The smell of coffee
in the morning helps me wake
from my dreams. I wake
to the edgy ob-
jectivity of caffein con-
sciousness, or the real.
It seems. The day’s text
is Jaccottet’s Violets—-
qui ouvre une voie.
Violets appeal
from innocence beyond us
to our finitude.
Later I’ll remem-
ber he says the violets
will need replacing.
The rain blurs the bay
but not the yellow of the
fisherman’s rain gear.
In the gray immense,
the dinghy is a shadow
under the yellow
of the rain gear. No
other shade of yellow would
quite tell the story.
I watch geese waddle
into the bay and wade out, be-
coming blanks in the
blue. A painter of
space, I stare into it un-
til my eyes water.
The Zhuangzi says the
Way is brightness, is stillness,
is emptiness. Take
Basho’s sound-vision:
‘the sea darkens, the voices
of the ducks pale white.’
The maker still loves
things made as they are released
in their own image.
The quaranteen does
not separate light from light,
light and origin.
Today the light made
a man reading the paper
on the breakwater
look to me like an
egret in a shallow pool
moving slowly. That
delightful mixup
did not keep me from thinking
of light as Eros.
In the distance whitecaps
on the bay and the spray of
white geese lifting off.
I watch the waves come
in. The honks of the geese fade.
Jaccottet’s words go
triste et transparent,
leave a blank, and continue,
dur, exact, et fragile.
Let the honk not e-
cho my grief’s perfect void nor
the waves sound the same.
Not a breath of air.
The pine boughs above my head
build out the stillness.
The gray of the bay
is the gray of the sky. Be-
tween them a dinghy,
blue green, at anchor.
Or is it the horizon,
or distance calling,
possibility
disturbing the mood, giving
mindfulness a pulse?
Things can outlast grief.
The cap she wore when we went
down to the river
came to hand today.
I wore it on my rounds. It
says Sandford Shipyard,
WA. Alive it said
she loved boats and men who built
them. And their poets.
The Piscataqua
still runs fast and cold, her cap
will outlive us both.
