Excursion: Road, Water, Road

Pinnacle

I have taken so many shots of this pinnacle.  I really ought to check my archives and present a blogpost on the different moods, the different silent voices of this one hunk of stone.  I don't really explore.   I really enjoy coming back to the same few places again and again and again in different seasons, different weathers, different mindsets.  And, just as I love getting coffee at Moody's and a fish & chip dinner at Sea Pal Cove in the harbor, I love looking at this pinnacle from the deck of my kayak or, even better, from the water itself.

Jenner Paddle and Portage

Thanks, JP, for the shots.

Second Cave, North from Van Damme

TBT: "The Sea-God Sailing"

Throwback Thursday?  Here's a poem of mine from high school that I recently (re)discovered:

THE SEA-GOD SAILING

When the wind's a howling, red-eyed scourge--
The surf beats out a dismal dirge
     And the rigging hums with a dire tune--
     There comes a-racing through mist and gloom
The lord of sea and surge.

The winter sky is fraught with grey,
In frozen heaps the storm clouds lay.
     So fill with ale your carven mug,
     In hearty gulps drink down that slug,
As he glides into the bay.

Aye, drain that mug to the king of the sea,
Before whose prow the troubled waters flee.
     To Manannan, the Celtic one,
     Besides whose ship the dolphins run,
For the sea's true son is he.

And like the wilful, wind-swept waters wide,
Indomitable as the turning tide,
     Wild and daring as the untamed surge--
     Until the oceans very verge
His sturdy sloop doth ride.

While Neptune and his kin doth sleep--
Sung in their castles buried deep,
     Indolent in the languid seas,
     Lolling in the warm, southern breeze--
Manannan storms the ocean's briny keep.

For Manannan Mac Lir is he,
The warrior of the northern sea.
     With flaxen sail and ashen spar,
     The Celtic god doth make his war
With the legions of the sea.

In anger, the wayward sea attacks,
With swell and squall and ice that tracks.
     Yet closer to the wind he leads
     And braces the ocean's white-maned steeds,
And slides across their lathered backs.

Though the spray to ice in air doth turn,
And iron and flesh together coldly burn,
     He grips the tiller like a hearth,
     Through his frozen beard shines his mirth,
And strains at stem and stern.

Through the heart of a raging northern gale,
Pelted by the sling-stones of frosty hail,
     As to futile wrath turns the sea,
     Manannan, making his way with glee,
Tightens his grip and trims his sail.

In a stinging salt-spray haze he's whirled,
At him the wrath of waves is hurled--
     Over him they break, like soldiers on a wall,
     Above him the gulls, in brazen voices call--
And with a flag, his sail unfurled, he skims across the frozen world.

He turns his prow to the midnight land of sun and sea and sky,
And sails in the gleaming snow of the ice that will not die--
     Across the world's ridge, he slowly spreads his sails,
     And beaches his boat on the barren backs of whales,
And gulls about him fly.

As the wind, Manannan is free.
He sails across the sullen sea,
     And though the proud waters permit no track,
     Mac Lir, with a cloak from a leathern sack,
Is master there, aye master, for all eternity.

--Matthew Duckworth
from Unrecognized Poems of Literary Merit
by Mrs. Covell's A-P English Class
1978-1979.

--I just found this old volume in a box in my study, recently pulled out of the garage.
Juvenilia, by any other name . . . .

Walking in York

Summer ambling.

A Day at the Beach

Photo courtesy of JP.

Checking Out the Locals

Double Vision: Haul-Out

Harbor seals, here; kayakers, there.

Geese and pelicans intermingling too.

Flying the Flag

I don't worry too much about fitting in, but a sense of community still feels good. Among the communities that have made me feel good, I have to rank the beachside parking lot full of divers fairly highly. I recall how my buddy Keith and I did our (old-school) diver training back in the late 70s and we went diving up and down Northern California, but we wouldn't put stickers on our cars or wear dive t-shirts until we felt we earned the right after a year or so. Then, we each put a modest diver-flag on our bumpers. (I think my dad gave me one that read "Think Deep.") And, we kept diving fairly frequently, at least for a few years before English grad school and law school distracted us. Nowadays, I like walking up the beach, in a soaking wetsuit, pulling that kayak with the rocket fins and weightbelt and other gear secured properly, getting and sharing the nods and smiles of like-minded souls in pursuit of salty experiences. I shoot my fish and creatures with a camera, but I still can talk abalone and spearfishing, and I like hearing those stories.

Yearning (Oh, I Miss The Salt and Kelp)

I need to go diving.

(And, to be realistic, this diver would have a camera in his hands, not the speargun, and he'd ditch the tank for free diving.  Well, a tank dive would be fun too.  Oh, and the knife would be strapped to a leg.)

Maybe next weekend--or the one after that.

Pining For North, Calling For Kelp

Mendocino Coast: August 1, 2012.  I took this shot a little before taking the photos of the abalone divers, I think.  The fog thickened this next hour something fierce before pulling back again for the afternoon.

I like how this one scene tells all sorts of stories.  I like checking the churning out front while lurking in the calmer water among the kelp.

Heaney's "Bone Dreams"

 BONE DREAMS

I

White bone found
on the grazing: 
the rough, porous 
language of touch

and its yellowing, ribbed 
impression in the grass —
¬a small ship-burial. 
As dead as stone,
flint-find, nugget
of chalk, 
I touch it again, 
I wind it in

the sling of mind
to pitch it at England
and follow its drop
to strange fields.

II

Bone-house:
a skeleton
in the tongue's 
old dungeons.

I push back
through dictions, 
Elizabethan canopies, 
Norman devices,

the erotic mayflowers 
of Provence 
and the ivied Latins
of churchmen

to the scop's 
twang, the iron 
flash of consonants 
cleaving the line.

In the coffered 
riches of grammar 
and declensions 
I found bān-hūs, 

its fire, benches, 
wattle and rafters, 
where the soul 
fluttered a while

in the roofspace.
There was a small crock 
for the brain, 
and a cauldron

of generation
swung at the centre: 
love-den, blood-holt, 
dream-bower.

IV

Come back past 
philology and kennings, 
re-enter memory 
where the bone's lair

is a love-nest
in the grass.
I hold my lady's head
like a crystal

and ossify myself
by gazing: I am screes 
on her escarpments, 
a chalk giant

carved upon her downs.
Soon my hands, on the sunken 
fosse of her spine, 
move towards the passes.

V

And we end up 
cradling each other 
between the lips 
of an earthwork.


As I estimate 
for pleasure 
her knuckles' paving,
the turning stiles

of the elbows,
the vallum of her brow
and the long wicket
of collar-bone,

I have begun to pace
the Hadrian's Wall
of her shoulder, 
dreaming of Maiden Castle.

VI

One morning in Devon
I found a dead mole
with the dew still beading it. 
I had thought the mole

a big-boned coulter
but there it was, 
small and cold
as the thick of a chisel.

I was told, ‘Blow,
blow back the fur on his head.
Those little points 
were the eyes.

And feel the shoulders.’
touched small distant: Pennines, 
a pelt of grass and grain
running south. 

--Seamus Heaney

Poem from Seamus Heaney's North, Faber & Faber, London & Boston: 1975.

The clay pieces: Works in progress.  Viking Coin ornament and Ship & Hammer: sculpture mix; green glaze, unfired.  (We shall see how these pieces look after their firing.)

Heaney's "Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces"

VIKING DUBLIN: TRIAL PIECES

I

It could be a jaw-bone

or a rib or a portion cut

from something sturdier:

anyhow, a smaller outline

was incised, a cage

or trellis to conjure in.

Like a child's tongue

following the toils

of his calligraphy,

like an eel swallowed

in a basket of eels,

the line amazes itself

eluding the hand

that fed it,

a bill in flight,

a swimming nostril.

II

There are trial pieces,

the craft's mystery

improvised on bone:

foliage, bestiaries,

interlacings elaborate

as the netted routes

of ancestry and trade.

That have to be

magnified on display

so that the nostril

is a migrant prow

sniffing the Liffey,

swanning it up to the ford,

dissembling itself

in antler combs, bone pins,

coins, weights, scale-pans.

III

Like a long sword

sheathed in its moisting

burial clays,

the keel stuck fast

in the slip of the bank,

its clinker-built hull

spined and plosive

as Dublin.

And now we reach in

for shards of the vertebrae,

the ribs of hurdle,

the mother-wet caches--

and for this trial piece

incised by a child,

a longship, a buoyant

migrant line.

IV

That enters my longhand,

turns cursive, unscarfing

a zoomorphic wake,

a worm of thought

I follow into the mud.

I am Hamlet the Dane,

skull-handler, parablist,

smeller of rot

in the state, infused

with its poisons,

pinioned by ghosts

and affections,

murders and pieties,

coming to consciousness

by jumping in graves,

dithering, blathering.

V

Come fly with me,

come sniff the wind

with the expertise

of the Vikings--

neighborly, scoretaking

killers, haggers

and hagglers, gombeen-men,

hoarders of grudge and gain.

With a butcher's aplomb

they spread out your lungs

and made you warm wings

for your shoulders.

Old fathers, be with us.

Old cunning assessors

of feuds and of sites

for ambush or town.

VI

'Did you ever hear tell,'

said Jimmy Farrell,

'of the skulls they have

in the city of Dublin?

White skulls and black skulls

and yellow skulls, and some

with full teeth, and some

haven't only but one,'

and compounded history

in the pan of 'an old Dane,

maybe, was drowned

in the Flood.'

My words lick around

cobbled quays, go hunting

lightly as pampooties

over the skull-capped ground.

--Seamus Heaney,

from North, 1975.