The carving-power of landscape (call it "destiny") carved, or moulded this: The midnight-special headlight (full moon) shone (ostensibly--storms were down from the north) in the window, if there was one, of my birth-room at the Holy Cross hospital. Calgary, Alberta: soaring mountains there, deep and steep land: prairie vista there, the wind of spirit to kite high and far: supreme definition and the great void. That year's harvest in the larder and the belly, even the latest man, Mr. Jack O' Lantern had been one week to compost, the luminous light of glorious dying Alberta Autumn models, the sky now freed for witches of rain, towering hypethral shouts of sky.

Later, the farthest west coast: immemorial deep woods there, wild robins filling the open gloom, and the grand Pacific there, carrying my mother's longing out where there is room to move. Mater Dolorosa. She combed the beaches for signs of what she had lost. Elle a trouve. Due signs and overdue: Glass Balls, net-floats from Japanese trawlers--orbs that had journeyed, so the story, all the way across1: perhaps gifts from her father who died early and left so much responsibility on her, to bring her childhood down like laundry gathered in to baskets long before it's dry: to take care of her childlike mother faute de mieux gone mad, hallucinating, alcoholic from the grief, and by other things: hunchbacked with it perhaps, or with trying to hold back its power. A hump in the back too is a form of pregnancy.

And my father once, lost all night up-coast north past Schooner and Sunrise coves on a long walk with Tom Peart-- coastal storm in the Northwest, two wives smoke together at the cabin's kitchen/living room table through the night, the 6-year old is aware from his bed of something amiss; the radio on low in case of news-- Late the next morning Dad brought home, beside his story which apparently was written up on the local paper, the biggest glass ball of them all--to survive at least two more sea-changes, then it hung in their foyer, and then her foyer, perhaps collecting their lives, or the lives of all that passed its big wisdom, its total "come hither" curvature, three kids off and gone and then middle-aged, and four grandsons bigger than their uncle; a large jar of years. Gift From The Sea. The old man and the. What of that, driftwood gargoyles or glass sea-changed gypsy's crystal sea-balls baptized navel intact, cord cut, after impossible odysseys across the gigantic countries of whales and starfish zodiacs, undersea astrologies? This of that: my discernments, and construals, Orpheus's lyre rising to meet those events; to erect my own archway, "reality once more" this way, to pass under into Deep Time.

Leonard:

Dynasties sown and spent
To serve the language of a fine lament

But no: not a lament. Or if that seems to be its play, the plangency of its chords/waves, no house is reared there, no foundation/ philosophical base/ choice of tragedy. It is the framing of a ship, it is the thunder of the sea. It was influential on me when my brother, age 8, used hands and perhaps a stick to dig/carve/sculpt a boat of sand out of the great "uncarved block" of Schooner Cove, circa 1957. I was passionate for forms but my time was not yet. I "re-constructed" the ship of my past into the ship of my story, and launched it. In Song, breaching the whole thing, the sails filled with what they call "sorrow"; watched the tree undress itself from the wind that blew away my childhood leaves, my childhood loves, for reasons yet to be unfolded fully from plicatures incalculable, inscrutable.