The Blomidon Logs

by Deirdre Dwyer

Overview

A spellbinding evocation of the power of memory and the spirit of place

Set in the small farming community of Blomidon on Nova Scotia’s Bay of Fundy, The Blomidon Logs starts with tales of Glooscap and a leaky old cabin. Complete with the wild imagination of youth and rumours of a drowned artist, the book moves up the road to a new A-frame cottage and back in time to the generations who preceded the author at Blomidon, providing a rich heritage of farmland, beach, and stories. Taking its title from the logbooks kept by Dwyer’s parents, the collection is about childhood, family, and a time when summer meant freedom and outdoor play. The poems refer to the legends of the First Nations chief/god who once made his home at Blomidon and celebrate the work of farmers, loggers, and their families and predecessors who have made, and somehow still make, a living from the land.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781770909441
Publisher:	ECW Press
Publication date:	10/11/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Deirdre Dwyer is the author of two collections, The Breath That Lightens the Body and Going to the Eyestone. She has worked as an ESL instructor in Japan; travelled in Asia, Europe, and in an old Volkswagen van across Canada and the U.S.; taught at universities in Halifax; and helped found a farmers’ market in her hometown. She lives in Musquodoboit Harbour, on Nova Scotia’s eastern shore, with her golden retriever, Molly.

Read an Excerpt

The Blomidon Logs

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By Deirdre Dwyer

ECW PRESS

Copyright © 2016 Deirdre Dwyer
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77090-944-1

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CHAPTER 1

THE OLD CABIN

    GLOOSCAP AND HIS MAGIC

    The book at bedtime —
    my parents read to us
    when we were more than seasons
    away from the Great Chief.

    He strolls out on the first page,
    a loon on his shoulder,
    with a tall staff, a smile,
    his braids curled like two thick earrings.

    By his side, two wolves:
    the dark one on a rock howls
    a story to the animal world,
    a summons.

    The other lowers his head,
    scowls at troublemakers, any dark force.

    When my father returned
    he said he found a ring of stones.
      Oh, where thy wigwam stood tall.

    I believe in Glooscap
    who came from the sky
    in his stone canoe.

    The Great Chief who fought the Ice King,
    year-round winter,
    fought the giant Famine
    and Badger, sometimes a man.

    Glooscap brought the Queen of Summer
    for six months
    as we rally, eager,
    to meet her at Blomidon.


    THE FIRST LOGBOOK

    (JUNE 1964–SEPTEMBER 1970)

    "Hunting" is all
    he's written, my father alone,
    five October days at the old camp,
    and setting his steps quietly
    down on the fall envelope
    of a wooded path.

    "Camp Glooscap": he pays tribute
    on the first page to the Great Chief.

    The short entries, the slender
    black book. Unwritten are the lean years,
    the war years, and before
    as if history's pen had not yet
    been carved.

    And the barrel of mountain water
    is found only in the foliage
    of a photograph; its cold
    ancient taste says nothing
    of the short entry

    when we arrive: 4:30, July 15
    '66. A year later my first words
    in the log, of hiking back to Indian Springs.

    We grow the words of summer.


    REQUESTED

    We always asked for the story
    of the fat Giant of Seasons, Coolpujot,
    always turned to him cross-eyed:
    sprawling rolls of his tummy,
    press of his wide arm
    as Glooscap wields a crowbar —
    to roll the giant over.

    He'll defeat the Ice King's
    charm where the Great Chief sleeps
    for six cold months.

    When Coolpujot turns over
    he warms the world.

    Night, wind climbs
    down the mountain. Maybe
    the fire listens when we ask
    for stories of swamp-soggins

    with bulky feet as long
    as snowshoes. Can you hear
    that damp oozing sound?

    And the chunk and chew,
    the mangle, spitting out of shrubs
    by side-hill gougers with one short
    leg, the other long and loose.

    And even in town in daylight
    we listen, look up for Wolfville birds
    that bark and spread wide wings
    over a tree-lined sky.

THE OTHER CHILD, GOING THERE

The surplus of summer: Mom and boxes in the kitchen, Dad in the driveway carefully packing the trunk. Later the youngest cradled in the front while the four of us in the back tease, wrestle anticipation: another fidgety child, my invisible sister. We stop for donuts. I like the chocolate ones with lemon where the hole should be. She gulps hers down, pokes at us to be off; at the Uniacke House rolls her eyes, slips into roped-off chambers. "Don't jump on the ...?"— crack of slats, crash, and she scurries away, doesn't look back as staff confer.

When we slow for the full face of the house we call haunted — grey boards, crooked shutters — she sulks. The sister my parents can't see. Somewhere we eat ice cream; Ian loses a tooth in the soft kind, maybe biting on anticipation's presumption and grit. Above the Avon: filigree of the widow's walk. She surprises, feeds me stories of women: sombre dress, yoke of dark lace, as if she's known them through their yearning. Lunch under a canopy in Grand-Pré: chowder, scones for adults; for us: hamburgers with relish and ketchup she drips.

    And when we crest the hill, lounge
    in our gaze at the Cape across the basin,
    she dances, squirms,
    pleads with us, when we go
    beyond that moment
    where she, resplendent,
    would have us wait.


    ANOTHER LANDMARK ON THE WAY

    The grandest, most elaborate house
    in town a sleeping castle
    with climbing wisteria, deliberate
    shrubs, a tall privet hedge

    had us cloistered around questions:
    Who are they? What do they keep
    from us? What have they done,
    in their prestigious absence, with time?

      It's as if the car
    is slowed by contemplation,
    nineteenth century thought, the anachronism
    of its machine.

    Canning, the town should take back
    its early name, Apple Tree Landing:
    ships would dock again,
    box bins full of McIntosh, Gravenstein
    would fill the hold.

      Does every house
    have cubbyholes, tunnels,
    a desk with a secret drawer?

    Its brown paint is sombre
    and ivy grows unusually quick,
    winds itself like a shroud
    and climbs like a ladder up the tower window

    so we'll never know if a young girl
    meanders those halls and dreams
    of apples unloaded in sweltering Brazil,
    if she looks out the curtained turret
    to the street below
    and sees us wondering,
    driving on.


    CENTURY FARM

    The green canopy, large umbrella
    of the elm on the lawn, its trunk
    wider than hay bales and barn doors.
    At its foot, a sign:
    Century Farm.

    Century — where numbers
    have been silent before
    in notebooks, on chalkboard,
    now they jabber and babble —
    the dialogue and spin
    of zeros makes me really
    use the old math — the tree

    shrinks to seedling; paved road uncurls
    to gravel, red dust. Fence posts
    are released from the earth
      and electricity that makes them hum.
    Cars turn to Model Ts, drive right out
    of the picture.

    To the time before early morning kitchens
    came alive with light, before
    Arley washed the clothes outdoors —
      pale Monday sunshine,
    the wringer washer's churning,
      rollers fed a wicker basket heaped
    with sheets, towels, their nap
    laid flat as they go under.

    Plank by square-nailed plank
    the walls of the farmhouse
    are un-hammered. A team of horses
    rides backwards to the sawmill
    on the mountain, and mortar
    around the fireplace stones
    goes soft, spills down the hill
    with the tumbling stones
    and time.


    INVITATION

    The invitation of fields, fences,
    unlocked doors.

    The elegant appeal of columbine,
    delphinium, sweet william

    at the verandah edge: flowers that summon
    hummingbirds in the windless afternoon hush

    when parents are napping.
    Listen to the evening duty of the dogs

    treeing porcupines with an urgent
    barking barking.

    We just have to look
    at what tumbled the garbage pail

    on the back step. Switch the outdoor light
    for raccoon, wash bear,

    made small by being caught.
    Invitation: the waterfall at Netty's Turn,

    the soft rain and lace
    of its falling,

    the tide writing runes in the sand
    and the names of places, their histories

    like the loose bed of rock below
    the Landing, rock that once shouldered

    a wharf and industry. Old foundation stones
    on the Cape invite you to sit

    but farmers make sitting
    an evening art.

    The stones frame a weedy emptiness,
    a beckoning.


    OLD CABIN RAIN

    What we inherit —
    the image of our great-grandmother
    on her cot reading
    holding an umbrella
    for the roof leaked in her day too.

    And all the pots that Mom can find,
    some with bent handles, others
    their bottoms black from campfires.
    We inherit the sound of rain falling.

    The sound of five kids in one bedroom
    in sleeping bags, scratch
    of horsehair mattresses.
    We inherit the rain.

    And through dry green curtains
    an Irish ploughman sings of his toil,
    his song on eight-track tape
    leaves the black-topped birch table,
    the shelf above the fire,
    beach stones and mortar.
    The song leaves the machine
    turning around on itself,
    the ploughman turning adversity ...

    To fall asleep we count
    the fireplace stones,
    count on the leaking roof, the sound of rain
    depending upon kitchen pots,
    the ploughman singing to my older blood
    turning adversity and damp spirits
    to rhyme.


    CHARACTERS

    1

    Nancy's pet raccoon
    washed its slender hands

    in bowls outside the kitchen step,
    inside opened all the cupboard doors

    wrack and anarchy: latch them
    closed thereafter with elastics

    and one night — bump, trickle —
    made a waterfall down

    the TV's tunnels and tubes —
    Coonie banished to the shed.

    2

    Johnny was the other accident waiting
    to count fingers, stitches ...

    spilling kerosene on his shirt.
    Check it out: candle on the table, he is

    flame, running red and hot in circles
    till someone rolls and blankets him.

    His cousin. Almost everyone
    is somebody's cousin.

    3

    The farmers have old names
    they don't use: Dwight, Irlyn, Forrest.

    We call them Skip, Ike, and Tear,
    and Mary is matriarch

    of the Bigelows, second
    mother to my father who summered here.

    Maybe now I can ...
    no, can't even chart the long thick

    branches of the family trees:
    Legge, Lyons, Borden, Bigelow —

    they go over the mountain, beyond
    the monuments, all through and over

    the fields that run to the very edge
    of the cliff.


    PARTY LINE

    A long ring and a short — someone
    is calling Theresa down the road.

    Two shorts — Connie
    as she answers
    hears the soft click
    of a neighbour listening
    from her kitchen.

      "Arley, you could ask me
      yourself,"
        she might say

    if she wasn't wondering
    what Gloria is cooking
    for farmhands
    picking apples.

    And we keep
    to what they hold
    dear: secrets are apples
    on the tree, there
    for the taking, falling
    to the ground,
    windfall.


    SATURDAY NIGHTS

    The verandah chairs
    we sit on playing cards
    and the table are old sage
    burlap stretched around
    a wooden frame, but the light
    through the screen door
    is older

    than the silhouette of parents inside:
    she rises to do dishes,
    he places a log on the fire —
    that old story of betting on a sure thing.

    Another night, restless, we pelt
    windfalls from Jim's orchard
    at Bible Camp tents.
    In the tradition of Lox —
    not beaver, badger but shape-changer —
    we place molasses, cow skull, & hay
    in a sleeping bag. Oh, Lox would laugh
    when the campers howled.

    But one night we shiver our souls,
    transfixed, are thralls
    to twilight's diminuendo
    as ghost stories escape
    from our mouths, of grandmothers
    tongue-tied by lightning

    as the sky shows her aces:
    lights pulse and throb,
    Glooscap's practical joke
    as if he teaches us a lesson.


    THE HOUSE, SO THEY SAY

    Who does a farmer call a hippie? Anyone
    with long hair, bell-bottoms.
    Any youngster they don't know.

    It's a woebegone house:
    with mossy grey boards
    and leaning slightly
    in its stillness,
    the last house
    as you leave Lower Blomidon.

    They camp there, live
    on sunflowers and no running water
    (though I have never seen them).
    Summer of low rent and fresh veggies.

    Anyone who dares live
    in a derelict house.

    One night, Kay, Nancy, and I woke
    at midnight and swaggered up the road.
    We sang, flinging our arms for the rare freedom
    of the hour.

    Oh, the buzz next morning;
    how hippies ran the roads.


    SUMMER'S GONE SOUTH

    1

    In deep snow
    an old tractor is covered.
    All that shows: trees,
    the skeleton of wheels.
    There is no end to the field
    or sky. All snow,
    wheels, branches, twigs,
    snow-driven.

    2

    On the windowsill
    the decoy of a duck,
    bulrushes in an earthenware pitcher
    beside a burlap curtain.
    The duck's eye is focused
    on a fly in the season's dust.

    3

    The orchard, rows of trees lost
    like a road sacrificing itself
    to the horizon,
    the vanishing point.
    The only hint of harvest,
    past and future,
    a box bin
    waiting for apples.

    4

    The high tide
    is a mirror,
    the Cape haunts the Basin:
    ghosts of cattle
    roam the top of the cliff.

    5

    The cabin's closed for the winter:
    no new entries in the logbook
    where we place ourselves
    among fields, seasons,
    our mythology of Glooscap
    who names our lodge.
    A fly strip hanging
    over the table
    is the shape of all our coming and going.


    THE BOY WHO FOUGHT WINTER

    Nokome, you can't kill
    the Ice King, the old enemy
    with blizzard hair, crown of icicles,
    that awful giant who feasts on the cold

    while you watch your people shiver,
    huddle around their ornery fires —
    they won't burn, wet logs won't dry —

    after damp sleep, your hunters
    creep out into morning's white offering.
    When branches let go snow
    and long shadows taunt,
    cold breath blows down their necks
    and the hunters become the prey
    and silent.

    No, Nokome, you can't kill Winter.
    The bargain Glooscap made
    so his people will not succumb
    to ease and pleasure all year.

    Winter's servants, Frost and Slumber,
    could trick you, make you sleep
    for six months. I could
    stack books and blankets, drift
    from January to June
    in my warm house

    but yours is drafty and the birch bark thin.
    Your tall feather comes with effort:
    furs, stores of seeds, dried meat,
    and branches you strap to your feet
    to walk on the white land.


    PINK SNOW

    Where snow drifts
    under Hun's orchard,
    December winds carry
    the blush of beach and sandstone cliff.


    WINTER READING:
    BLOMIDON ROSE

    The book opens with travellers
    craning their necks for the first glimpse
    at the Cape: "beloved landmark,"
    North Mountain's abrupt end.

    During those slow winters
    I read, surveyed the ice, like a hovering osprey,
    till it turned March grey
    and broke.

      The book the colour of faded
    bee balm, bleeding heart:
    I read notes, "returning home,"
    in the margins, my father's
    underlined phrase, "talk of undercurrents,"
    farm kitchen chatter

    like the trickle and fall
    of stones along the cliff,
    "an artist," my great-grandmother,
    "found floating on the tide."

    As if I'm to crack a code, stones
    will break to reveal ... I split
    the book's seams, look for more notes.

    I search her painting of the sandstone
    walls. Was this the last brushstroke?
    She leaned against this length of driftwood
    and was lost?

    If I could read in the sand
    the answer — tide or despair? —
    as we praise the colour of her cliffs
    — the perfect bloodless red.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Blomidon Logs by Deirdre Dwyer. Copyright © 2016 Deirdre Dwyer. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

DRAMATIS PERSONAE,
THE OLD CABIN,
Glooscap and His Magic,
The First Logbook,
Requested,
The Other Child, Going There,
Another Landmark on the Way,
Century Farm,
Invitation,
Old Cabin Rain,
Characters,
Party Line,
Saturday Nights,
The House, so They Say,
Summer's Gone South,
The Boy Who Fought Winter,
Pink Snow,
Winter Reading,
Blomidon Rose,
"She Slept Out",
The Bigelows' Dog,
The Summer of Pierre,
The Long Flow of the Morning,
Picking Strawberries,
First Entry,
Community Picnic, at the Lookoff,
Games,
Pageantry: The Red Barn,
Three Queens, Five Jokers,
Nancy's Watermelon,
Beach Notes,
Indian Paintbrush,
The Tight Weave,
Desserts,
By the Bigelows' Barn,
Awakening, Camping Trip,
Mountain Walk,
Halloween on the Cape,
Don Forsythe's Store,
THE NEW COTTAGE,
Moving Day,
Glooscap's Lodge,
Loft,
Heirlooms,
Cottage Owls,
After the Chores,
Milk Agate,
Translations from the Log,
Not Mother, May I,
Card Party, White Water's Hall,
The Story,
Blomidon Dogs,
Clothes for Blomidon,
New Cabin Visitors,
The Visiting Dog,
A-frame Christmas,
Stranded,
From Log Entries, June '86,
The Last Entry,
Blomidon Nights,
The Core to Keep,
A Gift of Cherries,
North Mountain Fix,
Every Elm and Story,
Glooscap's Fire,
ARCHIVES,
Photograph with Dutch Door Open,
Great-Grandparents Saunders,
Wharf,
Think Evening,
The Years Mapped Out,
Haying, 1941,
At Jordan River, 1950,
Halo,
Aunt Di Before Her Vows,
To Name a Brook,
Bride,
His Words about the Brook,
Bedtime Stories,
The Soul of this Place,
Rescue Before the Cabin's Torched,
Before the Cabin's Torched,
The Verandah Steps,
Hand-Drawn Maps,
History in Those Fields,
In the Turning,
She Speaks to Her Drowned Mother,
A Sacred Place,
Blomidon Beach,
Deliberations, at a Craft Market,
NOTES,
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS,
ABOUT THE AUTHOR,
COPYRIGHT,

Editorial Reviews

If there is such a thing as summer poetry — where you drag your Muskoka chair into the July shade, and curl up to read the entire book in a single iced-tea gulp — The Blomidon Logs is it. Deirdre Dwyer’s poetry is arresting and lyrical ... Dwyers’ poems seem to read themselves aloud, and the listener is transported back to the days of childhood storytelling and possibility.” — Scene Magazine, July 2017

From the Publisher