Two Poems from What is Long Past Occurs in Full Light by Marilyn Bowering

 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 pocketand a note in the bottom of my shoes: my family will needto know what happened. I carry keys, in case everyone is absentthe day I return. I know it has to do with the seaand a fixed aid to navigation giving cardinal direction,although I am not about to set sail. Mostly my eyes are on the groundwhere people drop clues—gloves, hats, tissues—before they continue. The world will end, but not its sadness: that island so closethat 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 umbrellaand deconstruct chewing gum wrappers and crushed beer cans,and track a hermit crab as it clicks and clambers out of its shelland 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 quickskipping 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 timeand its drumbeat, and call out through the shoals without stopping—hello,hello, hello, hello, hello.” * * *  CoveYou, age, you are not cheerful,Though we don’t know how to avoid you.—Dòmhnall mac Fhionnlaigh nan Dàn  The cove of my heartwhere the swans swam, the sun glassedand 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 blindto 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.comPhoto 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.