Linley Valley on the First Warm Day in April Someone playing duduk, slowly, the heavy notes filling me up, sealing me tight, like the mourning sea pouring in through my ribs. I remember strings and peaks, glacial sopranos once, looking as long as the light held. The world filled with blackness before my eyes could be filled with distance and time. Here, there is only woodwinds and marsh. Turning upwards, paper-skinned birches against the watery sky. The denuded earth pale, fading. I search, among the low quaver of the blow, for something you could call the sublime, that thing we are trained to seek out and devour. Brown grass, brown water, grown geese. Mud on my boots. The desire that has been gnawing me all week, suddenly silenced, died, cooked off. A blackbird darts across the bars of the metal dam, his epaulettes flashing scarlet, like a Prussian soldier. Mountains left me raw and wanting, empty, weeping, snowblind. The marsh has not wits or edges enough to be at all cruel. I should be crying, but wonder at wonderlessness distracts me. There is nothing here that I haven’t seen every lunch-hour walk this winter. The only difference is that I can stop, now, and look at the nothing, and for the first time, hear, unfrozen. Trees fallen in the last windstorm, a week downed and already become muted, washed out; skinless, cored by ravenous ants. See how the storm has reshaped the trail like a river moves to spare a stubborn hill. I trip, and, rather than wait for a steadying hand full of contempt and sharp fingernails, I spring up, walk faster. You are not here. I have no reason not to bruise my knee, no one to preserve it for, no reason not to cry out, wipe dirt on my cheek. You are not here. It is only pain. It doesn’t mean anything, unlike this salal growing directly from a douglas root, which means, of course, everything.
Kaye Nash is a teacher, poet and closet novelist living on Vancouver Island. She can be best reached on Twitter @knashingmyteeth.
Amethyst Review 