#poetry – Craig Spence

My Better Half

My Better Half

How can you be a symbol
of my love
inanimate, cold, and barren
as you are?

How can a far flung
chunk of star
spinning slowly,
majestically
in my night’s sky
reflect the truth of who we are
of me and mine?

I look up
through an imagined pane…
And there you are
a distraction
an abstraction
searching for its name,
sailing through my spangled dark,
brighter than any spark
of heaven’s sequins.

And yet?
A mystery to me.

Surely there’s a science
to this madness,
to your slow motion pirouette
that matches mine.
You draw me to you
and I you to me,
clasped in an eternal whirl,
a planetary skirl that?
Changes the levels
of my restless seas
and the courses of my inner tides.

And yet?
This is nonsense!

I awaken, and you are gone
the fading notes
of a forgotten song.
I roll over in my fallen form
and there’s the truth,
beside me all along,
my better half.

You give my love its meaning.

Off Leash Zone

OFF LEASH ZONE

Lead on! Lead on!
my old, best friend,
beyond the very end
of this leash we both
are tethered to.

Lead on! Lead on!
Even though we do not know,
and dare not say,
exactly where we’re going…
Even though there is no point
within the compass of our ancient souls
to suggest one way or another—
no brilliant star, no station of the sun
for us to fix upon.
Whichever way we face,
that becomes the direction of our knowing.

And yet you pant, and strain,
and snuffle, and sniff,
as if there were some secret
(just around the bend
or crouching under some bush)
that makes sense of it all.

Lead on! Lead on!
Beyond the very edge
of this—our flattened earth—
and be assured, for what it’s worth,
that I must surely follow,
and you are not alone.

Craig Spence
 CraigSpenceWriter.ca

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Mystic Beach – January 2022

Until now Mystic Beach has been a name on a map that conjured images: glittering vistas, sea breezes, the white manes of a thunderous surf.

The young woman we met at the trail head told us the hike was not too difficult. Some ups and downs, exposed roots, puddles and mud, nothing worth a fret. She and her frisking, mini Labradoodle have not yet conceived the true meaning of fate.

We wondered how it must have been for First Peoples to traverse this place, before the scrape of human infrastructure made it easy for our invasive species to cross its gullies, breach clinging underbrush, reach sacred strands?

Down, down, down we went. Our deepening descent staked by snaking steps and ramps, which would have to be retraced in an uphill climb… when we’d be left behind by younger sprites, sprinting by in the fast lane, leaving us to complain about weary muscles, creaking bones.

Down, down, down into our vision we homed, seeking that place that astounded, where senses are confounded, and the promise of wonder becomes a something known.

And, Oh! What a sight it was. Not the Vatican, or Taj Mahal, or an interminable, stone-faced wall marking boundaries between us and them, but a thrashing, crashing place where ocean, land and sky converge, making sense of an inner urge.

As always, wherever human feet have trod, there’s monuments to past descents, marking the supposed extent of human mind. Mystic Beach? There’s a thousand of its kind, a thousand more inspired vistas to be seen. But none that I have dreamed.

CSW