Month: September 2015

Forecast

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Autumn, publishing season. John’s new book arrived the other day. Forecast:Selected Early Poems (1970-1990), published by Harbour Publishing. It gathers together the work he published in chapbooks and small books now out of print. Harbour did a lovely job of production. When Anna Comfort O’Keefe was designing the cover, she and John exchanged ideas, various images, and came up with something I think is really interesting. (I took this photograph in the sunroom with today’s sunlight dappling the book.)

forecast

The front cover shows a window opening, newly-framed. Looking out, you see trees (the trees out our windows), a full moon that provides the “O” in the book’s title. And the back cover shows the same window opening several decades later but you’re looking in, the trees reflected in the old glass. That’s our blue window, the one in our dining area. And the book’s trajectory covers a similar span of years.

I know these poems so well. There are some from books published before I met John in 1979 and in fact I’d read some of them before I knew him. “The Crossing” is one of my favourites, from Port of Entry. Its preoccupations — place, how we find ourselves a place and how we write into it and out of it — forecast much of our life together.  Here are the final lines:

not until arrival does the journey

focus. but that is late and looking

back distorts the purpose

we cannot hold our coming through the world

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the stray, its second crop

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strays

I wrote about the stray apple in my essay “Euclid’s Orchard” and yesterday John picked its small crop because there’s a bear around right now (yesterday it broke a large limb of the huge crabapple tree) and we don’t want it climbing onto our deck to get at the apples. And I wish I could say the apples taste good. They don’t. But they are beautiful (and kind of miraculous) and maybe that’s enough.

And now a stray. Just beyond the sliding doors that lead from our kitchen to the sundeck, coming up from rocky ground, is a small tree that has revealed itself to be an apple. Not a Pacific crabapple—our native Malus (or sometimes Pyrus) fusca—which is what I thought it was when I finally recognized its leaves and bark. I left it to grow up beyond the pink rambling rose tangled among the deck railings so we could enjoy its blossoms in spring. Last year it had fruit, and they weren’t crabs but fairly large green apples: there were four of them and when it seemed they might be ripe, when they came easily off the branch when twisted a little, I picked one to try it. Not delicious, not even remotely. I think now of Euclid: “The whole is greater than the part.” A tree’s beauty is more than the taste of its fruit. But the question of course is how the tree got there. I know that apples don’t come true from seed. Blossom from a Merton Beauty, say, is pollinated by an insect bearing reciprocal pollen from another apple—here, it would be a crabapple—and although the resulting apples would be true to their tree, their seeds would be the children of the Merton Beauty and the crabapple. One in ten thousand of those seeds might produce something worth eating. Who are the parents of this stray apple tree? It started growing before the Merton Beauty began its small production of fruit. Did this tree sprout from a seed spit over the side of the deck or excreted by birds or even seeds from the compost into which I regularly deposited cores and peelings from apples given us by friends in autumn? Belle of Boskoops from Joe and Solveigh for instance which make delectable fall desserts and cook up into beautiful chutney. Or else a seed from the few rotten apples from the bottom of a box bought from the Hilltop Farm in Spences Bridge, their flavour so intense you could taste dry air, the Thompson River, the minerals drawn up from the soil, faintly redolent of Artemesia frigida. This stray is all the more wonderful for its mysterious provenance, its unknown parents, and its uncertain future, for it grows out of a rock cleft, on a dry western slope.

almost spotless

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I was making rose-hip jam (kind of insane, I thought at one point as I sliced each hip in two and removed the seeds: 4 cups worth…) with the beautiful fruit of the Rosa canina growing up one side of the house —

hipswhen I looked out the window over the kitchen sink. This fawn, almost spotless, was sniffing the pile of logs from an alder tree blown down in last weekend’s storm:

almost spotlessThis fawn and its mum have been around a lot lately. In fact, I think this is the same mum who brought two very tiny fawns in early summer to browse on the tips of roses growing through the deer-proof fence around the vegetable garden. A little later, there was just one fawn. This one. We have our memory-maps of the woods and mountain near our house — where chanterelles grow (and they were delicious on pizza last night!), where to see the first shoots of death camas and then the ghostly white flowers, the pond where the tree frogs and long-toed salmanders lay eggs in early spring. And I guess the deer (and bears, grouse, elk, bobcats, weasels…) have their memory-maps too. Where a few sweet rose-leaves can be nibbled or a tendril of cucumber vine edging out of its box. Where a crabapple tree is strong enough for a bear to climb at dawn on autumn morning before a woman at a sink sees and comes out with a dishcloth to chase it away.

“That time of year…”

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morning bouquet

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. (Shakespeare, Sonnet 73)

How everything shifts — the weather (our drought ended with torrential rain, wind…), the light, the things that call for daily attention. Most years it would still be summer, and maybe it is, but it’s so much cooler than even a week ago. When I go out to gather kale for my morning smoothie, my feet in flip-flops are cold and wet when I come in. Luckily John lights a fire in the woodstove when he comes down to make coffee. (There’s almost nothing that tells me where I am like the smell of woodsmoke and dark French coffee. )Tomatoes ripen in their sheltered location under the eaves on the second-story deck. The young bear walked by again this morning, pausing to eat grass on the south side of the house. Like us, he (or she) is waiting for the salmon runs to begin. Time to put plastic over the cucumber boxes at night, time to tidy the garden and keep the beans picked (and pickled).

Time to think of the larger world too, the Syrian refugees waiting at train-stations, on the edges of dark water with makeshift rafts, precarious boats, for other countries to open their borders, their hearts. Our particular government baffle-gabs and pontificates while the image of a drowned child washed up on a beach asks us to question our own inaction. I don’t have a solution but I want to part of one. So many of us are the legacy of grandparents or great-grandparents who left their own countries in difficult times and this country made it possible for what came after — our stable lives, the lives of our children.