Cold and Grey

from The Grey Islands
John Steffler

scoured sky. wind
and open miles.
all morning we climb the bright
hills cresting across our course,
pitching us up, sledding us sideways
down, wallowing, walled in water.
                     quick. near us
and gone,
              slim birds flit low, banking,
twisting, skimming the closing troughs,
and I feel it,
                 know it a laughing
fact: the harder your hungry eyes bite
into the world (the island cliffs pencilled
in blue haze, and there, Nels pointing:
whale spray!
                 huge flukes kicking at the sun), the more
you spread your arm to hug it in,
the less you mind the thought of diving under,

eyes flooded, gulping dark.

...

what can we do in such elements?

rock hills only recently
softened with green, some moss
and boggy hollows

vast migration of cloud

the wind in invisible glacier
wearing the island down

I keep warm burning
bits of a house

the work of people who tried to live here.

...

not man's time here,
sun's time.
rock's time.
I begin to feel it.

days blink by - light
and cold flowing over - tide
breathing smoothly, evenly, I

slip between half-seconds, flash
light-beam pinball-style, do
ten thousand vanishing things
in a breath.

...

jagged island
island of noise.
the sea serious as ever, breaking
all that it touches.
wind tearing itself to pieces
pounces with all its weight, stops, flattens
grass again. tramples the waves.

the mountains cinder grey
cinder jagged
handsome as animals
hunt the passing clouds.
gathering trouble.

...

warm sounds: the gas lamp's
loud hiss

the stove snaps and flutters

outside
the wind
the cold wash of gravel and sea

John Steffler's The Grey Islands is one of my favourite pieces of Canadian literature. It was probably reading excerpts from this work in the second half of my Canadian lit class that sold me on Canadian literature. This is how my Can lit textbook introduces this work: "This mixture of prose and poetry describing a pilgrimage to the islands that lie off the east coast of Newfoundland's norther peninsula is the story of an individual seeking solitude. 'A way to corner myself is what I want,' he explains on the first page; 'Some blunt place I can't go beyond. Where excuses stop.'

I realize that I live in the middle of the prairies and as such am completely landlocked. Despite this I not only love these excerpts because they capture one of the qualities that I love most about the east coast, but because they capture a huge element of the Canadian relationship with landscape and weather. This is something I've been contemplating a lot lately since it is part of what I want to study in grad school. With the arrival of winter this week though (snow yesterday) I've been reminded of it anew.

I took this picture a couple weeks ago over the Thanksgiving weekend. I like how grey and flat the sky is and how much the red of the berries pops against it. It captures the cold perfectly. My mom looked at it and said it kind of looked like a piece of modern art, and she is right. That's probably part of why I like it as well.