From the islands gathered like lambs in the shelter of the wind
the water ripples with a million concave mirrors for time
seeming like the breath of the dawn
laps on the aluminum hull brought down round Cape Fox
the night before; past the gold cross facing the orient
marking the spot where the fisherman had drowned
kelp rising to the surface a friendly, tenacious life holding fast
the sweet smell of cool salt water and fish beyond day...

Walking until the land has no more promise
the sea becomes the place of hope to stroll
many hours more to go rowing to Port Simpson
in this area I watched for the shoals
Prince Rupert and the road for bicycling lay beyond
Portland Canal
seems like the end of a journey and the beginning of their world
broken occupations and riding on bike handles backwards
peddling stories and ideas apposite
to Hollywood's immense power
of propaganda and global megalomaniac sales networks
the fog covers
over rippling waves growing higher to six feet
crabbing hours and tossing a rope warp aft
to smooth the wave crests
a fog wall approaching with the change of the tide from the sea
another water temperature invasion
and it's five hundred foot wall of white silence
calming everything below it rolls on
like a blanket of snow it has its destiny in settling
mysteriously for a boat moving like a walker
with a compass carefully south on the last sighting of land's course
six hours through the minutes overtaken by darkness

The fog ashore like that of the sea is a world of being
becoming unto itself a freshness of potential
stirred by a troubling of the waters with actualized wonder
dreams of shadows and substance rent asunder
in its immanence fog shares a freedom of time
with space dimensions flooded in pure simplicity
transcending the previous world
its emptiness and desertified grains
still I smell the oil field distant
in the persistence of memory.

- May 2009