Juniper Beach

Jan 2024

Standing in the gallery
you asked me what I saw,
and before I knew myself you quipped
- that you didn't get it.

And I must have looked silly
standing, looking at lilies, but,
I wasn't.
looking at lilies, that is, or meadows, or ponds,
for there were none,
only paintings of some, but that's beside the point.

I was standing in front of a forest and looking at trees.
I was standing in front of the trees and looking at leaves.
I wasn't staring at the painted things
but at the paint with which those things were painted with.

And in where one might see a lily
I found a face there
staring back
but if you asked I could not point it out to you.
And in that moment I was transported
to a pullout in the Fraser canyon
stretching my legs about sun-down
and looking around I saw the same hills
and crags
and torrential river below me
as I had seen each time before
when I'd driven down that road.
And then the wind had blown,
or maybe it hadn't,
but just as easy as though it had been carried with it,
it came.

Suddenly they weren't the same.
The hills were the hills he had promised to take us on adventures over,
the river was then the same river he used to goldpan with us in,
and the crags then weathered the same storms that his familiar face had so unmovingly endured.
Just then I felt a shimmer
across the backside of my breastbone.
And as I stretched my legs with a short walk
I did not walk alone.

"What do you see?" you said.
"What can't you see?" I want to respond
but I cannot bear to cut the moment short.