STANLEY PARK SEAWALL, JANUARY
Jessica Lee McMillan
Jessica Lee McMillan (she/her) is a poet with work in CV2, The Malahat Review, Canadian Literature (forthcoming) and others. Her chapbook Shine Like a Dime in the Dirt under the Moon is now available via Pinhole Poetry. Jessica lives in New Westminster, BC with her little family and large dog.
around the peninsula
I return my bones to you
—the monolith and fulcrum
I've made yearly pilgrimage
traced your rise
through ages
layered in sediment
seaming the land's foundation
on a coast submerged
and risen again
where you remain
the monolith retains
intimacy of breaking
rock flows
finds what's brittle
all of it
is in the cracks
Earth's molten breath
from its diaphragm
//
the path, like memory
interrupted by fallen trees and sea breach
and the walk mending
where memory breaks
along the wall
snapshots,
my face in Oma's hands
by the totem poles
your stroller repeating
cove point bay head
land
lull of interlocking coasts
from another continent
shadow-mapped water
phantom of opposite shore
walking mends
where rock echoes
into rain
echoes
location
//
wave action
sculpts stone
and step by step
sea edge
holds me
in periphery
on the way
to the monolith
distance markers
mere mile
stones that measure how far you are
from here
they do not capture the walk’s
inner work
bones
that carry stress fractures
from the teen, the mother, the seeker
my body:
a column of moving parts
returning to a stone testament
moving through time
//
distance markers do not capture
paths of first people
x̌ʷay̓x̌ʷəy̓ village
for millennia before
Park Board and West End construction zones
milestones don't mark how
hands of temporary
and penal labourers
placed them
don't commemorate death
of village estuary
eelgrass herring
the sinking wall
and tankers holding the horizon hostage
don't remember
//
I take for granted the paved scrawl
for indelibility
as it borders
the subduction zone
from which the Coast Mountains
pronounce their height
through cloud with spectral shine
mirrored by wet boulders
that came down with the ice
I ramble around the inlet
past the sulphur piles
and Capilano’s silt mouth
persistent with mussels
to the monolith
invite winter sea to salt the back of my throat
breathe through seasons
remembering summer mouthfeel
of yellow algal bloom
now cooled turquoise
//
a shelter from endless asphalt,
I follow the rocks
earth's tilt
from colliding plates
the slope
drawing rain into shale
into city basement
joining membrane of lost ocean beds –
I seam along the path
round the Point
I am a headland brined by Pacific
feel the hug of sediment
feel the cliff rise above, a bastion
of volcanic basalt
– once island –
and sentinel with the monolith,
twin magma chambers
from mantle
to birth
and long life with sky
//
under the precipice, I feel my size
as a prostration to time
I am to-scale
the volcanic rock mounts
Lion's Gate, the old bridge
just a preface for eons
I read
the cliff it grips
in vertigo foliations cut
from compression
scribed in biofilm –
the tome of earth's movement
my eyes weigh the layers,
girders thick with green paint
flaking and recoated
//
after the bridge
signs warn
for falling rock
what falls away
to keep
structure sound
iron on rock
skin on bones
temporal bodies
of immortal ore
mirror timelines
in two speeds
//
around the bend, signs ask me
not to carve the sandstone;
to respect its history
its wave-etched cheekbone glistens
the juvenile crows
flit eyelashes on its face
as the inlet widens
loons sluice below surface,
cormorant spreads wings
on sandstone bed, water rimmed,
the top of a seal's head
glimpse of beach and rocks in semi-circle
– Coast Salish fish trap –
rocks parted for canoe launch
no crowds
under deep cloud ceiling
on my way to you
no polyester-clad bodies running by
checking wrists
//
how many people I've been
around this bend
I yield to all versions
– my selves in crosscut relationships
like basalt on mudstone,
pink on greying brown hair,
youth on age –
each crossing I've changed
through this Ocean Gate
//
the cliff slopes south
and the stones gain youth
on the final leg
where the monolith comes into view
you
stacked from the first ocean,
the pillar of home
by your existence alone,
I am not alone
you flowed through a chamber
with the hosting cliff –
pushed through Cretaceous sandstone
now last one standing –
parents eroded away
you are punctuation without words
like heart chakra, you beat into the open
and into my body
//
your outline
stubbled with hay
and a Douglas Fir crown
bearing cones
with fortressed seeds
your core,
hexagonal columns
mobile in freeze/thaw,
alive in all tenses
wanderer,
you are a story
of movement and time
//
fallen granite litters your feet
among broken blocks from the cliff
unseen at high tide
your roots sprawl
under the ocean and city
you are a lengthening from depth
a gesture of the deep
where seekers come
to feel as one
but one is everything
your arch to the cliff, vanished
you were never mono at all,
nor any of us in the end –
all shapes, soon shadows
of eroding landscape
//
layers of earth
snowfalls of time
records of rise erode rise
I am a drift
you are rock incarnate
at your feet, I am released
from my narrow lifespan
it starts all over again:
mountain-seafloor
core-sky
//
I walk between you
and the cliff
retreat with the slope
where winter logs are gathered high
up at Third Beach
from your winter shore
I leave the ghost
line at the concession by Second Beach
you, behind me,
among grand things
monument of change
on my pedestrian route
I take greatness
into my brief specificity