Wednesday, January 30, 2008

there where you have landed --

bright shadows on midday snow, ridge above lu zel män (fish lake), yukon, jan.27/08.

from a ridge where we snowshoed, above lu zel män, yukon, jan. 27/08.


From an Atlas of the Difficult World -- Adrienne Rich

I know you are reading this poem

late, before leaving your office

of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window

in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet

long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem

standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean

on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven

across the plains' enormous spaces around you.

I know you are reading this poem

in a room where too much has happened for you to bear

where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed

and the open valise speaks of flight

but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem

as the underground train loses momentum and before running

up the stairs

toward a new kind of love

your life has never allowed.

I know you are reading this poem by the light

of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide

while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.

I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room

of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.

I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light

in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,

count themselves out, at too early an age. I know

you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick

lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on

because even the alphabet is precious.

I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove

warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in yourhand

because life is short and you too are thirsty.

I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language

guessing at some words while others keep you reading

and I want to know which words they are.

I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn

between bitterness and hope

turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.

I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else

left to read

there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

animal mother & crow.

arctic maidenhair, banks of the tagà shäw (yukon river), late october 2007

looking over kwanlin (whitehorse) & the tagà shäw from the trail to long lake
* * *

Those are just two of the six million other pictures that I took while in the Yukon this past autumn but still have not yet posted... I am returning in just eight days, now, for the second part of my fieldwork & despite the fact I still have another six million little things to do before I leave, I am very, very excited. I'm so grateful for the opportunity to go up again... & I miss the people -- I miss interviewing & asking questions & photographing & filming (so tired of being chained to a computer), I miss learning the language from actual speakers (not tapes), -- & I miss the land terribly...
I felt so at home there so quickly, much more so than I have ever felt in any other place in such a brief time, really. There is something about the northern boreal & plateau that just swallows you up, engulfs you, makes you feel as if you are just as vast.... this feeling struck me swiftly, & still remains with me, even now.

* * *

(poem fragment)

animal mother, she speaks dän k’e
sibilants that carve riverine & gentle,
like a herd breathing over the land,
cool spreading stream of the tagà shäw
singing over rocks, down the valley
from the marshy glacial lake in the sky

crow carries a voice, bubbling
up sulphury, call hollow as a cave,
blue ice & a spirally sinuous consonance
rolling over the land’s knobby vertebrae, his
wings smoothing out her tired back.

animal mother, her rich arms of a mountain,
cradling you even in the crumbling loneliness
is the land that swallows you whole
takes you away from the white silences
singing owl-lullabies

lets you burst through the goat-fleece sky
like a rose-hip, bitten-lip thorns along the silty cliff
with rivers of aspens shaking copper into spring
& the strangest kind of understanding
of this tongue you’ve not yet heard

* * *

'Animal mother', as her name suggests, created a number of important animals in Southern Yukon traditional stories... a number of the stories are told by angela sidney in 'life lived like a story' by julie cruikshank, a book I highly recommend... it was one of the prominent things inspiring me to focus on a Yukon Athapaskan language for my MA. the way it frames the life histories of three Southern Yukon women is deeply respectful & compelling. The way it presents the traditional narratives embedded in these women's stories reveals so much about local understandings of place, history, belonging & the transmission of knowledge.


Tuesday, January 15, 2008

long quiet highway (or, zen & the art of crying)

flowerhead in the snow, river valley trails, late november 2007

more flowerheads, river valley trails, nov.07

* * *

I actually made resolutions this new year; this is a rare occurrence, mostly because my natural new year's rhythm seems to fall on one level in September at the beginning of the academic year, & on another level in the springtime, in late March, when everything's melting... so it's always seemed odd to me to have a new year in the middle of winter, when my resolve for a lot of things tends to be hibernating. Nevertheless, I made resolutions, one of which is to
*read more books that have nothing to do with my thesis!
This is not to say that I don't really enjoy thesis-reading, because I do, & I read a lot of books that are only tangentially related on various linguistic anthropology things & the like. But I need to remember to branch out a little more. I have quite the list picked out, and I am excited to lose myself in something other than Language and Symbolic Power for awhile.
This afternoon I finished reading 'Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America' by Natalie Goldberg... which was part memoir, part 'Zen & the Art-of-just-sitting-down-and-writing'... I've never read any of her other books about writing (like 'Writing Down the Bones') in which she specifically discusses writing practice as a form of Zen practice (akin to zazen, or sitting meditation) but I found what she spoke of to be compelling and refreshing, as well as comforting in the strangest way. She is such an unpretentious writer, & she writes of the littlest details in a way that does not try to make them into BIG SYMBOLIC THINGS, but just presents them as they are, important and profound in and of themselves. Here she tells of a moment she experienced whilst teaching a grade six class in Taos, New Mexico.
"I stood up in the middle of 'Please, please, be quiet' and suddenly stopped. The place where my chest was sore -- it was opening, opening, red and enormous like a great peony, and it was radiating through my body. I felt the blood flowing in my hands and legs. I turned and looked out the winfow. I looked at the smoky appearance of the spring cottonwoods near the parking lot. Any day now they would break into leaf. There was a spindly Russian olive near our window. Suddenly it looked beautiful. Then I had one simple vision: I saw myself wandering in autumn fields and I felt that nothing, nothing else was important..." (Natalie Goldberg, in 'Long Quiet Highway', p.58-59)
* * *
A strange thing happened today while I was reading. I started crying about three-quarters of the way through the book, not because it was particularily sad, or intense... I can't even identify a page or a line that catalysed it... it was just strangely moving in its simplicity, so much so that before I was really cognizant what was going on, I was sitting at my kitchen table, weeping, and I couldn't stop. Not of sadness, or anything in particular. Just crying for the sake of crying, and it felt surprisingly good. I wasn't even terribly alarmed, I wasn't worried, wasn't wondering if I was going crazy, wasn't even trying to pin down my weeping on a reason. I just sat there, content in the stripes of late-afternoon sun coming through the red venetian blinds, crying until I was finished crying. & then I felt tired, & a bit strange, but oddly refreshed, like I'd just run very hard in the cold. & I am not really sure what to make of this, I know I'll read the book again & probably be able to discern what brought on this profound bout of tears, but right now it just seems a very fitting reaction, for a book about writing, & living: the importance of the unanalysed, the momentary being-not-thinking of Zen.

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

poems from edge of the earth

dusk at the field at the edge of the earth, november 2007


the edge of the earth, nov.2007

old wheat stalks... looking a bit like underwater corals or fronds of some sort... nov.2007


high-bush cranberries in the forest by the field at the edge of the earth, nov.2007

* * *

poems in various states of poem-finishedness, out to get some air... i've also written about the edge of the earth here, back in january 2006 when i first discovered it... (see very bottom of page)


i)

down beyond the last of the houses
where suburbia bleeds out
its last paved streets we found
the field at the edge of the earth.

over the rise, the trampled wheatstalks
waving again pure, treeless sky,
there is no curving horizon to remind you
of the earth as an oblate spheroid,

no geographers to remind you
that there is no abyss, just another dip,
remnant of an ancient riverbank
swimming in yellow skeletons of rye.

we just found the field that
snowless december, funeral-weary &
wandering in the woods not knowing
whether we escaped ghosts or

sought them. tried to feel a quiet
hand in the ice-fog settling, dancing
on the earth that held them, held
us in its dizzying spherical waves,

snapped pictures of our fuzzy forms
whirling in the frost, running up over
the illusory slope until we felt them,
there, on the periphery of our breathing,

in the suggestions of our flurried movements,
the bend of the tired grass spines,
creeping up on the hill’s rim
our sparse tears, the fingers of the wind --


ii)


at the edge of the earth
lie the bleached skeletons of wheat,
still spines curving under sleep-weight,
blue smoke of winter;

deep underneath,
my ancestors dream seeds:

from those tightly curled embryos
they arise and fly as skeins of geese
unravelling, a living memory
in that ragged purl of a v,

a migrant blanket
moving over cloud-gates &
continents, pulling us over
the edge of the earth –


iii)

at the edge of the earth
i lie fallow at dusk
waking & wondering
what holds me here?

born here i was made
of this dust, mixed with
star & pulsar, consumed it
& consuming, water & soil:

a river breathing ice
on its edges, my baba
with handfuls of that dark
matter, nodding at the mass

in her hands as we
planted, & i still sow her
carrots & poppies, wondering
what holds me here

when those i love are scattering,
slowly shifting in their orbits,
in distance, til our fingers can’t touch,
in words, til soon we’re unintelligible –

when i rise there are deer
dashing over the crooked fences,
whiteflag tails trace a camera-flash
of their paths over the night fields,

never looking back as they
run leaping, spreading themselves
wide over
the edge of the earth –

Tuesday, January 01, 2008

it's a new year and i'm glad to be here, so let's sing...

the shores of chain lake, north of athabasca

(blistery sun, north of athabasca)


I can’t sleep when I think about the times we’re living in, / I can’t sleep when I think about the future I was born into (...) / And the pain that we left at the station will stay in a jar behind us. / We can pickle the pain into blue ribbon winners at county contests.
('2080', Yeasayer)

* * *

Let’s play this one out, until it explodes / Into a thousand tiny pieces / What’s the story universe /You are melody in numbers / You were shapes you were rhythms /There are signs that we can learn / Place over the heavens / To predict how long we’ll burn /How long will I last? (...)
('Thousand Tiny Pieces', Sean Hayes)



* * *



Happy New Year! з Новим Роком! That is really all for now...



Here are some songs I find appealing... (lyrics above). I feel exactly like both of them at once.





2080 (mp3) -- Yeasayer (All Hour Cymbals)



Thousand Tiny Pieces (mp3) -- Be Good Tanyas (Hello Love)



(Also, both of these CDS are lovely & most definitely worthy of purchase, in case you are wondering)