Of things that last

I have always loved rocks.

As a child I used to holiday in Pembrokeshire, Wales, where the geology is incredibly complex, old and folded; and in Devon, England, where the Jurassic coast is no less remarkable.

The old, granite rocks of the Canadian Shield on which we sit were once under 3 kilometres of ice. It is glacial terrain, which leads to our lakes and tumbled boulder-fields, and is mostly but not exclusively enveloped in forest. The extraction of gravels is a local (20 miles away – that’s local in Canadian terms!) industry.

Adjacent to the bands of moraine that form the gravel deposits, some of those old rocks are left exposed even now, in huge and beautifully smoothed outcrops, many meters high in places.

Geologists call them “whale-backs”.

But then, this poem is only partially about rocks!








On childhood’s coasts,
the coiling scars of frozen adolescence
show fears and ecstasies aslant
snapped tight in cline and anticline,
And are struck open, vulnerable,

yet here, in older, shielding land,
the very forms and bulgings of the thew and mouldings of the venerated frame
are by a deeper chill now calm and tenderly laid bare
in whale-back breasting through the silent wood.


Old fires are long suppressed;
The earth hath yet its bones and sinews, variously o’er mantled with a fair and passing flesh.


When you and I are gone, my love,
shall time the slip and fault of our unruly youth reveal?
or shall our quieted bosom then display the vestige of our metal,
our small steadfastness,
our adult permanence to view?





© 2010

Visitors

One Fall afternoon,
with every hillside dressed in Venetian silks,
the sun came to visit our maples.
The little grove on a broken hillock just inside the boundary
stirred
and then fell still.

And the sun spread, all at once, through every leaf and twig and burnished branch until the air itself was filled with honeyed,
liquid,
Sauterne light;
palpable.

And sated Summer declared “There, that is the very best I have to offer you”.


I stood inside a cathedral; speaking to Summer gone and Fall present and gave both thanks.



An hour later, less perhaps, great Winter came to call,
resplendent in imperial purple cloud and tattered biting wind;
heralded by trumpet skein of swans and wild, eerie loons.
“Behold, The North!”

The snare drum of sudden rain and rattled windows made no easy announcement; skysails and topgallants of great trees were torn down in moments,
the air was thick with white and gold,
whirling together.

“I am come!”


And,
with respite and return
over the next days,

King Winter came to rule amongst the leaves.







Copyright 2010

Things you've always wanted to do.......

There are just some things that you've always wanted to do; no reason, but just always wanted to. Ever since I just scraped through "fire-lighting" in Scouts all those years ago, I've always wanted to build a fire properly, and make a hot drink over it.

And the very best test would be to build it in the snow with no matches.

So that's what we did!