Carving A Bufflehead

Sitting here on a hard wooden chair in my room at the Capri Centre, It looks like the wind is rising and I see lightning in the distance,

I am restless for home.

Riffling through things I could be doing there, I remember books, errands, projects and a small wooden duck now long gone,

can I carve another?

I have done it before, so no doubt it should rise a small winged shape whirling up from the turbulent surface of my mind,

has it been there all along?

No longer than my hand, a small black blemish from the black paint of the eye staining the clean basswood of the head,

enshrined now in a coat of vanish.

Is it there, the person I was still buried in the person I became, can I reclaim that person with each stroke of the rasp on the same blond

wood that gave that other bird life,

I want, I need to summon back that small delicate migrant, to float once more a calm still shape in my mind

can it find its way back?

Carrying  on its wings the feathers and pinions of not just one me but all the selves  that loved white pelicans floating in a northern river,

drumming grouse at dawn.

What will it carry, what will I receive, the sound of marbles,  the smell of chalk brushes, snapping kites against a blue sky, frustration, longing, joy.

A lot of freight for one small bird.

                                                    

Paths

                                                  “Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,”

                                                        Tintern Abbey  

                                                                   William Wordsworth

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

Time was I did not walk this path alone, but words uncounted

could not tame the world to hold your shape once more.

Gone now, like so many, gone and I await some future call,

but until then I am here, remembering a questing spirit,


who pads the pathless night, the trackless starfields,

the wild aurora, thru great winding fields of light.

But remember to return by way of these tamer fields

so that one day we may take that walk together.

                                                                Guy