sleepy sparrow

Nesting in a sunny nook on the Sakha Teatra fountain... (Yakutsk, Sept. 2010)

Oh, did I wake you with my camera-shutter? Let me pick you up & put you in my flannel pocket!

(Yakutsk, Sept. 2010)

It's getting colder in Yakutsk, down to about -20C now, and the cheeky little sparrows are getting spherical.

sviristeli!

Yes, more little waxwings, sviristeli,* perching on ash and red-currant trees in the Zalog area of Yakutsk. More of them, because as I said, these creatures make me a wee bit less homesick. I never saw one last year in Scotland, & perhaps that's why I suffered such an acute sense of dépaysement** the whole time.

*that's Russian for waxwing, sviristel'. I don't yet know the word in Sakha.

** new French word I learned that I love... It refers to the sense of disorientation you always feel when not in your home country. It's more than homesickness; it's the feeling of never quite adjusting to living amongst the new scenery, even after you start to feel at home.

waxwing silhouettes

Waxwings again, Yakutsk, October 2010.

Silhouettes in autumn afternoon sun. I love when the wind ruffles their head-feathers, giving them wee mohawks.

waxwings on wires

Bohemian waxwings on wires, Yakutsk, Sakha Republic, Russia. October 2010.


I wish I could express what a comfort it is to me that my favourite bird lives in this city. It's subtle things like this that make me feel a little more at home.

communication

Graffiti on the giant grey sphere (the moon, I think) on Kirova street, Yakutsk, Sakha Republic, Sept. 2010

Sakha language graffiti on the stone in the old town, commemorating the city's founding, Yakutsk, Sakha Republic, Sept. 2010

More moon-ball graffiti, Yakutsk, Sept. 2010

Dear blog (which is nearly 5 years old!), & blog-readers, if you are out there,

Contrary to what it may seem, I do still intend to write things here! Yes! However, in the past month, I've been a little busy, packing up & travelling off to Siberia (the Sakha Republic/Yakutia -- I'll be based in the city of Yakutsk) where I'll be for 9 more months, doing my PhD research in (linguistic) anthropology.

As for exactly what I am up to, I am still not so good at the little research-in-a-nutshell descriptions, but mostly I tell people I am interested in their experiences of bi- and multi-lingualism (in this case, Sakha-Russian, primarily, with some other local languages possibly thrown in the mix, like Evenki) in terms of how they live their lives through language. And of course, how processes like urbanization affect these sorts of things, all the politics, global, federal, local, etc. But lately, I've particularly been trying to discuss how through language and communicative practice, we experience, and express the world. We make connections, create relationships through language. And I am interested in the choices people make when they use language, in terms of what influences those choices, and in turn how those choices shape their lives, & the lives of others.

I will be blogging here, anyway, but mostly posting poetry & photos & such. But I hope soon to start a Yakutsk-blog in particular, which will probably be mostly image-based (to give myself a break from all the language work, perhaps) or tell you small stories about the quirks of quotidian life here as I discover the place.

But there's no blog set up yet, as this past month has been hectic & I have been trying to settle in & get started. In the meantime, some Tove Jansson, from Moominland Midwinter, on how sometimes it is difficult to make connections, to make our words & our selves understood:

(but first, if you want to make yourself understood -- at least a wee bit -- in Sakha, you can see a list of basic phrases here!)

A herd of small creatures with spindly legs came blowing like a wisp of smoke over the ice. Someone with silvered horns walked stamping past Moomintroll, and over the fire flapped something black with large wings, which disappeared northwards. But everything happened a little too quickly, and Moomintroll never found time to introduce himself.

"Please, Too-ticky," he asked, pulling at her sweater.

She said kindly: "Well, there's The Dweller Under the Sink."

He was rather a small one, with bushy eyebrows. He sat by himself, looking into the fire.

Moomintroll sat down beside him and said: "I hope those biscuits weren't too old?"

The little beast looked at him but didn't reply.

"May I compliment you on your exceptionally bushy eyebrows?" Moomintroll continued politely.

To this the beast with the eyebrows replied: "Shadaff oomoo."

"Eh?", asked Moomintroll, surprisedly.

"Radamsah," said the little beast fretfully.

"He has a language all his own, and now he believes that you've hurt him," Too-ticky explained.

"But that wasn't my intention at all," said Moomintroll anxiously. "Radamsah, radamsah," he added imploringly.

This seemed to make the beast with the eyebrows really overcome by rage. He rose in great haste and disappeared.

"Dear me, what shall I do?" said Moomintroll, "Now he'll live under our sink for a whole year more without knowing that I just wanted to be friends with him."

"Such things happen," said Too-ticky.

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