I return to Chesterman Beach every year now. It always surprises me that the house still isn’t there, that she is nowhere to be seen. I look up from the beach, expecting to see her, there at the top of the rocks, cradling a steaming mug of tea in her hands.
Black Frank was the Lord of Nanaimo
And Admiral’d the fleet that made tubs go
When they mounted an engine
“Well,” Frank said, “let’s go racin’!”
Across Georgia Strait, what a great show!
A tree grew to near maturity
Then whithered, died
Stripped of leaves and bark
Beside the pockmarked stone wall
Obsidian black
Beside a towering escarpment
Or is it just a sprig
An ephemeral growth
A life spanning a single desert rain
Beside a rock worn smooth
By the long dead river
Which cut a chasm wall
Aeons ago
Once under an overturned rowboat
On chill Swedish tundra
Fending off the mosquitoes
For just one more word
Before midnight’s nightfall
And a welcome sleep
But what this writer loves
Is a table, a chair and a view
Overlooking the sea, perhaps
Or a river, and its teeming scene
Pix to Words 