sidewalk & postbox graffiti.

{stencil on the sidewalk, 76 ave near 105 or 104th st, near rollie miles park}

Focus is something that I have been lacking lately. It's nice that there are stencils on the sidewalk to remind me. The oppressive heat has melted my attention span for most things, especially summarizing linguistics articles in French. The sidewalk stencils (within the span of a block) also reminded me to try, love, and trust.


On our gelato obtaining expedition yesterday evening, Bryna & I had the opportunity to peruse the neighbourhood graffiti... I'm finding a lot of linguistic graffiti I'd like to investigate -- I've seen the word 'keverz' scribbled over a number of places, and also the strange bilingual phrase 'oui-knee'. (Weeny?) Edmonton also has a vibrant, eccentric post-box stencil scene, as evidenced by a double rendering of our favourite Klingon, seen above. This one is about 2 blocks south of my house.

Here are some 'listen' birds, roosting on a box on 82nd avenue and about 112th street, I think. They're the only pigeons I've seen around. I also saw a sketchy-looking 'listen' bird sprayed on bus-stop bench on Whyte Avenue that was advertising French bilingual school programs. It said 'ecoutez' instead. & that made me happy.

Yes. I should focus.

smells like rain today

{sunset after the rain, belgravia}

{tree reflections in a puddle}

"Stand in the shade of me
Things are now made of me
The weathervane will say
Smells like rain today."

I am in love with Tom Waits' song 'Green Grass' as covered by the splendid Brazilian singer Cibelle. If I were very technologically adept, I would somehow link to it, like those nifty mlogs (mlog = music blog). But alas. Do attempt to download it. Or really, anything that she sings.

creation is soundful. (r. murray schafer)

{this is a calico cat that lives a few houses down, who likes visiting us & sleeping on our porch. his meow is very plaintive & sweet & yowly.}

I have been thinking a lot lately about sound, & how we remember sounds, how we store aural memories. Not so much the process of how we remember the things we hear, the songs or facts or stories, but how we recall the quality of sound, its texture, resonance. How we conjure up the particular tone of someone’s voice, the sound of wind moving through lodgepole pine trees, the scratchy squawk of magpies in the morning – how we remember the details of the soundscapes we inhabit.

I was having a nap this afternoon & was awakened quite definitively by a bagpipe medley, coming from the church across the street. Bagpipes have the timbre of geese (in a good way, not a dying-goose-in-pain way), make me think of the sound of water moving over rocks & grasses, makes me think of the sound that sunlight would make when it shines on green pine trees, or makes long november-ish shadows over wheat & dead grasses. So I lay in my bed & listened to the streams of music, hoping it was a wedding, not a funeral. & indeed it was a wedding, because when the bagpipes ceased, there was a small roar of cheering, the sound of an old car’s motor sputtering & vrooming, & then the sound of a garland of tin cans banging & clattering over the warm asphalt.

& I thought about how the visual is more valued in our culture – Bryna wrote a super-excellent paper on gendered sound, the visual vs. the oral/aural, which discusses (among many things) the celebration of the visual, the visual primacy so omnipresent in western industrialized societies. This is no better exhibited in the way we take so many pictures – that photographs are the way in which we preserve memories of any important event. (That there is so much advertising based around this – photo albums as ‘memory books’, ‘preserving your memories’, etc).

The wedding participants & guests will undoubtedly have taken many photographs. They will remember the wedding attire, the light coming through the stained glass in the church, the old turquoise car with the shiny cans glinting in the sun. But how well will they remember the clank of the cans, the tremulous slide of the notes in the bagpipe melodies?

I suppose now many people do make audiovisual recordings of events, where together both elements are important. However, I would still argue for a favouring of the visual, because it is much rarer to have a solely audio recording of such things.

Audio recordings (that are non-musical) sometimes don’t go over so well with the general public sometimes. (Poor audio-(w)hereabouts!) But I still believe that they are essential & incredibly important, and evocative in ways that the visual masks. When I listen to Bryna’s recording of her family’s Easter dinner, when I listen to the recording we made skiing in the woods – you pay attention to so much more without the visual. It’s easy to be distracted by what we see. Different elements emerge, become salient – things like voice quality, little movements & fidgets around a table, & the precise layers of sound, train whistles, frosty breathing, the crunchy squeak of snow beneath ski & its changing tone moving over the dips of the trail.

Bryna is about to start on a writing project with an audio component, where she will incorporate found sounds with sound clips & text that she will read. I am so excited to have our neighbourhood, places we know documented. I think this is very, very important – to create these records, to document & highlight the sounds around... like R. Murray Schafer did with his soundscapes and soundmarks –

Because I worry about losing sounds, forgetting them. I don’t think it’s that our visual memory is inherently stronger than our aural memory, but I think we do tend to develop it more in this visually-prime society, & we have such a plethora of visual aids to help us, like our photos & such. This is unlike a society such as that of the Kaluli (see Stephen Feld’s very good book, Sound and Sentiment) – where sound is the focal point of everything.

To think of forgetting the sound of my grandma’s voice makes me inexpressibly sad. Her voice is such an integral part of who she is – it carried her kindness, her humour, her weariness, her wisdom. I am so glad that I have those four little songs I have recorded us singing, so I can always remember. I probably won’t forget the songs themselves, I can’t even really imagine forgetting her voice – but it’s nice to know that I can even put them in my new-fangled technology like my mp3 player & carry them around in my pocket & have her voice singing to me kazalo divchatko, or sumno meni sumno, anytime I like.

neighbourhood botany lesson

{pineapple weed -- matricaria discoidea}

{larkspur -- delphinium}

After it rained last night, I went traipsing about the neighbourhood with my camera... I noticed how that while suburbia has one uniform smell after the rain -- that of slightly sweet grassy peppermint -- Edmonton, or at least the Belgravia neighbourhood, smells like a complex blend of that same mint, with notes of ripe compost, pot, campfire smoke, & bus exhaust. When I arrived home, Bryna said I sounded like a dog recounting all the scents... "& then I smelled this! & a bit of this! & then some of this, & then & then..." So yes. My olfactory memory is expanding...

I also took pictures of plants -- the top one seen here is pineapple weed, & is a relation to yarrow & ragweed. I remember it from my childhood -- it grew along my grandma's garden path, just like it does on my street, cracking through the pavement like a furry green backbone... We used to pick the small buds & mash them between our fingers to release the sweet, tropical scent. I had previously thought it was an introduced weed, but it's indigenous to North America & has been used for thousands of years for many purposes: a insect repellent when mixed with fir & sweetgrass, mixed in salads, or brewed a chamomile-like tea to aid menstrual cramps, heartburn & indigestion, & fevers. Again, another nutritious weed rendered inedible by urban pollutants...

The second picture is of larkspur, or delphinium. It grows everywhere here, lining the gravelly alleys & the sides of houses, all elegant & sentinel-like. Traditionally in the Carpathians it was sacred to the feast of Ivana Kupala (John the Baptist), & was used to repel lightning & vampires. However, its gorgeousness is deceptive. In Ukrainian it is called sokyrky, or 'little hatchets' -- it is also related to the adjective sokyrkuvatyj, which means bitter, malignant, & caustic, which is very apt considering that all parts of the plant contain the extremely poisonous, paralytic alkaloid delphinidin. Thus, as lovely as it is, its terrible purple vertebrae make me uneasy. Even the sap of the plant burns, so I give it a wide berth on my way to fetch my bike in the mornings...

(Up next: Russian Sage, Asters, & other good things)

poetry is not a luxury (audre lorde)

{tree stumps below sarrail falls, kananaskis}

I recently stumbled across this webpage (http://www.goodreports.net/) and read a few essays by the author, Alex Good, that critique the current scene of published poetry in Canada. He primarily writes book reviews (see Carmine Starnino’s ‘The New Canon’), but I found a few rants as well under the essays and reviews section. (See: “The Morning After”, an essay from 2001 dealing with April as National Poetry Month, etc)

Now, currently I am debating whether or not to send him a little note, because the more I think about what he has to say about poetry, the more I wonder if he has actually read any recent poetry...

So I read these essays – he said some things I agree with (e.g. some poetry is pretentious), as well as some things I vehemently disagree with (which I will discuss in a moment). However, overall I just dismissed them as just another person who doesn’t like (hasn’t read??) much contemporary poetry, and I suppose I agreed with him in some ways when he talked about how pretentious some poetry can be, etc. It’s true. It can be.

But not all poetry now is like that, not by any means at all. Not at all.

Tonight I watched a film ‘Listening for Something’ that is all conversations between Adrienne Rich and Dionne Brand, and is beautiful and thoughtful and illuminating in every possible way – it’s so fascinating to listen to them discuss politics and class issues in a thoughtful, respectful, yet provocative way, and then hear them read their poetry, in a way that is like collaborative storytelling... and immediately I thought back to these things that Good has written. And I just couldn’t understand the place from which he writes, I couldn’t understand how he could be missing so much.

In his piece called ‘The Morning After’, he writes:

“The dullness of today's poetry has become so pervasive, such a given, that we have to force ourselves to remember that poetry is not at all dull by nature. Donne is not dull. Blake is not dull. Browning, Whitman, Dickinson, and Pound are not dull. Reading new poetry, however, nearly always bores me to tears, and for many of the reasons we have just been canvassing: its sameness, the lack of imagination and energy in the language and verse, and the unalterable truth of human nature that it is never very interesting listening to people talk about themselves.”

see: http://www.goodreports.net/essays/themorningafter.htm

Or, in his review of the ‘The New Canon’, he implies that most of the poetry being written is detached & irrelevant:

“But it has always been the long poem, the epic, that most directly addressed, allegorically or otherwise, our deepest political, religious, intellectual, cultural, and social concerns... The non-narrative, non-thematic, non-intellectual (indeed anti-intellectual) poetry of epiphany and observation, no matter how exquisitely crafted and brilliantly realized, is no replacement.”

see: http://www.goodreports.net/reviews/thenewcanon.htm

And so, I can’t help but feel incredulous. He deifies Donne, Pound, all those past poets – but has he ever read Dionne Brand? Adrienne Rich? They are writing now, still writing, and I’d hardly call them dull or irrelevant – they both are the first to come to mind when I think of poetry that is deeply socially, politically, spiritually, & intellectually aware.

And he is so quick to denigrate the non-epic poetry – doesn’t he understand that all realizations, all powerful statements come from ‘epiphany and observation’. (Even the themes that find their way into epic poems begin here!) That’s the only way we ever come to understand anything at all. To be able to express your own moments of clarity, comprehension, emotion, idea is the most potent thing I can think of – I am so unspeakably, inexpressibly thankful for writing for inspiration. I truly am. Being able to express my feelings and experiences and thoughts in a way that even a few people find relatable and meaningful saves me.

He needs to read Rich’s “What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics” – perhaps after reading some of these essays he will finally see that there is a connection between poetry and everything. That a person who says ‘I don’t understand poetry’ is losing so much, that a person who reads two poems in junior high school and decides poetry is ‘dull’ because it doesn’t flash like a television & does involve thinking, and feeling, is selling themselves short.
In her piece entitled, ‘To invent what we desire’, she quotes Audre Lorde: “Poetry is not a luxury.” And that in itself, is so much of what her writing embodies. Poetry is necessary, and accessible, & can be created & understood by everyone. It is, as she writes, “activity and survival.”

So I am very close to writing a friendly little letter to this Alex character, suggesting that he go to his nearest library, rent this film, tell him to listen to these women discuss what inspires them, drives them -- issues of race and gender and sexuality, the politics of the countries in which they reside, dying, living, disease, desire, everything. And then he can listen to their poetry (full of striking imagery & delicious phonology), like Dionne Brand’s ‘No Language is Neutral’, Adrienne Rich’s ‘An Atlas of a Difficult World’ and be moved by poetry that is relevant, political, full of passion, anything but dull.

nova knyzhka! my chapbook is done.

I recently finished my second chapbook-zine; it is called 'waxwing cloud' & contains eleven poems written over last fall & winter & spring, as well as photographs i have taken mixed with collage-bits.

If you would like one, please let me know; I have 11 left. You can leave me a note here or via email, & I will send along a copy. They are all hand-bound with wool, & contain pretty papers (brown lokta from nepal & oatmeal-y coloured earth's general store paper).

'Tis all.

canada day fireworks (that resemble oceanic creatures)

{golden jellyfish}

{purple sea urchin}

{red tentacles reaching for a chrysanthemum}

{sunshowers & white fern fronds}

river valley trees

{river valley trees on the running trail to hawrelak}

on the promontory the old tree
unravels with sticky sap trails
of trailing memory, floating like
aspen fuzz, days that creak with uncertainty

rolling past summer thunderstorms
lightning-struck branches reaching
beyond his hospital windows &
tired concrete

rain aches his bones hollowed
ivory pelicans black-tipped wings receding
over the silt-swollen river,
the crumbling rust of their banks

he watches her running in the tunnels
of the woods below,
foxtails silver ghosts brushing ankles,
remembering what the body is meant for

as she plunges down the riverside
gravelly footsteps shedding their
small avalanche trails rushing behind her,
ochred stain blood of rock on her shoes

(do you remember the taste of dust & salt
trickling down your face, slow green flow
& the air thick with pollen & light?)

on the promontory the old tree
waits & he sees her legs’ blue blur,
approach of thunder rustling up,
echoing in decaying cambium

(do you remember how once too
your running legs could become
limbs of trees, the green leaves of her breath
rising falling, the lungs of earth)

but only the pain now, in the very marrow,
the lightning on the blue of his eyes –

kananaskis mountains

mt. elpoca, looking down from highwood pass at dusk

looking down the kananaskis valley at dusk

"Я візьму тебе на Верховину

Де ми знайдем чудовий край,

Поглянемо на полонину

На чарівний, безмежний рай."

-- Чекання

very small morsels of kananaskis

lady's-slipper orchid, campsite

fawn at the salt-lick

i am very lucky.

{a picture taken by bryna. i am performing a very special dance move in our living room}

I have now lived in my new abode for one month now, and despite the sinkpipe exploding & loosing its green algal contents all over everything, & the raucous magpie conferences at 5 a.m. outside my window, it has been a lovely month indeed. Here is a brief list of particular things I enjoy about my dwelling place:

-- the good, nourishing food that we cook in the kitchen, which is rather spacious & full of light & contains a rolling spice drawer & three shelves of tea.

-- the light shining on the hardwood floor in late afternoon; the ridiculous slipperyness & possibilities for dancing on that floor (see above photo)

-- the shadows: on the white walls, the 'waves' on the kitchen floor in the morning

-- the constant chirping & singing of birds (not so much the indignant magpies, though)

-- the lilac tree that was in full bloom when we moved in, the honeysuckle, the shade of the elms

-- the gravelly back alley, the green sweep of the old trees & the houses nestled between them, the kitchen view

-- tigerlilies, russian sage, peonies, irises, asters, delphinium...

-- hearing the united church choir across the street singing on sunday mornings, coming in my open window

-- riding my bicycle home on 115th avenue after the rain, the certain swoop of the slick road, the arches of trees above me

-- the night june air coming in my window, direct ambrosia to my nostrils, it pulls me, unravels, makes me want to go out walking forever.

pigeon poem.

{the remains of a pigeon i found on my way to work.}

today on the sidewalk
i found the splayed skeleton of a pigeon

wings barely attached to bones, but legs still pink,
with toes curling like a baby’s fingers
caught in the soft tight grip
of that sleep –

& it caught in my body, the sadness:
empty cambium of the heart carved out,
aery avian wingbones to pestle down ache
& slowly digest –

for an empty nest will haunt us, frightens us,
the little lobes of the beak still intact, mouth
open half in song –

for when a bird falls suddenly out of the sky
death comes to the breathing
to hollow us out,
remind us that

death is felt only by those still living,
a strange reflecting of sun on wings
falling not on the dead
but those who are left clinging, clinging

as beloved things leave us
& we try to hold, to hold
with soft pink pigeon-toes
to the birds of their souls –

run on (for a long time)

{weeping birch shadow out the kitchen window}
{mottled sky}

I can't believe how often I seem to forget how good it is to run, how truly good running is for me. How it's such a good alternative to being trapped in my head, where I spend far too much time -- especially with my job, which accentuates my tendency to overthink, overanalyse, overintellectualize absolutely everything. Sometimes I wonder about all the things I should let myself do, but don't because I'm too busy theorizing about implications & complications & such. It can get completely ridiculous.

So sometimes it's just so good to go running simply because I can. It's good to just breathe & be (with unshaven legs & little blue running shorts) & not theorize or scrutinize. It's good to do something like run, that is purposeful yet natural, freeing & yet so corporeal -- so good to remember what the body is for, to remember that I am inhabiting a body, that my mind lives somewhere. It brings me to far more awareness, it is far more meditative that any other activity I could think of.

& I love where I live now, very very much -- the air is so thick in the river valley, thick & pendulous in the aspens, thick as the cottony veils. Air like curtains of pollen, air & light. Gravelly footsteps, dust & salt on damp skin gather like silt in the slow green of the river, only the sound of breath & pulse, everything very very close, nested in the calm lungs of trees; trees are lungs transpiring, surrounding you with breath held waiting for rain & night & sleep.

burya buryakiv (a storm of beets)

{i like shadows & poppy teacups}

Yesterday Bryna & I made borshch for her friend Dawn, who had been estranged from beets for quite some time. But now, thanks to this recipe, I am happy to report that Dawn & beets are friends again. My baba would be proud of that, & also of the purple-brown rings of juice still staining my fingertips.

Borshch of the most traditional sort

- 1 large onion, chopped
- a couple cloves of crushed, minced garlic
- ½-1 cup of fresh mushrooms
- some vegetable oil, or butter
- 2-3 cups of beets, diced (if you want to be really fancy, you can grate them, but I like to make very chunky, hearty borshch)
-1 cup of diced carrots
-1 diced potato (or more, if you like it chunky)
-2-3 cups shredded cabbage
-lots of freshly ground black pepper
-some (hungarian-style) paprika
-salt if you like
-8-9 cups of water (can used half vegetable broth too, it really brings out the flavours & you won’t need to add salt)
-lots and lots and lots of fresh chopped dill!

First, sauté your onions and garlic in vegetable oil or butter until the onions are translucent. Add the mushrooms and cook until just tender.

Next, cover the beets with just enough water and cook until barely tender, with the lid on. I like to call this ‘sweating’ the beets! Then add the potatoes and carrots & cook until tender as well & all is full of buttery sweet root-vegetable perfection...

Add a little paprika to taste, along with freshly ground pepper, and salt (if not using broth) and then the cabbage. Add the rest of the water (to your desired consistency) Cook until cabbage is barely tender.

Squeeze in a little bit of lemon juice (not too much, just a little for a bit of tartness) and add all of the chopped dill. Bring to a boil and then simmer until all vegetables are as tender as you wish.

Serve with sour cream (or thick plain yogurt) on top! Add extra dill to taste.


July Borshch

essentially the same ingredients as the above version, but use:

- ½-1 cup long green beans,
- 1 diced sweet apple, and
- ½-1 cup of fresh garden peas (unless this repels you too greatly... apparently it does for some)

and leave out the cabbage and mushrooms.

Add these ingredients when you’d normally add the cabbage, and cook until beans are tender. Use a little less paprika and pepper.

ears & hearts

{shadow on the garage door.}

lilacs, remixed.

first night in the new house;
midnight is rainy grasses & the sounds
of weeping birch-braids tangled,

& the bursting lilac tree –

today my mother & uncle
admired these blossoms, called
them lai-luks, just like those under

mama’s window; and the sound

blooms at the root of their tongues;
those two syllables: lai – luk
& i hear my baba’s left an inheritance

because i can hear her voice again

like a persistent pulsar, i can hear her
voice in the air through
that long ai: lai-luk – lai-la-lai-luk

shaping the earth through sound;

a memory like a seed pod
bursting forth, her voice shapes
the earth, the garden of poppies roses cucumbers

in the loam of my cochlea,

& that sweet cool wrinkled skin of summer,
voice like water ripples in the tin washtub
my cousin & i are shelling peas

plink plink plink

& she says, come take some lai-luks, girls
we watch her strong legs under the flowery gusts
of her skirt, veins of periwinkle blue

warm skin flowing so soft under earth

caked to her hands, hands overflowing
with lilacs in little twig bundles, wrapped
in a washcloth given to me as her voice

waves goodbye & i still smell the lilacs,
still hear the lilacs in her voice sounding
into the years of mud & loam &

the dusty brown ghosts of lilacs resonate

& regenerate in the voice of my uncle, my mother
myself we are flowers, we are the roots
that dig down, absorb the sound &

grow from that earth, she is

the earth now, her hands are full of lilacs,
her hands moved her heart, pushed her voice
sounding like the soft remnant of a star

in the middle of thousand purple ears of lilacs

her voice whispers through the earth
now a live little pulse moving through
everything & the seeds of sound scattered

in my voice & i hear i say lai-luks in my hands
my voice my (h)ear(t) --

how to pronounce 'lilac'

{our lilac tree}

I have been thinking of my grandma especially much lately, living in this new house of lilacs & rhubarb & sparrows everywhere. The following is a poem-embryo thing that is not finished at all -- rather, this is the way it emerged out of my head & into my writing book, & hasn't been shaped or smoothed.

When we were moving in, everyone commented on our lilac tree in the backyard, as it was in its prime that weekend... It was lovely at night to press your nose up to the windowscreen & inhale until inebriated by the scent. Everyone would comment on it & I began to notice they all pronounced 'lilac' slightly differently. There was a whole spectrum of vowels; 'lai-leks' & 'lai-laks' & 'lai-liks' (In the song 'Lilac Wine', Nina Simone says 'lai-loks'!) but I noticed that my mother & my uncle pronounced it 'lai-luks' & everytime they said it I could hear my baba's voice, so clearly, echoing & echoing with such presence. & so I had a messy sort of memory come to me like this:

* * *

living in the house now that i am sure
she helped me find
night air of rainy grasses & honeysuckle
& bursting lilac tree
how she used to say ‘lilac’ as lai-luk
& how her son, he daughter still say it like that
beautiful aural inheritance at the root
of their tongues & how i can hear her voice still
her voice like a persistent pulsar
how the sounds shape the night air
that long ai lai-luk
how the sound shapes the earth
like her hands working loam in the garden
the poppies roses & cucumbers of summer
their sweet cool wrinkled skin like my cousin
& i sitting in the tin washtub, pea-pods plinking
against metal in cool water
remembers watching her strong legs moving under
the gusts of her skirt
the periwinkle veins blue & lacy intricacies
under her warm skin flowing so strong she moves
the earth with her hands caked on her golden ring
how she goes still shaping with her voice,
lilacs in bundles twigs wrapped in a washcloth given to me
in the front seat of the car her voice waving goodbye
sounding into the echoes of mud and loam the flowers
violet the roots absorbing the sound & growing from it
that earth she is in that earth now her hands moved
in her heart through the earth now, live little echo moving
through everything she makes growth
& i carry the seeds of sound in my voice & in my hands &
i say lai-luks as the sound shapes my hands my voice my heart

the adventures of stella & johnny.

{blurry honeysuckles in the yard + nose of bryna}

If I were actually able to write things that are not poems, & actually create these chimerical, elusive creatures called "characters", I already have a plethora of names for them. They're names I've stolen from various sources, e.g. the travel study research, or random concerts I haven't attended. For example, 'Stella Pink' is my favourite name for a female sort of character. She's a writer, or performance artist, or spy.... & her partner-in-adventures is called 'Johnny Eden'. Now, Johnny Eden is a real person too, a singer-songwriter Bryna saw perform yesterday at the Black Dog, who sang about lost socks & sharks & his distaste for 'fake-tan girls'. If only I could write "The Adventures of Stella Pink & Johnny Eden." They sound so charismatic! But it could never be prose. It might have to be an epic poem, if anything. But I already tried that.

I am really not sure why I can't write story-prose. I suppose I just don't think that way very naturally, in that I can't fully embody any characters. (& my characters certainly don't seem to want to write themselves.) I think perhaps there is only room in my head for my own 'self' (however nebulous a concept), & so if I were to write about Stella & Johnny, they would only be permutations of myself. & that would be rather boring. & redundant. I could just use them as aliases in poetry, if I wanted.

But really, they are such charismatic names. I don't really know 'who' they are, but they could be people.

I've also thought that maybe I am writing in the wrong language when I attempt narrative prose. Maybe I could do better in my Ukrainian, because I feel I have the license to be more fantastical then. I'll probably make Shevchenko roll about in his tomb, but he might appreciate someone having respectful, imaginative, Björk-esque fun with his native syntax. Also, Ukrainian uses the instrumental case, & I really do love the semantic relations that can entail -- it allows for such relationality to be expressed, that would be awkward & run-on in English, but is so smooth po-ukraïnskomu. & Stella could be 'Zoria Rosichuk' & Johnny, 'Ivan Rai'... Hmmm.... It's good...

However, regardless of language, I have a horrible, wretched time with plot. I know that plot isn't always necessary -- or at least not plot in the conventional sense -- but things still have to happen. I know how to make characters have experiences. I know how to make them feel & think, have little poems sprout in their heads, but I can't make them 'act'. It is a problem.

Inspired by Anne Carson's 'Autobiography of Red' and Nicole Brossard's 'Hier', I tried last August to make a 'story' in short poem-y bits. But it's failing . Some of the bits are pretty, but that's all. Maybe too pretty-ish. But I'll save them, because maybe some day, Stella &/or Johnny could use them.

* * *

Random excerpts from Realis/Irrealis:

which is about moths, perception, de/creation, brains & anxiety, & the blurry lines between this & that.

1.

he last saw you
standing in the doorway,
when everything was
happening three minutes slow –

dust motes & stray moths caught
in quick amber, the swift sunset
sparking & haloing about your head.

your skin, lit intermittently,
appearing fluid,
and the whole forest behind you moving
like light over water,
the trembling aspen flickering
in soft shadowy waves.

he was thinking of something to say,
but his mouth – already paralysed,
tongue gone soft as silt.

you turned to go, & he –

soon the sun went out.

2.

halia is not into
hallucinogens.

her mother’s best friend
died jumping
in front of a train
in saskatchewan, because
lysergic acid lied, told him
god might save him.

how divine.
& her own mind
(slightly complacent
under sadness pills)

once rejected the lazy lull
of cannabis so violently
she could not stop
shaking.

twitching in the cold.

she walks over to the firepit
where small sparks are still rising
up like reverse meteors
before falling
back into an atmosphere of ash.

grey moth wings, brushing her legs.

across the clearing
the tent shines
like a small silver lung,
glittering in the dark,
the walls shaking & sighing heavily.

she almost feels
the unsettling urgency of their breath
on the tight canvas,
& it is too close,
too near in the darkness.
& she feels strange then,
restless, sad, alien.

why did they invite her,
why did she come anyway,
why did it matter.

tonight, no kisses.
& no mind-altering substances.

so

stumbling for shoes in the darkness,
she heads down to where the path leads to the lake.

3.

beside the stones the creek flows
on unsleeping

it will flow on even as the snow
comes, singing under the
ice

halia’s grandmother told her
that the spirits of the dead
sound like that, dwelling
under the streams; their
voices echoing
in the frozen amphitheatre
of the riverbed,
on just the other side –

frosty patterns, a
mavka’s hieroglyphs
ethereal as halia’s breath
in early october air

everything is so close.
a living herd of elk
moves soft
as their ghosts around
the bones she disturbed –

we can hear in their
slight hoofprints
a trail of yearning

to slip through the river
to feel their way
blindly
to the other side --

* * *

erin mouré poem

{it is not weather for boots anymore. but i like this picture.}

The following is a poem by Erin Mouré from her book Little Theatres (or Aturuxos Calados). The book is in English and Galego, or Galician (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galician)

She moves with such fluidity between the languages -- in some cases, mirror versions of the poems appear together. However, they aren't exact reflections, word-for-word translations -- each is distinctly its own self.

This poem is very comforting to me; it makes me think of precisely how I feel lying in my field, my backbone pressed up against the earth, how my anxiety lessens, my boundaries, nerves, feelings blurred. Forgetting where the edges of my skin and the nettles & wheat stubble separate, feeling so akin to that ground.

Soidade (English version)

by Erin Moure

All my life I've had a tough time

breathing.

I get scared and feel alone,

me and the earth.

Which me is it talking in the first person?

Should I get up? But I want to lie down.

Sometimes all I have

is water gulped with air

and cut into every membrane.

I try not to let it make me sad. I just say

(Which me is it talking in the first person?)

That as long as a carrot can be orange,

I'm going to be orange too.

I'm not going to live with sadnesses.

But free myself, céibome das tristuras da vida mesma,

and touch my face to the soil,

and breathe with the breathing

of the earth.

stupid earl. (some anthropological observations)

{i am at the bus stop}

Whenever I find myself in places that make me feel terribly uncomfortable and accentuate my awkwardness, I’ve found I can survive many less than savory situations by being an anthropologist. Once that’s established, I can then proceed to distance myself from any unwanted stimuli by analysing and intellectualizing anything and everything, especially things that are disturbing and/or overwhelming. My last few visits to particular eating establishments inspired me to write down a number of observations that have been accumulating over a long while.

After I get used to the dim light & extraordinarily loud, obnoxious music (& finish searching the menu for something meatless yet still containing some amount of protein) I am continually confronted by the fact that most popular chain restaurants are replicating & perpetuating binary gender roles overtly & unapologetically. This is not necessarily a trait of all restaurants in this culture. I can name many, many restaurants that do not create this type of space; however, on multiple visits I’ve noticed that Earls is a perfect example of a rigidly gendered environment. Not only is the space gendered, it also replicates the conventionalized gender roles of a capitalist patriarchy.

I suppose it’s no worse than any bar, but I never go to bars or nightclubs so I don’t have as much experience with analysing those spaces. It’s horrible to be in there because it seems every time I’m there I have to bite my tongue and never reveal my observations. I’m always there with very conventional people who just don’t understand & anything I say is lost on them, or I’m there with my dad, who finally has regenerated his taste buds after chemo obliterated them, & wants to enjoy his favourite caesar salad in silence. But I am digressing. I will now describe this little microcosm of patriarchal hegemony.

The first thing I always notice is that the interior decorating generally has a theme that we might categorise as being ‘masculine’ (in this culture) – dark mahogany wood, rough-hewn stone fireplaces, everything big & angular. With enormous squishy dark brocade chairs pulled up to the tables, it makes me think of a Victorian patriarch’s library. (belonging to Earl, yes?) There is usually a large bar area in most Earls restaurants, complete with large screens endlessly showing sports games with only males playing, of course – because, you know, serious sports fan don’t watch women play, even if they’re really ‘hot’ tennis players or wearing beach-volleyball bikinis! Men are behind the bar, concocting alcoholic potions, and in the kitchen, preparing all the food. They do this all fully clothed, whilst the far-less-clothed women are flocking together by the door, waiting.

Women are the waiters here. According to my informal counts at 3 different Earls restaurants, women outnumber male waiters 5 to 1, and any males in that position tend to be responsible for cleaning off the tables, instead of bringing out the food & drink. Regardless of exact numbers, I have noticed a pervasive phenomenon. Our ‘Earl’ plays the Pygmalion-patriarch in ensuring these women are dressed identically, in little black skirts and high heels – terribly impractical for being on one’s feet all day, but essential, of course, for accentuating the curves of the buttocks and the breasts, which are barely encased in tight lululemon pseudo-‘yoga’ shirts that tend to have necklines plunging to just above the solar plexus. Thoroughly hairless skin, tanned & layered with make-up, hair on the head artificially coloured to either unrealistic blonde or improbable black. Individual identity becomes negligible. They are sculpted into the ideal ‘attractive’ female in the culture; there is no variation, nor is there anything androgynous, or, rather, sexually-neutral about their look.

In this way, I see them as being essentially made into another product at Earls, commercialized into a sexualized serving object – these ‘Earls-girls’ have had their individualities blurred in this adherence to a hyperfeminine stereotype. They may cater food to all members of the public, but they cater aesthetically to the ‘male gaze, here where (to paraphrase John Berger) men look and act, and women appear (and serve). Women are evaluated and valued on the basis of what Laura Mulvey calls, ‘to-be-looked-at-ed-ness’.

Some people get quite indignant when I bring this up, telling me I’m prudish, or try to tell me that it’s the women’s choice to look this way, and perhaps they like it. Firstly, it’s not a question of prudishness – breasts are not offensive to me at all. After all, I do possess them myself (though quite subtly). And secondly, I don’t doubt that some women don’t mind the extra money they supposedly get for being the ‘pretty piece of flesh’ serving up, well, pieces of flesh. I don’t doubt that some need no coercion to dress this way, and they have no qualms about being hired based on their appearance (and, it seems, bra-cup size). But even if they feel they are being empowered, does it really changed the fact that people are still exploiting them, that their sexuality and appearance is being exploited? I’m not sure it does.

I guess it’s like in pornography. I really don’t accept the whole argument of the potential for it being a source of empowerment for women. (or anyone, really.) You can create something with the best, most empowering intentions, but what happens to it when it’s devoured and re-interpreted, mis-interpreted by the masses – is it still truly empowering? Can something empower someone truly even as it continues to contribute to their exploitation? The post-modern thing to say might be that if one believes they are empowered, that’s all that matters. But I don’t know. I think that’s just more than a little sketchy & naïve to see that as empowerment. Even if they are willing to be subjected to the ‘male gaze’ (among other things), I really do believe that they are simply conforming to the hegemonic norms of ‘beauty’ and ‘femininity’ in this culture that are constructed and enforced for male benefits, which highlights male power. So neither pornography based on women’s desires nor women dressing up to serve the male gaze is going to overthrow any patriarchy, or convince anyone otherwise about their beliefs about women’s rights and status, which, contrary to the beliefs of many, are still an issue! As Audre Lorde would say, these sorts of tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

The Earl’s-girls are so ingrained into the Earls restaurant environment that it seems quite difficult to dismantle Earl’s cushy little house, & they don’t seem to mind. What irks me most of as is the lack of people questioning this – do they really care that many of these girls aren’t even terribly good at their job, because their ‘hotness’ makes up for it? Is it that even if the men in the kitchen aren’t having a good day, and the meal is less than stellar, they can say, ‘well, at least the waitresses are hot!’ Do they even recognize that they’re drinking their man-beer (never a fluorescent green martini – those are ‘girly drinks’!) in the ‘Red Lite Lounge’? (How much more obvious can you be in evoking a brothel?) What is really so different in theory between Earl’s-girls and Playboy-bunnies?

I’m really not so sure there is a difference. Playboy*, of course, is clearly about overt sexuality, phallocentric male sexuality in particular, via the ‘consumption’ of images of ‘attractive’ women. But how different are food and sex, when compared for the possibilities for pleasure? At Earls, as in many restaurants here, it’s very easy to see how women are clearly transformed into products for consumption via the male gaze, along with the food they serve. Women may eat food at the restaurant alongside the men, but it is clear that Earl sees them little more as either further decoration (or detraction) from his uniform little harem of servers, there for the male’s viewing, and serving, pleasure.

Give me Cafe Mosaics with their subdued service! The skinny boys & tattooed girls wearing whatever they like! Serving food, & showing local art on the walls!
Or the King & I. Pleasant, fully clothed boys and a few girls in bow ties. That’s much better. Or Roots, where they all wear chef-outfits with personal embellishments, and you serve yourself, mostly. Gender-neutral and focused on nourishing food, 'tis what a restaurant should be.


*I don’t even want to start talking about Playboy here. I recommend Ariel Levy’s book "Female Chauvinist Pigs" as an thorough, well-written, & unapologetic look into that scene, as well as the miasma of bars/nightclubs/‘reality’ tv, etc, etc. It really highlights the pervasive extent of ‘Playboy’ culture and the continued exploitation of female sexuality, which is not only restricted to men – the reinforcement comes from females themselves, females of all sexual orientations.

because...

{bryna, standing in the field}

...it's like standing... on your head!

what beauty this is

{riverlot field}

driving home i see those flooded fields... how can people not know what beauty this is?

-- neko case, ‘fox confessor brings the flood’

There are some things I would like to tell the counter-protesters in Caledonia, Ontario who have issues with the peaceful protest by some people from the Six Nations.

Yes, it’s certainly inconvenient to have a road blocked for a month, isn’t it?

However, wouldn’t you agree that it’s also rather inconvenient to have the land you know taken from you and exploited for centuries, rather problematic to have your ancestors’ graves overturned and shoved beneath excessive unnecessary suburban development? Yes?

I just cannot understand how so many people feel no connection to the landscape. Or, if they can appreciate the beauty of it, it’s only in a very superficial way, like it’s picture painted especially for them, instead of something far more vast & powerful, & something they are part of. In the industrialized world, cities are not connected to the land, even though their sewers and cables and basements form a twisting labyrinth beneath the surface – cities float above the earth on a crust of pavement, and the boundaries between cities and the ‘wilderness’ is definitive. There is a binary, the ‘civilized’ and the non. This does not exist everywhere.

In Anna Maria Kerttula’s book 'Antler on the Sea', about Yup’ik, Chukchi and Russian relations in the village of Sireniki, she relates a conversation between a Yup’ik woman and a Russian visitor. The Russian is poking fun at the woman, because she is walking around outside in slippers. He says, ‘What are you doing, wearing those out on the tundra, you’re supposed to wear those inside the house, they’re for the home.’ She replies indignantly, ‘Isn’t the tundra my home?’

I think of my own forest that I know and love so much. I think of how comforting it is for me, how much more sane & like a real person I feel when I am there. How I know the certain trees by their bright splashes of lichen, trees with bark nibbled by the porcupine, the birch cradling the lost antler of a deer. The pussywillow tree, the fuzzy hanging candles of aspen blossoms, the woodpeckers in the rustling poplar. & the saskatoon bushes, the kalyna-berries, the waxwings calling. The curve of the hill at the edge of the earth, the eight deer wandering in the long grasses, white flashes, the soft silence when through the branches one will look you right in the eye. The sunlight coming through blackened branches, warm furnace of the woods. I lie in the field there & feel the earth under my back & my bones are filled with good. It fills me, the land fills me.

I think of my dad and I once, we were hiking up a ridge & looking over the Kananaskis Lakes to Elk Pass, & my dad said, “I look out over this land, and I just wish I were big enough to wrap my arms around it all, and just hug it.”

This land hasn’t been in my family for millenia. My ancestors never knew it. But it’s a part of my self, it’s woven into my memories. So much has happened there to me. Skiing, running, wandering there & speaking to people I remember the sound of my breath echoing in cold ear-caverns, the calls of waxwings, the way the light looked when something was said to me that if I stand there long enough I hear it all come back. If I can feel so strongly to this forest – what would it be to have the stories of my people’s cosmogenesis, creation, history, and collected memories for thousands of years all cached in the same land? If humans had been created, right there, under the manitoba maple? If those small ridges in the hill are the ribcages of my ancestors?

When the stand of aspens I could once see from my window was suddenly cut down, I was devastated. The empty line of the sky made me nauseous for days. I felt severed. When I think of this, I realize I understand a very small bit of what it might be line to be forcefully evacuated from a homeland of ancestors, of your lineage’s history. How can people not see how psychologically damaging it is to relocate people, to take their land from them? This is unfortunately a major part of Canadian history, this process of forced disconnection.

If my forest was destroyed by people bent on building & buying, I honestly don’t know what I’d do. I cannot comprehend losing it. It makes me ache for anyone – & there are hundreds upon hundreds of cases here – who has had their land taken from them.

I recently wrote a paper on the linguistic links to place and landscape among the Inuit, and the ‘oral maps’ created that not only help in navigation, but in creating a sense of belonging, as when Mark Nuttall and Béatrice Collignon speak of the ‘memoryscape’. This is a powerful way of understanding place and its connection to people – people who do not live on the land, but live with the land, because they were created as it was created. & they know that there is so much knowledge stored in the landscape. Knowledge, memory, and the land becomes a living mnemonic; as you experience it, you remember, and it changes each time you visit, yet remains the same presence, the same force, the same place.

I am so grateful to my parents for raising me in a way that taught me to feel a connection to the land, despite dwelling in an pavement-covered environment. Teaching me respect for it and the value of connecting with the earth. Taking me to Kananaskis when I was less than a year old, my mother carrying me on her back up the mountain, around Marl Lake. My dad taking me to the creeks and lakes of the Windfall boreal forest, going mapless & learning to follow water and changes in vegetation to wind your way around, showing me places he loves and feels spiritual about. My grandma, always with earth caked under her nails, always in the garden with her raspberries and root vegetables, praising growth. It helps me to understand better and truly appreciate the different ways the land can be understood.

I just strongly believe in recognizing multiple epistemologies, respecting different understandings and ways of knowing. Maybe if the people in Caledonia actually thought about what it represents, what it means to live in “Canada, your home on Native land”, there might be a little bit of enlightenment. If they would think beyond the narrowminded, ethnocentric roadblocks in their own minds, their dominant truth that oppresses multiple others, perhaps the barricades could start to come down. If they cannot face this, that block will remain.

this poem isn't quite done

[crocuses in the garden]

(but the crocuses are opening already)

* * *

there is
no separation
in the worlds between us –

they lay like lichens bright on
the rocks clinging, a necessary
symbiosis, the strata giving life

to bright mosses, death revealing
layers of emulsion as the picture
becomes clear –

death is not a foreign language.
& there is no need for translation

there is no separation
just a transliteration, same
speech transcribed in another
alphabet;

or the transfiguration of
sound – death is just a different accent
from the same country, upon the same
words shifting through time
& place

but i need no passport to visit you
all i need to do
is speak to you
in any language

in a heartbeat
like waxwing wingbeats pressing
up to the trees

& you answer me
with a tongue like petals of crocus
pushing violet up
from your whole throat
now the earth

earth day footprint

[walking over the edge of the earth]

If you go here: http://myfootprint.org/

you can have your ecological footprint calculated. This is mine:

CATEGORY
GLOBAL HECTARES
FOOD
0.5
MOBILITY
0.7
SHELTER
1.3
GOODS/SERVICES
1.5
TOTAL FOOTPRINT
4
IN COMPARISON, THE AVERAGE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT IN YOUR COUNTRY IS 8.8 GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON. WORLDWIDE, THERE EXIST 1.8 BIOLOGICALLY PRODUCTIVE GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON.
IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 2.2 PLANETS.

I am hoping that when I move into the city and my commute involves much less of the bus, I can reduce closer down to one planet and my 1.8 hectare. It's terrifying to know that the American average is 24 acres. I don't know how many hectares that is, but seems like it's a lot.

flocks.

{waxwings in a tree, at riverlot.}

i am making another little chapbook of poe-hems, accompanied by photographs & collage-bits. it is called 'waxwing cloud' & should be finished by the end of this month... one reason why i haven't been putting things here is because i am saving them for the book. they shall be introduced in a tangible paper-form instead. (in the meantime, i will try to put up pictures & essay-like fragments... i have just been lacking in time & desire to spend more hours on the computer...)

now, i am not sure how many of these wee books shall come into being. if you are reading this & would like one, let me know if you want one or two or six. for then i shall be able to make just as many as i need to & none will end up sad & superfluous.

so. i will update more on this as it materializes...

take care. happy spring! vesna pryjshla!

waxing poetic about skiing. (oh. that's a bad pun.)

lately upon waking up in the morning, all i want to do is go skiing; honestly, the eventuality of going skiing at some point in the day is all that can lure me out of my bed. today i knew i didn't have to work in the evening so i found myself counting the hours between going to school & working there & then going home so i could retrieve my skis & then go around & around for an hour before coming home to do more work. my sanity has been preserved by the snow. (which is starting to melt at an alarmingly swift rate....)

when i ski i think a lot about things i bury in the various layers of sedimentary strata in my brain. these are things that would upset me any other time, but somehow they seem less disturbing. they still ache, but they ache in a way that seems natural, like the burning pain between your shoulder blades (where your wings would grow if you had them) when you fishbone up the hills. that sort of pain is accepted, & can be understood.

everything feels heavy lately. bone marrow turned into amber, heavy heavy light. i think sometimes about how i feel like i've suddenly grown up over the last few months. it's strange. i've always felt numerically ageless & insouciant in so many ways. but now, i feel that i have suddenly realized not my chronological age, but my actual emotional age.

when i found out dad was sick i was having a lot of issues with my anxious, paranoid brain. it sort of shocks me how quickly i was able to force that to subside, to gather up all the strands of my loose mind to prepare myself to help him. i still can't believe how i managed to get through some of this. how i can quell the horrible internal discord that i feel in order to take care of him, take care of my mother. & she too has needed that so much since her mother passed away.

sometimes i think, too, that it is my grandmother's strength that allows me to function right now. i like to think it's been transferred, inherited, somehow. my mother gave me a cheque the other day for a large sum of money. she told me it was my inheritance from my baba. it struck me as so strange. incongruous, even -- because when she said it i thought about the old ukrainian word babizna "an inheritance from one's grandmother" & how it seems to consist of the words baba + zna, & how zna maybe comes from znaty, to know, znannia, knowledge. i don't know the official etymology, but i know that for me, my grandmother's wealth will never be associated with money, but wholly with knowledge.

sometimes lately when i start to feel crumbly, i think that what i need is someone to come & take care of me. but if i go out on my own, i go skiing, i realize that maybe i can take care of myself. & just bothering to actually do something for myself is what i actually need.

however, the snow is melting now, & while spring is all fine & good, running until my joints complain does not compare with the lovely low-impact glide of skiing. i think the season's over... & so i lament.

"momentum...for the sake of momentum..."

I wonder if anyone would notice or care if I skipped my job(s) and class & just skied around & around & around the woods all day? Every morning lately I wake up feeling like I haven't slept, my heart beats too fast & my groggy brain keeps repeating Run away! Run away! I know that I'm far too busy right now, that I have taken on too much, and I should not complain about it because it's my own fault. I had hoped that it would distract me & keep me from thinking about things I don't want to think of, but now it's just starting to become very stressful. My body is rebelling & leaving me with sick stomachs & tension headaches and face-aches, because I told it to shut up, we can't stop yet. There's nothing I can really let slip right now.

But I skied for over an hour today, just before sunset. I came upon a I felt so clearheaded, with a good, new healthy ache in my shoulders. I feel so much more like a balanced human once I've been moving around in my forest, much less like the maladjusted extra-terrestrial I usually am. (or at least I am a better adjusted alien, there...) & I love this snow, the cold weight is satisfying, the fluffy amalgamations of flakes comforting. This winter has been strange and tiring enough, I would have been even more confused if it had been snow-less. It's reassuring.

The trees were so lucid this afternoon, & on the back stretch near the edge of the earth, a cloud of waxwings passed over me, all fluttery and srrrreeeeeeing. They settled in a tree & I stopped in the middle of the long hill to listen to them, watch them fluff their feathers up & perch on the tops of the aspens. It was so lulling, little waves of birds waxy in the sunlight moving between the tree-tops. I felt very lucky. The forest is a potent cure & I am grateful.

* * *

This week I have also been listening to the Neko Case CD continuously. One of my other most lovely moments in a while involved her in my headphones singing 'Lion's Jaws' & me dancing around in a deserted parking lot making waltz-steps in the untouched snow. (I should listen to Audrey, & dance more...)

I wish I had Neko's ringing voice. I sing 'Star Witness' in the shower & wish everyone sang more often, more spontaneously. I know my baba did, all the time, but she comes from a countrywhere their latest revolutionary actions mostly involved folk music and rebellious rock songs.* My mother used to sing more too... but my sister always got embarrassed or something when she sang & yelled at her, so she stopped.

Most nights, when I wait for the bus at the Westmount transit station, a man in a mustard-yellow puffy coat comes in. He looks permanently distracted, & carries a plastic bag from Grand and Toy. Sometimes he eats a bag of dill pickle chips, & paces back & forth until the Kingsway bus arrives. But the most striking thing about him is how he'll abruptly burst into song -- not just any song, but something in French, almost operatic. Ah, je veux arriver...! He's done it twice now; once he sang to the window, the other time to the vending machine. It was highly amusing. People look at him like he's absolutely crazy, & maybe he is, but I don't think that is indicated by his singing. Bus stations, with their concrete & plexiglass have quite good acoustics.

I keep wanting to sing my grandmother's songs but they tend to make me choke a little, still.

* Dr. Bohdan Klid at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies did a presentation recently on "Rock, Pop and Politics in the 2004 Ukrainian Presidential Elections and the Orange Revolution."

* * *

... and the melon sky
& my snowy eyes
see a different night...
the night i fade into the lion's jaws
of my regrets, & young love...
those teeth themselves could not divine,
their pressure estimate,
the haze i wish to never break
& never contemplate
momentum
for the sake
of momentum...

[neko case, 'lion's jaws]

myeloma

marrow

1)

every bone in the house
is creaking now

like shaky stair-boards when
they protest as your sleepy
footsteps crack
their backs --

you can touch the echoes
as they slides down the slippery
wooden vertebrae

through our bodies
through the walls
with their pink insulation
frayed like your fading marrow

& they go tunneling
through your heart –

2)

for you know full well
my sister only says
she loves you
as a selfish reflex
of a guilty conscience;

so if you die she can absolve
herself immediately, pure
sweet & martyred, poor
fatherless child!

so she can still come home late,
with nicotine tooth-stubs shed
on the doorstep,
a poisonous but sparkling
heart, wailing & stumbling up those
tired railings
drunk

& maybe she’ll visit him
sometime, but she’s got
no structural integrity:

she’ll go
if it fits in her schedule
between sleeping with
strange boyfriends
& those hungover sleeping-ins.

3)

she’s never home,
of course, but
it’s really you
the dog is keeping vigil for –

shuddering quietly at the
door, waiting;

outside the yellow-white
weeping birch bone trees
whipped in the winter wind.

the chill of a nosebleed,
a cell-creek the only water
in the february drought –

& mama, i held her hand
last night, soft stomach
of worry turning itself
inside out –

for your frame is fragile as
a dry fish skeleton separating,
turning slowly
to salt –

what is left of you, what
is left of us to hold
you through?

(i am my mother’s daughter
but my father’s son
too)

what is there but blood
& spiral sequences,
a strange glue –

i’ll be the paste between
the tendons,
i’ll be our new connective
tissue,

you grew me from your cells once.
& now you say
i’m grown up,

(i could be your parent too)

4)

today you stood up
for the first time,
your new shrunken bones
shaky.

aged a decade in
mint green pyjamas, white
salt-lines on your lips,
the scruffy white beard
of seventeen days without
the strength for shaving.

you are the old man
& the sea, adrift on your
hospital bed --

your body betrayed you,
left you trying
to vanquish the marlin

swimming through your feverish
doldrums, the monster
in the sea of morphine –

sharks have sucked your
marrow dry, this disease
has no cure but i know
that you are
tougher than hemingway

& i know that right now
you will survive,
even if you must return
to the sea someday

because i like...

[chickadees at riverlot]

...birds.

more semi-baked poems.

i)

waves of waxwings
wind & disperse
across treetops,
the beating of their wings
like windblown snow;

embroidering the city sky
with a swooping language,
fluid black flecks, woven

& moving over a
page of whiteness,

confusing me as to
the syntax
of the deceased.

your baba was, they say, she
was a good cook, good mother
good dancer she was so good
but
i can’t say it like that,
this was,
this were,
when she still
is;

realis, irrealis.
dead is not alive,
but that doesn’t negate the
fact you existed. it
proves it.

so death is not was;
death is just forgetfulness.

like the waxwings migrate, repeat
their soft sreeeeing call
over and over --
they’ve flown
for as long as they can remember,
they will fly as long as those wings
breed memory.

i cannot use the past
perfective for someone
who is still living for me,
for dying did not render you
not my grandmother.

ii)

& i want to believe in the semantics
of small miracles,
like faces in birchbark,
a voice heard in my sleep.

like the lone bird
who came to us, came to me
in a dream sealed by the
tail of the bird in flight, gold wax
dripping into my eyes,

the light in her face, her soft hands
when she said,
ty duzhe dobre, oh, you are doing so good!

there is no was. she is ever
my grandmother, not irrealis.

but real & migrating
like small birds
that come in a waxwing cloud,
alight suddenly, embroider

themselves dark into the pale
sky of the heart, then
move on.

"Ich bin meine eigene Frau..."

the infamous listen bird. (which is not actually advertising for Listen Records.)

Last weekend I had the good fortune of seeing a beautiful play at the Citadel – ‘I Am My Own Wife’ by Doug Wright, performed by John Ulyatt. It was one of those one-person-playing-multiple-character-shows that I find so engaging & truly amazing. To watch someone change characters by the subtlest, yet most crucial gesture, – the tilt of the head, the heaviness of a footfall, all before speaking. It was brilliant, as was the set design, with all the vintage furniture suspended from the ceiling in the dark recesses of the stage, at times softly illuminated...

The story was very compelling as well – it was based on Doug Wright’s own interviews with Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, directly inspired by her taped oral histories that he researched in the early 1990s. In short, Charlotte was an East German transvestite who led a tumultous and colourful life as a furniture collector and antique museum curator, surviving an abusive father, as well as both WW2 and the Cold War... I do not want to give too much away here – her story should really be seen, experienced if possible (the play is over now, but the script is published and quite easy to find at a University library, I’m sure) so I should just say that her life story is definitely compelling and unbelievable.

One of the recurrent issues in the play is the ‘truth’ of Charlotte’s stories; the narrator (Doug himself) and other characters continually return to this problem, distressed because they cannot match her memories with the documented facts. The play deals beautifully with this issue, I think, and through Charlotte he reveals something very crucial about the practice of collecting oral histories, and the intrinsic truth present in any individual’s recollections of her life.

I will paraphrase Charlotte herself in saying that we must accept her stories and she herself accepted each piece of furniture that she found -- unperfected, unadorned, untainted by polish or authoritative voice, simply as is. Her stories are truths in that they are her ‘telling of herself’, her own perception and mediation of the story of her life, and they are thus full of truth, in all their complexity and contradiction. She preserved her stories, collected them like her furniture, memories illuminated in ornate clusters, suspended, arranged, sometimes tangled, but all there, all part of her life. She presented her stories just as she pulled old antiques out of a box, randomly, out of linear order. Is a shiny repainted cabinet a more truthful cabinet than one covered in scratched and fading stains? I would think it is almost less so, because then we are not seeing any record of its experience, that is being hidden from us for the sake of appearances.

If we want to actually understand Charlotte’s life, it is better to go to her memories and personal experiences, rather than Stasi files or German talk show hosts. Bryna and I discussed this in depth after the play, and we both see this play as being supportive the value of plural histories, and oral history as an important research method. Whether or not one even believes in a definitive, objective truth, this play eloquently shows us that finding one grand ‘truth’ matters little in coming to deeply understand one person’s life experiences and motivations. ‘I Am My Own Wife’ is Charlotte’s truth, and also Doug’s truth as the mediator between her words and the audience. His writing is reflexive, but never overpowering, and he conveys their relationship simply and eloquently.

One of my favourite bits:

[Charlotte]: …This table, he is over one hundred years old. If I could, I would take an old gramophone needle and run it along the surface of the wood. To hear the music of the voices. All that was said…

I am so glad I got to see it. I remember Audrey telling me about it after she saw it first in New York City two years ago, how amazing it was. Mostly I recalled her mention of the ‘lion picture’ but I shall not reveal that secret now.

***

Last Wednesday I also got to hear Wade Davis speak – (or, rather, orate documentary-style!) He seems to be traipsing across the country with some lovely photography in tow, and I very much enjoyed what he had to say. (I also covet his National Geographic explorer-in-residence position. I would like to take over when he retires....) He mostly touched on subjects he has covered in his newest book, ‘Light at the Edge of the World’ and an upcoming documentary, and while I wished in many cases he could go into depth about what he was mentioning, I was just glad to hear these subjects discussed.

He talked mostly on the incredible importance of biodiversity / cultural diversity and the (hopeful!) persistence and adaptability of culture. I was especially happy that he mentioned language endangerment and the connection of language to cognitive system. He spoke so passionately about the respect needed for multiple systems of knowledge, for indigenous worldviews to be valued on the same level as industrial/Western scientific knowledge, that I wanted to run up and give him a hug.

His discussion of sacred geography and examples of Quechua communities in Peru also interested me – I was not so aware of the exact symbolism of the layout of Macchu Picchu. I am so enthralled with the image of the Urubamba river (below the city) being the earthly parallel of the Milky Way, the glacier of the sky. It makes perfect sense now, really... His descriptions of the village pilgrimages, especially the one where the whole community runs up and down the sacred peaks surrounding the village in a ritual, mappable pattern to rebalance the feminine energy of the earth goddess Pachamama was so beautiful, and especially provocative considering my obsession with landscape and toponymy right now. I am hoping to write a paper soon for my northern language issues class that somehow deals with landscape and its place in unifying community and asserting group and individual identities (through language).

Davis's book Light at the Edge of the World (which contains many of the same photos!) is waiting for me at the library and I am excited. I am taking full advantage of my not-sleeping to read & read & read...

den' narodzhennia.

This is my grandmother. She would be 91 today. I think she's in her mid-twenties in this picture... already a long way from the cowshed down by the river.

She loved to dance. She taught me to waltz on the yellow linoleum kitchen floor at her house, she told me of hiking through winter fields in the darkness just to get to the dances, the vechirnytsy, in her youth.

I never knew her when she was this age, of course, but this is how I like to think of her now: free to dance all the time now, waltzing & curtsying so whimsically & elegantly in the perpetual-summer grasses somewhere not far away...

"Mother, may I go out dancing? Yes, my darling daughter... "

quelques mots...

I was recently thinking (due to discussion about oral history) about how life has no linear plot.

Of course, being in an industrialized society we have conceptualized time in a line, chopped it into quantities, conceptualized it in little manufactured calendar-boxes and threw out our cyclic sundials in order to keep track of stuff, keep track of our “progress” – thereby shaping our thoughts to make it seem as if it does have a set plot.

But really, even past-present-future are so hazy in actuality; things happen from all directions, the past floats up, or we do go ‘back in time’ & get mired in the past just as we also sometimes get ahead of ourselves & fall into the future. Thoughts and memories and emotions of the distant past and distant future influence us at all times, at random, things happening in tangents, never going only forward. It’s not always just the direct moments of cause-&-effect, one at a time, plotted out on a little triangular diagram from grade seven language arts...

& our lives are never organized thematically. Sometimes everything does happen at once & every action becomes tangled in multiple plot-strands, each string informing every other string of action in the knot. It’s impossible.

This is also why I like to write poems. (& really have insurmountable trouble making stories...)

For poems also have no linear time, no insistent plot.

I like being able to deal with one moment, or a series of moments all entangled but in any particular order. I like to deal with the emotion & the memory. I don’t necessarily like to concoct what will happen next.

& I’ve been reading much Nicole Brossard lately. She is a fantastically amazingly delicious Quebecois author who is sadly overlooked, I think, in favour of Anglo authors such as Margaret Atwood, Brossard eclipses her in all manner of everything, especially in the sheer beauty of each line. I have never been terribly shaken by an Atwood sentence, I’ve never really wanted to quote her. Her phrases are very edgy & functional & powerful, yes, but nowhere near as purely poetic as a Brossard clause. When I read Atwood, I can see she is psychologically interested in stories, but I wonder how much she loves language. Brossard, however – even her language is filled with details about the delicacy of pronouns, the heady rush of verbs. “Certain words ignite me.” I am currently reading Hier, or en anglais, "Yesterday at the Hotel Clarendon" which is so intricate & gorgeous & lush. Four character-strands told in interwoven musings, swift short chapters. So wrenchingly good. It made me miss my bus stop...

I also finished her short book Elle serait la première phrase de mon prochaine roman, ("She would be the first sentence of my next novel"). It’s a lecture she gave on writing, & she says something I really like:

«La vie n’est pas un histoire, elle est un émotion qui donne lieu à une aventure dans la langue.»
"Life is not a story, it is an emotion that gives rise to an adventure in language.''

I think that very much summarizes poetry for me, & even as much as the reason why I am ultimately writing. I truly do not see my life as a narrative, although certainly I am aware of a great many patterns and recurrences and the overarching laws of causes and effects – despite all this, I feel like I live through a mass of collected experiences and feelings that come from all directions, all origins in the past/present/future, and it is this wholism I want to convey in my poems.

As Brossard also writes in Elle serait...

« Je suis un femme du present... J’aime sentir que le monde peut converger, se défuire et se reconstituer en moi dans le temps court du poéme... » "I am a woman of the present. I like to feel that the world can converge, deconstruct and then reconstitute itself within me in the short time of a poem. "

This makes me happy, because her words encourage me on my writing, and the possibilities of a particular project of mine... I don’t have to have conventional dialogue! Or chapters! Or linear plot! & what I write might still even make sense to people other than myself... Her words inspire me to experiment with forms.... I’d been working on a short ‘novella’ since August, which is not really a novel at all, & is not really prose either... it’s a poem with chapters, I’d say... & it got very frustrating & fragmentary so I left it alone for a few months... because I couldn’t make things happen in it. & I thought things were supposed to happen. But Brossard’s ideas make much sense to me & have provoked me to continue it... because maybe I can make something readable & meaningful out of little themes & images in this little haphazard web... a collage with threads of characters... I too don’t want to be caught in the ‘subject-verb-object’ schema Brossard speaks of. I like using second-person narration, & switching point of view often, to focus on different significant details like changing camera lenses.

I like tangents. That is the moral of the story.

So go read Nicole Brossard. She is easy to find en francais (mais oui) et en anglais, et aussi en les deux a la meme temps!