Cape Smokey
March 26th, 2011
I heard recently from a friend who lives part time in Novia Scotia, that blessed land. She was crowing about having just eaten a three pound Nova Scotian lobster. That’s a lot of lobster, but she’s a dancer. I’ve been up that way a few times, with the then-wife and kids. We used to camp in Cape Breton National Park. I remember particularly one sunset I stood watching a pod of Minke whales from our sea-side tent site, their arched backs black and massive and numerous, passing only a couple of hundred yards offshore, somehow putting me in mind of a buffalo herd. I’ve been a lot of beautiful places. Vermont, where I live, is by all accounts beautiful, but every time I came home from Nova Scotia I felt as if I were returning from the truly beautiful to the merely pretty. There is a different quality to it. Rilke liked to emphasize how terrifying angels are. I think he was on to something. On the Cabot Trail, the road that follows the shore around Cape Breton, there is a high place called Cape Smokey. With a nod to Rilke, this poem is an attempt to bring home something of Cape Smokey back to the Green Mountains:
perhaps the way a gull
may beak a clasped shell
up beside the headlands
up and then drop it to shatter
upon the rounded rocks
that contain mere rock
and swoop then to the meat
among the shards a tan
bit it carries off
so the headlands misting
blued in their plunge to the sea
still and empty words
shuck them of what sustains
the rock the heaving foam
the hidden trembling Name
