Land Is A Loom

A sailing adventure along the coast between Vancouver Island and continental BC.

A Sailing Poem Dedicated to My Special Friends

 

 

 

 

For my friends :  

( This is a work in progress. It is intentionly partly poetic and partly prosaic. It is from real experience in my catboat.  Since I am late getting it to you for the New Year of 2016, I need to send it now. Fare well, love well, sail well my dear friends.                        Wally Du Temple )

 

Land Is A Loom

I sailed the fiord like inlets between Powell River and Drury Inlet.

The land itself  spoke from mountains, torents, islet

From bird song and bear splashing fishers

From rutting moose and cougars sharp incisors.

The place has a scale that needs no advisers

But in our bodies felt, sensed in our story talking.

The Chinese spoke of sensing place by the four dignities

Of Standing and Lying and Sitting and Walking.

Indigenous peoples of the passage added Paddling by degrees

For the Haida and Salish sang their paddles to taboos

To the rhythm of the drum in their crested clan canoes

Trunks transformed indwelling people who swim like trees.

First Nations marked this land, made drawings above sacred screes

As they walked together, to gather, share and thank with spirit sapplings.

So Dao-pilgrims in the blue sacred mountains of Japan rang their ramblings

And conjoined with the soul of their place.

Now the loggers’ chainsaws were silent as men who had sinned -

Motoring now for of wind not a trace -

I could see stories from the slopes, hear tales in the wind.

Modern hieroglyphs spoke from clearcuts convex and concaves

Slopes of burgandy and orange bark shaves

Atop the hills, beige and silver drying snags

In the gullies, the brilliant pink of fire weed tags

A tapestry of  times in work.

A museum of lives that lurk.

Once the logging  camps floated close to the head of inlets.

Now rusting red donkeys and cables no longer creak,

Nor do standing spar trees sway near feller notched trunks,

Nor do grappler yarders shriek as men bag booms and

Dump bundles in bull pens.

The names bespeak the work.

Bull buckers, rigging slingers, cat skinners, boom men and whistle punks.

…………………………………………………………………….

Ashore to pee with my my dog I saw a ball of crushed bones in scat

Later we heard the evocative howl of a wolf

And my pooch and I go alongwith the song

Conjoining  with the animal call

In a natural world fearsome, sacred and shared.

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Old bunk houses have tumbled, crumbling fish canneries no longer reek.

Vietnam Draft dodgers and Canucks that followed the loggers forever borrowed

The hoisting winches, engines, cutlery, fuel, grease and generators.

While white shells rattled down the ebbing sea.

Listing float homes still grumble when hauled on hard.

Somber silhouettes of teetering totems no longer whisper in westerlies

Near undulating kelp beds of Mamalilkula.

Petroglyphs talk in pictures veiled by vines.

History is a tapestry

And land is the loom.

Every rock, headland, and blissful fearsome bay

Has a silence that speaks when I hear it.

Has a roar of death from peaking storms when I see it.

Beings and things can be heard and seen that

Enter and pass through me to evaporate like mist

From a rain dropped forest fist

And are composted into soil.

Where mountains heavily wade into the sea

To resemble yes the tremble and dissemble

Of the continental shelf.

Where still waters of deception

Hide the tsunamis surging stealth.

Inside the veins of Mother Earth the magmas flow

Beneath fijords where crystalized glaziers glow.

Here sailed I, my dog and catboat

Of ‘Bill Garden’ build

 The H. Daniel Hayes

In mountain water stilled

In a golden glory of my remaining days.

In Cascadia the images sang and thrilled

Mamalilikula, Kwak’wala, Namu, Klemtu

The Inlets Jervis, Toba, Bute, and Loughborough.

I chose to tear from out my mind

Ugly sounds and vulgar images, that could recall

Unhuman stories of Nagasaki, and Bophal.