This piece, an excerpt from an ongoing manuscript of plein-air nature writing, is one of forty projected journal entries involving excursions beginning before sunrise, with exploration of natural settings and observations of natural phenomena (birds, plants, mammals, insects, water, clouds, light, the sun, etc.) interwoven with readings about morning in scientific texts, poetry, and other kinds of writing

Bartlett, Brian

English

Scholars Commons

The Goose 
Volume 18 Number 1 Article 12 
3-2-2020 
FROM Daystart Songflight: A Morning Journal 
Brian Bartlett 
Saint Mary's University 
 Part of the Art Practice Commons, and the Nonfiction Commons 
Follow this and additional works at / Suivez-nous ainsi que d’autres travaux et œuvres: 
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose 
Recommended Citation / Citation recommandée 
Bartlett, Brian. "FROM Daystart Songflight: A Morning Journal." The Goose, vol. 18 , no. 1 , article 12, 2020, 
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol18/iss1/12. 
This article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for 
inclusion in The Goose by an authorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please 
contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca. 
Cet article vous est accessible gratuitement et en libre accès grâce à Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Le texte a été 
approuvé pour faire partie intégrante de la revue The Goose par un rédacteur autorisé de Scholars Commons @ 
Laurier. Pour de plus amples informations, contactez scholarscommons@wlu.ca. 
BRIAN BARTLETT  
 
From Daystart Songflight:  
A Morning Journal 
 
The following prose is one of many journal entries from an experiment begun in the spring of 
2018 after my previous plein-air work, Branches Over Ripples: A Waterside Journal. In the new 
manuscript I’ve turned attention both to particular, unique mornings, and to morning as 
explored by scientists, poets, painters, and other sorts of observers and thinkers. While much of 
the project’s seeing, hearing, writing, questioning and learning is unpredictable and 
spontaneous, one guideline I’ve followed faithfully is to be outdoors before sunrise. The 
following journal entry is the ninth.  
By Partridge Island, near Ottawa House, Cumberland County, Nova Scotia 
Friday, June 15, 2018 
Sunrise: 5:25. Writestart: 11:48 
Three apple trees have been stunted by icy winters and the winds off Minas Basin. Their 
crookedness and their favouring one side, however, suggest they’ve adapted well to the 
waterside location. Not only has the weather bent them; you could say they’ve cooperated in 
being bent, yielding when yielding helps them survive. One of the trees leans onto another, 
their trunks touching for only about a foot; the upper tree likely hasn’t damaged the lower. The 
third tree is on its own but its highest branches nearly touch the highest branches of the taller 
of the two others. Its trunk keeps the sun out of my eyes while I sit writing in the tree-cast 
shade. Farther up the grassy bank, near a Canadian flag ruffling on its pole, is a more shapely, 
more thickly blossomed apple tree. The flag is there because in 1871 the peak-roofed house, 
now a museum, became the summer retreat of Charles Tupper (1821-1915), founder of the first 
free, non-sectarian educational system in British North America, Premier of Nova Scotia in his 
forties, member of the first Canadian Parliament, and Prime Minister from 1896 to ’99.  Much 
of the house was first built in 1765 but Tupper oversaw its expansion into a 21-room Georgian 
mansion.  
One reason for choosing to write near shore, with breezes stirring and cooling the air, is to 
avoid being plagued by mosquitoes as I was while writing by Bass River two days ago. A 
drawback to the seaside location is that I’ll not hear as many kinds of birds as I did on 
Wednesday with more trees around—yet a warbler species I usually associate with forests, the 
Parula, has briefly visited one of the apple trees. A few times its trill with an abrupt, pinched-
sounding end-note has cut into the quiet. If the birds in the following hours are going to be few 
and far between, that’ll create a space in which I can copy out from three small slips of paper 
1
Bartlett: FROM Daystart Songflight: A Morning Journal
Published by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2020
my lists of the first ten species I’ve heard and/or seen during the past five mornings, starting 
before sunrise. 
Monday (beginning outside Elizabeth Bishop’s Great Village childhood house, where I’m in 
residence for a week, and from a walk through the village, then a visit to Spencer Point): 
1. American Crow 
2. Song Sparrow 
3. American Goldfinch 
4. Black-capped Chickadee 
5. Red-eyed Vireo 
6. American Robin 
7. Duck species (three flying & quacking) 
8. Cedar Waxwing 
9. Belted Kingfisher 
10. Bald Eagle 
(If mammals were included, a squirrel and a cow would’ve been including for their 
voices.) 
Wednesday (beginning outside Bishop house, then again at Spencer Point): 
* species not among first ten encountered on Monday. 
Parenthetical numbers refer to place in previous morning’s order. 
1. Cedar Waxwing (8) 
2. Song Sparrow (2) 
3. American Crow (1) 
4. Northern Flicker* 
5. Black-throated Green Warbler* 
6. Belted Kingfisher (9) 
7. Great Blue Heron* 
8. Chimney Swift* 
9. Mourning Dove* 
10. American Redstart* 
Friday (today) (after the Bishop house, where—hilariously—I rushed out to the car and drove 
away as fast as I could so I wouldn’t hear too many familiar birds there, though numbers 1 and 
2 were inescapable): 
* species not among first ten encountered on either Monday or Wednesday. 
Parenthetical numbers refer to place in previous mornings’ order. 
1. American Crow (1, 3) 
2. Song Sparrow (2, 2) 
3. Winter Wren* 
4. Northern Cardinal* 
5. American Goldfinch (3, —) 
6. White-throated Sparrow* 
7. Blue Jay* 
2
The Goose, Vol. 18, No. 1 [2020], Art. 12
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol18/iss1/12
8. Red-breasted Nuthatch* 
9. Mourning Dove (—, 9) 
10. Northern Flicker (—, 2) 
With all the early species heard, glimpsed or watched between about 5:00 and 7:00, the 
following can be noticed. Only two birds—crow, ever-reliable, ever-welcome Song Sparrow (the 
2nd species heard Mon., Weds. and Fri.)—were among the first ten observed all three mornings. 
Five were recorded on two of the three mornings. The others appear only on one of the lists. Is 
this record too brief and narrow to hold much significance beyond one observer’s experiences 
in one week of a particular June? For it to be of ornithological interest to others, should the 
record extend over dozens or hundreds of mornings, preferably over a few years, so that 
broadly illuminating patterns would emerge? As it stands, the listings might seem an example 
of a statistical approach in its infancy; yet going back over the species encountered in the given 
order (given not by me but by natural, complex happenstance) helps me re-experience, even if 
in a greatly distilled form, three early mornings’ sequences of witnessed birds. Collecting such 
data needn’t yield obvious rewards for it to feel valuable and nourishing. Can’t it be a way of 
honouring small varieties among the hours just before and after sunrise?  
For how many mornings would I have to scratch down the names of birds as witnessed one by 
one until a morning’s order was exactly repeated? At least the gathering of even a few temporal 
sequences of names might demonstrate how one daystart differs from another. It’s tempting, 
yes, it‘s tempting to consider doing these lists of “the day’s first ten birds” as long as I work on 
the manuscript—a thought I’m surprised hadn’t occurred to me until a minute ago. 
After reading that Parrsboro is currently the central site of a four-day-long International Plein-
air Painting Festival, I was curious to check out the annual event. Over 30 painters have 
registered for the festival (including a competition. Before choosing this unexpected spot under 
apple trees, I chatted with Ray and Jane, a past-middle-age couple from Massachusetts, who’d 
set up easels and begun painting before I showed up. By now they must’ve paused to have 
lunch elsewhere; they’re nowhere in sight, but their easels and some of their bags still rest in 
the grass. Before I had much time to mull over the etiquette of dealing with plein-air painters in 
action (is it okay to gaze at their works-in-progress or to strike up conversations, which might 
break into their concentration? would it be the height of rudeness to say, Do you always paint 
‘realistically’?) they chatted willingly. In yesterday’s desultory, damp weather, they said, some 
painters did their work—awkwardly, I’m guessing, with annoying limitations—from their cars (if 
their windows were open, would their acts quality as plein-air?). Ray and Jane said they “love 
this coast” and wish they could live here. Ray’s praise of Canada must be fed by his despair over 
Trump’s America, and in his first mention of the White House Ozymandias his speech sped up 
and his tone grew more anxious. “It’s on our minds all the time,” he said, “even at night when 
we’re trying to sleep,” and by we he likely meant not just himself and Jane but many, many 
Americans. I recalled for Jane and Ray a moment at last month’s Swedish conference on 
Thoreau when one of the plenary speakers cited HDT—at a time when the Fugitive Slave Law, 
the Mexican War, and disappointment in Daniel Webster weighed him down—writing, “The 
remembrance of my country spoils my walk. My thoughts are murder to the State” (108). To 
3
Bartlett: FROM Daystart Songflight: A Morning Journal
Published by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2020
the visiting painters their fellow countryman’s words seemed to ring all too true. “Yes,” Jane 
said, “on our walks we try our hardest not to talk politics, but . . . .” 
Other than Herring Gulls, the only ocean species that have entered my sight is a Black Scoter, all 
dark brown, solitary unlike scoters often seen in small fleets along the Nova Scotia coasts in 
January and February. When I sauntered down to the jumble of rocks lined up as a border 
between the grass and the shore—too systematically placed as a wall to have all travelled there 
together naturally—to photograph the apple trees, I was startled by a squeak, but I couldn’t tell 
whether I’d stepped on a mouse or a Mink. (I recalled seeing over a decade ago a black Mink 
among the great rocks of Peggy’s Cove far from the famous lighthouse.) An hour later, I’ve 
looked up and seen a Woodchuck resting on the rocks, breezes ruffling its fur. Had that hefty, 
thick-coated mammal, or one of its kits, made the high, hurt-sounding cry? As I approached 
from the side, it hardly blinked, then when I faced it head-on the Woodchuck still remained 
where it was, as if absorbing the sun’s warmth after no sun was visible during yesterday’s 
prolonged drizzle. If that animal and its family have found a home among the rocks with many 
gaps, crevices and mismatched surfaces, with neither wood nor soil central to their lives, then 
the name Woodchuck might be replaced by Boulder-hog or Rock-hider. Now the creature has 
left the rocks and is sniffing its way across the buttercup-scattered grass, as if to claim the name 
Grass-muncher or Buttercup-guts. 
The Massachusetts couple returned and moved their equipment up into the shade. To give my 
legs and neck some flexing changes and movement, I wandered over to Ray and Jane. Ray, in a 
long-sleeved blue shirt and blue jeans, told me that about half of the festival participants are 
Canadian, half American. He joked about trying to suppress his accent, so he wouldn’t be 
associated with the putting-Ray’s-guts-in-a-knot president. “Look at the portraits of American 
presidents and compare them to Canadian politicians, like that Tupper—I noticed there’s a 
warmth in his face, whereas one of our presidents—”—he put his hands on his hips and stuck 
his chin up in the air—“—look like they’re saying, ‘I’m American, you better believe it, I’m the 
best!” I didn’t point out that many Canadians in public realms have been or are entrenched in 
social intolerance of all sorts, or that a gallery of prime ministers would reveal some cold or 
sullen faces (I should check the Tupper portrait to see if Ray is projecting); instead I suggested 
that some photos of FDR suggest his humanity. “Oh yes, I loved FDR,” said Ray, “and Obama. 
Obama was good, but he had terrible advisors.” Ray went on to mention that Ottawa House has 
a bathroom: “And you have to remember three things in this plein-air business: park—paint—
piss.” His and Jane’s realistic renderings of the sand and water, with Partridge Island farther 
along the shore, and the cliffs of Blomidon across the bay, were drying, removed from their 
easels and placed flat on the ground. I didn’t see any of Ray’s feisty, intense character 
expressed in his conventional canvasses.  
“You’re done for today?” I asked. “For the weekend, it looks like,” answered Jane. “We have to 
go home tomorrow.”  
“So you’ll be missing the competition results on Sunday?”  
4
The Goose, Vol. 18, No. 1 [2020], Art. 12
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol18/iss1/12
“We’re not here for the competition,” she explained. “We’re just here to do what we came 
for.” 
Before driving back to Great Village, I want to look again at a few lines I copied out last night 
from the final poem in Bishop’s first collection. Once I misremembered the title as “Aubade” 
(morning song) rather than what it is, “Anaphora” (succession of repeated line-beginnings), not 
surprising since the poem starts: 
 
Each day with so much ceremony 
begins, with birds, with bells, 
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
with white-gold skies our eyes 
first open on, such brilliant walls 
that for a moment we wonder 
“Where is the music coming from, the energy? 
The day was meant for what ineffable creature 
we must have missed?”  
As is often the case, Bishop is both serious and funny here, with nothing in the alliterative 
accents and ceremonial tone of the first lines suggesting what’s to come: the second question’s 
wryness, and the allusion to humans as “some ineffable creature / we must have missed.” The 
following lines foreground the “long intrigue,” “memory” and “mortal fatigue” of the human 
subject, but another surprise awaits us at the poem’s end: the introduction of a  
. . . beggar in the park 
who, weary, without lamp or book 
prepares stupendous studies: 
the fiery event 
of everyday in endless 
endless assent. 
While the conclusion of “Anaphora” remains elusive, I see a kind of mythic radiance around the 
self-reliant beggar who deeply considers the “music” and “energy,” the fire and yearning 
(“assent” punning on “ascent”?), in every day. 
Not that early today suggested a fiery climbing, since clouds were amassed so thickly that the 
rising sun was hidden for the day’s first few hours. Early this morning on a drive to and from 
Londonderry, a village once known for its gypsum mine, CBC Daybreak on the car radio included 
a brief story that in Britain and Ireland plastic straws—two million of them distributed daily—
will be banned. The morning show’s hosts also mentioned that today marks the end of 
Ramadan, and somehow the intersection of that with the welcome news about plastic straws 
felt appropriate: my daybreak-freed imagination took flight into a fantasy that prayers and 
fasting might’ve helped prompt a decision beneficial for us and the planet (I wrote “our planet,” 
then crossed out the “our”). 
5
Bartlett: FROM Daystart Songflight: A Morning Journal
Published by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2020
It’s past 3:00 p.m. so I’ve begun to wonder, Does today’s entry truly belong in a “morning 
journal”? The apple trees were just barely part of my morning experience. Much else—the 
woodchuck in the rocks, the solitary scoter, Bishop’s poem—have belonged to the afternoon. 
As I wrote about them I absentmindedly didn’t for a moment consider that I’ve included 
encounters from the afternoon, though every sentence articulated after 12 noon, even if it was 
about the morning, was created after morning. The project is evolving, still finding its forms and 
modifying its guidelines (I write as if the project were animate, with a will of its own, and 
sometimes that does feel like the journal’s nature). Morning, I’ve now decided, needs to be 
essential as the time of writing, and the primary but not exclusive time of subjects and topics 
(we have morning thoughts about afternoon, evening, and night things, and they shouldn’t be 
barred at the gates). 
Like a final punctuation mark for writing this entry, a tent caterpillar has crawled onto my 
sweat-jacket, then across the blank book’s page. If I had any talents as a painter, I’d try to do 
justice to that with watercolours or oils: with a backdrop of rocks and ocean, a page of 
handwriting with a blue-black-orange caterpillar moving across it, the golden hairs sunlit and 
alert (what a tiny brush would be needed to paint them), the larva intriguing enough in itself 
that you hardly need remember its transformation into a flying moth. 
 
  
6
The Goose, Vol. 18, No. 1 [2020], Art. 12
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol18/iss1/12
Works Cited 
Bishop, Elizabeth. “Anaphora.” The Complete Poems: 1927-1979, Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1979, p. 
52. 
Thoreau, Henry David. “Slavery in Massachusetts.” Reform Papers, edited by Wendell Glick, 
Princeton UP, 1973, pp. 91-109. 
 
 
 
BRIAN BARTLETT of Halifax has published seven collections of poetry and three books of non-
fiction. Excerpts from his books of nature writing, Ringing Here & There: A Nature Calendar 
(Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2014) and Branches Over Ripples: A Waterside Journal (Gaspereau, 
2017), appeared in earlier issues of The Goose.  
 
 
7
Bartlett: FROM Daystart Songflight: A Morning Journal
Published by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2020


FROM Daystart Songflight: A Morning Journal

Wilfrid Laurier University

The Goose Volume 18 Number 1 Article 12 3-2-2020 FROM Daystart Songflight: A Morning Journal Brian Bartlett Saint Mary's University  Part of the Art Practice Commons, and the Nonfiction Commons Follow this and additional works at / Suivez-nous ainsi que d’autres travaux et œuvres: https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose Recommended Citation / Citation recommandée Bartlett, Brian. "FROM Daystart Songflight: A Morning Journal." The Goose, vol. 18 , no. 1 , article 12, 2020, https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol18/iss1/12. This article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Goose by an authorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca. Cet article vous est accessible gratuitement et en libre accès grâce à Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Le texte a été approuvé pour faire partie intégrante de la revue The Goose par un rédacteur autorisé de Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Pour de plus amples informations, contactez scholarscommons@wlu.ca. BRIAN BARTLETT   From Daystart Songflight:  A Morning Journal  The following prose is one of many journal entries from an experiment begun in the spring of 2018 after my previous plein-air work, Branches Over Ripples: A Waterside Journal. In the new manuscript I’ve turned attention both to particular, unique mornings, and to morning as explored by scientists, poets, painters, and other sorts of observers and thinkers. While much of the project’s seeing, hearing, writing, questioning and learning is unpredictable and spontaneous, one guideline I’ve followed faithfully is to be outdoors before sunrise. The following journal entry is the ninth.  By Partridge Island, near Ottawa House, Cumberland County, Nova Scotia Friday, June 15, 2018 Sunrise: 5:25. Writestart: 11:48 Three apple trees have been stunted by icy winters and the winds off Minas Basin. Their crookedness and their favouring one side, however, suggest they’ve adapted well to the waterside location. Not only has the weather bent them; you could say they’ve cooperated in being bent, yielding when yielding helps them survive. One of the trees leans onto another, their trunks touching for only about a foot; the upper tree likely hasn’t damaged the lower. The third tree is on its own but its highest branches nearly touch the highest branches of the taller of the two others. Its trunk keeps the sun out of my eyes while I sit writing in the tree-cast shade. Farther up the grassy bank, near a Canadian flag ruffling on its pole, is a more shapely, more thickly blossomed apple tree. The flag is there because in 1871 the peak-roofed house, now a museum, became the summer retreat of Charles Tupper (1821-1915), founder of the first free, non-sectarian educational system in British North America, Premier of Nova Scotia in his forties, member of the first Canadian Parliament, and Prime Minister from 1896 to ’99.  Much of the house was first built in 1765 but Tupper oversaw its expansion into a 21-room Georgian mansion.  One reason for choosing to write near shore, with breezes stirring and cooling the air, is to avoid being plagued by mosquitoes as I was while writing by Bass River two days ago. A drawback to the seaside location is that I’ll not hear as many kinds of birds as I did on Wednesday with more trees around—yet a warbler species I usually associate with forests, the Parula, has briefly visited one of the apple trees. A few times its trill with an abrupt, pinched-sounding end-note has cut into the quiet. If the birds in the following hours are going to be few and far between, that’ll create a space in which I can copy out from three small slips of paper 1Bartlett: FROM Daystart Songflight: A Morning JournalPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2020my lists of the first ten species I’ve heard and/or seen during the past five mornings, starting before sunrise. Monday (beginning outside Elizabeth Bishop’s Great Village childhood house, where I’m in residence for a week, and from a walk through the village, then a visit to Spencer Point): 1. American Crow 2. Song Sparrow 3. American Goldfinch 4. Black-capped Chickadee 5. Red-eyed Vireo 6. American Robin 7. Duck species (three flying & quacking) 8. Cedar Waxwing 9. Belted Kingfisher 10. Bald Eagle (If mammals were included, a squirrel and a cow would’ve been including for their voices.) Wednesday (beginning outside Bishop house, then again at Spencer Point): * species not among first ten encountered on Monday. Parenthetical numbers refer to place in previous morning’s order. 1. Cedar Waxwing (8) 2. Song Sparrow (2) 3. American Crow (1) 4. Northern Flicker* 5. Black-throated Green Warbler* 6. Belted Kingfisher (9) 7. Great Blue Heron* 8. Chimney Swift* 9. Mourning Dove* 10. American Redstart* Friday (today) (after the Bishop house, where—hilariously—I rushed out to the car and drove away as fast as I could so I wouldn’t hear too many familiar birds there, though numbers 1 and 2 were inescapable): * species not among first ten encountered on either Monday or Wednesday. Parenthetical numbers refer to place in previous mornings’ order. 1. American Crow (1, 3) 2. Song Sparrow (2, 2) 3. Winter Wren* 4. Northern Cardinal* 5. American Goldfinch (3, —) 6. White-throated Sparrow* 7. Blue Jay* 2The Goose, Vol. 18, No. 1 [2020], Art. 12https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol18/iss1/128. Red-breasted Nuthatch* 9. Mourning Dove (—, 9) 10. Northern Flicker (—, 2) With all the early species heard, glimpsed or watched between about 5:00 and 7:00, the following can be noticed. Only two birds—crow, ever-reliable, ever-welcome Song Sparrow (the 2nd species heard Mon., Weds. and Fri.)—were among the first ten observed all three mornings. Five were recorded on two of the three mornings. The others appear only on one of the lists. Is this record too brief and narrow to hold much significance beyond one observer’s experiences in one week of a particular June? For it to be of ornithological interest to others, should the record extend over dozens or hundreds of mornings, preferably over a few years, so that broadly illuminating patterns would emerge? As it stands, the listings might seem an example of a statistical approach in its infancy; yet going back over the species encountered in the given order (given not by me but by natural, complex happenstance) helps me re-experience, even if in a greatly distilled form, three early mornings’ sequences of witnessed birds. Collecting such data needn’t yield obvious rewards for it to feel valuable and nourishing. Can’t it be a way of honouring small varieties among the hours just before and after sunrise?  For how many mornings would I have to scratch down the names of birds as witnessed one by one until a morning’s order was exactly repeated? At least the gathering of even a few temporal sequences of names might demonstrate how one daystart differs from another. It’s tempting, yes, it‘s tempting to consider doing these lists of “the day’s first ten birds” as long as I work on the manuscript—a thought I’m surprised hadn’t occurred to me until a minute ago. After reading that Parrsboro is currently the central site of a four-day-long International Plein-air Painting Festival, I was curious to check out the annual event. Over 30 painters have registered for the festival (including a competition. Before choosing this unexpected spot under apple trees, I chatted with Ray and Jane, a past-middle-age couple from Massachusetts, who’d set up easels and begun painting before I showed up. By now they must’ve paused to have lunch elsewhere; they’re nowhere in sight, but their easels and some of their bags still rest in the grass. Before I had much time to mull over the etiquette of dealing with plein-air painters in action (is it okay to gaze at their works-in-progress or to strike up conversations, which might break into their concentration? would it be the height of rudeness to say, Do you always paint ‘realistically’?) they chatted willingly. In yesterday’s desultory, damp weather, they said, some painters did their work—awkwardly, I’m guessing, with annoying limitations—from their cars (if their windows were open, would their acts quality as plein-air?). Ray and Jane said they “love this coast” and wish they could live here. Ray’s praise of Canada must be fed by his despair over Trump’s America, and in his first mention of the White House Ozymandias his speech sped up and his tone grew more anxious. “It’s on our minds all the time,” he said, “even at night when we’re trying to sleep,” and by we he likely meant not just himself and Jane but many, many Americans. I recalled for Jane and Ray a moment at last month’s Swedish conference on Thoreau when one of the plenary speakers cited HDT—at a time when the Fugitive Slave Law, the Mexican War, and disappointment in Daniel Webster weighed him down—writing, “The remembrance of my country spoils my walk. My thoughts are murder to the State” (108). To 3Bartlett: FROM Daystart Songflight: A Morning JournalPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2020the visiting painters their fellow countryman’s words seemed to ring all too true. “Yes,” Jane said, “on our walks we try our hardest not to talk politics, but . . . .” Other than Herring Gulls, the only ocean species that have entered my sight is a Black Scoter, all dark brown, solitary unlike scoters often seen in small fleets along the Nova Scotia coasts in January and February. When I sauntered down to the jumble of rocks lined up as a border between the grass and the shore—too systematically placed as a wall to have all travelled there together naturally—to photograph the apple trees, I was startled by a squeak, but I couldn’t tell whether I’d stepped on a mouse or a Mink. (I recalled seeing over a decade ago a black Mink among the great rocks of Peggy’s Cove far from the famous lighthouse.) An hour later, I’ve looked up and seen a Woodchuck resting on the rocks, breezes ruffling its fur. Had that hefty, thick-coated mammal, or one of its kits, made the high, hurt-sounding cry? As I approached from the side, it hardly blinked, then when I faced it head-on the Woodchuck still remained where it was, as if absorbing the sun’s warmth after no sun was visible during yesterday’s prolonged drizzle. If that animal and its family have found a home among the rocks with many gaps, crevices and mismatched surfaces, with neither wood nor soil central to their lives, then the name Woodchuck might be replaced by Boulder-hog or Rock-hider. Now the creature has left the rocks and is sniffing its way across the buttercup-scattered grass, as if to claim the name Grass-muncher or Buttercup-guts. The Massachusetts couple returned and moved their equipment up into the shade. To give my legs and neck some flexing changes and movement, I wandered over to Ray and Jane. Ray, in a long-sleeved blue shirt and blue jeans, told me that about half of the festival participants are Canadian, half American. He joked about trying to suppress his accent, so he wouldn’t be associated with the putting-Ray’s-guts-in-a-knot president. “Look at the portraits of American presidents and compare them to Canadian politicians, like that Tupper—I noticed there’s a warmth in his face, whereas one of our presidents—”—he put his hands on his hips and stuck his chin up in the air—“—look like they’re saying, ‘I’m American, you better believe it, I’m the best!” I didn’t point out that many Canadians in public realms have been or are entrenched in social intolerance of all sorts, or that a gallery of prime ministers would reveal some cold or sullen faces (I should check the Tupper portrait to see if Ray is projecting); instead I suggested that some photos of FDR suggest his humanity. “Oh yes, I loved FDR,” said Ray, “and Obama. Obama was good, but he had terrible advisors.” Ray went on to mention that Ottawa House has a bathroom: “And you have to remember three things in this plein-air business: park—paint—piss.” His and Jane’s realistic renderings of the sand and water, with Partridge Island farther along the shore, and the cliffs of Blomidon across the bay, were drying, removed from their easels and placed flat on the ground. I didn’t see any of Ray’s feisty, intense character expressed in his conventional canvasses.  “You’re done for today?” I asked. “For the weekend, it looks like,” answered Jane. “We have to go home tomorrow.”  “So you’ll be missing the competition results on Sunday?”  4The Goose, Vol. 18, No. 1 [2020], Art. 12https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol18/iss1/12“We’re not here for the competition,” she explained. “We’re just here to do what we came for.” Before driving back to Great Village, I want to look again at a few lines I copied out last night from the final poem in Bishop’s first collection. Once I misremembered the title as “Aubade” (morning song) rather than what it is, “Anaphora” (succession of repeated line-beginnings), not surprising since the poem starts:  Each day with so much ceremony begins, with birds, with bells, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . with white-gold skies our eyes first open on, such brilliant walls that for a moment we wonder “Where is the music coming from, the energy? The day was meant for what ineffable creature we must have missed?”  As is often the case, Bishop is both serious and funny here, with nothing in the alliterative accents and ceremonial tone of the first lines suggesting what’s to come: the second question’s wryness, and the allusion to humans as “some ineffable creature / we must have missed.” The following lines foreground the “long intrigue,” “memory” and “mortal fatigue” of the human subject, but another surprise awaits us at the poem’s end: the introduction of a  . . . beggar in the park who, weary, without lamp or book prepares stupendous studies: the fiery event of everyday in endless endless assent. While the conclusion of “Anaphora” remains elusive, I see a kind of mythic radiance around the self-reliant beggar who deeply considers the “music” and “energy,” the fire and yearning (“assent” punning on “ascent”?), in every day. Not that early today suggested a fiery climbing, since clouds were amassed so thickly that the rising sun was hidden for the day’s first few hours. Early this morning on a drive to and from Londonderry, a village once known for its gypsum mine, CBC Daybreak on the car radio included a brief story that in Britain and Ireland plastic straws—two million of them distributed daily—will be banned. The morning show’s hosts also mentioned that today marks the end of Ramadan, and somehow the intersection of that with the welcome news about plastic straws felt appropriate: my daybreak-freed imagination took flight into a fantasy that prayers and fasting might’ve helped prompt a decision beneficial for us and the planet (I wrote “our planet,” then crossed out the “our”). 5Bartlett: FROM Daystart Songflight: A Morning JournalPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2020It’s past 3:00 p.m. so I’ve begun to wonder, Does today’s entry truly belong in a “morning journal”? The apple trees were just barely part of my morning experience. Much else—the woodchuck in the rocks, the solitary scoter, Bishop’s poem—have belonged to the afternoon. As I wrote about them I absentmindedly didn’t for a moment consider that I’ve included encounters from the afternoon, though every sentence articulated after 12 noon, even if it was about the morning, was created after morning. The project is evolving, still finding its forms and modifying its guidelines (I write as if the project were animate, with a will of its own, and sometimes that does feel like the journal’s nature). Morning, I’ve now decided, needs to be essential as the time of writing, and the primary but not exclusive time of subjects and topics (we have morning thoughts about afternoon, evening, and night things, and they shouldn’t be barred at the gates). Like a final punctuation mark for writing this entry, a tent caterpillar has crawled onto my sweat-jacket, then across the blank book’s page. If I had any talents as a painter, I’d try to do justice to that with watercolours or oils: with a backdrop of rocks and ocean, a page of handwriting with a blue-black-orange caterpillar moving across it, the golden hairs sunlit and alert (what a tiny brush would be needed to paint them), the larva intriguing enough in itself that you hardly need remember its transformation into a flying moth.    6The Goose, Vol. 18, No. 1 [2020], Art. 12https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol18/iss1/12Works Cited Bishop, Elizabeth. “Anaphora.” The Complete Poems: 1927-1979, Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1979, p. 52. Thoreau, Henry David. “Slavery in Massachusetts.” Reform Papers, edited by Wendell Glick, Princeton UP, 1973, pp. 91-109.    BRIAN BARTLETT of Halifax has published seven collections of poetry and three books of non-fiction. Excerpts from his books of nature writing, Ringing Here & There: A Nature Calendar (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2014) and Branches Over Ripples: A Waterside Journal (Gaspereau, 2017), appeared in earlier issues of The Goose.    7Bartlett: FROM Daystart Songflight: A Morning JournalPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2020

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FROM Daystart Songflight: A Morning Journal

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