SEA-SIGHT: DAY TWENTY (A REFLECTION)

northward the vancouver island coast in an effort to honour the landscape with poetry

helen frankenthaler, mountains and sea (1952)

when I received funding for sea-sight in the last breath of 2020, it came as a total, epiphanic shock. I had begun conception of it two years previous, but upon finalising its infrastructure, had sheltered it somewhere in the invisible regions of my mind—not because I was indifferent to it, nor even because I had more urgent preoccupations, but simply because it was then only a private satisfaction, a tepid study of my position in the world as a poet, and a theoretical inquiry posed to the tenets of the poetic medium. my poems, at that time, were windows by which I glimpsed at the wideness of the world—a study of how its measures could collapse to fit into the span of a page, and how the page must insist towards an infinity so that it may justify its starving, egotistical, manic appetite for its subjects. the art was something I loved and clung to with an intense, but wandering, devotion. I had only begun to draw upon the great endlessnesses of language. I see in my poems of that time a truth of disparity—that I could write a space in which to house the various natures I perceived in the world, and in myself.

in my proposal, I wrote:

There is something strikingly vulnerable about the coastlines in which these islands pledge their faith, their livelihoods, and the foundations of their lives; should the earthquakes come as long predicted, their forms will be relinquished into the ocean, and what has been carved at and shaped for centuries into a infinitely rich world will be lost. The ocean, and its conjurings of the abyss, are at once something to be revered and feared. In tribute to own the coastline as it is in this moment, its shapes and crevasses and holdings in which thousands of stories congregate, I’d like to dedicate the poems to this landscape.

I wrote my poems in the occasional overcome of glorious world-seeing. lines streaked by the soothe of landscape outside train windows, my mother’s shoulders in her wedding dress, open palm of a man I loved. they were the private iconographies of my transfiguring speculations, but whatever magic innate within them was inscrutable to me. and when the reality of undertaking sea-sight occurred to me, it initiated an unprecedented fear of inability; I do not know from where poems come. I do not know how my hand proves the tangibility of idea. I have started and ended so many poems not knowing where I have been inside them—only that I trusted the underlying vision that held me in its thrall during those wonderful moments. now, with this new undertaking, I would have to be servile to the volatility of my thinking. I would have to trust that I could do this work, this work that I do not set in order, but that which holds me, fleeting, in its absolution.

it has been a little over half a year since. in that time, I’ve driven the two mirroring coastlines. the fishing docks, the seawalls, the austere torii facing westward under january snow, the insistent tide, the morphic moon, the firs, the stones, the quiet bones of seashells, the illuminating forces of blue. I crossed the pacific with more ease than it takes to cross a single framed image in the mind. I’ve spent twenty days chasing the sea. to write about these places with the ink of the moment, with the mind tangible as it coerces itself into the singular vantage of perspective, it has been an immense, generous privilege. I will remember it my whole life. days become in themselves eternal.

before me there is a notebook—its pages are forced with salt, the writing unravelling in places under sea-spray, the lock of wind, the sear of sand,. they were written upon cliffs, by the dim glide of lighthouses, by the vibrating percussion of riptide. by dunes, by basalt, by mountains, inlets, shipwrecks, places of worship, stolen land.

from where I am the whole world is frail with illusions. of the self, of love, of home, of the temporal, of memory, of the soul—it is all invented again and again, without extraordinariness, without even much thinking. but to have been at the places where the land meets the sea—

Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
To perish never;

I live always with the tender belief that poetry is the gathering place to which these truths arrive.

here marks the end of the journals.