Wednesday, February 28, 2007

sweeping pine, swept-up poem.


{pine tree by Belgravia School}


{slushy tree reflection on my street}


{looking up into the centre of world that is in the pine branches of the tree by Belgravia school}

{self-portrait, observing the upper branches of aforementioned lovely tree}


{the red pine bark on that tree soft as my grandmother's skin was, once}

* * *

A number of poems are living inside my head, slowly trickling out like snowmelt. This one I'm posting is still very sketchy -- but I do find it really helps me, to put them up here, it lets me look at them critically. & I enjoy the half-finishedness, really, because reading them in their awkward states compels me to make them better, so then I can post a finished version that has hopefully evolved.

* * *

today would be
her ninety-second birthday;
[...] <-clearly unfinished stanza! bah

tuesday’s false fecundity
with all those pampushky ( little ukrainian shrove tuesday donuts)
& wednesday, ashen; winter
slowly ending, each droplet
of meltwater on the eaves

hits my eye with the
migraine-dull precision;
pools of slush hissing rotten
fuchsia & oxidized copper,
fingernail moon widening

its jagged eclipse, then disappating,
then pain; my icicles for eyes, just
lying in the damp washcloth darkness
while outside everything sways
in the sweaty arms of the chinook.

snow seeps, blackens the
red pine’s bark. peeling tendrils
dissolve into papery light nesting
in the branches, soft like the
skin of an old woman,

cool as the paper of her
skin i kissed just after she died;
& that’s when all it’s all there
again, sadness flaring aura-sudden,
weeping trails of light & i

dig my little treefingers down
through fibrous bones, i cling to
the roots of our sharing, singing,
suffering that leaves her soil
& grows straight through my pines.

& it’s her ninety-second birthday,
grave lying under snowdrifts, &
soon the ache will stop. & this
inherited hemiplegic memory
a nervous purgative it fills me

with an clean echoing clarity
with a closeness so luminous
an ache in the spine of the world
for how this pain can heal us,
how we are both birthed into the light

Saturday, February 24, 2007

reprised.


{somebody lost their wings. left them under a tree in arts quad, or crashed there, icarus-like.}


I poked these two poems a little more. I am done (for now) with the first one -- it's not great but that's all it can be right now. The second one I think I am liking a bit better, but I'm still not entirely satisfied. (If I put it up here, I might be able to find a new angle from which to poke.)

prometheus or icarus?

i)

when my mother was young she feared nothing more than the flash of the bomb the rehearsed rush to duck & cover facedown & curled up

on classroom carpet, fetal turtle waiting for the shadows to pass, for ash to rain down like chalkdust, tasting the sicksweet bile of separation in her thoughts:

mother / daughter, flesh / skeleton, that’s what her brothers told her, they said it would be like being engulfed by the sun –

all the families on her street with their little concrete beehives built in their backyards, filled with their tin-can & water-barrel honeycombs, that’s where she’d run

if the siren sounded, where they’d all hide from the fire falling, & the long winter, ashen
& cursing a terrible creation, the theft of that blasted fire –


ii )

just this month white-coats slowly slipped the hands of the doomsday clock two dashes closer, now it’s sitting at five to midnight but i’m not scared of that –

i heard that up in iqaluit they’ve realized they’ve not yet got a word for the bird
with a breast ruddy as seal blood, they’ve never seen one before –

those robins gone north to warmth, & orange trees perish in frosty california.
a woman in the maldives watches her pearls, sands swiftly dissolving, her neighbours falling into the sudden swell of the sea –

& she isn't so worried about nuclear fission / fusion, no,
she knows we’re already melting our wings of thread & beeswax, all those people

with their wheels & their oil bring us

just seconds & seconds closer to the sun –


* * *

[no name yet]

when my father meditates
his spine gleams straight just like a winter birch
with each white knot of vertebrae
fecund & flowing with the ghosts of a sweet sap,
amber plasma / a healthy blood –

(the ash of last year’s platelets, clotted, hang
from broken branches, stems of the useless transplants)

yet down in the valley ice blossoms on water;
he sees the new white cells forming clean in the cold, lulling veins of the stream,
lymphocytes crunching, collecting on the bank –

somewhere in all this he finds
all these little benedictions, they rustle like
the peeling paper-bark, his breath rushing
in exhale / inhale –

(that sweet psychasthenia lets him forget his bones,
their bitter greenish marrow, empty homes)

just forget the body, only remember breath –

when my father meditates
he brings the whole world rushing
into his throat, lungs flashing their alveoli
of white weeping birches splayed across the sky
to embrace / to heal / to rest

Sunday, February 18, 2007

wanderings in slush, last thursday


{walking in snow slushy & soft like tepid ice cream}


{someone's grade nine social studies homework in the bus shelter by mckernan school. it reads "gorbachev was an energetic young university-educated leader who wanted to make change"}

{my camera was propped up, causing some overexposure, but i do like the red of my leggings & the red trim of the bus shelter windows...}


{dried-up rosehip doorbell -- along 114th street just before university ave.}


{there was a little flock of waxwings greeting me from the elms along 116th st. when i got home...}

Song: Sad & Beautiful World -- Sparklehorse



Thursday, February 15, 2007

typology of window-frosts.


{bedroom window, lightning strike surrounded by fern-waves}



{bedroom window, stray seed surrounded by mimosa fronds}


{front window covered by icy swiss-chard like leaves}

A note: There will be fewer words & more images in this space now. {It's easier to maintain lucidity with pictures than with sentences} Poem-bits will still show up -- they like the fresh air before they are finished & put into a chapbook or zine.

Tse vse.

* * *
Dust of Snow (by Robert Frost)

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

spelunking.



In attempts to avoid doing things I'm supposed to be doing right now, I went spelunking about the forgotten folders & files of my computer. I found things from the summer that make me happy. Item 1: The above pictures, of sunsets coming down from Highwood Pass in Kananaskis just past solstice. Item 2: Tiny fragmenty poem-thing, the equivalent of archaeological pot-sherds. That is all.

[poem-fragment]

came over aeolian plains to nato-oh-siskoom
i am sitting in the holy springs
against the cold glass railings, the shadows
of tamarack, hemlock

blind & soft into the dark, black mountain;
dissolve into the indigo of the sky, wings flutter urgent /
gentle over the envelope of the valley,
comfort of omnipresent rock –

i pretend i’m calm / i pretend i’m permanent.
floating here in the pool,
my heart crashing up again the sky
like the mooncoloured belly of a moth –


[that was written in banff in august in the hot springs pool. well, not written down whilst i was in the pool, but it came then & i remembered it for later. nato-oh-siskoom is the name for banff in siksika (blackfoot) ]

Friday, February 09, 2007

prometheus or icarus?


{a furnace in the trees, looking over the river valley from sask. drive, last last wednesday afternoon }

I'm not overly fond of the sound, the phonetic texture, of the German word Weltschmerz ('velt-shmerts'), but it really is so evocative, so apt. It's not just summed up by a gloss like 'world-weariness'. & it's not necessarily pessimistic. You can feel it, but not be tired of the world at all -- you are just feeling such a profound sadness, something that aches because of all that is bad, cruel & abhorrent in a world that is, (I believe) at its heart, so wonderful, divine, & good.

* * *

I admit I wasn't immediately taken by the music of Joanna Newsom. Bu, oh! soon I was smitten. Her turn of phrase makes me smile, & her harp makes me ache. Here is 'En Galop' (mp3!)

And I go where the trees go,
and I walk from a higher education
(for now, for hire)

And it beats me, but I do not know. [repeat]

Palaces and stormclouds
the rough, straggly sage, and the smoke
and the way it will all come together
(in quietness, in time)

(Joanna Newsom, 'En Galop')

* * *
Petition here.

Rough notes (which may grow into poem) below:

i)

when my mother was young
she feared nothing more
than the flash of the bomb, the rush
to duck / cover
facedown /curled up

on classroom carpet,
like a fetal turtle
to wait for the shadows to pass,
for ash to rain down like chalkdust,
nauseous at the thought of separation--

mother / daughter
flesh / skeleton, that’s
what her brothers told her
it would be like being
engulfed by the sun –

families on her street
with their little concrete
beehives built in their
backyards, filled with their
tin-can / water barrel honeycombs

that’s where she’d run if the siren sounded,
where they’d all hide from the
fire falling, & the long ashy winter,
cursing a terrible creation,
the theft of that blasted fire –


ii )

this month white-coats slowly
slipped the hands of the doomsday
clock two dashes closer / it’s sitting
at five to midnight
but i’m not scared of that –

i’m more concerned
that up in iqaluit they’ve realized
they’ve not yet got a word for the bird
with a breast ruddy as seal blood,
they’ve never seen one before –

those robins gone north to warmth,
& orange trees perish in frosty california.
a woman in the maldives watches
her sands swiftly dissolving, thousands of lives
falling in the sudden swell of the sea –

& she isn't so worried about nuclear
fission / fusion, no, she thinks,
we’re already melting
our wings of thread & beeswax,
those far-off people with wheels & oil bring us

seconds & seconds closer to the sun –

Thursday, February 01, 2007

get ink, shed tears.




I took these pictures of myself out on a walk a few nights ago. It was getting colder but I desperately needed to feel like I was breathing, I've been feeling a bit strange like that lately. I ended up swinging on the swings at the playground a few blocks south of my house for quite some time, gently gliding back & forth with quite a bit of glee. It was a very comforting motion, to swing in the dark, unnoticed by passing cars & raucous hockey players under the loud fluorescence of the rink nearby. Only a stray snowshoe hare watched me as it rummaged under the icy snowbanks. After swinging left me a little dizzy & much colder, I wandered by the elementary school, & took these pictures on the basketball court, having much fun playing with the one glimmering ambery light on the side of the building.

There's a Regina Spektor song, Après Moi (mp3 here), that contains a few lyrics from Boris Pasternak that I really love, that are somehow a summation of my feelings, & of February:

февраль достать чернил и плакать
писать о феврале навзрыд
пока грохочущая слякоть
весною чёрною горит

February. Get ink, shed tears.
Write of it, sob your heart out, sing,
While torrential slush that roars
Burns in the blackness of the spring.


And these words, in turn, reminds me so much of a book I just read, by Marusya Bociurkiw, a writer I am really, really enjoying right now. First through her poems (especially those about her baba) in Halfway to the East, and then through her novel, The Children of Mary... about three generations of Ukrainian-Canadian women, about how the past is inherited & resolved within a family, how the haunting of that river is inescapable. Really lovely & achy, especially in the imagery of water, the image of the rusalka... I highly, highly recommend it.

"Who was it that said, you can't cross the same river twice? The river I step in is not the river I stand in. Stuff rises up, you never know when. Sewage, overflow, effluent, the ebb and flow of time. We want to think we control things, we're only human that way. But what was it Baba used to say? Nature so-o-o-o stubborn, always have its way. And the rusalky, those haughty demanding sirens, lurking even in these buried rivers, pretending to call me home. Your sister, your mother...

Rusalka die only because people make her, my Baba once said in her gruff, cryptic way. People having to live better, then rusalka can rest.

The river is always there. The river is letting go."

-- p.205, Marusya Bociurkiw, The Children of Mary (Inanna Publications, 2006)

It will make you weep, but it's definitely worth it. Definitely definitely. & if you need some comfort & nourishment after the book, Bociurkiw also has a food blog with some very succulent-looking recipes on it. She also has a food memoir appearing soon, called Comfort Food for Break-ups, which intrigues me & entices me, based on the very small excerpt posted on the link above. Very sumptuous indeed. Meanwhile, I need to try her Jamaican soup...