Thursday, August 21, 2008

it is summer, & life is good to me.

double rainbow, mid-july, university ave & 115th st.

my kitteh-friend down the block. i call him nosfercatu, due to his little snaggle-tooth fangs. ahem.

i didn't mean to cut myself in half here, but i often misjudge distance & height when taking photos of myself from ground-level. i still like this one though, especially the billowing in my skirt. in my alley, also middle-of-july.


End of heatwave, back to tea-drinking & moccasin-wearing on the hardwood, bedsheets cool again, at least temporarily. Summer's going swiftly now, unravelling into autumn -- I look forward to this, having missed the season here last year, as I was in the north... & there fall-time is blood-red tundra & coppery mountains for just two weeks before the wind changes & the rain comes & the leaves disappear. & that was beautiful & intense, but I am excited for a long, languid season, because it's going to be the last one for me in this city for a while. In a year's time, I'll be most likely moving somewhere (Aberdeen? Chicago?) to start my PhD. So, in recognition of the crazy acceleration of time that I've been feeling, I am going to go on long meandering walks crunching every single leaf very mindfully, & spend a lot of time on my steps every night, inhaling the smoky apple-cider air. Of course leaves will fall wherever I go, & Aberdeen will smell like the sea & Chicago will hopefully smell like something other than big-city-pollution. But they won't be my autumn smells or textures, they won't be home, & I am just feeling so attached to here, to my city, my landscape, my geography, & I want to savour it.

This has been one most favourite songs over the past few months for a number of reasons, and I've been meaning to post it for a long time. I was introduced to Pepi Ginsberg's music by a particular lovely person... & also, there are delicious lines in here that I want to eat: it is day, breaking underneath our feet. & her voice is just like that cherry wine (come on come on cm'on) she sings of in the opening line. & oh the strings' chromatic scales loping along together with the horn, one struggling to catch up, skipping over sidewalk cracks... it is morning & movement & holding onto things, to joy.

Pepi Ginsberg - In my bones (mp3)

Friday, August 15, 2008

river hieroglyphs

rivulets in the sand, north saskatchewan riverbank, may 1/08



birdprints along the north saskatchewan, edmonton, may 1/08

the second part of first fruits, rough draft.


two)


whitemud cracks on the riverside
pushing my fingers into cerebral folds
to touch exposed thoughts:

terrestrial through the roots,
slash of weeds a bursting backbone,
siltgreen summer river running wide

& our fingerprints leave barely
an impression on the soft skin
of the shore, a grip

on the river’s hips:
there in the shallows scrawled
avian hieroglyphs, those

footprints create the world,
leave us a story:
the currents are full of strange birds

carrying mouthfuls of earth,
swallows diving swift, divide
the land from the water from sky,

from you from i –

beneath the trees they scatter
a thousand tiny moss-hairs,
scarlet-tipped & reaching

up up up!
but it’s a comfort,
this separation, this

being made of dust.
we’re a thousand trees gone to soil,
all sweet & liminal in flesh

this transfiguration
of the wind-stirred sap & light
all dripping down

to where we lie there
on the sleeping bank, i press
myself into you,

the valley of ribcage to ribcage,
the whole of the earth’s
beating heart pushing back --

Saturday, August 02, 2008

whale magic.

evening view from the front window of the lodge, shrine of st. thèrese, juneau, ak, june 5/08
(whale in the distance)



I keep meaning to tell stories from the beginning of summer, from my trip back up to Whitehorse. During that time, I also went on an excursion down to Juneau, where I accompanied the traditional dance group from the elementary school where I did some of my fieldwork. I felt so lucky to be asked along to accompany the dancers to Celebration 2008, where they'd perform in this gathering of coastal peoples, connecting as the inland relatives, historic trading neighbours of the interior. I was so grateful they would think of me, & also so excited to witness this gathering & see the dancers and language students perform. While the whole trip was very powerful, a fitting culmination to my fieldwork, there is one particular thing I can't stop thinking about, a story I want to keep telling, because I feel so honoured that I was there to witness it.


We stayed at a retreat lodge, a little ways up the coast from Juneau, on a beautiful stretch of land by the gentle bay, which we soon discovered was frequented by eagles & herons & cormorants, otters, seals, as well as humpback whales. The night we arrived, the dancers had practiced for their next day's performance out on the lawn between the lodge and houses. Long pre-solstice shadows twisting amongst the drumbeats, endless coppery gleaming of the water. & the whales seems to be attracted to the sounds, as they circled at the edge of the bay, loud exhales mixing with the singing, mist rising up thick in honey-ambered light.


The next night, it poured. Sitting in the living room of the lodge, we were finishing dinner, writing in journals. Some of the kids were singing, practicing songs for the next day. Then someone saw a shape out in the bay & we were pressed up to the rainy glass, watching for the steam amongst the raindrops. Two whales were there, breaching up in the spray. A few kids rushed out onto the porch, leaning over slippery railings, & then one boy came barrelling out down the steps, one of the dancing drums tucked under his arm, headed for the shoreline.


& that's when all the kids followed, & began to sing. They headed out for the point, under the dripping cedars, clambering gingerly over mussel-slick boulders to the very edge of the land above a cutbank. & they sang their dancing songs, their songs in Southern Tutchone. A welcome song, a potlatch song of power passed down from an old matriarch. They sang without anyone leading, anyone guiding. & everyone joined in these land-locked songs carried down to the coast for whales who had probably never heard anything like this before.


They were close; we could see their barnacle-riddled skin, their tiny abalone-shiny eyes in their wet slate faces. They were breaching; later one dancer's father, who was Inuvialuit & had hunted bowheads along the North Slope, identifed them as a mother whale teaching her baby how to dive deep, resurface, to play in the whitecaps tossed up by the storm.


& the kids kept singing, a song they'd just learned about having to leave a country behind, not knowing when you might return. & it soon became apparent that the whales were moving closer, closer to the rocks, their wild exhales mixing with the drumbeats & the crashing of waves on shore. Our breaths, sliding between our phrases, could they feel our hearts, connected? They're coming, someone might have yelled, keep singing! & the whales came closer, closer, ebbing out again, but still staying near as long as we sang.


Even now, months later, if I'm really quiet, I hear us yelling out hoarsely, I feel my raw throat & the tears pricking in my eyes. I see them all standing there, slipping on the rocks, soaking, their hair plastered down like black seaweed. Even now, I am overcome with memories of this rich act -- I am still in awe of the kids, their spontaneous instinct to sing for these animals, the way their hands flew up to carry the sound, just like the Elders do at potlatches. Still in awe of how the whales responded, coming closer, the connection between our voices & their groans & watery breathing, the connection made of songs.


I've told a lot of people this story, & not everyone gets it. Maybe I don't do it justice, Maybe they have trouble believing that whales would react this way, but really, it's not a matter of believing, it doesn't need to be analysed. It goes deeper than that. It just was. It happened.


These kids sang in Southern Tutchone for the whales, picked up their drums & their language, made the language live in a way it should. They chose it over English; they reconnected with a usage of their native language so rare now, though their Elders still speak of it -- the conversations between people and animals, between any beings. And the whales responded, somehow, there was a connection there, an affirmation in their curious motions, something that made my knees go weak & my whole body warm with rain & tears.
Right now, I think of all of my time in the Yukon over this last year, & all I can think of is that one song they sang: Oh my friend, I'm leaving your country, (I'm right at that place where the mountains dissolve into the horizon), I'm looking back and wondering, my friend, what can I do to go back there again?








Friday, August 01, 2008

first fruits.

over-ripe cherries on the floor, july 2008
first fruits

one)

wish i could tell you
how the land fills me: the
space between the branches & the
& the crumbling cliffbanks, pale
birch arms & the blue gesture
of your gaze, double-fruited
branches to our mouths:
(стояла вішня над водою)


how this decreates you
into a honeyed green haze of
leaf & light: the silty hum of
thunderstorm a waxy blossom
caught in the crisp polyphony
of grasshoppers,
(вишня стояла, свічка палала),
a singing bowl of gold-red cherries
in my hands.

let me feed you the first
fruits of summer communion,
cherry juice dripping through a
jungle of freckles on my arms,
(свічка палала, іскра упала!) our
rosepetal tongues separate bright
flesh from the stone: spitted pits


between our kisses
fall fecund in the rivery silt:
(іскра упала, річенька стала)
& they set root there in the sand
where you & i, we’re waiting
for some sort of transfiguration,
to become the sweetest saplings
of next spring
* * *
* the ukrainian bits come from a folksong that talks about the creation of the world. in the beginning there a cherry tree stood over the water, it burned like a candle & a spark fell to earth, creating a little rivulet. later in the song, god bathes in the water, puts on his robes & wanders up the mountain to dream the earth into being.