spring says

crows over the north saskatchewan river, early april, 2009

I have trouble with early spring, with a deep anxiety that seeps in with the first rivulets of melt. I'm fine now, now that it's mid-May, & the ground is dry & the river is bluegreen with summery silt. Now that there is green, there is sap-sticky air, now that the leaves have decided it is safe to unfurl, that tanagers are nesting & frogs sing coarse & elusive in the bogs.

This sort of panic is similar to the kind I feel in the mornings, especially when I wake suddenly -- I hate feeling pushed, thrust into some newness, out into something that feels stark & full of ambivalence. Not when I'm cozy in sleep, in winter, in rest -- I feel abundant then, rich & creative & safe. By mid-morning, I'm fine, because there will be purpose & direction & distraction. I'm just always a little uneasy of april's white skies, being dragged from hibernation, thrown into an unknown not quite awake, a wasteland not quite ready to change & grow.

* * *


spring says

spring says go now,
be born! & we are
pushed from

winter’s soft womb
with lungs full of blood
& amnion, a sticky cry to

separate us swift
from our hibernation,
our wantlessness, shift

us into beings with
sightless mouths open
always, desirous to reunite.

but the rough tongue
of the wind comes
like pinebark on skin,

harsh papillae of mother
cat on her kitten, licked
fresh & hairless –

go now, spring says,
now you are born!
but you are bare

& lost & red-willow
shocked, caught now
in the dialogue of air

& rock, exposed
to the crumbling language
of erosion, slow Os

leave your lips calcified,
a headlong slide
into the river,

cracked skull
shining on the wet
wash of ice. spring says

go, out under the
sky unheld by anything.
plagued by wordless

ache for the everything
we once had, we are
ghosts with eyes open,

grit our teeth in silent
yearning. go now, into
the spring & try to find

a way to survive, to
free yourself. admit that
you are wanting. admit

that you need.

dust, breath, light.

butterfly resting on old leaves, the river valley, april 19/09

pysanka gave to my mother this easter

willow sunday

bud' vysokyj yak verba, zdorovyj yak voda, i bahatyj yak zemlya.
(be as tall as a willow, as healthy as water, and as rich as the earth.)

spring melt vanishes the skins
of things, show their spines plainly,
delicate skeletons bare & shocked:

barbed wire stars of burrs
& asters, stalks of sleeping parsnip
& the bleached tendrils of grasses,

snowy epithelia peeled back
to show us the bright arteries, willow
capillaries that will feed the new

lightning shoots sprouting fresh off
last year’s bones: layers of earth
reassemble, regather the flesh

of our ancestors, transform these
new spring clothes: old woman, her
silver hair turned to green rivergrass

& arms woven with bright birch
leaves; little bird cracking a shell
of ancient bones, flying up with

egg-slick feathers, wearing waxy
new plumage made from her passed
life’s worth of that same water

& dust & breath & light.

rusalochka

footprints & breath-cracks on the north saskatchewan, a few months ago

rusalochka
(for arwen)

april, my dreams still filled with ice:
gliding & effluent, cryptic cracklings,
the slow choke of winter. but sun

slices a hole in the creaky windpipe
of the river, lets her foggy breath seep
out the cracks, pale blue edges

ragged with melt. rustless & restless,
she cannot wait for thawing; her voice
sublimates sparse into

air, hits my cells & spreads like a
snowy hoof-print melting, stretched in the
crooked dance of the spring sun.

oj, provedu ja rusalochku
azh do shtiri bor!

rusalka with her mouth open
she holds the rotten berries
of our small deaths on her tongue

spits pomegranate pits into the sweet mud
of the banks, sings to the new seedlings:
gives us water, grows us words.

bleaching in the light

strange plant skeleton, looking a bit like shriveled pasta... in the river valley, edmonton, april 19/09
butterfly in profile, river valley, edmonton, april 19/09

There are poems in gutters and drains, under the rails laid for trains, pages of novels on the pavements, in the supermarkets, stuck to people's feet or the wheels of their bikes or cars; there are poems in the desert. Somewhere where there are no houses, no people, only sky, wind, a wide-open world, a poem about a dormant grass-covered volcano lies held down half-buried in sand, bleaching in the light and heat like the small skull of a bird.

-- Ali Smith, in the story 'Text for the day', in Free Love

(This is just my favourite bit in that whole book. I love it for what it says about the omnipresence of poems. I love how she writes, such brevity, such potent imagery, such simple honest goodness truth.)

dazed spring approaches

white noon sun in the dry grasses, river valley, edmonton, april 10, 2009

tarkovsky-esque alleyway puddle reflection, belgravia, edmonton, april 10/09


(I believe I may have posted a fragment of this before a few years ago, but I feel compelled to post it again...)

Spring and All

by William Carlos Williams


By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the

waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—

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


[1923]

more waxwinging.

waxwing perusing pincherries in the tree across the alley, feb. 28/09

waxwinging

i know i said i almost
could not write about them,
these waxwings: flocks too vast
burst through a camera-lens, ever
reeling graspless beyond my gaze –

(but they’ve swished into
this one, dripped a rain of red hail
all over the sidewalks, old peels
plastering pavement, clotted blood
on all the new snow

this morning) & the trees are
ripe with them, slick wingtips
& sleek fuzz, clusters of birdfruit
buzzing songless, sreeeeeeeing
like distant water, ebbing cold –

watch them with me.
watch them seek sustenance,
beaks full of bitten-lip ashberries;
watch them swirl slow & giddy
& sure, two flights merging

like a galaxy’s spiralling tendrils, dark
sparks weaving an undulant orbit,
a tornadic dancing; watch them pull
us warm into the breast of the wind
& the clutch of their birdskins,

the telepathy of wingbeats like
mouth seeking mouth with
our eyes closed, & i feel whole
feathers of us tear & scatter,
unknowable & never named –

(pull me close & kiss me.)
the waxwings alight, fluttering
aureole crowning an ash-tree;
(i touch you & we cry out.) they
disembark now, keening

as we come together: watch
a corona shine golden
on our avian bellies, light
pulling us resonant upward
through the shaken trails of sky.

the one that knows your name.

jason has a chickadee-friend. feeding birds in hawrelak park, edmonton, march 1st, 2009

I'm parting with a lot of my books right now, because I have too many -- too many to bring over the ocean next autumn, & too many to leave behind in boxes in my parents' already cluttered basement. I'm starting to mail off (finally!) packages to friends living away, & poring over some copies for the last time in a little while. Many of them I know I will buy again, when I have a more stable bookshelf, and more space... But it's still a wee bit wistful to let them go.

My copy of Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit will always fall open to its penultimate pages, because I bent it over enough times to copy out a paragraph that was very pithy for me at the time I first read it (July 2004, 21 yrs old, oh my):



"The unknownness of my needs frightens me. I do not know how huge they are, or how high they are, I only know that they are not being met. If you want to find out about the circumference of an oil drop, you can use lycopodium powder, and I will sprinkle it on my needs and find out how large they are. Then when I meet someone I can write up my experiment and show them what they have to take on. Except they might mutate, or even disappear. One thing I am certain of, I do not want to be betrayed".



I'm now in a very different sort of mindspace than when I first read her, (& of course so much as happened!) but what still resonates the most strongly for me is the way she evokes desire and the intrinsic fear it carries. It has always struck me as deeply comforting, the way she writes of it; how she celebrates the fear of it, the faith in it, the freedom in it. This is at the very heart of every story she tells.



More from the same page in Oranges:



"There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights, who can call you home? Only the one that knows your name."

draft: part four of a poem not yet finished (though this is the last part).

dried flower bones, near sask. drive, edmonton, january 2009

iv)

i don’t know what moves me
like this, across these fields
like i have travelled them

before, following a crush
of fuzzy lupines, & your voice
stuck like a burr in my mind –

don’t know if it’s a dream
half-remembered, an aching
sightless & cellular

that is telling me i am exactly
where i need to be:
i feel your sweet seed-packets

sewn into the lining of my coat,
old-country nettles catching
on my dress –

a flock of bulbs is lies
eyeless, winter-deep in my skin,
subterranean birds curled in sleep –

onions & crocuses like
nesting dolls shedding a
thousand papery kerchiefs

& i open & i open,
& find you ever
growing there.

draft: part three of a poem not yet finished.

illuminated seedcoats, saskatchewan drive, edmonton, january 2009.

iii)

late october,
& i dream of you
in my kitchen:

o, doroha babusja!
call us in from the
fields now, from the

threshing & stoking
& singing, the chopping
of wood for the winter –

for we all eat round
the same table now,
you & every ancestor

who whispers in, pokes
a hole in the soft beeswax
of my cerebrum,

comes bearing gifts –

we’ll share that stubborn
gentleness, quiet relentlessness
& all that troubled wisdom

we’ll feast together
on roasted roots
that still taste of wet clay,

& the endless aching
centuries of sunshine
ground to flour –

we’ll make a toast
to this pantheon,
a pagan hagiography,

for there are no saints, no-one
except those who made us,
left us long before.

draft: part two of a poem not yet finished

fields, the acreage, october 2008

ii)

you had one thousand years
of orthodoxy in your mountains,
but still, you know better:

there is no paradise,
no such thresholding,
no either/or.

just the endless sweeping
of steppe-grasses, a slanting
of light on bare aspens
like honey falling on bone.

no tunnels to spit you
through blindness, no tubes
to suck you up into a bowl
pure whiteness –

just that everpresent whispering,
hushhush of the wind
in the barley,

a slipstream of voices
rushing through the wheat-ears,
calling us in from the cold.

draft: part one of a poem not yet finished.

bare trees, the acreage, october 2008.

“your eyebrows will be tangled up with the ancestors, you’ll see with the same eyes and hear with the same ears. won’t that be wonderful?” – wu-men, on solving a zen koan.

i)

out in the fields, you looked
for the last time. travelling blurs
sharpened, & you saw only

the threshed hills rolling
into the silent black hearth
of the earth.

autumn passed, the geese
flew low; your shaky hands
followed their paths,

instinctual embroideries,
left piles of pillow-down
woven with snow.

then one day you slipped
away with the owl’s glide, &
slid like the fallen aspen-spine,

into the fallow of the field.
you fell asleep, fox with a
brushtail curled in shelter,

a soul gone bone-white
& blown clean
for dreaming.

kukuvala zozulen'ka...

footsteps on the frozen river, n.saskatchewan, edmonton, january 2009

I go to this site very often, just to watch this animation over & over again... I was introduced to the lovely artists of Tin Can Forest through their book Pohádky which was given to me as a Christmas gift by my dear friend Arwen. We spent an afternoon poring over the details of each illustration, & I was delighted to be able to recognize so many of the characters once mentioned to me by my baba & interpret the pysanka-inspired iconography. Tricksters, wise women, rusalky, the forest come alive... It was also a fitting introduction to showing Jason my most beloved film, Tini Zabutykh Predkiv (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors)... as the pantheon of forest spirits figures prominently in that work as well.





I am currently particularly enchanted by this set of illustrations, called 'Domovoi' (house-spirit). Layered shelters, dark but warm, ancestral & hibernal. Certainly, some of it might be seen as sinister, especially by Western European sensibilities -- but I feel comfortable with this darkness, the ambiguity, the presence of death & the connection with ancestors tangled in the roots that brings forth life. These images evoke so many stories, feelings, songs, & I always feel this sense of wordless recognition when I look at them, wild & inchoate yet so deeply familiar; their work feels like such a home to me.

i couldn't have done anything else.

sun in the wild grasses, n. sask river valley, edmonton, jan 09

snow on old blossoms, n. sask river valley, edmonton, jan 09

Gentle Hour (mp3) -- Yo La Tengo (off Dark Was the Night, which is an excellent compilation & you should obtain it)

This song is sumptuous & lightfilled & hopeful, it is the colour of gold in these photographs, it is winter sundown & I want to live in it, lovelovelove like warm burrow in the snow.

kitchen language

iced-cherries in the cold, belgravia, dec. 23, 2008.

kitchen language

heard your voice again, babusya,
as i woke in winter lightlessness;
you crept like sticky apricot footsteps
on the cobbled linoleum, bare feet
slipping warm into the morning.

how i once grew in the thick stirrings
of your kasha accent, the butter-on-toast
of your kitchen language; it came through
the cracks in a krashanka, nourishing yolk
on hungry ears.

been three years now, but you are still
singing to me. i hear you move between
the shifting frequencies of memory,
trailing apron strings, your lilt still a morsel
of sweet almonds & milk –

do you remember the taste of it?
or is it something like the food we eat
in dreams?

but i cook now, baba. i roast beets & scoop
onions into the pan, stain my fingers rosy
& pinch the leaves of sour cabbage. i pile
the bowls high & swear psha krev when i
i slice my finger, sing

your songs to the girl with the accordion,
whisper them coyly to my lover’s ears –

i’ve set a place for you on the poppy-seed
dishes, & i can say these words back to you
now, scatter them like kernels of buckwheat
flung to the frost & the soft blue dirt
of the horizon:

i’ll bake them well into myself, drip
them like honeyed amber onto the plates of
others – alive in me so that i might still
feed you, living now in the whole
earth’s mouth.

pomegranates & pine nuts.

pomegranate, arwen's windowsill, montréal, dec. 7, 2008

Recipe time, because I am starting to fear that cooking is becoming obsolete. Lately, when I spy on everyone's groceries in the check-out line, I increasingly numbers of packaged noodles & frozen pizzas & microwaveable dinners & deli meat... I worry that cooking skills are being lost, or even worse , that they were never transmitted in the first place, with all this oven-dial-turning & microwave-button-pushing.

I am so grateful for being taught to cook by my mother & my grandmother, who let me stir stew & put homemade pyrohy in the water & sing to the cookie batter when I was three years old, who let me help cut things up as soon as I was dextrous enough to be trusted with a knife, who nourished me so well & helped me to appreciate freshly made, unprocessed food.

There are so many issues here -- I think loss of cooking can also lead to lack of respect for food, because one is less engaged in the process of creating it. When things are processed, I think we are less likely to be conscious of the source(s) of our food & what it took (in human labour, the energy of the earth, the workings of the market) to get here to us. This can lead to seeing food as less significant, more disposable. If things are easier to consume (all convenient & pre-packaged & the like), as well, we tend to consume even more, more freely, & without a second thought. & there just seems to be too much mindless consumption already.

Being in the north last year, I witnessed attitudes to food that struck me deeply. Understanding the hunter-gatherer approach to eating has really reinforced for me the respect I've always had for food, but wasn't always able to articulate. The combination of a harsh climate mixed with cultural ideologies stressing the connection of humans to animals & to the earth as a whole made people very aware of where their food came from and their responsibility to consume with care & respect. Sharing food was also of paramount importance, & I was honoured to be given meat (even though I am a vegetarian) because I understood its significance. I also respected the manner in which the animal was treated, in spirit & body; people were very much conscious of the fact that in order for them to eat, & live, other things had to die. Both animal and plant lives were seen as sacred, & that eating anything was a gift. & I find that really profound to remember now, when eating, that these deaths are necessary to sustain a life, & that it is so important to be thankful.

We have so much here. It also destroys me to think of how there is more than enough food to eat on this planet, & yet so many people have so little. Part of the reason for this is the extreme levels of North American consumption of meat & processed foods. Energy & land could go to provide vegetables & grains for far more people -- according to trophic levels, it takes ten times the vegetable matter to feed animals being raised for meat than it would to feed the same number of people a vegetarian diet.

So all of this just makes me very happy to buy fresh vegetables, because that is truly a luxury, & all of this also reminds me that cooking is not a chore, it is an experience that I am lucky to have. It makes me want to share food even more, have more impromptu dinner parties & partake in more kitchen socials where everyone cooks together & learns new recipes & then shares what they have created.

This recipe was first prepared by a friend at one of his infamous tea/delicious-food parties. I think pomegranate season is waning, but you can save it for next autumn when they are abundant once more.

* * *

Pine Nut Pomegranate Pilaf

Ingredients

Some olive oil
1 onion, chopped
½ cup pearl barley
½ cup wild rice
2 cups of veggie broth
The seeds of one pomegranate
½ - ¾ cup of pine nuts, toasted
2 tsp lemon zest, or lemon juice (or a tbsp of each)
2 tbsp chopped fresh parsley

Instructions

Heat the olive oil in a good-sized pot and then sauté the onion until nice & translucent. Then add the barley and rice, and stir about for a few seconds before adding broth and bringing it to a gentle boil.

Reduce the heat to low, cover and simmer until the wild rice and barley are tender, and most of the liquid has been absorbed (about 45 – 50 minutes).

Meanwhile, toast the pine nuts carefully in a small, dry pan over medium-low heat. Stir constantly! They should be golden and fragrant in less than 5 minutes.
Let them cool in a small bowl.

De-seed the pomegranate, zest the lemon and chop the parsley while you are waiting for the rice and barley to cook.

Once the rice and barley are tender, add the pomegranate seeds, lemon zest, pine nuts and parsley. Stir well, and cook a little more if there’s still a bit of broth left unabsorbed. Give it a fork-fluffing, and serve!

gratuitous waxwinging.

birdfruit, waxwings, belgravia, edmonton, jan. 24/09

perching waxwings, same tree, same place, same day.

This is such joyfulness, such brilliant languageplay. Besot my soul, indeed.

Here it is, with the original Russian alongside.

Where The Waxwings Used To Dwell

by Velimir Khlebnikov

Where the waxwings used to dwell,

Where the pine trees softly swayed,

A flock of airy momentwills

Flew around and flew away.

Where the pine trees softly whooshed

Where the warblewings sang out

A flock of airy momentwills

Flew around and flew about.

In wild and shadowy disarray

Among the ghosts of bygone days,

Wheeled and tintinnabulated.

A flock of airy momentwills

A flock of airy momentwills!

You're warblewingish and beguilish,

You besot my soul like strumming,

Like a wave invade my heart!

Go on, ringing warblewings,

Long live airy momentwills!

waxwing blessings.

a waxwing reaching for an ash berry, belgravia, edmonton, jan. 23/09

berry obtained by same bird, same place, same day.

New camera. Waxwings. That is really all. I love these birds. That is all. & no matter what I try to write about them, I cannot do justice to these creatures, & what it's like to stand with someone & watch two flocks of them, a skyful of thousands, merging like the unconscious arms of a spiral galaxy, their telepathic wingbeats. & their joy, of feeding & fluttering, voices like clear keening water. It stirs me so deeply, the blessing of witnessing this, that nothing I write seems to fit the scale of this, just like I can't fit their whole migration in a camera lens.

I know they will make their way into poems, sneak in to feed, leave a rain of metaphors like red berry-hail on the pavement. But I can't write about just the waxwings themselves. They just are.

Jason sent me this poem, A Rescue, by John Updike. I am fond:

Today I wrote some words that will see print.

Maybe they will last "forever," in that

someone will read them, their ink making

a light scratch on his mind, or hers.

I think back with greater satisfaction

upon a yellow bird--a goldfinch?--

that had flown into the garden shed

and could not get out,

battering its wings on the deceptive light

of the dusty, warped-shut window.

Without much reflection, for once, I stepped

to where its panicked heart

was making commotion, the flared wings drumming,

and with clumsy soft hands

pinned it against a pane,

held loosely cupped

this agitated essence of the air,

and through the open door released it,

like a self-flung ball,

to all that lovely perishing outdoors.

the flash of a hand

brushtailed grass at nearly sunset, december 28/08, in the river valley.

Czesław Miłosz

SPOTKANIE

Jechaliśmy przed świtem po zamarzłych polach,
Czerwone skrzydło wstawało, jeszcze noc.





I zając przebiegł nagle tuż przed nami,
A jeden z nas pokazał go ręką.





To było dawno. Dzisiaj już nie żyją
Ni zając, ani ten co go wskazywał.





Miłości moja, gdzież są, dokąd idą
Błysk ręki, linia biegu, szelest grud --
Nie z żalu pytam, ale z zamyślenia.





* * *





And in English:



Czeslaw Milosz



ENCOUNTER



We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.


* * *

Sunrise as a red wing rising in the darkness = oh my. This whole poem, I want to recite it over & over. The last lines are so tender, especially in Polish, soft throat rustles in a language I half-understand. Winter ache.

beauty is summoning...

dried flower heads, past sunset, the river valley, dec. 28, 2008.

winter asters, the river valley after sunset, december 28, 2008

My little camera (which has taken all of the pictures posted in this blog since December 31st, 2005) retires today. In three years, the shutter has clicked 12890 times, & its little parts & joints are wearying... the zoom function broke this past summer, now the screen shuts off at inopportune moments, the flash no longer flashes, and the dial at the top which allows you to switch functions doesn't always cooperate. It has travelled with me to France and Denmark, taken countless hiking trips in Kananaskis, and spent months with me in Yukon and Alaska during fieldwork, taking photos at -45 celsius, or at 3000m on a mountain in Kluane in the summertime. I've dropped it a few times, yes, gotten it wet & muddy & scratched, because it's in my bag everyday, so I can take photos of a bird or a leaf or a cloud or a pattern in the pavement on the way to the university or on a walk to wherever I am going...

I've gotten a new camera now, the newer, more sophisticated sister of this one. Hopefully she will have the same magical colour saturation tendencies & receptivity for light that made me love this one so well. & 'tis time for my dear FujiFinepix E500 to wear a golden-laureled lens-cap... Happy New Year! You have served me well.

* * *

I've been watching Tarkovsky again lately -- Ivan's Childhood & Stalker & Mirror -- & hungrily eating with my eyes the scenes of light & errant wind playing in the grasses, & bird-wings & watery dreams & the light on weathered faces. As well, I've been reading 'Sculpting in Time', his reflections on his films and film-making process. This is one of my favourite bits (p.200):

"In the end everything can be reduced to one simple element which is all a person can count upon in his existence: the capacity to love. That element can grow within the soul to become the supreme factor which determines the meaning of a person's life. My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give his love, and be aware that beauty is summoning him".

-- Andrei Tarkovsky.

happy solstice!

wild rose skeleton, n. sask. river valley, end of november 2008

(somewhere out in the field
we are walking, & our strong
legs tremble.) paper-birchs kneel,

fall: & the wind drifts through,
brushtailed grasses quiet hands
on my spine. come,

bury yourself in me: the edge
of the earth yawns gently,
bleached wheat wreaths paling,

stalks spent. (somewhere
out in the field lying fallow
the wind’s an old man, winding

his fingers in an old woman’s
wiry sun-silvered hair, unplaiting
the last of the woven strands

with shaking tender hands.) now
to sleep in the remnants of the sky’s
charred marrow, a gentle furnace;

rest in me. (somewhere out
in the field we hold it in our
bones, a soft glow in the root-tangle)

curlicues of fireweed embers
frozen to the horizon, to the
rib-ripples of clouds; just strip

to your soft skeleton, starry
filaments of cow-parsnip, twine
around me, now:

we’ll conduct light.

* * *

this poem has no name yet... also, i'm not sure i'm finished with it. but it wishes you a happy solstice nevertheless.