Île de Mont-Royal

Nothing can be salvaged, but nothing will be lost.

I am a camera with its shutter open, passive, recording, not thinking...Someday, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.
—Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin


I want to organize all these details—
Milky oysters, traitored churches, mountainous clouds
Like the forehead of some whale-voiced prophet—
And doing so, elevate them. 
Salvage them from the inevitable exile of my forgetfulness.
From the shame of my so-blurred vision deliver them:
Offerings to the endless from the foot of tiny experience.

But this, too, is unnecessary.
Another game, to win us away from ourselves.
Nothing can be salvaged, but nothing will be lost.
Let it rest in the mind of God.
Let it all churn and sink into the sky.
When the rain is drawn again with the great ladle,
You will taste it once more. 
Write no more, say no more now.
Close your eyes.
Picture only the flying wheat fields of summer, and below,
The secret blue lake
Whose precise coordinates in that very heaven,
That undefiled past,
Have been hidden from you,
Salvaged for you, set aside in holy trust,
Alive now and ever in the fullness of time.

Montreal, July 2018