The Sunrise Liturgy. Mia Anderson
of sunrise and
the Imminence
began to burnish the backside of the grey,
the mist
emboldened
feathered the fingers further with fur, rime no longer doubtable
no less than
visible and risible now
on the poised dancers, whose dance is… in this
retina skittering over their limbs.
The sleep of night rolls over,
likes the feel,
rolls again
rolls the riverbreath round like cud in its mouth
intestinefuls of cud that stretch out the length of the riverrun seaward
rolling, rolling
curling like unwound cud downstream
chew-chew! le train-train of rivering dawn mist
fed by imminent sun
you think I’m joking? fanciful? I say it like I see it.
Now immanent sun’s sunning up the -rise
risible and visible
and the riverbreath coating the mirror, haa-haaaing on the
mirror of us, shoreline, and us, riverains
all the breath’s neighbours and all the breath’s men
on whom the precipitate of river falls like… a baptism
a condensation of dawn. The Sun Effect :
blessed, graced, manna’d, this white fallout, this alter-precipitate
of light with voice like a foghorn,
herald of the down train.
Tin coin of sun
having mustered the wattage to burn through the grey
is gold sovereign now at break of day
and about its business of doubling and redoubling the helix of
mist twisting downstream
towards town and gown, master of ceremonies of this
mystic parade
of evaporating banners
lord of the ephemeral
His Eminence
Lord of the Things.
Mistagogy.
Shorelight
It’s shorelight you’re seeing,
the sky performs a metaphor
for you
(like Chaplin putting his bowler hat
under the bed at bedtime)
the riverrun of sky this time (every time) being
our life lived, with banks or berges
in need of shearing. Did you know
shore comes from shearing?
Imagine.
Dawn’s twilight sees us
shorn of our matted dreams
disembarrassed of our shag by our bergers
and shivering with expectation
at the fringe of the day
like sheep
or else sheep waiting to be driven
into the flood to wash their wool wool-white
after the treatment —
liminal
Hebridean for now, and blinking at it all.
So that great band of orange in the sky
is a sandbank and seems to bank
the choppily skidding sky
but it’s your life it’s banking on.
Really.
And all our life we’re just part
of a shore people who were born to this,
for this.
We grew up here aquatic apes,
youngster apelets each of us once
hanging onto our mother’s every hair
and she weaving the shallows, the littoral
a few million years ago.
Seems like yesterday.
Hope
so they say springs eternal but I say
hope is solid, factive
it is our all-season all-terrain our
home and native
shore
dawn is the land we thrive in, that’s
our song its
theme, shored up here for something
we know nothing about
far out and away beyond.
Dawn
counts for a lot
with us, and accounts for a lot
or so I think I know —
Shoreline
Ashes to ashes, snow to snow.
The ash is a species threatened by the emerald ash borer.
Ottawa is soon to be denuded of trees by 50%. Ash-bound ourselves
we are ‘bracing for massive destruction of forests in Ontario and Québec
in the next fifteen years.’
Imagine this shoreline without Isolde
Imogen
Morgan and
Beatrice Tristan
Anselm
Seraphim and Gregory
home-brew christenings for ash trees whose arabesques chisel mosaic chips
into the cloisonné of sky against the bit of fleuve we call home.
How do without? How not this
mosaic air on a G string, this gut-bark and blank?
its seeds of snow horizontal on the vector of wind
orient express pit-stopped by ash? this kind of
morning light ‘new every morning’ with ‘the love our wakening
and uprising prove’?
What has Love got to do with it
the blinking out of another of Love’s species?
Did he who made the lamb make thee? Or did we make the emerald threat?
The maker of alle thing
sees with a bigger scan than I can pretend to.
Take off your sandals, this is holy ground.
The Church is its members future and past, with the present :
the communion of saints.
The Earth is its members future and past, with the