VIEW WITH CAMEOS

View with Cameos

Above the calm air—immaculate, actually—

a more restless, nervous air accumulates

and knocks the highest limbs of the tallest trees

startling birds, snarling invisible

ropes of sky, I know it by

the barely audible swishing sound

over the rapids’ racket, which if I had

my ears plugged like everyone else

I’d miss, too. None of this however touches

me, strolling gently the gravel paths

down low by the river

if by touches I mean on the skin, and if

by skin we don’t include the eardrum.

Little tympanum, I love what you give me

in a typical day, wind I’d otherwise only know

by chill or eye, birds deep in cedar.

And who alert to the stink of arrival

hasn’t heard a shadow? But look—

this spring the standing waves—

glassy-skinned, vociferous—

push higher than ever into the air

under the wind, into liqueous wind.

The eddies gleam like rubbed shells,

each with the shape of another

dear friend lost or departed, carved in relief,

full of intent and vortical pull, our lives.

from Twenty Views of the Lachine Rapids (Gaspereau Press, 2012). A later version of this poem appears in The Rapids (Brick Books, 2012)
Image by Klaus Pfieffer