Saturday, June 28, 2008

letter to a friend in greenland

moss-hairs on a log in the river valley, early may 2008
This next little poem bit I wrote a while ago. It's a response to/was inspired by this poem by Oksana Zabuzhko, 'Letter from the Summer House'. I remember my mom telling me that when she went to the Ukrainian museum in Chicago last year, there was a display about Chornobyl that made striking use of these words.
A friend and I had been talking then about an English course where you write poems to a poet (in response to their work), experiment with the reverberations of the words... and I wanted to experiment with this, just to see... Anyway, Zabuzhko's poem was nibbling at my brain, and I was thinking about a friend from Greenland & the melty North & the ducks that fell in the oil, puddle universes & spiderweb-connections, & running in the snowstorms of late April, etc. I just feel haunted, sometimes, by the intrinsic connections exposed by disastrous or extraordinary happenings, make me think of the Gaia hypothesis, how they bring the distant near.
Anyway, I don't know about a lot of it, haven't edited much, but it is something, for now.
letter to a friend in greenland

dear _____________,

there’s been another summer snowstorm, here.
may’s new leaves, grassy month stunned
by the sudden tornado-ing of snow.
spiders & their frozen silks dead on the doorstep.
in my garden, the twining clematis
shadows twist up the stucco, their
brittle hairs shaped by the ache of frost.

friends in inuvik said they’ve seen
polar bears wandering down the dempster
this year, there’s nothing for them at the edge
of the floes. tourists mistake them for
furry SUVs, chasing confused caribou
up past tsiigehtchic.
no one knows where they’ll go.

i don’t know. maybe it’s like erika said:
we live as fleas on the back of this
great green doe & she’s just scratching us,
trying to shake us, gain her balance
as she picks about the lichens, all we do
is suck her dry in the summer heat,
itch & etch herself into her soft skins

& lay ourselves a clutch of eggs, never sated.
where i am, people are discontented
nestlings, spending their breath
squawking about the price of oil.
a blizzard comes, five hundred ducks
go down over the tar sands. immense
dark waters a false harbour where the

trees ebb and fall, boreal tide gone out
silent into a sticky black lake. walking
along the cracked sidewalks of the city,
cars splashing past; everything is much
closer than it appears. the world turns
to meltwater puddling over the sidewalks
& alleys, but a drought dries up our cells,

twitching with ache half a world away.
crops fail, & i think sometimes i feel it in my cells,
earthquaking its way along the human
fault line. i’ve been thinking of you, worrying
about your own epicentre on that
melting, fishless coast. will you
write soon, have you had to leave to nuuk for work?

this morning i found a frozen
spider’s web, illuminated in the ice, stretching
beyond the telephone wires, the clinking metal
of my fence, its silvery nets – that great doe scrapes away
at the soggy permafrost, under a may snowstorm,
& the wind that twists in the twining clematis
is the same air that’s a cyclone somewhere –

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

mad baba skillz


little flowers in the 10 pm sunlight on the cliffs, whitehorse, yukon, june 11, 2008

(Hi blog, I remember you!) I has occured to me that of the 25 days so far this month, I have only been home for 5 and half of them... meanwhile I have amassed a pile of stories & many many things I shall hopefully find time to post soon. But for now, this is an incredibly endearing 2 minutes of animated video to the song Kolomyjka Nowa, by Orkiestr sw. Mikolaja. Go rejoice in the the triumph of the knitting of Carpathian grannies over colourless mass produced goods!
Also, happy belated solstice -- another song by Orkiestr sw.Mikolaja, Piesn Sobotkowa (mp3 on yousendit), for the feast of Ivana Kupala. Traditional purification & fertility rituals of midsummer centered around water & fire transferred to a day set aside for St. John the Baptist, very convenient, yes :)
Anyway, the round-singing & harmonies & repetition are hypnotic & delicious. Listen, listen!

Sunday, June 01, 2008

sane-making

russian chokecherry blossoms... illuminated leaf-veins! my parents' house, may 28/08

ghost hands piano-ing, my parents' house, may 31/08

These past few days I have worked on finishing up a rough draft of my thesis. Though there will be many more long days spent revising it, fighting with it, forcing it to behave over the next few months, it is a liberating feeling to have 140 pages of words out of my head. & there is a growing sensation of clarity now -- when I read bits of it now, I see I actually have ideas in there, swimming around in a muddle of tangents. It's reassuring. & I feel a bit more sane, now. (& I'm Yukon-bound tomorrow, which is even better...)
Whilst I was writing, I was so grateful to be house-sitting at my parents', for they have my piano. & I sat & played whenever I needed breaks, & I experimented with my audio recorder.
Here, I am playing Erik Satie's Gnossienne #3... I realize my way of playing it is more... ponderous, perhaps, than most recorded versions... I suppose since 'gnossienne' is a dance from Knossos, perhaps it should run along a little quicker. But I have this narrative in my head, about minotaurs & labyrinthine forests & echoes, & I think it is necessary to slow it down & play with the weight of each note....
I also recorded various things, like my favourite Chopin prelude (#6) & a haphazard version of Radiohead's No Surprises, & it was good fun, & sane-making indeed.


the singing tree, & other tangents

the muddy sturgeon river, a.k.a red willow creek. st. albert. may 30/08





This weekend a friend of mine took me to a pond in my hometown that I did not know existed! A sprawling swamp, green haze & still water. We attempted to catch frogs, but they eluded us -- though I did catch them on my audio recorder, singing their nighttime sonatas accompanied by what I think is a grebe:




We also saw a muskrat, and a fox waltzing down the bikepath with some sort of rodent-like dinner in its jaws, and red-winged blackbirds with their urgent echoes: we found an old nest perfectly woven onto the side of a cat-tail, yellow grasses & dried berries & eggshell-remnants inside.


I climbed an old willow, all sunset branches, & there was a yellow warbler, calling, flashing about in the uppermost leaves. It reminded me so much of climbing in my grandma's crab-apple tree, & hearing the robins singing: it reminded me of a book I read a long long time ago, that I loved when I was about eight: The Singing Tree, by Kate Seredy. The singing tree in the story refers to the world tree in Hungarian folklore -- the unseen bird in the tree is 'singing up the world', keeping all the levels in balance, coaxing the branches to hold up the sky, telephone to heaven.

The book is set in Hungary during WWI, and at one point, I think I recall one character tells the story of a long, harsh crawl made by a battalion -- they travelled days without seeing any signs of life, neither human nor animal, and then one morning, there's a tree standing in the middle of a wide plain & it's full of a flock of birds, all singing...


I actually read something really good in the newspaper, as well. The Hay-Zama Lakes Wildland Park in Northern Alberta, which has been designated as a Ramsar Wetland site, and has been a protected area since 1999, is going oil/gas free! The oil companies are now forbidden to drill any more wells as of right now, and will have to have pulled out of the area completely by 2017. Stewardship of the park is being turned over to the Dene Tha' First Nation based out of Chateh, who will now be responsible for its continued protection. They have amazing plans for ecotourism there now, leading horseback and dogsled expeditions on the old trails, & birdwatching at the lakes (it's on 4 major migratory routes). This is incredibly promising. It makes me hopeful.


Also -- this reminds me of a really good book on Dene Tha' epistemology -- philosophies of meaning & experience: Ways of Knowing by Jean-Guy Goulet. I read it originally for a paper in linguistics class in which I was writing on language and meaning, hermeneutics & why truth-conditional theories of meaning are not universal (rather, Western industrialized-culture specific), using Northern Athapaskan languages as a base. & it was one of the many resources that pushed me into Anthropology, because I realized I was more interested in the usage of language by people, for purposes, than just the wonders of syntax.