They call this place “new found land” and in a way, it is and was, for me, even in the brief three days I was in the province. Today in my lectionary meditation, I wrote – “back from Newfoundland, now where next?” For over a month I’d been on a steady voyage to this unknown shore through the wideness of our country – from my edge of prairie in Manitoba through to Canadian Shield down to Niagara Peninsula and then up again past the hump of New Brunswick onto Nova Scotia and past the wee crescent isle of P.E.I onto the rocky banks that form the narrow cove that is St. John’s Harbor. I came because I was invited, and I was invited because I interviewed Margaret once, and we had the kind of exchange that left a lasting impression. My fellow panelists Barb Nickel, Stan Dragland and Maureen Scott Harris are also familiar with Margaret or her work as editors, readers, poets and collaborators. Together we celebrated her life and her art.
Of course, I was on another kind of journey as well. And that is the parallel one that mirrors the literal, the one Margaret might refer to as ‘anagogic.’ That word ‘anagogic’ has been a touchstone for me for my own poetry ever since I encountered the term somewhere in my readings about or by Margaret. Fond as I know Margaret was of being etymologically precise, I decide to look up the word ‘anagogic’ on my generation’s equivalent of Margaret’s favorite dictionary (Klein’s Comprehensive Etymological dictionary of the English Language) which is the Internet. Here is what I found from various sources:
Anagogic: “pertaining to the moral, uplifting, progressive strivings of the unconscious.”; “relating to literature as a total order of words”; “leading on high; or that which draws towards divinity” or as referring to ‘anagoge’ which is “a mystical or allegorical interpretation (especially of Scripture.)"
I think somehow all these definitions, disparate as they appear, do define the word precisely enough in the context in which I use it in my journey with Margaret’s poetry. Thus it is, I end with this poem, a summation of my experience:
To Margaret from St. John’s, Newfoundland.
Confession: I came to dwell on your words once more
so I might catch glimpse of the sea. However, two days in,
the mist is so heavy, the only sight from Signal Hill are the
cannon ends of the Queen’s Battery – cannons, the sign says,
which have never fired “angry at an enemy.”
Mist obscures and has no face, but the sea is certain beyond it.
By the hotel bed, the Gideon Bible with its cloud of witnesses
blankets the page and I am stymied again by what veils
the hidden, yet obvious. Mere mortal record,
in language that lisps, God meets Time as mist to hillside;
still I am left, gaping at the edge.
On the third day, my last, the clouds clear
and ocean, blue and undulating, palpable as air and wind,
is glimpsed.
It is the sight I have been waiting for, longing in your words
to find it.
