time in the white light

{jasmine bush, just past 114th st... it sometimes takes me a long time to walk home when they're in bloom, as i am compelled to stop & bury my nose in each one i see}

{more jasmine blossoms... last week. sadly all the petals have fallen now}

This poem, one of the last Roethke ever wrote, is very very good, painfully so -- so acutely descriptive & epic, yet with such sweet little lines, like "What I love is near at hand, / Always, in earth and air." (see part III - my favourite)

The Far Field -- Theodore Roethke

I find parts of it just so (brutally, in places) lovely, it's both sensual and spiritual, certainly the most lovely & poignant poem of coming to terms with mortality. (I'm not one for all that raging against the dying of the light...) Sometimes when I am at my most serene, I can almost feel this kind of peace-making with finitude, with dying, being a little easier -- because of that flash of realization that nothing is really finite at all.

All finite things reveal infinitude:
The mountain with its singular bright shade
Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow,
The after-light upon ice-burdened pines;
Odor of basswood on a mountain-slope,
A scent beloved of bees;
Silence of water above a sunken tree :
The pure serene of memory in one man, --
A ripple widening from a single stone
Winding around the waters of the world.

(Roethke, The Far Field, Pt. IV)

I know this, exactly. & I think the poem haunts me ever more so, because this idea of union with trees & shadows & earth & air reminds me very much of things my father has said to me, on the rare occasions we have spoken about things we believe in.

& it came a heat wave...

{caragana pods, getting ready to spit their little black seeds in the heat}

{my dog, prancing, so happy that it's cool enough to finally go outside}

{not a particularily flattering picture, but i like the light, andsomehow it's exactly how i feel in the heat: dishevelled, sticky & glowing}

Songs for nights too warm to sleep:

Saw-Edged Grass -- Alina Simone (placelessness)
La Denigracion -- Bowerbirds (Danger at Sea)
Pickerel Lake -- Sufjan Stevens (Michigan Outtakes)

white asters

{maple leaf in the woods, london, on., june 2007}

{grasses & white asters, london, on., also june 2007}

Sometimes when I write poems I come up with such small little disjointed pieces it feels like I am some sort of archaeologist; I can imagine how whoever found tablets with the fragments of Sappho must have felt, trying to reassemble them. At the early stages of poem, all I have are tiny flashes, shards in the dirt that are clear yet disconnected, and I have to figure out how to re-unite them.

[fragments]

1.

dwelling in the togetherness
of our (im)perfection:

2.

we found the secret of the
heartshape wood-knot, black acacia.
days of catlike wandering & russian fairytales,
lying in the grassy chaos of the ruins:

(you know
i could never be with someone
who didn’t understand the beauty
of burnt by the sun)

3.

we are prowling for something,
& our little truths are filled with light,
in every space between the leaves,
our breathing, wind in the long grasses,
cat-tails resonate with blackbird notes
& the parallel songs
of locusts humming in the dust.

4.

something about her
makes me dream
of waking up facedown in wet grass
tongue-ful of white asters.

5.

but every time i am shaken
from that languour
by my promise of protection

all tangled in the roots of this;
to take every ache &
sun on the pool
through the willow, weeping
thick with carpglint,

braid it into your hair
& hold you without thought
of myself, or possession,

remembering the ethic
of my love

6.

don't know how
to voice the truth that's
trapped me here,

struggling in the leghold,
tender snapping of my
bones like white flowers
snaring the stems leading
to the heart;

but i am not shadowy
nor vulpine i just don't know
how to speak the words

flying away like blackbirds flushed
from the rushes, red slashes on their
wings like startled blood --

on this high hill in a year's turning...

{three little post-solstice pictures, me in all three}

Though I generally like to refrain from writing anything too rambly & revealing here, I sometimes have the urge to write things that might be a little self-indulgent, & are more of a personal record than anything else -- things that are not likely very interesting to virtual passersby. However, it was my birthday recently (well, two weeks ago) & I am going to indulge myself by talking about that birthday. I mused to myself then that he numbers seemed to be getting rather high & important-sounding... though really, to me, the chronology is quite meaningless. Really: what is a 24-year-old in my society 'supposed' to be like? What 'should' I be doing? It's really quite absurd when I think about it. Sometimes I swear I'm six years old, chasing after rabbits in the yard, spinning around... (see above for photographic evidence) Or, this evening, I am already an old baba, curled up in my living room knitting a sock, the news on mute, listening to birds sing. I am not, as it seems so many of my peers are, engaged, pregnant, or buying a condominium in the suburbs. (It seems every time I log on to bloody Facebook, I find out that a friend of a friend is getting married)

It's just so strange because I am not at that place in my life at all. I am working on my M.A., I am about to go do fieldwork in two months, I have no idea where I'll do my PhD, but I'm willing to migrate. & this birthday, I think, has somehow made me feel a little more sturdy, despite my recurring spasms of a rather frightening self-doubt. Am I bit more capable, perhaps, somehow? I accomplished a lot this year, I think. & I feel a little more aware of this sense of potential for the next years... and I am constantly awed by the opportunities that are available to me. There is truly so much before me; I am a lucky little fish with dear friends & a wonderful family, who has a lot of freedom right now to learn & experience & do so much. & I don't have to worry about down payments on a house or what a partner might think of me wanting to go to school in Scotland or do doctoral research in the Sakha Republic for an indeterminate amount of time.

On my 14th birthday (10 years ago!) I decided to emulate Emily of New Moon -- I wrote myself birthday letter, telling my future self what I envisioned myself doing by this point in my life. (I was bad & actually opened it last year, actually, because I was moving houses & was in a purging fit...) but anyhow, I am pleased to report that I am fulfilling a lot of things I had hoped for myself back then (especially in terms of my education), and I daresay my 14-year-old self would be a little bit proud of me now. I am doing what I want (even if I don't always know what exactly it is what I want!) & despite the tumultousness and uncertainty that comes with it, I am deeply glad of this. I can say I wouldn't want it any other way. I am full of that cusp-feeling right now, & full of gratefulness, and I just hope I can do justice to the abilities I've been given & do things that are good & useful & fulfilling.


The loveliest birthday poem: Poem in October by Dylan Thomas.

prairie smoke

{three-flowered avens, above the red deer river}

{lonely tree, blackstone-chungo forest area}

{ram falls}

i wanted so much for the land to heal you this time, wanted to hear it say shhh i know every tree on the hill rock on the mountain ache in your body & it would all seep away, purple blossoms dissolving to prairie smoke, campfire ashes sparking out out out into the twilight that never comes, just a rolling blanket of echoes & storms. but it wouldn't leave you, it stayed all night as thunder leapt the arching curves of the foothills -- frozen like a deer's body mid-run over the rocky slope of the bank. in the morning your bones ached rapid-white, endless blind rushing, slowly eroding.

on the forestry trunk road...

{somewhere north of Nordegg, Blackstone/Chungo Creek Forest area}

{meadow, either Elk Creek or South Ram River, above the falls}

{bluebells, campsite at the Red Deer River}

{the Red Deer River, young & still in the mountains}

{Waiparous Creek valley}

Come gather yourself from the grass, the branch, the earth.
Walk here, sleep well, on the ground that is not yours, but is yourself.

-- Ursula K. LeGuin, 'Exhortation from the Second and Third Houses of the Earth', in Always Coming Home

(Always Coming Home is a profoundly beautiful book.)

shadow & silty heat.

{me, by the river, may}

{willow blossoms, by the river, same evening}

These are old photos, from mid-May before I left for Denmark -- both of my secret stretch of riverbank on the North Saskatchewan. Here is their accompanying poem : (again, in a very early state...)

i think of you when i visit
the river, sometimes singing
when i think no one will hear.
just like the cemetery songs,
my mother spilling lemon pepper.
tearburn of khortytsya hits the earth.
another spring, & we are aging,
remembering the
old country we never knew.

by the river, the dark-eyed juncos
go fan-tailing, bursting aspen candles,
a forest of green fireworks suspended
like chandeliers; & i slip into the
giddy languor of evening, of one
who was born here & knows nowhere
else. never has to ache for home.

on the deadfall, the sound of the nuthatch
saying kék, kék.
i remember you telling me
that’s the hungarian word for blue,
sky bright as its silky underbelly.

but there were no magyar neighbours here,
you told me. no markets, no mamalyha, no
distant wreath of mountains. i remember
your eyes over the valley,
the cracked whitemud of the riverbank,
an endless sparkling, the cacophony
of wood-ducks. where is that
village violin?

you crossed the ocean too late, you said.
too old past twenty to emigrate.
after a certain time, a transplant’s
roots will never quite take. oh, they
might grow, yes, but they will
ache for some other chernozem, or
the salt of carpathian rocks.

but i am the kalyna seeds that drifted,
carried by birds, in beaks & feathers,
in your apron pockets.
my mother landed
in this ground, grew well here.
strong bones, pale branches like
you did, but a waxy sap,
a tolerance for frost.

& i think of you, passed on,
wondering if the swallows stayed
here with you, or
carried you home. followed the
flow of the sky in the flow of the light
til west became east, a slow migration
of shadow & silty heat.

i think of you when i see
the black earth of the spring fields
churned up, the luminous wind
& the scent of sweet willow honey.
it’s not yours, no, but it's a rich land
& it will nourish you:
here are my red fruits, my
petals & plumage, feeding you now
with what i am.