible. each time, writing feels as though it will never happen again, so when it does, it appears in splendor, the most extraordinary gift, built up between oneself and replete emptiness. and this long enchantment, the having and not-having, the presence and the non-presence, the way language can talk back at you, becomes something by which to define a life. the dark of the pen meets the light of the paper. I study the waters. its splayed glitter, the long foaming tongue of its tide. the words do not come gently or easily, but they come.
among the reasons why I have chosen the sea as subject is its circuity, the always-sense of an arrival, of what must travel a long way.
after a handful of strawberries that taste exactly of their colour, we drive the undulating roads of highway 14 towards port renfrew, winding through the seemingly permanent conifers, the fragrant blackberry, the small-leafed currants, climbing upward as the mercy of moving onward takes us singularly. at an unsuspecting shoulder L pulls over, and the high, early moon glances into the late, late sunlight. the scent of green intoxicating. in the distance, the fog over the waters gradually covets the mountain peaks, almost as if the light reversed directions, and aimed skyward instead of earthward. this discernible magic, when light turns from something of elucidation into something of illusion.
northward the asphalt rolls as the tide does, and we encounter the accompaniments of our presence—two male peacocks utterly unconcerned with traffic, night-shade bear cubs scrambling up a tree. there is a distinct pleasure in knowing that we are strange to them as they are to us, that between the creatures of this world the mystery is eternal.
our lodging for the night faces the water, so we pull into the wooden house and cross the garden paths to meet the san juan port, a small enclave which the pacific has claimed in a finger-dip of possession. the sun is past the ranges that face us, but the skies are soft in that brimming way of multi-hue, pastel and formless. the shore is unfurled in driftwood skeletal, and the waves crash in amongst their nebulous shapes, clapping in a thunder that unfolds around us. I climb to the top of an enormous skull of wood, unstructured in its slow melding with salt and sand, and richly golden in its indrawn curvatures. from there the sea is at my feet. the day dims, and froths, and creates the distances that we call minutes.
once the last lustre has skimmed the crooked skyline, L and I slowly and with great effort soothe a fire to life, which sends its own crackling code skyward and soothes the dark with its inconceivable dance. the moon, steel-bright, bathes the whole cove in a intense, blue glow. the stars travel towards us. they are all working together in some sort of hallucination, that of a perfect rightness, of the white glints in the dark fabric of the sky, the dissolving stone-face of moonlight, the intimate chorus of waves as they probe the land, and us, always in the shining middle of things, looking outward, to look beyond.
