When I opened the curtains and then the balcony door early yesterday morning, I saw the lights and shadows of False Creek, smelled the sting of salt air. Gulls cried. A couple of sculls paused mid-way across, the rowers talking. I’d awoken a few minutes earlier. Where was I? Where was I? The bed was huge and John was still sleeping.
Dinner plans had gone sideways the night before so we winged it, eating at Via Tevere, wonderful pizza and a salad of fresh argula with salt-cured capers and lemony vinaigrette. And then the panto at the York Theatre. Which was fun but not as wildly original as some I’ve seen.
I went back to bed for a bit after opening the balcony door for the fresh air. And then joined John and Evelyn Lau at breakfast where Evelyn was signing the broadsheets John printed last week, her beautiful poem given elegant treatment in Goudy. (We have a few for sale. Contact me for details.) We sat and talked for hours at the window looking out at False Creek, a different angle than the one I’d awoken to, a heron on the prow of one of the big boats docked beyond the hotel. We talked about how writing came to us, still comes if we’re lucky, and the server kept filling my coffee cup. None of us wanted to leave, the talk important, the view changing as the light changed. I thought of Gary Snyder, one of my touchstones, his poem describing the encounter:
It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light
I have been thinking that writing has left me, the last decade filled with excitement as I wrote, then published Patrin, Winter Wren, Euclid’s Orchard, The Weight of the Heart, Blue Portugal, with The Art of Looking Back waiting for spring, and two other manuscripts quietly put away (because it seems no one is interested…). I don’t have that excitement any more. Excitement, or maybe curiosity: to leave the fire to meet it at the edge of the light. I am trying to work out the way forward but standing by the balcony door yesterday morning, I felt the conspiracy of light and scent of ocean, a little glimmer. Maybe a willingness to at least wonder what might be waiting.
Note: the lines are Gary Snyder’s, his poem “How Poetry Comes to Me”, from No Nature.
...Theresa Kishkan 