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.

solstice-time

{irises, my garden...}

{flower shadows, also my garden... perhaps the midsummer tsvit paporoti?}

{ladybug on clematis leaf in the garden}

Happy Midsummer! (slightly post-Solstice, but really, traditional celebrations for the occasion are occuring this whole week...) In honour of the light hours & the presence of the sun, I have been trying to get away from my endless computer work to be outside. Warm mornings and stormy afternoons, and daily running in the river valley, hearing the locusts singing in the grasses, sweet humming of wind in the poplars, feeling as if I am inside a massive green lung at the forest bottom. Playing music again -- I'm rededicating myself to playing oboe: Polovetsian dances, the Largo from New World Symphony, Gymnopédies, the Romance from Eine Kleine... The sound is the colour of warm honey evening light melting the sidewalk, the light that goes on forever, exhaling into the dark before breathing out a sunrise again.

In two months, I'll be up north & the days still won't be getting shorter... though I'm sure mid-August in Whitehorse will already mean yellow leaves, dying fireweed & smoky nights.

Alexander Borodin's Polovetsian Dances from Prince Igor -- the Slovak Philharmonic with Daniel Nazareth, conductor. (click there for mp3!)

mostly a note to myself.

{rays shining on the vor frelsers kirke, christianshavn, copenhagen, may 25}

{wavy grasses, windmill at the moat at kastellet, copenhagen, may 20}

{chesnut flowers fallen on the cobblestone, copenhagen, may 20}

{lilacs, botanisk laboritorium, copenhagen, june 1}

So, going to Copenhagen piqued my curiousity in Mister Søren Kierkegaard's writings.
I haven't read much yet, but I must say that thus far, he refreshes me. It seems we are kindred spirits on a few points, already, e.g. existentialists who still believe in divine forces do make me Even if he gets a little melodramatic and angsty sometimes, I overall deeply appreciate his focus on emotions and feelings and how they affect our ethics. We are not little rational logic-machines! (I deal with that far too much in academia...) Anyway, currently I am starting with 'The Concept of Anxiety' (because goodness knows, that was written for me) and appreciating statements like:

"[Anxiety is] neither a category of necessity nor a category of freedom; it is entangled freedom, where freedom is not free in itself but entangled, not by necessity, but in itself."

'Freedom entangled in itself', I think, perfectly captures both the panic/dread and yet the anticipation and potential of anxiety. All in all, it resonates.

wonderful wonderful Copenhagen

{a bicycle patiently waiting for its owner, christianshavn, copenhagen, may 25 i think}

{looking down nyhavn canal, copenhagen, may 20...}

{a swan nibbling the end of a waffle cone, nyhavn canal, copenhagen, june 1}

I am missing Copenhagen now, hyggelig København... missing, among many things:

-- sitting on the edge of Nyhavn canal in the afternoon, talking with conference-people, sun on my face melting my soft is, swinging my legs over the water

-- the walk to the Dansk Polar Centre every morning, over the Knippelsbro, the nine o'clock flock of bicycles swooping down, emerging out of the fog. chats with anyone and everyone, gravel in my shoes, the scent of salt sea & lilacs

-- certain foods, especially my usual breakfast: banana-pear yogourt, hyldeblomst (elderflower) juice, sticky sweet almond pastries, & spiced green tea.

-- swans! & the constant flight of swallows, shrill canopy of calls over the canals.

-- all that intellectual ecstasy at that Italian restaurant, that red wine, smoke in my face & some of the juiciest, most inspiring & honest conversations I've ever had... being with people who are so passionate & sincere about their fields of study... who understand the importance of emotion in academia... this never fails to remind me why I love what I study.

all of the trees were in light

{st. albans kirke, kastellet, copenhagen - may 20/07}

{hyldeblomster, swan, kastellet moat, copenhagen, same evening}

{old ramparts, swan, kastellet, copenhagen, etc}

This place felt like magic; palpable & sweet & sad. Illuminated elderflowers & preening swans, & light that you could taste - you knew where all the stories came from. Behind the calm that yearning, that heart bursting, & everything he could cling to: little tin heart, fir needles, & white sea foam blossoming on the waves.

* * *

We didn't sleep too late
There was a fire in the yard
All of the trees were in light
They had no faces to show
I saw a sign in the sky
Seven swans, seven swans, seven swans
I heard a voice in my mind
"I will try, I will try, I will try
I will try, I will try, I will try"

-- Sufjan Stevens, 'Seven Swans'

host of golden daffodils.

{tree bursting, my back alleyway}

{daffodil in my mama's garden}

{siberian iris shoots, also in my mama's garden}

Inspired by the daffodils, I think I shall post what is one of my most dearest, favourite poems ever -- Tintern Abbey, by Wordsworth. I first read the poem about six years ago, in my first year of University in English class, & ended up writing an essay about Wordsworth's writings, and their similarities with Taoist philosophies. There are so many poems that I adore & appreciate, but it's rare for me, & wonderful, to connect so spiritually to a piece of writing -- to read something & feel as if it is reflecting your own thoughts. The way he writes about this place -- Tintern Abbey, on the banks of the Wye -- I feel about so many places dear to me. The riverlot-forest outside the town where I grew up, the Kananaskis mountains, the deep bushes & streams near Fox Creek where I've fished. I love how he expresses the way in which places become a part of us, how we carry them with us, how this nourishes us:

"While here I stand, not only with the sense /Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts /
That in this moment there is life and food /For future years."

And so many other parts of the poem just completely resonate with my own spirituality, nameless but everpresent, & so strong. My beliefs are... rather personal, & solitary, & I don't mind that; it's just so lovely to hear echoes of them, sometimes, in the speech of others.

"While with an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, / We see into the life of things."

'Nature' is not something separate from people; there is no culture/nature divide, rather to understand one's place in the totality of things is simply a shift, a re-adjustment to a different way of seeing.

And this part, this idea of spirit within everything (pantheism, I suppose) is just it. IT. This 'force that rolls through all things'...

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A love of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

Growing up Eastern Rite Catholic, there is a part of me that relates on some level to Byzantine rite and ritual, perhaps because I can find some comfort in repetition, & ancestral connection. However, that tradition does not express or encapsulate what I believe, where I instinctively place my faith; I find that I relate simply to that force that inspires one to all those "little, nameless, unremembered, acts / Of kindness and of love".

sugarcube

{one of the local blue jays, sunning her or himself in the lilac bush... s/he let me come quite close before hop-fluttering away)

{tree in my alley, last week or so. i like to think that the force of the new buds bursting caused the branch to break in two}

This next poem is sticky & sappy (not the tree kind of sap, the other...) but at least putting it here will likely inspire me to fix it. Or delete the post -- I really don't write well when I feel all unrequited.

* * *

(if i were to kiss you,
i’d first press a cube of sugar
between our lips)

a little cube, sparkling;
amber-coloured grains
like spring’s early evening,
rusty call of a redbrown thrush,
smoky orange light –

tree shadows of birch-limbs
on the kitchen linoleum, our arms
up the xylophones of our
skinny little backs,

o i don’t mean to be so saccharine

you know; i would just slip
that sugarcube between your lips
like some balkan wedding ritual,
just like kusturica, ill-fated
promise of some pure & sweetened

life – but i missed your lips.

you were too busy kissing
that man with the hütz moustache
& there was no time for me
to press that sweetness to your face –

& frankly, ma belle,
i don’t believe he can temper
those salt-tears, sticky fears like
poppyseeds on the saucer, fannings
& grains at the bottom of your cup –

& o, i know we’d never last,
never a forever, no, in time
we'd dissolve leaving little tongues
sere & shaken, but i know

it could still be sweet, sweeter,

all those dusty grits of sunshine,
clouds & our sugar-golden spines
twisting us – so even
after we’d all fall apart
there’d be something remaining –

(something to linger, some shards
beyond saturation, o at least
we would remember that taste!)

* * *

Here is my favourite kitchen-dancing song of the moment:

Joro Boro, (mp3) by Balkan Beat Box... from their new album, Nu Med...

spring and all.

{little cherry-coloured buds on the flowering shrub in my yard, yet to burst, two week ago}

{rhubarb leaves unfurling look a bit like gooey subterranean-zombie brains}

{rhubarb unfurling, also about two weeks ago}

{collaged card i made for my cousin for her birthday. that bird is a redpoll finch}

* * *

This is a poem called 'Spring and All' by William Carlos Williams. I know he spent most of his life in New Jersey, but there is something quite northern-prairie-ish about these lines especially:

       ... Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

And the slow progression of the spring coming, so very Albertan:


Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken

* * *

The whole collection that 'Spring and All' is part of was apparently written as a response to T.S. Eliot's 'The Wasteland' -- Williams was trying to show the beauty and power in the natural world, in its constant reincarnation... That it truly held something other than the bleakness & inevitable decay. & that is something I have been trying to convey, I realize, in so much of my writing this spring...

lissome light of evening

{my back alley, last week before the last of the melting}

{light in the front yard elm, last week also}

* * *

(more fragmented poem-bits)

skin is warm, the scent of dust
i carry through the inland sea –

sprung from that red earth
& cradled in the hipbone of a prairie

awash in light; the saltmetal taste of blood,
lost rabbit’s foot, bright flush of the poppy;

black-starred ground, a thousand seeds
& a second sky inside of me.

* * *

(я нічого не чую, не чую нічого)

once i held you &
felt your ribs under my fingers
like little wooden xylophone rungs
i let my nails go soothing, echoes
tap-tapping to curl up in your hair –

& my sigh stifled, like
a floorboard squeaking i pray
you don’t feel the little tremors
beneath my feet, i can’t let you
feel the beating, taut
trembling shame of my telltale heart –

* * *

This is one of my favourite songs right now -- this new version of the song Cosmia (click there for mp3) by Joanna Newsom. It's on her brand-new EP, 'Joanna Newsom and the Ys Street Band...'
Her voice is so swooping & her lyrics gorgeously potent. When she sings

dried rose petal, red-brown circles
framed your eyes and stained your knuckles

it's so lovely I don't know what to do. She's mentioned in an interview that this song is about the death of a close friend, & that just makes the whole thing all the more aching. I'm especially in love with all the imagery of the moths, moths as messengers, their little dusty hearts, all that harp-plucking! Something that is alive in the evening, dwelling in spaces between:

beneath the porch light, we've all been circling
beat our dust hearts, singe our flour wings
but in the corner, something is happening!
wild Cosmia, what have you seen?

(the 'cosmia' she's singing about is probably cosmia trapezina)

seeds, leaves, lights.

{elm helicopters, in the park on my way home...}

Here are some poem fragments (some fragments more fragmenty than others) to accompany these illuminated leaves. Not sure what the poem-bits will do next, but they will bask in the sunshine right now.

* * *

how light soothes madness:

all winter i left the candles burning, my sad tallow brain
melting slowly all over the kitchen floor;

but now the sun comes, leaves me fluid, slush running
in the streets slick with the rainbow sheen of oil

& in the muddy gutter winter left a wind-torn lost mitten
dead pigeon yellowed skeleton going to dust

but i pool curbside, a flowing laugh, reflecting elm
branches rooted in blue sky,

the geese flying home calling:
echoing over the gravelly riverbank, the silty delta

shines back all that light & the constant
beyond us

* * *

{leafy parchments, in the river valley when there was still snow}

* * *

how light wakes the earth,
presses its fingers down through
melting snow & coaxes

those young bulb-flowers
pushing up waxy beaks
through dead leaf-lids, her eyes
now open & thirsting at the sun;

how light washes our faces,
each ray like a sweet wafer
on our tongues

& this is what saves us:
(this communion)

its strong hands part strands
of despairing, this something
that exists regardless; how this
earth (for)gives.

* * *

{old wild rose stems, in the river valley a few weeks ago as well}

* * *

you don’t have to tell me;
i know there is no cure.

bloodsap only lasts for
so long, the marrow going
brittle, & all the sweet syrup dry.

yet somehow there is always
something to soothe the sadness:

your bone-white aspens, the fuzz
of their buds alit, the haloes of catkins,
& above that chaotic hopak of crows;

dry seeds of the elm shake out
the winter, wind’s sussurous, soughing rustle,
translucent parchments shining

over bending red willows, cut branches
in their green shock of brightness,
the simple gift of what saves us –

we twist & ache but
there is always that dark wet earth
with us,

all those seeds springing simply from
the chornozemlya of the heart –

* * *

archers of an afterthought.

{little stick-saplings at the place in my forest called the edge of the world}

{feather caught on a wild rose bush, also at riverlot}

{a rabbit's lost foot. alas, unlucky rabbit!}

There's a beautiful song on Andrew Bird's new album 'Armchair Apocrypha' that I am loving very much right now, a simple little elegaic song called Scythian Empires (click there for the mp3). It's not just that I have a thing for my distant, horse-back-marauding, golden-grave-good-making, ornate-anthropomorphic-animal-tattoo wearing ancestors, but because this song is such an elegant little thought about the varying degrees of (im)permanency that everything, that we all, possess.

Scythian Empires by Andrew Bird

five day forecast bring black tar rains and hellfire
while handpicked handler's kid gloves tear at the inseams

their Halliburton attaché cases are useless

while Scotch-Guard Macintoshes shall be carbonized

now they're offering views of exiting empires
such breathtaking views of Scythian empires

Scythian empire
horsemen of the Russian steppe
Scythian empire
archers of an afterthought

routed by Sarmatians
thwarted by the Thracians
Scythian empire

kings of Macedonia
and the Scythian empire

muddy with twigs & branches.

{red willows, riverlot, april 7th}

{grove, riverlot, this past saturday}

{illuminated windblown grass, riverlot field , also this past saturday}

There is a very new Björk song out now, called Earth Intruders (Mark Stent Extended Mix, mp3) ... It's a powerful song, with all her words creating these images of bones being reconstructed, muddy excavations, endless marching pulsing on, everything flashing by quickly, fragmented -- but with a certain serene urgency despite all that, & it makes me think of spring, the agency of the earth, & how the earth renews itself, heals itself, & forgives.

willow sunday

{pussywillows! actually, these aren't willow trees; they're aspen poplar. so these are pussypoplars}

{i did find actual pussywillows down by the river, but there were only a few so i didn't want to cut them to take home -- so i brought the more abundant poplars instead. they're still soft, just like kitten feet}

* * *

Bud' vysokyj yak verba, zdorovyj yak voda, i bahatyj yak zemlya.
(Be as tall as the willow, as healthy as water, as rich as the earth)

-- Ukrainian blessing for Willow (Palm) Sunday

vesna prijshla! spring sprung!

A belated happy spring, with little beaky alien-tulips from the yard, pushing up their hungry waxy leaf-mouths to the sun.

I saw Paris to Kyiv perform at the Citadel last weekend. Alexis Kochan's voice was so gorgeous -- warm, with both kindness & urgency. Between songs, she read a little snippet of a poem by Oleh Lysheha, which made me very very happy, since I really love his work. She read an excerpt from Swan, which I found translated here (by Lysheha & James Bradfield):

...At last I entered your bright museum
Over the river channel
Just to get warm. The cold rain
Seemed not to stop,
And no one was there . .
But in the corner, under glass
A pair of tall boots was drying
After lying idle somewhere
In a peat bog or a swamp . .
The feet that owned them
Are stones now
Under rippled laces,
With sharpened toes . .
I couldn’t stop staring . .
[...]
Does anyone believe
I have been there? . .
That my feet felt so comfortable
In those shoes? . .

And Alexis said that's how she feels when she hears the old old songs, & I know exactly what she means. Especially when the seasons are changing, fall & very much the spring -- the dark crumbling earth & the shiny white bone-trees of the weeping birches, the wind tasting like dust & light.

hometown.

{budding poplar in the field near my old elementary school}

{dried-up rose hips in red willow park, by the river}

{half-frozen shopping carts abandoned in the river. somehow a sad summation of suburbia}

{self-portrait, red willow park. along the bike path where the trees grow over in flickery archways in the summer long & straight all the way to sturgeon road}

Some photos taken on a walk Friday afternoon, from the bus exchange to my parents' house, my old house. Not yet spring. That's all.

* * *

Also, The Mountain Goats. John Darnielle writes the simplest, most oddly compelling lyrics. & the way he sings them, he can get away with saying things like 'our love is like the border between Greece and Albania' & it sounds so very apt. & very true. & his words, they etch themselves on the tip of my brain -- 'new found rich brown deep wet ground' has been floating around in my mind & off my tongue since I first heard 'Going to Scotland'. Other times, his phrases are much more unassuming like 'wild sage growing in the weeds' or 'a tricky young southerly wind' yet they are are also evocative. & they all sound like they were created in a single moments, like the songs sprang fully formed into life, dropped onto his head like pinecones, little seed-note spilling out. Like they floated around until, shadowing him like birds soaring, then descended suddenly & overtook him & he simply had to pick up a guitar, press record & sing before they flew away again.

The Mountain Goats -- International Small Arms Traffic Blues [mp3] (from the album 'Tallahassee')
TMG -- Whole Wide World [mp3] (from 'Sweden')
TMG -- Going to Scotland [mp3] (from 'Nothing for Juice')

blood oranges, poem edit, etc.

{a very delicious organic Moro blood orange, my afternoon snack today.}

{Though I've been assured they do get regular oranges in Whitehorse, will I be able to eat blood oranges there next spring?}

{so tasty! so sweet & juicy! fruit of springtime}

Aside from gratuitous blood orange love, I have edited my ghazal poem slightly. Using an established form in a poem is still very novel to me. Other than experimenting with tanka, haiku, & sonnets (oh, junior high english class) it is something I just haven't done. I find some poetic forms ridiculously contrived, there is something so elegant & elegaic about the ghazal. Despite the second couplet's repeated phrase, there's something freeing about it.

* * *

of waxwings.

they come as a gift, this sudden crescendo of waxwings:
a blue sky shattered, feathered filaments of waxwings.

& when i dragged you outside, took you from your tea
it was just to share with you the gift of waxwings –

& they are darting so intricately, this ephemeral embroidery
edging our eyes, the clouds with ashy stitches of waxwings.

& from beak to beak they pass elm-bark and ash-berries,
your lips were red as the throat-flutes of waxwings –

& how they alight! then leave, reverberate urgency
surging through us softly a warm wind of waxwings –

& an echoing srreeeee leaves an ache so sharp, saddened
as grey wings sweep the air, the dissolving of waxwings.

& their migration: simplicity that deconstructs me,
leaves me earthbound & hungry for the flight of waxwings –

& would that i could hold you so tightly, though i see
we can’t be as whole as a flocking of waxwings –

our bright hearts lay on the snow, remnants of chokecherries
how graceful waves scatter us, trees dripping of waxwings –

o would that i could speak to you & ease you of grieving!
but my words flutter inchoate, distant keening of waxwings.