Monica Kidd

Clangs the Bell*

For Harry Thurston


I.

Deep within the rocks is water that falls on fir, birch,
trickles through moss and soil, discarded tools and potsherds,
down to an aquifer. The black eye of the well stares back.
Drop in the bucket and pull water for the day, hand over hand.
Here it is only saltwater than runs. The river is within us,

the sea is all about us and throws up its hand when the wind rages
and the sky goes black. Lightening strikes and the rain pounds down
until there is no difference between sea and sky. The boat plows forward
with each paddle stroke, making for shore. For the sea is the land’s edge also,

the granite fringe where we pitch, a thing of both worlds, the fish that
gropes its way to land. Cobblestones and hellfire. Fin turns to fist and
then the story starts — how should one live? Curled against the wall,
writing by candlelight as the world sleeps under the governess quarter

moon. The dark comes into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses the tide
and all the boats it floats — mine, yours — to this improbable homeland
to begin again and again. Draw the water, cut the wood, pin the clothes
to the line. Burn the plan, its hint of earlier and other creation: strip malls and
broken spirits. Like the waves that come again and still, or the old

who hold their tongues, forgive: we are all sinners and yet we fumble forward.
O, for a midwinter here, the trees bedecked with the starfish, the horseshoe crab,
the whale’s backbone, a jar for each week of the year stacked against the lean months,
polished, the juices sweet and dark, distilled from the land more thanksgiving
than we deserve. A child’s pink cheeks, plimmed in sleep, the soft snoring

no different from the waves, the endless tide and the pools where it goes to our
curiosity. Our faces in camera. Flight paths abandoned, the wilted compass rose.
Today, from the top of Shag Cliff, I was back in Labrador. Pink granite sliding
to black water, bakeapples, crowberry, Labrador tea. Tangled blasty boughs
wrapped around cave openings, air burials for first peoples.

Below, the more delicate algae and the sea anemone — no. Whelks, mussels, barnacles.
All hard toothed things, clinging. A gentle lop on the water tonight, the paddle
disappearing into the black. A girl drowned somewhere in this cove,
and the idea of her haunts me. Where, I want to know, and how. I crisscross the bay
wondering if the kayak will witch like a rod when I pass. It tosses up our loss,

our torn seine, the beach each morning a rumpled party dress, the past
forever rising. Beside the cabin are faint humps of an old potato patch
from the livyers who carved this point into story. Each pass of the beach
reveals the shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar. I can wrest a little home
from these rocks with the mother that bubbles through the night.

I bake it brown in the snapping fire. Fishes and loaves, many cups of tea,
and the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices. When does a life begin?
A branch lies down, is covered by deadfall and time, becomes a trunk,
grows for the sky, lays down a branch, begins again. How old is a tree?
I crouch in the duff and tug at the layers. No one here is an island.

No soil, but a thousand generations of life and more life. Many gods
and many voices. A deep humming in my feet, barefoot across the moss.
Down the path, a grove of elderberry overhangs sawn logs, collapsing
into earth. Ruins and ghosts. We take the juice, make small jewels
at the window. My daughter smells of wood smoke and soap. The salt

is on the briar rose. Ritual in a cup of tea: peacock feathers and a
drop of milk, sun on the water and all the time in the world.
The voices of gulls and children preserved, luminous in the window.
Aches and pains and lines in the face. The fog is in the fir trees.

The paddle cuts. I pull and pull out around the point. The swell picks up
and I nudge into a cove where last year whales cavorted with capelin.
Not now. I pull and glide over a frayed rope disappearing into blackness.
The sea blanches white to show a massive sunker. The dead live here.
I am not made for this. I about-face.

The sun casts my shadow on the sea floor, where it falls away
to depth. A gull clucks overhead as I land on the beach.
The sea howl // and the sea yelp are different voices. A fire tonight.
Not a breath of wind. A fish surfaces and pulls
under a dragonfly. It flaps furiously until the end.


II.

We punch a trail through the tuckamore to the north beach,
scree and scrub to the water’s edge. A boulder of granite, bone smooth
and scooped by tides. Driftwood snarls — endless, too beautiful
to burn. Each piece a story. Pink coral. Black sun. The western sky
burning over Exploits. Often together heard: the whine in the rigging

and a fibreglassed gunwale licked by flames. I walk to the point,
a carpet of crowberry and juniper, scravel up the basalt to the roost of a
blackback, warm smell of guano painting the rocks. The tide rushes in,
falls backwards to the sea. The menace and caress of wave that breaks on water.
This scattershot of islands, black and blacker in their advance from the horizon,

tonight’s thunder moon that peaks over the rise, the distant note in the granite teeth.
Tomorrow we will build a crowsnest looking south over Indian Islands, Tinker Islands.
The Rock Conspicuous, not quite gone at high tide, that sends chills up the spine,
a place you put someone with cement shoes to howl with all the sea voices,
and the heaving groaner. The water molten black. We push our nineteen feet through

to Sugarloaf. In town today for provisions, all dust and attempts at order.
The Bond tied on, waiting for cargo on its beeline to Cartwright. A grounded wreck,
collapsing piecemeal into the sea. I take the tiller and the boat moans. And the
wailing warning from the approaching headland, red and white tower on the point,
defunct in the light of day. The fog advances, a clouding of the eyes. Something in the air

that won’t touch the water. The islands are paper filigree, rounded homewards, the sea gull
and puppet master stilled. Fog has intention. It closes in, surrounds, cocoons. Silences the
noisy sky. After last night’s westerly, the birds have disappeared. A distant boat
hitting the waves. When I look up, more is missing. And under the oppression of the silent fog,
time stops. We must face each other and all we have done. Fog is not weather,

but judgment. Listen for the tolling bell — the ferryman’s signal is the breaking hearts of women
at the widow walk, left with babies and forever casting their eyes to sea. The in and out of the tide
measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried hand that pushes one boat home and another
toward the rocks. No reason. No series of predictable misfortunes; just some are lost to the deep
and others the sun will shine upon. Everyone rides the ground swell, a time for living, a time for dying,

a time for deciding which line to hold. Impenetrable rain this morning, everything in the cabin
damp, and a gentle G chord floating out through the trees. This time is older than the time of
chronometers, older than hollows in the earth where the ones before us watched the advance of ships.
Her haunted face, breasts obscured by heavy skins and her strong hand, alive in mine, like she might
turn to me and weep. Older than time counted by anxious worried women

forever straining for the horizon. A reflex to look for a boat at sea, and listen for engines.
How fast the approach, and from where. To read peril on the humps and whitecaps
as one listens to the sounds of a child sleeping, each held breath a pause that keeps her
lying awake, calculating the future. Down toward the point, the trees tight as linen.
Trunks twisted into keels and stories told in paths and stumps obscured by moss

that swallows footsteps. Saplings suspended in old age, awakened by a sliver of light,
trying to unweave, unwind, unravel the path toward the light. Heartwood, dense
where the branches sprout and where the wood bends for the sky. It gives,
splits into clean blonde, is stacked again and again, a charm against hunger.
We split, stack and burn, and piece together the past and future where his woodpile

is the measure of a man. Where strong hands and a willing heart are
currency beyond gold. Where there is always bread rising and time for tea,
where the world marches by and we are forever students of weather.
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception and the wind roams
its borderlands, weaves fantastic brocade, we are weightless. Adrift.

Remember the room, two candles at play on the walls and the
soft black of the night. The future futureless, before the morning watch
when the radio crackles with warning. Three white walls and the night
for when the heart staggers. The steady breaths of the ocean and
the wind in the trees: this is when time stops and time is never ending.

Imagine the past of things and see you are part of an unbroken chain.
The people before you, their women’s hands that hurt and healed,
how it came to pass that you are alive, here, what you owe, what
you are afraid of, and the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
the answer. The heart knows.

* A kind of glosa on “The Dry Salvages,” by T.S. Eliot