Lorraine Martinuik

Beadnell Creek

N   49°32.531'
W 124°45.536'

1

How time can stop. Stand still mid-passage, mid-stream. A bridge, high water, flood  where the creek curves to run north. The creek leaves the forest canopy there, where gray, where no horizon. Where the estuary, wide open. Mouth, urgent for the sea.

Bridge, cross over. Leave or return to, come to. A different time.

2

Sweetgrass smoke fused with winter. Fog closed in, shrouded a figure formed of leave-taking words pronounced for weeks, months following the news. How a death can shape things, as if all life is soft clay.

Water, flood-high swept close under the bridge. Wind, storm-force swept in from the sea, from the north, from outside the forest canopy. Effigy of clay swaddled in cedar fronds. Halted for a time there on the bridge.

3

Released, the effigy rode the creek, but not far. The outflow, even in flood, not strong enough to sweep it all the way to the estuary. Where the tide.

Freighted, the weight of clay took it under water, there where the creek curves north. Settled it, mid-stream, in the soft silt bed, to be worn away, over time, grain by grain. Over time, the creek carried the story to its mouth, where it opens to the sea.

Lorraine Martinuik ©2014

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Lorraine Martinuik

Awake

Winter storms the night awake,
rain striking glass panes a nocturne for three a.m.
a melody on the black keys
arranged for the longest night.
Though now all nights are long with wondering
how he sat, enveloped by the dark.

Late winter afternoon gathers dark
the fired imagination, how coming awake
he retraced the familiar valley roads, wondering
could he could drive through one more three a.m.,
would this be one more starless night,
might he find on a back road a key

to turning back, giving back the key
to his father's gun, taken. And sometime after dark
– exact time unknown – stopped at the edge of town [night]e
to the urgency of three a.m. [awake]
[three a.m.]
and stopped wondering.

How could I not have asked him open, I wonder
how long he had planned to take the key
without being caught. At three a.m.
patterns emerge from the dark,
in retrospect. I was not awake.
I thought his dreams were starry nights.

Rain prevents the stars tonight
nothing to navigate by, stop wondering.
How his mother carried home his ashes, awake
many nights wondering, if he had not found the key,
had not the gun to run with, into the dark.
We all question the night at three a.m.

No answers at three a.m.
nothing we can know. But imagine, night
howling like winter, time long and dark
as the distance to the North Star; wonder
how long to compose the black-key
Nocturne for Three A.M. While I, awake

wonder how he failed to exhale the dark
weight deep in the lungs, night pressed hard
against the heart. How take aim?

© Lorraine Martinuik

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