The Poetry Well is a monthly column that showcases island poetry. This month includes a poem by the current Vashon Poet Laurate Cal Kinnear.
HOODSPORT
This morning the Dream Time dawns anew
at 5:15 am.
Great Blue Heron lumbers by like Pterodactyl.
The water faintly ripples,
its blue
still stirred with the blue of deep sky.
White-throated violet-green swallows work
their quick,
hungry stitchery into the swelling light.
The dark, forested, far shore bristles like the
clenched,
barbaric
child of night it is.
Houses, a few boats at anchor, a dock,
a whole town,
are late strokes, and barely hold
against the erasures of so many
nights and gales.
I have never felt so salted,
so glacier-scrawled, so
intimately
fingered with light.
A Seattle native, Cal Kinnear left the West Coast to attend college in the East before returning to the Puget Sound area. Landing in Olympia, Kinnear ran a bookstore for 10 years, then moved to Seattle and then to Vashon.
“The waters of Puget Sound, the south end of the Salish Sea, have been my home,” Kinnear wrote in a recent email. “For many years I was a sailor, sailed nearly every sailing race up and down the Sound and into Canada. I know the region better from the water than land. Over the years, I have also hiked nearly all of the Olympic range.”
Kinnear said he studied literature in college, where he read the history of poetry. He wanted to write poetry but was not convinced he could. That notion changed one day when he was teaching at the University of Virginia. The nation’s poet laureate, W.S. Merwin, came to the campus to read from his new book, “The Lice.”
“I was amazed and deeply moved,” Kinnear recalled. “All of a sudden I understood what poetry was in my time, and that I wanted to write it. It has been the soul of my life, always with me through all my years at various jobs. In 2010, I left the working world and, with my pen and notebooks, I moved to Vashon to live with Jennifer Johnson, now my wife. Poetry, the life of words, is the driving force of my life — what words choose to bring to me of the life of all that surrounds me.”
Last year, Chatwin Books published Kinnear’s latest book, “The Great Wheel,” a blend of poetry, prose and translations. Earlier publications include “My Father’s House,” a book of prose poetry; “Shale Eyes,” a chapbook of poems; and “A Walk in Bardo,” a book of poems. In June, Kinnear and a group of island poets called The Isolai published a small collection of broadside poems titled “Vestiges.”
