a land not mine

driftwood sculpture, lesser slave lake, alberta, august 2010

sunset & reflection, lesser slave lake, alberta, august 2010

* * *

A land not mine, still

forever memorable,

the waters of its ocean

chill and fresh.

.

Sand on the bottom whiter than chalk,

and the air drunk, like wine,

late sun lays bare

the rosy limbs of the pinetrees.

.

Sunset in the waves of ether:

I cannot tell if the day

is ending, or the world, or if

the secret of secrets is inside me again.

.

Anna Akhmatova

.

(this translation by Jane Kenyon)

ice-fishing ii

my father & a feisty perch on a lake, near st. albert, jan. 2010

skeleton of water hemlock, near st. albert, jan. 2010

field grasses by a lake, near st. albert, jan. 2010

It is August, and I have neglected posting for two months now, I know. After I defended my PhD fieldwork proposal in mid-June, I have been summering at home in Edmonton in preparation for going to Siberia for aforementioned fieldwork. I've been making things & taking photos & thinking about things, but not really sitting down long enough to do much with them. This is a recently finished-after-many-months, very unseasonal poem.

* * *

ice fishing II*

arching sedge bows low on the

shoreline, weeping into the snow.

slice my finger open on the auger,

cut skin gaping, a flared gill.

your lake lies in winterkill,

a thousand trout white bellies up

& bursting like cold willow

stems, flickering in the dark water,

snowflakes frozen to the sand.

there are two worlds here, in

the water: one obsidian sharp,

one soft as amber. from land

i call, how are you, down there,

father? but the voice i hear

is wasp’s nest hollow, awake

and gasping for air. how

do i lure you, now, out of

this dark season? where weeds

sway as if shadows only in the

memory of bent light? o

father, it was just a leech**,

you know, who sucked a small

hole in the sky’s white flesh, let winter

bleed out, suffuse into sun –

* * *

*ice-fishing I is in the March 2008 archive (scroll down for March 13th entry)

** the leech is part of a dän k'è story i heard in the yukon, & you can read about a lovely film that incorporates the story here.

poem draft about seashore at night; pictures of seashore in the day.

aberdeen beach at bridge of don, early evening, may 2010

the waves at night come like

small pale hands that spread

their fingers, soothe the sand:

the sea a grandmother i never knew

who puts the shore to bed: turns

the rocks over and over again,

worry polishing stones in shaken

palms, smoothing a coverlet

of froth. in the lessening light

her hair feathers out, white winter

cirrus, frost on the marram-grass,

prayers in a soft littoral whisper.

stand there, barefoot, sand beneath

a cupped sole, tides sucked up

by the shelled mouth of the moon,

each wave like a memory,

remembering comes inland:

skims cerebral ridges in the sand,

a piece of driftwood, inscribed with

runic toothmarks of that old

golden retriever, ever rushing

out & fetching as the waves recede,

reside. she hums a tune you

don’t recognize, like waves it’s

ever the same, it’s never the same

break twice: creeping waters will

comfort, endanger, wash

mussel shells lying butterflied,

their split spines salt-stuck, haunted

tide-marks lace your legs. but hush,

now, hush, her hands brushing

your brow, pebbles trace

each trailing thought to

renew, erase, recreate.

why i love tove jansson (part one of many, i am sure)

waterfalls of dry grass & moss on slate, patricia lake, jasper, march 2010

I can't believe I've never written about her in this blog before, because I've been in love with her writing for at least a year now... but Tove Jansson is incredible, & I'd like to attempt to explain why. I could write a lot, I think, about her brilliant Moomins*, which basically are existentialist novels for children, or analyse exactly why I want to be just like Grandmother in The Summer Book when I am old... but I'd rather let her words simply be, because that is what they do. They are simple & draw you into their truths, small little truths that suddenly sprawl open, refreshingly & widely & sometimes painfully, but they leave you with such a calm, such a reassurance, because this is what is & you have to be tough & that is beautiful in & of itself.

So I imagine I'll be returning to her words in the next while, because they are giving me a lot of comfort at the moment, but for now, an excerpt, from my favourite Moomin book (thus far), Moominland Midwinter:

On the other side of the lamp, someone had dug herself a cosy hole, someone who lay looking up at the serene winter sky and whistling very softly to herself.

"What song is that?" asked Moomintroll.

"It's a song of myself," someone answered from the pit. "A song of Too-ticky who built a snow lantern, but the refrain is about wholly other things."

"I see," Moomintroll said and seated himself in the snow.

"No, you don't," replied Too-ticky genially and rose up enough to show her red and white sweater. "Because the refrain is about the things that one can't understand. I'm thinking about the aurora borealis. You can't tell if it really does exist or if it just looks like existing. All things are so very uncertain, and that's exactly what makes me feel reassured".

*If you grew up without Moomins in your life, you should probably remedy that & meet them, & go find the books immediately. Then find someone with whom you might enjoy reading them aloud, it's the best way. & don't bother watching the animated shows. They are a disappointment & are generally devoid of all philosophy & charm.

letter from deeside (poem)

old pasture fence, kinloch rannoch (not deeside) , april 2010

poem draft.

letter from deeside, march 12.

in the backseat of a car rolling through deeside
the air is shocked with starlings; across the field
rooks peck away in the melting, & i will that
distance to melt, bring you here reeling beside me.

i want us to be the earth that piled the stones
here, in long crumbling fences dreamed
up between the roots, the yearly remembering &
forgetting held in the rings of trees;

i want to walk with you in those peripheries
beyond the edge of the fields, into the margins
of this country, among the soft yellowed bones
of sleeping grasses and the tea-coloured burn;

where the land is the same colour as spring
where we come from, the place where you are
now & the place that is ours & no longer
as we remember, shifting like a solar glory

over the peaks of our peregrinations, on
the river like sun-beaten copper, weaving
between the bare birches & overflowing
the trembling spring sands of the bank.

sometimes i just want the stillness that
can never be, for it’s too much an ache,
this passerine life: never perching anywhere
long, perpetual migration between continents—

but in the backseat of a car rolling through
deeside i suddenly felt you near me, curling
around gently my fingers like the soft claws
of a bird, wings shaking out breath:

& i felt then a nearness i never imagined,
& i felt myself touch with your own hands.

this is what i am made of.

this is my home; the land i am made of.
(a home for pollen)
(a home for seeds & vitamins!)

(a home that longs for water to visit)

(a home for wind)(this is a boll, a weevil's home)

(a forest of old wheat bones)

(a vast home, at the edge of the earth)

(cones, the tiny homes for seeds)

(double-storied home for magpies)

(a home for buds & leaves)

From Erin Moure's poem 'The Unseizable Elegy', in her new book O Resplandor:

VIII

To spring from our own earth

in the very sowing of such light; though winter

now ices lichen at the oasis of our dawn, spring

will write the length of laughter.

Springing from my own centre
where, human and alone, i'm haunted

by the net of love,
or purely and simply when winter
falls away and spring

is misting space in a wide circle
seeding hearts intimately
with the space of love's own unseizable margins.

Amazingly there is a cure

in spring,

the knowledge of seeds that speak life in the sowing

as earth already speaks of earth.

But more urgent than anything
we are seeds, we are
what wanders in all partings still,
and our place is also in the light that streams from eyes
of from a field, the field of grasses
grown before our eyes -- us with our ourness
not yet undone, though some say it hardens as do molten metals,
yet we still sow fire with our beings
to help us work in work's torrent
in the place of cherished tremors
in which our work is yet to be born.

More urgent than anything

we are seeds, and implicated

in the rising of our own selves as we hazard a way outward

to where exaltation rises,
to where parting bears the name of spring.
To be in being and laud the phenomenal, again and again

laud the phenomenal.

To be yet in being

these seeds spring up for us, unseizable

in our own earth.

geological poem #1

(all photos taken in Kananaskis, near King Creek canyon / Iyarhe na kiska (Goat Mountain)

& Marl Lake, for the loon, June 2009)

poem-in-progess.

when my father sleeps

when my father sleeps, he dreams
of the loon’s vertiginous whooping,
the strength of bones so unhollow:

envies that solid skeleton, a watery
gravity pulling it close to the earth
as he searches in the swirls of clay, ready

to remake a world. when he sleeps
he dreams he is rich like the marl
in the fens, made of sweet grey milk

to feed emptied bones, karst-ridden;
he doesn’t know where the waters go
when they disappear beneath him,
into the cerebrum of unknown crust.

when my father sleeps, he is deep
below the earth, watching fossils calcify,
haunted by the pressure of the core.

with each mottled fragment, he marvels
at the sightless molecular migration,
minerals gathering together, unifying

those million mayfly lifetimes. when
my father dreams, it’s all equal:
everything so swift to a rock.

nothing is briefer, more sudden,
more painful on the surface. the loon
dives, no one lingers more than another.
we all sleep early, sleep young.

montréal, decembre 2008

Photos above taken in Montréal, early December 2008 (right 'round this time last year, to be precise) ... ice storm. Funny how things are unearthed.

au coin d’hutchison & lajoie

you said: we’re in montréal, &

it’s snowing! not côte des neiges,

but mile-end, unlost now

in a neighbourhood of white.

parapets fog-veiled, muffled sky

falling down, a soft shy

rabbit down, translucent

boulangerie window beacon

beckoning on past lajoie & up –

je t’ai dit : quand le ciel est gris,

tes yeux sont plus bleus

& plus lucides – stop at the

épicerie, our pockets full of

clementines, & my hands, they

are full of your hands as the street

pulls us past a sculpture garden

frozen to the tracks, icy bicycle

sarcophagi, then a pigeon whirlwind,

like grey flakes upward flying,

a shivering drunken choreography

in the wind. we follow home

the dark coattails of the hasidim,

flitting winter moths in a haze

of soggy pollen, seeking window light.

* * *

late at night, an ice storm.

chimes of frozen juniper clink

on panes, basement bell choir

lulling us to sleep. outside

the snow falls, turns to rain

just above the tallest trees,

then ices on the ground, encases

the house. you reach out

for me in sleep, twining branches

of a frozen sumac, eyelashes

on my skin like snow brushed

from a railing, breath in my ear.

we change state. somewhere

we sublimated, went solid to air,

fell as snow & gathered here

& i am bursting. how do i

speak of the wild & quiet

beside you, when there is no more

space to be contained. &

hush, hush, do you hear it?

the icicles are singing – ascending,

descending the eaves like

a row of organ pipes, a hundred

roofs wide, making a remedy

for cryptic aching, a mouthful

of snow, the inner melting, trop

de la neige & de l’eau pour

un petit cœur assommé

revisiting the reclaiming

I've written about this car before, a long while ago (see October 9, 2006) but I feel compelled to post about it again... I recently re-photographed it, and was then further inspired to re-blog by this artwork, by Tin Can Forest (who I wrote about rather recently -- see March 13, 2009). A work like Autopust: Farewell to Cars (on the right is Nabozhnik), with forest spirits reveling & wrecking, sets my heart fluttering... An end to the personal motor vehicle! Tak!

And so this is a gentler reclamation of my mother's first car. Can't remember why she stopped driving it, I think my cousin drove it after her, finally it rolled to a stop out back on the acreage by the treehouse... and the hood came off, the engine was removed, and three, four, five persistent aspen sprouted up through the rusting cavity.

It's one of my favourite reminders that everything belongs to the earth. No matter how we change, shape, adulterate, mould, alter the materials we have -- even the most built, the most manufactured things the earth takes back eventually, slowly deconstructing. Held in place by the tangled fingers of vetch twisting about the disintegrating metal, this car waits to become rusted ashes. Chewed up by the silver lichen teeth, slowly engulfed in moss and leaves, the shadows of the growing trees.

At a recent seminar in my department, the head of the school here discussed his dreams for the future of anthropology and archaeology. Among many things, he called for a re-envisioning of time scales, of what it means to create, be created, to be & become. He wanted us to look beyond the conventionally given dates & times of when things came into existence, & to focus on the process of becoming, not of Aristotelian mixing of form+substance=conception, a single moment of creation. Nothing is fixed, everything is fluid & changing even as there is some underlying stability, recognizability. Rain, waves, rocks, humans, all like this.

So things are always becoming; everything is a process. There is a past-ness ever carrying on into the present & looking to the future -- what is a desk, he said, but perhaps a phase in the life of an oak tree? & so a car might be a phase in the life of metal, a phase in the life of rock, mineral, dust.

(& if I'd had a sword with me that day, (& a steadier tripod-like surface), I most definitely would've re-enacted this.)

aftonland, eveningland

sunset in august, north saskatchewan river valley, edmonton

Last weekend, I went to a concert at St. Machar's -- 12th century church in Old Aberdeen -- and listened to the choir Con Anima sing works by Arvo Pärt, Veljo Tormis, Pēteris Vasks, and Per Nørgård. It was magical -- the singers played with the space well, clustering around the pews, so close you could hear their stolen breaths, or stood all at the back of the church in the darkness with candles... when you couldn't see them, it was like the stones themselves were singing. I was introduced to Tormis's Estonian polyphonous lullabies, as well as the work of Nørgård, a Danish composer. I was not as struck by his composition, but his piece -- Aftonland (evening land) -- was based on the words of the Swedish poet Pär Lagerkvist, and they are a wonder. His plainspoken words are autumnal, elegaic, the calm acceptance of dying, ending, slow slip into shadow -- & the eternality of life not in the heavenly Christian sense, but in the good old pagan way of celebrating the beauty of decay: sowing of new seeds in the ground where the dead lie, & the ground is the very flesh of your ancestors. who provide the harvest for you. My heart flutters at the mention of the earth remembering; that's something I've recently be writing about. The earth remembers everything, because everything is of the earth.

(Another absolutely perfect song like this is Smog's Permanent Smile (lyrics here) -- decomposition has never been evoked so eloquently)

leaning sunset trees, north saskatchewan river, edmonton, august 2009

From Aftonland (words by Pär Lagerqvist, selected by Per Nørgård) -- English translation

I.

Some day you will be one of those who lived long ago.

The earth will remember you, just as it remembers the grass and the forests,

the rotting leaves.

Just as the soil remembers,

and just as the mountains remember the winds.

Your peace shall be unending as that of the sea.

and

III.

Let my shadow disappear into yours.

Let me lose myself

under the tall trees,

that themselves lose their crowns in the twilight,

surrendering themselves to the sky and night.

IV.

[...]

Into nocturnal ground you lower

the life which seems laid waste,

like the sower returning

to the earth which he sees open

the harvest that he has gathered.

midsummering

saturated light, near the solstice, the river valley, edmonton, june 2009

This was started a long while ago, right about when the photo above was taken, days before summer solstice... but only finished recently. Even though I'm coming to appreciate the Aberdeen landscape -- green woods, sinuous river, smooth sand, the singing of the sea -- I am missing home & the places I've made, the places I am made of.

midsummering

summer in the pines

& there’s sap tang

on quick tongues now,

pulse under lips &

the heat rising from

the slow breathing

of the river: between

the boughs the waxwings

hover, yellow tailfeathers

bright & sticky as caragana,

fingered sage, tangles in

the thicket of your hair.

summer & the water

below’s a smear of green

mirror, a streak of sweat

trailing a cheekbone,

& these shaking hands

caked in soft clay:

we coax the forest floor,

rustle the brush, push

each other deep

into the earth now,

pressed to a heart’s mossy

membrane, aspen-trembled

backbone. tell the woods:

remember, remember

us, in the spaces between

the roots & dark matter,

feathers & the nesting,

the water, the air.