I could have taken the flat road north,
the long grey patience of the plateau,
but I wanted water under me instead,
so I gave myself to the Northern Sea Wolf
and let her carry me out through Fisher Channel
into the green hush of Cousins Inlet,

where the mountains stood up out of the sea
and began, without a word,
to tell me how they were made.
I am no geologist,
but even I could read the slopes:
here they lay bare and young,
dark and raw, stripped of soil,
the trees still scattered
like the first guesses of a forest,
where the lava cooled
and was not yet forgiven by the ground;
and there the older summits,
sheathed in talus and colluvium,
the iron bleeding its long rust
down the scree,
wore every colour
that patience leaves behind.

Gazing down Cascade Inlet,
down the length of Dean Channel,
a single day handed me
more of the deep past
than I had ever been given at once:
snow on the aiguilles,
dense forest on the lower slopes,
and between them
the round glaciated shoulders of granodiorite,
exfoliating, bald,
that still remembered being fire.

Then the last reach,
Labouchere, North Bentinck Arm,
where Bensins and Howe
stood sharp against the morning,
and Kwatna lifted all its spires at once,
needle upon needle,
until I had nothing to say,
and saying nothing
was the truest thing I did all day.

Tonight I sit on a riverbank
with Bastille and Nusatsun
keeping watch around me,
and Saloompt, the Wolf Ears, close above.
I have brought the piano out under the stars,
the Donner with its warm wood grain,
set down against the cold andesite,
and I will play a little for the water,
which has been playing its own long song
through this valley
longer than any of us,
and tomorrow, and the day after,
I am going to walk into every green and broken thing
that these two feet can reach.