Last Summer’s Mornings When I Woke

december 1982

jp melville

Last summer’s mornings when I woke

I’d throw my blankets off and climb from bed

Pull on my jeans then mutter my way downstairs

To step outside and out beyond the house to hillside.

Looking out across the valley span

I’d take my morning piss

And breathe damp air, cool, thick

Tasting like grasses and pollen and pine -

My skin would shiver against the moisture

My arms, my chest, and back and belly naked

My toes and feet gone numb in wet grass;

Arching backwards – ugh – stretching

Spreading arms and fingers to dawn’s pale sky.

Down in that valley, there’s a stream

In my memory blanketed

By thick morning, winding mist

Wending its way wherever the waters beneath it did…

And the old leaning willows and cedar groves looked all asleep

Because it was darker down there in the valley

Darker than the hillsides where dawn’s morning light

Sunrise just skimmed over our horizon.

I stood there,

Everything quiet, still,

Then voices drifting…

And the sound of ducks and geese cackling…

Every morning into eternity…

Our neighbours at their chores, feeding time…

A clamouring floats over to me us

We know in our distant tied togetherness a day’s begun.

Sometimes, I wondered then,

Do we, how, greet the morning day’s wonder the way I had done,

When I would go back into the house

Put shoes and shirt on

And then trek back outside and to the barns

To do my our everyone’s life long chores…

As the day has sunrise begun.

Poems - JP Melville