the sacrosanct sea (slow ghosts)
the old sea was wild and wavy, and the morning birds loquacious where the buildings ended, where infrastructures ceased and the sand and salt water began. but we didn’t go to the lighthouse north, only to the pier south. what a regret. what is that place like and is it still there? a big truck would go sometimes along the sand and somehow gather the seaweed. if I hold a shell for luck and providence and fortune, or just for aesthetic, the people laugh and snicker. such is the way. nothing can be done about it. but I would wash the shell in the waves lapping, and sometimes keep it. yea there was the world of buildings and roads and regular things in the millions inland. but, out there was the sea and horizon and moon and gulls,- a million feral things. cargo ships far and far seemingly slow,- like slow ghosts-traversing the horizon line. they looked rusted, red and brown and unappealing to most,- completely utilitarian and somehow altruistic. what does the life of a cargo ship mean after its days are done? do they bury it somewhere? does it become recycled, and thus reincarnated? do they ever have names like other vessels do? don’t they deserve a name? in the middle of two worlds on the sand you can see and sense both, the city and the sea,- their relationship that had been going on longer than any human one.
the snow and how it was then
once we went to the far and far lands and it was November and I remember that the sky became full of heaviness and by the tall summit where the sumac lives and always stays red it suddenly began to snow. we stood for a bit and watched it fall being swept with a great force when it descended near the evergreens by a winter wind new that had been waiting and slumbering and ready and then strong as anything. one of my old friends is gone now but we had that moment and nothing will ever take it away. soon we also descended but slowly down the hill and went further into feral and beautiful and rugged rustic worlds, all like a mystical meadow meandering dream but in real life.
the three square fields
the three square fields, bordered in one side my other, private fields and then open public valley, unthreaded and mysterious,- one million branches and some crackle and sound in the wind like spirits talking. then the other end, secret paths and chaga mushroom on birch unknown, where past all that it turns up to a hill where everything can be seen. how the evergreens have grown and I remember the hidden low marsh where the buttercups grew out from the mud dazzling yellow like some bright enlightenment.
the stories the leaves tell
the narrow path and beyond
the entry to the forest world was skinny, narrowly contrived by human and or nature. it was steady and level even if just five or seven feet wide. as the leaves at for the most part left the branches, it being November, a soul could see further than in say summer, where the verdant world seemed to hold more secrets and mysteries. but- nature being nature- the sparse-becoming places w/branches plain, seemed to hold against reason and logic another type of mystery. difficult to name but there above the lands- in air by the farmer’s loam at the purlieu, down ‘round the long autumnal and winter marsh, and in the middle of it all, saturated and thick about the thousands of trees that waited and only slightly wavered in the season’s Sunday afternoon wind, the leaves still affixed to trees perhaps speaking about their own story, yes, telling their own non-words, words. for how else could it all be?
path travellers, and the autumnal songs of prayer and gratitude
the paths, sometimes going past a marsh where birds wait and watch, other times into valleys wonderfully strange and quiet, and way in the distance a sound of squirrel or something. the paths, and there is a series of smaller paths that lead to a long and straight one, thousands of leaves from early autumn blanketing the ground and the summer is over they say. in the distance again, an impossibly large group of birds begins to ascend from the ground of the forest. they are like a dream, like a vision, but real. this thing a sign of hope, completely auspicious and wondrous at once, like a classical music movement, a gift to see from God, a universal truth alive and agile. the path, where in parts old trees creak and sway, and what do they say? they talk perhaps about the winter waiting in the wings, the winter with its snow and wind, it’s newness and clarity, an old dreamer awakened again.
Brian Michael Barbeito is a Canadian poet, writer, and photographer. Work appears at Fiction International and The Notre Dame Review. The prose poem and landscape photography collection, Still Some Crazy Summer Wind Coming Through, is forthcoming from Dark Winter Press in the fall of 2024.