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.