Holiday Downpour, Slocanada, 30 June 2018

Tourists who had planned this weekend,
Some since last year, many for months, jam
The sodden campground, cram the quartet
Of small sandwich shops and cafes
That serve the lake villages, park diagonally
Along the usually all or mostly empty streets.
Not a tenth of them would have come if
They’d been certain, absolutely certain,
Several weeks ago it would rain like this.
Another breakdown in the anticipation
Machine. Time for a little postdiction, a bit
Of retroactive clairvoyance, of hindsight bias
Unavailable until after the fact. I knew it.
I knew it. My joints ached. I saw this coming.
I felt it in my bones for days, and I felt afraid.
Heaven always meant to rain on our parade.

Small Porch at Random, Slocanada, 29 June 2018

You could feel it again, the world descending
Like a veil over itself, a nictating membrane,
And, as before, as always, you couldn’t be
Certain whether it might be defending itself
Against irritants or just obscuring an ending.
The monster dragon of random occurrences
Blinked that vast, sleepy cat’s eye. It would
Be different this time, this time again, again.
But would it also be more or less the same?
Hmm. Any storm would be simpler than such
Uncertain weather. Largely the same, largely
The same: what does it mean for something
To be largely the same? If every point made
Were, like every point passed in the change,
Unique and never exactly the same, wouldn’t
It be the case as well, that nothing was ever
Wholly not the same? An absolute change in
Anything would entail the end of everything.
Thus extinction had always remained,
However dreadful, always local and partial.
The dragon sleeping below your feet, below
The mountains, could be beaten, had been
Beaten by the sky gods, knights, and heroes
Of human imagination, again and again, and
Yet was never, never could be, extinguished.
You could wonder, if you wanted, whether
It only slept, like any living thing it spawned,
The better to feel real hunger when it woke.
An occasionally screeching dog somewhere
Down the block, voices from an open shop,
A motorcycle leaving, a chainsaw whining
High in the woods, a thrush singing behind
The small porch of another borrowed house,
An indecisive thunderhead, and the ghost
Of a siren far down the winding highway
All spoke to the heart of this random dragon.
Blink if you must, but wake up, wake up.

Cold Pond, British Columbia, 28 June 2018

Out on the water, three women in red lifejackets
Floated in a rowboat with their fishing poles,
But nothing but the wind was biting today.
The frogs and the tadpoles were in hiding,
As were, presumably, the lethargic snakes.
Clouds concealed the higher mountains,
Leaving the scene lusher, greener, not so stony,
Which was mildly ironic, given the chilly reason.
Another moody midsummer in the Kootenays.
All that moved in the grass by the pond
Was the grass itself, a girl dancing for herself,
Narrating fables and twirling sticks as she did, and
A cluster of wildflowers that should not be named,
Since the names would evoke too much for some
And nothing much for others, and also
Since none of the names for them belonged to them
Anyway, not even the word wildflowers, which was
Already perhaps too much, taking us too far
Away from the pond to the stock footage in our heads.
The voices of the cheerfully unsuccessful
Women fishing floated through what moved as they did.

Attended, Slocanada, 27 June 2018

This village, like any community, any body,

Created so many minor-seeming epicycles

Of maintenance, things needing tending,

Things needing attention as to when to tend them, 

E.g., the numerous bear-proof waste bins in addition

To the recycling dumpsters and trash collections,

Also the open-pit outhouses placed strategically

Near trailheads and near but not too near the beaches.

If it’s not quite fair to say that life began in waste,

It’s only because waste began in and along with

Life. The simplest metabolism depends

On making waste to prime the pump, reduce

The local entropy, define the acts of maintenance 

That define a living system. Efficiencies are fine.

The organisms that reuse their own or others’

Otherwise useless leftovers most often thrive,

Although severe efficiencies are costly and,

Therefore, creators of fresh forms of energy waste,

While the creation of and separation from waste

Is one of the great gifts, if not the great gift of life.

A wasteful human thought this, walking past

The neatly maintained, shady gravel parking lot

With its picnic tables, trailheads, access to the shore,

Tidy outhouse (hand sanitizer and toilet tissue

Provided), and regularly emptied, bear-proof

Waste bin. Around the base of the bin, also neatly

Arranged, stood a colorful variety of dead soldiers,

Beer cans, pop cans, and bottles that had been placed

By people too indifferent to carry them to the nearest

Recycling bins, but who didn’t want to waste them.

Femtoseconds, Attoseconds, Zeptoseconds, Slocanada, 26 June 2018

Experience of the locally inconsequential day
Contracts and dilates. The rubbery awareness
Of passing events would be so much more
Delightful, think the thoughts, if the experience
Were under thoughts’ control. The swift hours,
The slow half-seconds, who would not prefer
To orchestrate them to taste? Let these blur.
Let these extend into glassy detail. But no,
The busier and the distracted pass quickly,
The peaceful slow towards boredom, and then,
Most unfortunately, they reverse their roles
In memory, the eventful passages remembered,
The peaceful vanishing under the waves of days.
And while the imagination taxes itself with these
Fantasies of directing the phenomenology
Of experienced time, what passes is another
Day in which minor good and bad all mix together,
With more or less added to give the particular
Flavor, and while little of it seems surprising
In retrospect, almost nothing was exactly
Expected. The wonderful details, the faeries
Of the real, continued to swim into the light
And sink away again. Imagination, that oaf,
Continued to fold in on itself and its memory,
An inwardness forever taking the smear
Of what passed and blurring it further, trying
To make a world more vivid than the world,
That primal addiction that fails and fails and fails
But can’t ever prevent itself from trying again.
The very term, event, derives from the Latin
Evenire, meaning, "to come out, to happen.'
Imagine all the dystopias you can imagine.
Imagination all the utopias you can imagine.
You won’t imagine what actually happens.
Heaven and hell themselves can’t fashion
One thread of the fabric of what passes, passing.

The Fainting Pill Bug, Slocanada, 25 June 2018

Poetry should not be reportage, but forever
The mundane craves attention. An empty
Afternoon in the village, after a morning storm,
Then sun before an evening storm. Daughter
Played on the front lawn and porch. A neighbor
Slowly cycling past called out a greeting, “Whatcha
Doing?” “Nothing much.” Daughter experimented
With a toxic, brilliant yellow mushroom, mashing
It for a witch’s potion, then testing which creatures
Were resilient. Ants cared not at all. A few tadpoles
Scooped from the dozens growing in the pool
She maintained for them nibbled the fungus
And seemed energized rather than dismayed.
A sow bug had a more adverse reaction, tumbling
On its back and lying still a few moments
Without rolling into its usual tucked cannonball
Defense, before righting itself and wandering off.
“The fainting pill bug,” daughter called it, trying
Repeatedly to tease her father by offering him
Draughts of her brew. He refused. She took
To playing with black lengths of PVC pipes
Lying beside the greenhouse, narrating
Adventures involving insects and amusement parks.
“Why did we, um . . . Remember?” she asked
Her father. “I don’t know,” he answered,
Teasingly. “I forget why we remembered.”

622 Hume, Slocanada, 24 June 2018

What had been a tarpaper and plywood
Shack now looks like a rather pleasant cabin
Covered in cedar siding with window treatments.
Outside there are at least seven raised boxes
Of garden beds with room for a wheelchair
To navigate between them, and a large map
On the south fence to elucidate the plantings.
There is a blue-tarped gazebo constructed
From recycled lumber and a jar of peanuts
For tossing to Spot, the handsome Steller's Jay,
One of a foursome that snatch and cache
And chase the observant squirrel away.
It is brilliantly sunny and all is forgiven of us
And the universe. Spot tilts his head
And chooses where to hide his latest prize,
But there’s no sign of that damned squirrel today.