Two Poems from What is Long Past Occurs in Full Light by Marilyn Bowering (Mother Tongue Publishing)

Happiness

When I go looking, I have a card in my pocket

and a note in the bottom of my shoes: my family will need

to know what happened. I carry keys, in case everyone is absent

the day I return. I know it has to do with the sea

and a fixed aid to navigation giving cardinal direction,

although I am not about to set sail. Mostly my eyes are on the ground

where people drop clues—gloves, hats, tissues—before they continue.

The world will end, but not its sadness: that island so close

that if the tide were out, I could walk to it,

once held the bodies of the dead in its wind-stunted trees.

I am looking, instead, let me say it, for happiness.

The whole affair gives me the sense of heading out into open waters,

yet I linger under a green umbrella

and deconstruct chewing gum wrappers and crushed beer cans,

and track a hermit crab as it clicks and clambers out of its shell

and looks for another. My heart remains quiet,

and so I listen, without giving consent,

to the waves’ cursive account of my life.

It is difficult to change. I could climb to the height of that island,

once the waters retreat, but it is flood time now,

and I see what I see with a penlight and the quick

skipping beam of a lighthouse, its pulse like a heartbeat.

What I’ll come back with, I have no idea,

but happiness is always ready to speak.

“Advance,” it says, “undress and enter the currents,

but above all, keep up with your finite measure of time

and its drumbeat, and call out through the shoals without stopping—hello,

hello, hello, hello, hello.”

* * *  

Cove

You, age, you are not cheerful,

Though we don’t know how to avoid you.

—Dòmhnall mac Fhionnlaigh nan Dàn 

The cove of my heart

where the swans swam,

the sun glassed

and alive on the waves.

A boat scraped ashore,

and friends now distant,

stepped onto an island.

Seated under the tree-roofed sky,

the hills to uphold me,

the mist for company,

and a dog on watch,

what could be better?

Traffic sullies the quiet,

the trees empty of birdlife:

I will not say more about age,

but why take everything

by force,

and leave us blind

to the Milky Way?

 * * *

Marilyn Bowering is a poet, novelist and librettist. Her awards for poetry include the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize and several National Magazine Awards. She has twice been nominated for the Governor General’s Award. Her most recent books are Soul Mouth and Threshold: An Encounter with the Seventeenth-century Hebridean Bard, Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh (Mary MacLeod), and the novel, What It Takes to Be Human. Marilyn Bowering lives on Vancouver Island.   www.marilynbowering.com

^{Photo by Xan Shian}

* * *

Thanks to Mona at Mother Tongue Publishing and Marilyn Bowering for sharing What is Long Past Occurs in Full Light with us.

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