host of golden daffodils.

{tree bursting, my back alleyway}

{daffodil in my mama's garden}

{siberian iris shoots, also in my mama's garden}

Inspired by the daffodils, I think I shall post what is one of my most dearest, favourite poems ever -- Tintern Abbey, by Wordsworth. I first read the poem about six years ago, in my first year of University in English class, & ended up writing an essay about Wordsworth's writings, and their similarities with Taoist philosophies. There are so many poems that I adore & appreciate, but it's rare for me, & wonderful, to connect so spiritually to a piece of writing -- to read something & feel as if it is reflecting your own thoughts. The way he writes about this place -- Tintern Abbey, on the banks of the Wye -- I feel about so many places dear to me. The riverlot-forest outside the town where I grew up, the Kananaskis mountains, the deep bushes & streams near Fox Creek where I've fished. I love how he expresses the way in which places become a part of us, how we carry them with us, how this nourishes us:

"While here I stand, not only with the sense /Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts /
That in this moment there is life and food /For future years."

And so many other parts of the poem just completely resonate with my own spirituality, nameless but everpresent, & so strong. My beliefs are... rather personal, & solitary, & I don't mind that; it's just so lovely to hear echoes of them, sometimes, in the speech of others.

"While with an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, / We see into the life of things."

'Nature' is not something separate from people; there is no culture/nature divide, rather to understand one's place in the totality of things is simply a shift, a re-adjustment to a different way of seeing.

And this part, this idea of spirit within everything (pantheism, I suppose) is just it. IT. This 'force that rolls through all things'...

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A love of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

Growing up Eastern Rite Catholic, there is a part of me that relates on some level to Byzantine rite and ritual, perhaps because I can find some comfort in repetition, & ancestral connection. However, that tradition does not express or encapsulate what I believe, where I instinctively place my faith; I find that I relate simply to that force that inspires one to all those "little, nameless, unremembered, acts / Of kindness and of love".

sugarcube

{one of the local blue jays, sunning her or himself in the lilac bush... s/he let me come quite close before hop-fluttering away)

{tree in my alley, last week or so. i like to think that the force of the new buds bursting caused the branch to break in two}

This next poem is sticky & sappy (not the tree kind of sap, the other...) but at least putting it here will likely inspire me to fix it. Or delete the post -- I really don't write well when I feel all unrequited.

* * *

(if i were to kiss you,
i’d first press a cube of sugar
between our lips)

a little cube, sparkling;
amber-coloured grains
like spring’s early evening,
rusty call of a redbrown thrush,
smoky orange light –

tree shadows of birch-limbs
on the kitchen linoleum, our arms
up the xylophones of our
skinny little backs,

o i don’t mean to be so saccharine

you know; i would just slip
that sugarcube between your lips
like some balkan wedding ritual,
just like kusturica, ill-fated
promise of some pure & sweetened

life – but i missed your lips.

you were too busy kissing
that man with the hütz moustache
& there was no time for me
to press that sweetness to your face –

& frankly, ma belle,
i don’t believe he can temper
those salt-tears, sticky fears like
poppyseeds on the saucer, fannings
& grains at the bottom of your cup –

& o, i know we’d never last,
never a forever, no, in time
we'd dissolve leaving little tongues
sere & shaken, but i know

it could still be sweet, sweeter,

all those dusty grits of sunshine,
clouds & our sugar-golden spines
twisting us – so even
after we’d all fall apart
there’d be something remaining –

(something to linger, some shards
beyond saturation, o at least
we would remember that taste!)

* * *

Here is my favourite kitchen-dancing song of the moment:

Joro Boro, (mp3) by Balkan Beat Box... from their new album, Nu Med...

spring and all.

{little cherry-coloured buds on the flowering shrub in my yard, yet to burst, two week ago}

{rhubarb leaves unfurling look a bit like gooey subterranean-zombie brains}

{rhubarb unfurling, also about two weeks ago}

{collaged card i made for my cousin for her birthday. that bird is a redpoll finch}

* * *

This is a poem called 'Spring and All' by William Carlos Williams. I know he spent most of his life in New Jersey, but there is something quite northern-prairie-ish about these lines especially:

       ... Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

And the slow progression of the spring coming, so very Albertan:


Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken

* * *

The whole collection that 'Spring and All' is part of was apparently written as a response to T.S. Eliot's 'The Wasteland' -- Williams was trying to show the beauty and power in the natural world, in its constant reincarnation... That it truly held something other than the bleakness & inevitable decay. & that is something I have been trying to convey, I realize, in so much of my writing this spring...