Wednesday, December 31, 2008

beauty is summoning...


dried flower heads, past sunset, the river valley, dec. 28, 2008.


winter asters, the river valley after sunset, december 28, 2008

My little camera (which has taken all of the pictures posted in this blog since December 31st, 2005) retires today. In three years, the shutter has clicked 12890 times, & its little parts & joints are wearying... the zoom function broke this past summer, now the screen shuts off at inopportune moments, the flash no longer flashes, and the dial at the top which allows you to switch functions doesn't always cooperate. It has travelled with me to France and Denmark, taken countless hiking trips in Kananaskis, and spent months with me in Yukon and Alaska during fieldwork, taking photos at -45 celsius, or at 3000m on a mountain in Kluane in the summertime. I've dropped it a few times, yes, gotten it wet & muddy & scratched, because it's in my bag everyday, so I can take photos of a bird or a leaf or a cloud or a pattern in the pavement on the way to the university or on a walk to wherever I am going...

I've gotten a new camera now, the newer, more sophisticated sister of this one. Hopefully she will have the same magical colour saturation tendencies & receptivity for light that made me love this one so well. & 'tis time for my dear FujiFinepix E500 to wear a golden-laureled lens-cap... Happy New Year! You have served me well.

* * *

I've been watching Tarkovsky again lately -- Ivan's Childhood & Stalker & Mirror -- & hungrily eating with my eyes the scenes of light & errant wind playing in the grasses, & bird-wings & watery dreams & the light on weathered faces. As well, I've been reading 'Sculpting in Time', his reflections on his films and film-making process. This is one of my favourite bits (p.200):

"In the end everything can be reduced to one simple element which is all a person can count upon in his existence: the capacity to love. That element can grow within the soul to become the supreme factor which determines the meaning of a person's life. My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give his love, and be aware that beauty is summoning him".
-- Andrei Tarkovsky.

Sunday, December 21, 2008

happy solstice!


wild rose skeleton, n. sask. river valley, end of november 2008





(somewhere out in the field
we are walking, & our strong
legs tremble.) paper-birchs kneel,

fall: & the wind drifts through,
brushtailed grasses quiet hands
on my spine. come,

bury yourself in me: the edge
of the earth yawns gently,
bleached wheat wreaths paling,

stalks spent. (somewhere
out in the field lying fallow
the wind’s an old man, winding

his fingers in an old woman’s
wiry sun-silvered hair, unplaiting
the last of the woven strands

with shaking tender hands.) now
to sleep in the remnants of the sky’s
charred marrow, a gentle furnace;

rest in me. (somewhere out
in the field we hold it in our
bones, a soft glow in the root-tangle)

curlicues of fireweed embers
frozen to the horizon, to the
rib-ripples of clouds; just strip

to your soft skeleton, starry
filaments of cow-parsnip, twine
around me, now:

we’ll conduct light.

* * *


this poem has no name yet... also, i'm not sure i'm finished with it. but it wishes you a happy solstice nevertheless.


Monday, December 01, 2008

heart spatter.

sun reflecting on the ice-floes, n. sask river, edmonton, nov. 28/08


sunset. n. sask river valley, edmonton, nov. 28/08


light in the dry golden grasses, n. sask river valley, edmonton, nov. 28/08

the spruces gone to kindling in the sun, n. sask river, edmonton
nov. 28/08

Often I am overwhelmed with the immensity of being in love with everything; I feel like I am being ripped up like paper, into heart-shreds, because there is so much & I want to encompass it all. & then the realization comes each time that I am already part of it, I am made of this: stand on the edge of the river, watch the slushy platelets of ice rush through the artery, crowding serenely, sliding up along the half-frozen edges, bloodcells pushing gentle & relentless against the soft walls of the aorta. Feel an indivisibility in the pulsing, the breathing, between you & the water & the air & the sand frozen at the river-edge, melting between the sky & the light, the light strikes & the heart spatters, exploding into a thousand droplets into the water, & freezing, flows on. (This is everything; this is being alive.)