journal 14/06/11 (tofino)
Dream upon dream, switchbacks seamed into coastal island. Thick fields of interest rising into woody altitudes, into bone-white groves made thin by summer fires. In a thin cream of silence, you’re slow to kiss me in canyons caged by snow, one pupil broken large, light swimming upon the lake-like surface. You can drink light like that, your skull buckling under pressure. You can lie heavy in darkness, shift dreaming weight on a mattress filled with air. Wild Canada, here’s your vein-marbled torso, here’s this ocean within tsunami zone always worth going under. Standing in the swell, you’re laughing in the blood-red sunset, you’re windblown and heroic and most of all half-drunk and I love you so much as the tide sucks in around the cove. Here we are now arriving infinitely into the tumbled howl of Pacific wild, boxing the ear of the continent, starting a trash fire in the yard. Wood paneling, Volkswagen pillows, dud roman candles, you in a woolen sweater diving to shield me from a rogue fountain of smooth heat & sparks, midnight on New Years’ Eve.
Those days I’d eat nothing but rosemary potatoes. We’d wake to storms passing over the skylights in haloed divorce, shamble to the liquor store with our hoods pulled up. Islands and islands and a settling coolness from Alaska, a precipitate of nicotine in a mason jar, a bedsheet stretched across trees to hide the house, to catch the light.
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A tree with flowers like lavender, your shirt upon the chair. The hour you laid me down upon the hood of your car, your eyes dining on nothing but my body on the Mexican blanket. The sluice of traffic, a dribbled basketball, rose petal tea & a weekend up the coast, secret islands, secret lakes, a roadway into dry mountains and then the forest again, hawk turning beyond engine noise, lonesome northwest sky. I’m done with art, it’s just our bodies in the wilderness. It’s just your laughter on the ocean like a marked path I could follow, so many miles to go. When I look at you, light swims upon the surface of your lake-like eyes. I no longer wake with dreams, only the smell of salt water, of woodsmoke; only the soft touch of rain against the skylight.
