
The Burning Eyes of Dragonflies
Ramon Kubicek
Acrylic, oil stick, pen, on canvas
18″ x 24″
A Season of Fury and Pestilence
Adelia MacWilliam
In the pit of our breasts we are together,
in the heart’s plantations we traverse
a summer of tigers.
Pablo Neruda (Furies and Sufferings)
In the core of our being we are one,
in the heart’s homestead we navigate
a season of cougars
ready to pounce from the shadows.
Scent of the blood of slain geese
on the farthest out island, nearly submarine, bleached
with guano and covered with goose feathers,
where the sea is a whip of wash and tide,
and each of us keeps a boat made of tongues of iron,
and the bones of beached whales.
You, my adversary of sleep, blankets ripped
to pieces by the moon’s hunting knife, who disturb
my dreams like a wayward tuning fork
might twist the wires in a piano, who are like a series of explosions
in a garden when the caches of buried nitroglycerin are disturbed,
you my narrow-hipped enemy, whose ears and neck my cheek has brushed
with sour pollen – notwithstanding the chilling quiet of the sea
with its absence of seabirds, waters no longer broken by the fins of orcas,
deep currents empty of salmon and herring –
in some corner of this season, we are together,
crouched in the shadows of Douglas-fir, consumed by a loneliness
we don’t understand, waiting with dry throats, for this pestilence,
umbra mundi, to pass. If there could be anyone who can dive through
the rings of phosphorescence left by my paddle
to round up the last of the remaining chinook in the bay,
and still each leaf of the trembling aspen, it might be you.
I also have with me the burning eyes of dragonflies,
who speak to history’s pain with Jurassic soldier mouths.
When we’re at gatherings on the beach –
Orion’s Belt laid across the bed of the sky, campfire smoke,
geese swimming, necks jerked by an invisible leash –
you are there hunting, seeking out lies with your bottle green eyes,
though you keep your gun hidden in the closet,
knowing that when you squeeze the trigger,
the silence will shatter like a champagne glass,
and the barking wolves in the woods will flee.
And the knives you use: the stubby one for prying open oysters,
the Swiss army knife for slicing the red wrinkled skin
of the orchard’s winter apples, or the long one, razor thin,
used to gut the Sockeye caught on your barbed hook,
(how neatly the abdomen parts),
and your sea anemone feet, with sting ray toes, looking
for undersea caves. Can you smell the wind’s betrayals?
Like an exhausted sea lion
can you divine the turn in the tide, let it guide you
to the shore? Can you witness thunderstorms, watch over lightning
cauterizing wounded ground? Can you string cables up
to keep your house from plunging into the sea?
And yet,
more, even more,
behind eyelids, behind closed fists,
behind the vestments of the forest, beyond otter-stained docks,
behind mountain ranges,
beyond countless journeys you’ve made across inland seas,
there is no distance, no boundary,
nor boathook grappling with a drowning soul,
your hands touch sheets, sails crack,
your hands touch the wind
and you are in Hecate’s straits,
making a furrow in black water’s foam.
Like a mosquito tasked with a mission
you smell out the shores of the body, the soft parts
where the blue seas of blood become visible.
You shut the floodgates that hold back the dawn,
caressing the long legs of the moon as she helps you
guide your boat into the channel between the oyster beds.
Can you smell the clams in the mud,
hear the rubbery creak of the tree frog? They all speak to you
in the voices of your parents. I have hidden your knives
and buried our kisses in a midden of rain,
but still I know the burning eyes of dragonflies.
Ah sunlight and crazy forest canopies,
expanse in which an inlet drowns
like a gypsy in a cul de sac,
like all the qualities of boiling currents,
ah materials, all the senses, warm blooded sea creatures,
shaking with blind uncertainty,
ah mountains with serious cheeks and noses and eyes,
great flanks brimming with green sap,
feet of pale granite, and chessboard pieces scattered
onto peninsulas, and rough waves flinging themselves to death
on the rocks again and again, sated with angelic desire,
And so, this inlet, this inlet runs between us,
and along one bank I run, biting my tongue.
Am I then, truly isolated
while the burning tide between us flows
during the night?
How many times have you been the one
without a name, how pulverized in the shadows
by torrential rain?
The image I hold of you
devours the green grass of my heart.

Among the Fallen
Ramon Kubicek
Acrylic, oil, oil stick, pen, on canvas
40″ x 30″
Ghost Wilderness
Adelia MacWilliam
Further up the coast a film crew
is making a documentary about sea wolves.
Near Zeballos I’m guessing
but Annie, their cook, won’t say.
Rumor has it they were hired by the BBC
but she’s mum on that too.
This much she’s told us they got some footage
of the wolfpack
tunneling into a beached grey whale
to get at the organ meat.
Near the ragged line of flotsam
on the beach that faces Nootka Island
pounded by surf from the open Pacific
among smooth stones, spiral shells,
tangle of seaweed,
we saw grassy wolf scat next to grassy bear scat,
a few days old
the wolf scat ropy.
So why poop so close to each other?
Is this their way of communicating?
You’d seen a wolf here years ago
moving like extra-planetary water
across the beach in front of the cabin–
doglike but clearly not
dog –trotting on lean legs
loosely sprung beneath gold and silver fur
slippery arbutus leaves
glimmered in predawn rain
the crows that usually scrabbled about on the tin roof
were silent.
You’d watched Brian’s video of the whole pack
crossing the sandbar
as they tossed a squealing river otter
back and forth like a football heard
the howls of the pack at night
from other side of this tiny island
something in the mournful eerie notes of their chorus
made you start up
packs of thought-wolves howling across
your ancestors’ minds
had left spoor with a half life
in your marrow
and then this
wolf
passing through
close-in
you peered down in awe. Where from?
Visiting its trapline?
Were left chewing away at the electric bone
of what was on offer in that
lean wolf light.
Indian paintbrush on the grassy knoll
wind-blown surf froths below us
shunting the freight of the open Pacific.
A sea otter spy-hops to look at us-
glistening dark fur
as it dives.
We gumboot hop from lava rocks
into another tiny cove.
“Hey Mr. Bear!”
Whoop, whoop, whoop,
kai yai
to warn him we are coming.
On the sixty kilometres of
altitude combined with attitude
gear down
l-o-o-o-o-o-w
that is the dirt road
to Tahsis
where Shannon met you with her boat
you passed two logging trucks
carrying sawed-up old growth trees
up and out.
Hundreds of years
of growth being cargo-ed out
no more nesting, foraging, no more deep-rooted
community of cedar and fir giants,
no more rain forest.
They’re gutting the cathedral one truck load at a time.
Why not leave these trees to die a natural death
among their kin? Is this some kind of
transgenerational trauma
being visited
upon the forest?
When the Europeans came here
they were already numbed by trauma,
nature illiterate,
most of their deep wilderness gone.
Those first explorers traded
trinkets for skins,
stayed in First Nations settlements,
walked their trails,
used them as guides,
intermarried.
But once they had a foothold, they
sent their emissaries of darkness
to wage war, messy genocide
- wiped out the bison, the Pronghorn deer
and the grasslands too, and now
the great forests, right up
to the edge of the Pacific.
Ironic to have Europeans
paying film makers to capture footage
of one of the last surviving packs of wolves
to be viewed like a curiosity.
Gary Snyder says, “A ghost wilderness
hovers around the entire planet, …
millions of tiny seeds of the original vegetation
are hiding in the mud
on the foot of an artic tern
or the dry desert sands
or in the wind.”
Think, think
those thought wolves that trot through ancient trees
in the periphery of your mind
caught in the crumbling edge
of our last frontier,
can you see them turning to look at you
one last time before they disappear
into the ghost wilderness?

It Will Show Through
Ramon Kubicek
Acrylic, oil, oil stick, pen, on board
24″ x 30″
Title
Adelia MacWilliam
Poetry Text

Stories Under Water:
Submerged Buildings of Cumberland’s Chinatown
Ramon Kubicek
Acrylic, oil, oil stick, pen, on board
24″ x 30″
Title
Adelia MacWilliam
Poetry Text

Wolves on the Way Home
Ramon Kubicek
Acrylic, oil stick, pen, on canvas
24″ x 36″
Title
Adelia MacWilliam
Poetry Text