Moya Cannon: "Eavesdropping"

I was reading around, the way I do, and then I hit upon this poem by Moya Cannon.  I have been there, have listened to the barnacles myself, and she captures the scene.  Beauty.  

"I don't want to alarm you, but . . . ."

What you say to your kayaking-buddy when you're in 80 feet of salt water and your paddle contacts something moving beneath your boat.

(I think those were my words, but I kind of can't remember.)

______

P.S.  A friend wanted more . . . wanted the "end" of the story:

My kayak-buddy then had caught a lingcod, a predator fish, so I prefer to think that that lingcod had followed the last fish caught, had bumped my paddle, and then was caught himself.

Any other stories--and I have many in my head-- would cause anxiety.

So, happy ending for the kayakers.

(I really felt a moving body under my paddle: fish, seal, shark, other?  Mostly likely, a seal.  You tell me.)

_______

P.P.S.    So, the lingcod was 24 inches long, and at the time I figured he'd followed the hooked rockfish my pal Jeff was reeling in, but now I'm thinking I felt a seal or sea lion, most likely, following the rockfish instead.  (I've watched seals chase hooked salmon and bite off all but the head just before I could reel in the fish completely, for example.)  We hadn't seen any seals for hours, so we didn't think first about seals.  A shark is also possible, but I'd rather go with the seal.  I felt something solid but flexible, muscles shifting beneath skin, but that's describing the feeling I had while holding a paddle.

Byron: "This Odd Labyrinth"

I won’t describe—that is, if I can help
    Description; and I won’t reflect—that is,
If I can stave off thought, which, as a whelp
    Clings to its teat, sticks to me through the abyss
Of this odd labyrinth; or as the kelp
    Holds by the rock; or as a lover’s kiss
Drains its first draught of lips: --but, as I said,
I won’t philosophize, and will be read.

--Lord Byron
Don Juan: Canto X, #28

Crossley-Holland: "Faithful As A Wordfisher"

BEACHCOMBER

Faithful as a wordfisher,
there he goes, old magpie of the foreshore!
Face chafed and chapped like driftwood.

Parcelled shapeless against
winds straight off the icecap
but look! agile even so, jumpy as a tick,
quick in his pickings.

Scoofs along the tideline scurf,
his oily sack full of consonants:
hunks of wax,
and seacoal, rubber ballast, cork,
sodden gleamings.

And swinging in that shoe-bag hitched
to his broad belt?
Ah! In there, sunlight and amber moonlight,
emerald and zinc and shell-pink,
Aegir's vowels.

--Kevin Crossley-Holland

from the sequence "Waterslain"
from his Selected Poems,
London: Enitharmon Press, 2001


Note: I can't say that I follow all the lines above, but the general situation and the definite fun with language and scene I follow quite well.

And, "Faithful as a wordfisher": that's a description I like, using "as" both as a comparison and as a signifier of action/behavior. Starting Monday I wordfish with whole crowds of new students.

Nicolson's "Sea Room" -- Gaelic and Norse

Adam Nicolson's Sea Room is a memoir concerning the Shiant Islands in the Hebrides.  Nicolson inherited the islands from his father, and he pays tribute to the islands, their life and history, his own life and history as intertwined with his father's gift.  Here is a longish passage in which Nicolson reflects on the Gaelic/Norse heritage, and though I don't always (or quite) agree with his interpretation of the intrinsic relationships or the causal links between borrowings, I will say Nicolson's delivery takes me into this mixed-lineage, mixed-linguistic world.

(Freyja is Nicolson's trusty boat.)

Freyja does at least belong to that world.  I hold her tiller and she is my link to a chain that stretches over five hundred miles and a thousand years to the coast of Norway.  Because there is no timber on the Outer Hebrides, the commercial connection with the Baltic has remained alive.  Until no more than a generation ago, Baltic traders brought Finnish tar, timber and pitch directly to Stornoway and Tarbert in Harris.  Although Freyja's own timber comes from the mainland of Scotland, her waterproofing below the water-line is known as 'Stockholm tar': a wood tar, distilled from pine and imported from the Baltic at least since the Middle Ages.  Until well into the nineteenth century, kit boats in marked parts came imported fro Norway to the Hebrides, travelling in the hold of merchant ships, and assembled by boat builders in any notch or loch along the Harris or Lewis coast.  In 1828, Lord Teignmouth, the ex-Governor-General of India, friend of Wilberforce, came out to the Shiants in the company of Alexander Stewart, the farmer at Valamus on Pairc, who had tenancy of the islands.  They launched forth in this gentleman's boat, a small skiff or yawl built in Norway, long, narrow, peaked at both ends, extremely light, floating like a feather upon the water, and when properly managed, with the buoyancy and almost the security of a sea-bird on its native wave.

The British Imperialist, the liberal evangelical, member of the Clapham Sect, travels in a Viking boat on a Viking sea.  I nearly called Freyja 'Fulmar' because of that phrase of Teignmouth's.  No bird is more different on the wing than on the nest and in flight the fulmar is the most effortless of all sea birds.  It was that untroubled buoyancy in wind and water that I was after.  But Freyja's  fatness was what settled it.

Almost everything in her and the world now around her, if described in modern Gaelic, would be understood by a Viking.  The words used here for boats and sea all come from Old Norse and the same descriptions have been on people's lips for a millennium.  If I say, in Gaelic, 'windward of the sunken rock', 'the seaweed in the narrow creek', 'fasten the buoy', 'steer with the helm towards the shingle beach', 'prop the boat on an even keel', 'put the cod, the ling, the saithe and the coaley in the wicker basket', 'use the oar as a roller to launch the boat', 'put a wedge in the joint between the planking in the stern', 'set the sea chest on the frames amidships', 'the tide is running around the skerry', 'the cormorant and the gannet are above the surf', 'haul in the sheet', 'tighten the back stay', 'use the oar as a steerboard', or say of a man, 'that man is a hero, a stout man, the man who belongs at the stem of a boat', every single one of those terms has been transmitted directly from the language which the Norse spoke into modern Gaelic.  It is a kind of linguistic DNA, persistent across thirty or forty generations.

Sometimes the words have survived unchanged.  Oatmeal mixed with cold water, ocean food, is stappa in NOrse, stapag in Gaelic, although stapag is now made with sugar and cream.  With many, there has been a little rubbing down of the forms in the millennium that they have been used.  A tear in a sail is riab in Gaelic, rifa in Old Norse.  The smock worn by fisherman is sguird in Gaelic, skirta in Old Norse.  Sgaireag is the Gaelic for 'seaman', skari the Norse word.  And occasionally, there is a strange and suggestive transformation.  The Gaelic for a hen roost is the Norse word for hammock.  Norse for 'strong' becomes Gaelic for 'fat'.  The Norse word for rough ground becomes peat moss in Gaelic.  A hook or a barb turns into an antler.  To creep -- that mobile, subtle movement -- translates into Gaelic as 'to crouch': more still, more rooted to the place.  A water meadow in Norway, fit, becomes fidean: grass covered at high tide.  'To drip' becomes 'to melt'.  A Norse framework, whether of a house, a boat or a basket, becomes a Gaelic creel.

But it is the human qualities for which Gaelic borrowed the Viking words that are most intriguingly and intimately suggestive of the life lived around these seas a thousand years ago.  There is a cluster of borrowings around the ideas of oddity and suspicion.  Gaelic itself, if it had not taken from the invaders, would have no word for a quirk (for which it borrowed the Old Norse word meaning 'a trap'), nor for 'strife', nor 'a faint resemblance' -- the word it took was svip, the Norse for 'glimpse'.  The  Gaelic from 'lullaby' is taladh, from the Norse tal, meaning 'allurement', 'seduction'.

The vocabulary for contempt and wariness suddenly vivifies that ancient moment.  Gaelic borrowed Norse revulsion wholesale.  Noisy boasting, to blether, a coward, cowardice, surliness, an insult, mockery, a servant, disgust, anything shrivelled or shrunken (sgrogag from the Old Norse skrukka, an old shrimp,) a bald head, a slouch, a good-for-nothing, a dandy, a fop, a short, fat, stumpy woman (staga from stakka, the stump of a tree), a sneak (stig/stygg), a wanderer -- all this was something new, and had arrived with the longships.  Fear and ridicule, the uncomfortable presence of the distrusted other, the ugly cross-currents of two worlds, the broken and disturbing sea where those tides met: all this could only be expressed in the odd new language the strangers brought with them.

--Adam Nicolson

Adam Nicolson,
Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides,
North Point Press: New York,
2001

I've quoted from pages 30-33.

Howard Nemerov's "The Makers"

THE MAKERS

Who can remember back to the first poets, 
The greatest ones, greater even than Orpheus? 
No one has remembered that far back 
Or now considers, among the artifacts, 
And bones and cantilevered inference 
The past is made of, those first and greatest poets, 
So lofty and disdainful of renown 
They left us not a name to know them by. 

They were the ones that in whatever tongue 
Worded the world, that were the first to say 
Star, water, stone, that said the visible 
And made it bring invisibles to view 
In wind and time and change, and in the mind 
Itself that minded the hitherto idiot world 
And spoke the speechless world and sang the towers 
Of the city into the astonished sky. 

They were the first great listeners, attuned 
To interval, relationship, and scale, 
The first to say above, beneath, beyond, 
Conjurors with love, death, sleep, with bread and wine, 
Who having uttered vanished from the world 
Leaving no memory but the marvelous 
Magical elements, the breathing shapes 
And stops of breath we build our Babels of.

--Howard Nemerov

Byron: "A Small Drop Of Ink"

But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
       Falling like dew upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
      'Tis strange, the shortest letter which man uses
Instead of speech, may form a lasting link
      Of ages.  To what straits old Time reduces
Frail man, when paper, even a rag like this,
Survives himself, his tomb, and all that's his.

--Lord Byron,
Don Juan: 
stanza 88 of Canto III.

Teague's "Explanation To A Student"

EXPLANATION TO A STUDENT

Even in Shakespeare, some words mean

what they seem; here water is its ordinary self, dripping

no irony, sloshing waves up the shore,

and when Roderigo wants to drown himself

from sorrow, he means, quite literally drown.

If you do not see a circle floating above the line,

a buoy marking deeper meanings,

notes submerged by ripples of thous and 'zounds,

you may lie on the raft of the surface--

as Roderigo might have, unrequited but still too light

for drowning, or as you would be carried 

from your chair if a friend said, I'd love

some water.  You'd fill her glass with liquid,

tasteless and transparent, not wondering

if she wanted something metaphoric (the boiling point,

viscosity, and surface tension unusually high

for its molecular weight), like tragedy, or love.

When the time comes to navigate 

the shoals inside soliloquies, you'll have to trust

not all words will deceive you.  Not all are false

as water, which you'll remember

Othello calls the dead Desdemona, to explain

why he has killed her, why he would not listen

to her vow she had always been true.

--Alexandra Teague,

from her recent award-winning volume

Mortal Geography.

Blue Drop

"Why can't you ever let anything just go?" Cora cried.  "Just let it go."

"You think I like remembering everything?" said Tom.  "There's this deep well--dark, dark blue with no edges that I can see--and I just keep dropping deeper and deeper."

"What are you talking about now?  Can't you just finish an argument, for once?"

"Finish it?  There's never an end, don't you get that?  That's what hollow, what empty, means.  It still hurts.  You blink, and I can roll out this anger at what happened before, at what you did or didn't do, at what I did and didn't do, like it happened yesterday.  And it's been years.  You know all that.  Of course, I still get mad.  Getting mad hurts less than being sad.  Sad's like this grip that squeezes and squeezes and never lets up.  The only way to breathe is to roar."

"Roar, roar, roar!  The past--let it go!  You need some help."

"Why do you think I'm still talking?  What do you think I'm doing here?  Throw me a goddamn rope."

"No!  No, you . . . coward!  Swim for it.  Swim out of your goddamn imaginary blue hole yourself!  Or drown.  Drown, drown, drown, drown."

Draft in motion, from "The Devil's Acre."

Anticipation

Passages: Kodak Moment?

"Every picture tells a story--don't it?" That's Rod Stewart singing, but today I'm thinking of how pictures work standing alone, as history, and in that difficult, turbulent territory that exists between subjective history and pure image.

Richard Ford is a writer I admire, both in his novels and in his short stories. I read him avidly, and I've taught his short stories to my students. The Ultimate Good Luck is Ford's second novel, a sort of detective-story-without-a-detective, a wonderfully tense excursion that has Hemingway's short stories, Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers, and Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato in its bloodlines. (I don't know the truth of those possible influences, but that's what I thought when I first read the book in 1986, and I still do).

There are so many moments I could quote for you, but today I want to pull out one moment. This passage concerns the way a picture can tell different stories to different people, concerns how a picture may be worth a thousand words, but we just may need those thousand words to properly appreciate the picture (or the real life of the picture), and concerns the manner in which the character Quinn just may be too susceptible to what the character Rae thinks and wants. (And Rae matters to him, though he'd better figure out how to make that work and be okay with it; happiness would just be a bit too much to ask for--themes of the larger novel.)

Anyway, here's the part of one paragraph from a tense, action-oriented, reflective novel that held my attention today. And, as I have been telling my students, writing that holds my attention is writing I value:

There was a picture taken nearly that long ago that showed him standing alone on the sand beach on Mackinac Island, staring gloomily into the camera as though into a dark thundercloud that threatened to ruin his day. Rae said he looked saturnine and didn't like the pose. But the truth was that he had just fucked a big Finnish girl from Ludington, whom he'd met on the boat from St. Ignace, and who had wide Finnish blue eyes and dusty skin and was older than he was. And he was, he thought, in the best spirits of his life, and had gone back in fact, the very next moment, and found the girl and fucked her again. But in his mind, over time, he had defeated the facts, become convinced that he was sour and out of sorts, and he didn't like to look at the picture and kept it in his footlocker where he never saw it.

--Richard Ford,

from The Ultimate Good Luck