POEMS
On Manitoulin Island
Lake Huron, Ontario
We have come so far north, we are in another country.
There is no language here, so we listen to the loons,
and when we cease to say loon, tree, star,
the nameless return to their original state, as though
the rule of speech had never singled them out.
We are not wrong to pluck from the night sky a “star” —
to translate a burning mass into a sound.
Unspoken, the night sky is a spilled necklace.
So we say the cygnet, the swan, the charioteer —
and darkness is restrung into maps for pilots,
and wishes — makes no difference who you are —
the words as helpful and handy as pocket knives.
But here, we have climbed the escarpment to the
lookout where the boreal appears, a forest flowing
without interruption, as far as the eye can see,
and far beyond. Before this, this life at scale,
we grow as quiet as the contemplatives who reason
that anything minds can think or say about, say,
ultimate reality, cannot be wholly, precisely,
what it is, but what we, in particular, perceive.
Such judicious humility, about mind, by mind.
Is reason’s pinnacle the sweet refusal to presume
that it fathoms all? Even as we on this cliff do not,
cannot, grasp the whole of the forest that grows
into and far beyond the pale blue curving horizon.