for Marike, πάντοτε Night or day, when at sea we are always on watch, Marike and I. She is the skipper, the one who oversees and takes charge of the whole vessel–without her there would be neither vessel nor voyage–and I navigator and cook, but we make all of the important decisions about what to do on a passage together, including how and when to spell each other off. Rest is as essential as wakefulness, for sailing requires both strength and presence of mind, particularly on a long passage. What you cannot see, you must teach your ears or your flesh to give shape. Love, you log the sea mile ..read more

for Marike, πάντοτε Night or day, when at sea we are always on watch, Marike and I. She is the skipper, the one who oversees and takes charge of the whole vessel–without her there would be neither vessel nor voyage–and I navigator and cook, but we make all of the important decisions about what to do on a passage together, including how and when to spell each other off. Rest is as essential as wakefulness, for sailing requires both strength and presence of mind, particularly on a long passage. It is never a question of if there will be a challenge, but rather of when and of what sort, for simp ..read more

A rainy morning in Ohio. I've not seen my brother for many months. Yet here he is, on the porch, plucking out a tune. Waiting for me to wake. Sound recorded on the morning of 27 July 2022 on Washington Avenue, Urbana Ohio. Leslie Cope plays one of the many banjos that he’s made, in this case a compact travelling banjo ..read more

Le temps [est en train de] s’enfant de chienniser (obscure/offensive quebecois slang for “the weather is spoiling”) The day spoils we say meaning the rain will soon come. As if it, too, were not as essential as air. The day spoils meaning that bitch is birthing bastard children (again). As if clear paternity were all it took to make the sun shine. As if clear paternity were all it took to make the days good, to keep us in line, unlike that bitch who only ever bears us rain. As if without that bitch who only ever bears us rain so many good days all in a row will not have burned us out, legit ..read more

There is a ghost of sorrow who lives in my heart. It wakes; it keeps me awake; it squeezes against my chest. Sometimes it leaks from my eyes when I am driving as if lured by a ribbon of song or the curve of the road as it turns inland. A cousin of grief or a pupil of regret-nor yet either—it wends seaward like smoke, unstitching every memory: how your braids snagged in our mother's hands, how piles of ruined clothes obscured the basement light. Tell me, are we still living in that old house? To think how all those days my heart rang and it rang and I never responded. Notes Th ..read more

The house cracks with cold and I wake as if gunshot, veering from dream into thumping pressure on my eardrums. I am inside Ilya Kaminsky’s republic of the deaf watching birds lift noiselessly into the sky after an explosion. The news coming from the Ukraine, from Odessa and Kharkiv and Lviv and Kyiv is uniformly terrible. Bombings. Disinformation campaigns. Mass evacuations. Civilians huddled all night in underground stations. Tanks driving over cars that have people in them. A reporter who walks 72 kilometres with a convoy of refugees from Lviv to the Polish border speaks of conscriptions an ..read more

Why are you here and what do you need to know to live well in the world? What are your responsibilities? What are the founding myths and creation stories that inform what your role, purpose and responsibilities are in the world, where you fit? Who are your ancestors and where are they now? What do they have to do with where you are now? What will you do to be a good ancestor? Is this a game? It could be a game. But it’s also a discussion. An occasion to think. A point on a moral compass. A place from which to ask other questions, to find things out. A way of saying these things are not besi ..read more

4 am and the fog has lifted. I can see the shore, across the bay and out to the islands. A westerly wind lifts the leaves of the trees and two or three frogs throat in the pond, but the water in the cove is mirror flat. The air is damp and ragged edges of cloud bloom and bleed along the horizon. No dawn light yet, but ambient scatter beneath low clouds illuminates the edges of a farther world than we’ve seen for days. I let out the dog and stand in the air, inhaling lungfuls of land and sea smell. A damp breeze circles my ankles. Suddenly nearby a loon cry and then another and another. On th ..read more

3 am 3 June 2021 Sleepless again. The moon rises in the east, a rosy crescent; it drops a trail of golden light across the mirror of the bay. Overhead a whirl of starts; frog chant fills the air. We walked at Sober Island today. The sea rolled in, crashing noisily against the shore and the wind was cold but bracing. Every day a little more of the path to the headland crumbles into the sea and the juniper swathed scrub is red with salt spray. Many of the remaining grizzled black spruce–more bush than tree-turn slowly to skeletons: twisted whitened forms scoured of bark and needles, branches re ..read more

We walk in the rain at dusk along a broken black road frogs chanting in the ditches. Just before dark thrush song and sparrow call; black ducks flap up from the shadows as we pass and the heron whistles overhead narrow as an arrow in the night. Houses pour rectangles of yellow light into cool blue air; the dock smells of diesel and creosote and bait, of mussels clinging to rotted bits of rope. We’re almost home when the dog spies three deer grazing at ‘the back of the marsh. One hot breath and she’s off— Notes This poem is one of a series in a project I am calling #13×13. These are test sonn ..read more