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Without Borders

I am back
from a few days
of work and play
in Los Angeles.

It was a wonderful trip,
filled
with terrific friends
and experiences,
but still
I was relieved
to be home
on the Salish Sea;
the historical common name
for the watery
geologically gem-laden
environment
spawning the archipelago
that drizzles itself
across the U.S.
and lower B.C.

I am beginning
to wonder
if any stray parts
of me
might have lived
here
in a previous existence.

What was I?
Human?
Bald eagle?
Sea slug?

From the very day
I moved here,
it has felt oddly
as though this has been
home
to me
for many years.

As close to
Los Angeles
as I had become
in twenty-four
action-packed years—
not a pang
held my heart
for even a moment
upon my return
to that city.

And yet each time
my ferry
or light plane
lands
on San Juan Island—
the pang arrives
in the form
or joy
and comfort.

Two days before
I left for California,
I had ferried
to and from British Columbia’s
Salt Spring Island;
a neighbor
to the northwest
just across the border—
and the reason
I ended up living on
San Juan Island.

The day was cool
and foggy,
and presented
a fresh planet of visuals
to me
as I crossed
from one side
of the boundary waters
to the other.

Obscured
by a haunting marine layer
and coyly lit
by flecks of sunlight,
the islands
and the sea
were simultaneously
new and familiar;
just like
my life here.

Staring out
across a random border,
I wondered whether
this lone sailor
might have had similar
thoughts
as his vessel passed
effortlessly between
two worlds.

Alex Shapiro July 2007

Lisa sounds like a very special lady, Wow, what accomplishments; all that and a mother too. I am the stepfather of three daughters, all grown now, and it amazed me how my wife, Melva, used to work full time and still never miss a beat in the mother dance.

“Haro Strait still beckoned like Sirens” is a nice piece of wordsmithing. It sounds like the first line of some poem or other. I would certainly be my honor to be the first, or possibly the next, unsalaried employee for Shaprio Industries. As I reflected and re-read some of my comments in your last posting, I think there was a poem missing; one that “disappeared” rather than show up as a comment. Maybe you will bump into it, or run across it one of these days. Of course, it did not occur to me that perhaps my poetic ardor as response to your music and your guided tours has made your cheeks a bit red; that perhaps by tooting your horn for you, so loudly and so often, has begun to make you a tiny bit uncomfortable. If so, it was not my intent. Your postings give me an excuse to exercise my poetic muscles, something that I had not been doing much of lately.

Actually it seems that each time you transcribe or write down the music playing in your left brain, and present it to us, to the masses, the left brain and right brain already have a picnic, as the sythesis occurs, as the composition ascends, descends, finds its own volition, flies, soars, runs, trots, strolls, crawls, and scampers.

Listening to your musical piece, and thinking about your comment has put me in yet another mood to wax poetus:

Without You

Piano speaks,
sax responds;
fingers dance
on divers
keys,
talking
in tongues and sign,
as the drummer finds
the heartbeat,
keeping the body
on its feet;

As dark waves crest,
high, harsh, and proud,
pushed
by brother wind,
kissed
by sister gray
skies;
there
near your home,
at it, within it, around it,
all of it
touching the sea
in every parameter;
creativity
that starts in trees
and stops in sand;
like a hundred miles
of beach belt,
holding up, bracing
the island;
keeping it
from sliding back
into the slippery salt
from whence
it came.

But certainly you know,
probably you understand,
that without you
we cannot find
the other shoe;
without you
we don’t know
what to do;
without you
the sky was never
blue,
not even once.

So
welcome back,
song lady.
For we missed your
guidance,
and counsel,
and your
eyes,
and your
heart.

Glenn Buttkus 2008