Posts filed under 'Poetics'
December 12th, 2008
On Friday’s, on a white beach, I eat clams from the shell.
On Friday’s I swim in an open bay with friends. Our bodies traced by phosphorescence.
On Friday’s I read the Kanji of stranded seaweed. The markings of love.
…These memories rise, then break like foam on a spent wave.
They play at the crossroad of muscle and neuron like bits of bobbing driftwood–unreachable.
And on that corner, I stand and pray that prayer will take me back there?
It was said of the Baal Shev Tov that one day in a pasture he made sheep stand and pray.
Later, it was reported that he said this altering thing: he said your soul has a wide genealogy, quite apart from you.
When I heard this I wondered if I was ready to believe, that like a school of fish, an ant hill, a black-out of waxwings, a weave of sphagnum, we humans are one organism, the magnitude of which is love?
…Ready, some day, to believe this without a molecule of diminishment for any particular thing?
Perhaps on that day, the nothing we have, will not be taken from us.
On that day, the riddle will transfigure.
On that day, sheep will stand and pray on their own.
And my Friday’s will return.
Technorati Tags:
Baal Shev Tov,
Love
September 22nd, 2008
A plug for a friend: This Thursday, 7:30 PM, at Edmonton’s Holy Trinity Anglican Church, Andrea will be celebrating her new CD, The Same Inside. (Tickets)
Having worn laser grooves in her last CD, Heart’s Hotel, I’ve been waiting patiently for this release–as has a crowd of others.
Knowing Andrea, The Same Inside is a perfect title. Andrea’s same-inside, is a blend of grace, compassion, humour, and large-hearted humanism, with a kind of, well-behaved-women-seldom-make-history honesty. And it’s honesty that comes out in her music and her voice. A voice that’s soulish, earthy, and wise–and sweeter than sangria.
Buy the CD. And enjoy.
Below are a few excerpts from Andrea’s interview with the Edmonton Sun’s, Fish Griwkowsky. (Click here to read the entire interview)
…on the CD’s title:
….the title might make you wonder, well, what exactly is the same inside? The obvious answer is House herself, having successfully become an adult and a mother. Hey, she even got married this month - but more on that later.
…on the gifted Chris Smith:
I’m a songwriter who needs a good producer," House offers. "Chris Smith knows how to take my songs and colour correct them, and he can talk to musicians in a way that makes sense to them. In fact, he’s so good at it I married him last week. Seriously, Chris and I actually got married on Monday, Sept. 8.
…on why the CD release party is in a church:
I have a romantic obsession with churches. I learned to sing with my grandma in a clapboard church in Arrowwood, Alta. My dad carved the alter table. It’s the size of most people’s living rooms. I miss it.
(btw: Lovely wedding picture taken by your’s truly…not anybody at the Sun.)
For tour dates and any other information, check out Andrea’s website as well as her Myspace site (See sidebar Links and Blogs).
August 22nd, 2008
I walk in very tall grass. Its green is beginning to drain and I smell the colour orange. The ripening heads are over my head. They tilt and swing. The grass stings my face in the wind. I receive a light flaying. Like a baptism. I am alone but unafraid. The sun and sky are eternal and friendly. I can walk or run. It does not matter. I can love or hate. It matters not. I will miss dinner. I will eat grain. I am inside and outside. It is all the same.
I wish again for tall grass. Grass to be lost in. Knowing that inside and outside is all the same.
August 15th, 2008
Today I wear a white T-shirt with nothing on it. I wear it blank as an affront to this world of mind-arresting slogans.
And I wonder…in an age of near reality surrounded by fabricated stimuli, does a body forget?
Reminded…
As I walk I feel a tenuous wake of air curl around my lenses and brush my eyelashes.
As I walk in the warmness that is an August morning I peel a small wooden match using my fingernails until I’m left with a point that fits easily between my teeth and I push out a poppy seed stuck there from breakfast toast.
As I walk I feel my heels compress the soles of my sandals and hear a gritty reply from the stones that lodge in the gavel parking lot.
And I consider that there is nothing wrong with our age that an attentive walk couldn’t fix.
July 31st, 2008
Every once in a while, life notices you. It gives you the equivalent of a free grande Sumatra. And those things you wrestle with and writhe in seem manageable. On such a once-while, you decide–because of that espied fingernail of freedom–to take your day and ride it–ride it the way a psalm-god rides upon a cloud. And you know, in that tumble of time, that good accidents don’t come along often enough and that if you refuse the gift just because of the rarity of those good accidents, because you’re in some pool of adolescent huffiness that refuses everything because of not getting what you want when you want it, well, then you shrink. A little piece of you, some part inside, shrinks, and hardens. And before you know it you’re missing all kinds of good accidents just because you can’t recognize them for what they are…little packages of good, (like plant slips). And, at best, your life resembles a Barry Manilow tune, and you’ll get stuck there, never able, never having the patience, to wait for that CD to end so that just maybe, Taj Mahal, or Bob Marley, or maybe even Sherry-D Williams "doing" poetry (with everything that that implies) comes on. It’s the adolescent part of you that interests you, that is, on those times you rise above. You can see its cloying desperation, vainly pulling and sucking slivers of achievement off of someone else’s life and you suddenly, or not so suddenly, see how long you’ve skidded under that weight like a steel runner under a shit-sled. Your bones crunched like half frozen horse turds. And you wonder aloud, even groaning as you walk a busy sidewalk, "when and how or how and when you’ll ever grow up…? But then you remember you’ve got today. And, you, sink, into, it, putting away the thoughts of your immaturity so that you stop circling and so that you allow yourself to be flung off that desultory orb and ride with god, upon any old cloud, even if only for one split second taste of ice cold rarified air. And that little notice from life prepares you, like summer-fallow, for the receiving of adulthood.
July 21st, 2008
The whistling of the bottle-picker at the dumpster this morning was strangely comforting. It was a tune that at that hour, or in that context, I couldn’t recognize. Most likely it was his own tune. His up-before-the-birds tune. His early round-making tune. No matter that it couldn’t be named. The easy melody was charming enough to evoke a small delight and I caught myself smiling, even at three AM.
I contrast that to the self-conscious sub-woofers that use the eternal duration of the adjacent red light to showcase a bass riff that assaults my resting ribcage turning it into a kind of snare drum. There is no hour or context for that. Music that oppresses cannot be justifiably called music. Can it? Yes, I know, ear of the beholder and all that. Still–and of course I might just be showing my age here–but when it comes to tunes, I like to be invited in, not invaded.
And that is what the bottle-picker did. Invited, I accepted, and hardly noticed the rattle of his shopping cart or the dumpster lid dropping on its metal self. All was eclipsed by his tune and tone. And after all, I could hardly begrudge him his three AM stop, it was the middle of his work day.
July 14th, 2008
A stout man, coffee carefully in hand, takes the entire allotted walk-time to cross Jasper Avenue. It’s his right of course, but his exaggerated caution is just an irritant to commuters. No one shares his approach to the morning–a Monday at that. I understand the auto-emotion and thank civility for showing up and saving his seatbeltless life.
Sometimes, more than manners, it takes a fundamental movement of the heart to see past the ruts of a Monday–the day we naturally know to be born under a bad sign…the day that’s down even before it has learned to crawl. Sometimes, to see your way to a manageable spirit in the perpetual ruins of a Monday it is necessary to employ certain strategies.
For some, counting upon shear endurance, plunging in works; for others, it seems, a new hair colour is an imperative. For still others, me included, it’s within the spark of a caffeinated second, that we see how a small change here, an adjustment there, a new habit or a dropped one (not coffee) might, over time, reach that wellspring of not merely Monday but daily contentment. And so we resolve a correction while convincing ourselves we won’t add to all the previous choked out resolutions. And under the fuelled flirtatious spell of sanguine intentions we envision ease-of-handling coming over us like a breaker on a beach.
But when this passes, remembering that it takes effort to get the emotional combination right to live out even a single day, we go back to experimentation. Like painters, we layer our feelings until the feel is right, or at least close. We’ve learned, even before we entered work-a-day life that there are no pure colours. We just try to find our best shade and stay under it as long as we can. And then live in the hope that the birds of suffering will not be able to snatch away the seeds of meaning.
Perhaps however, the stout man, attentive to his allotment of time, mindful of what is at hand, already has this all figured out.
Technorati Tags:
Mondays,
Emotions
July 11th, 2008
The young Hindi couple love deeply. They are unaware of me and wouldn’t care in any case; even, I suppose, if I stood and mocked their impetuous infatuation or their daylight groping.
They share one chair. They are alone in this universe. The dark girl glances furtively around, she feels the hand of her lover under her sweater and knows she should be embarrassed but she can’t think to be.
The table changes occupants.
An older couple take the place of the lovers. They talk quickly and awkwardly about their house keeping habits. She has a voice on the doorsill of shrill. They are getting to know one another and I wish they would have done this some other place. Now they talk of fabric and car interiors.
He wonders about the years ahead as he listens to this nervous nasal voice prattle on about how bad she is at curling. He weighs his 
loneliness against this future and stays on. And now he finds himself encouraging a conversation about the length of shirt sleeves. She listens with the side of her face and questions her own investment.
The whole thing rises in volume and inanity and I prepare to leave. Yet…I know these two have a story, have felt passion, have cried during a sunrise and a birth, have felt the human predicament of death and loss. They too long for happiness. And they know something the young lovers don’t–they know about a heart in conflict with itself.
July 6th, 2008
Writers write…still believing–to paraphrase Elie Wiesel–in the dream that a word rightly written takes on the power of a deed.
This past weekend, at my first Canadian Authors Association conference, I was brought into contact with these dreamers. To a person, from seers to pop-pundits, these writers still believe that that “thousand-words-worth” a picture may elicit, will still always take you to the heart of what a picture cannot help but conceal. And today, in a world gone media-graphic, the counter weight of this faith is culturally imperative. Why? So we can imagine in contour and save ourselves from the great flattening.
Hats off to these hope-ers. And next time you’re in, say, Audreys Books, pick up a book by a national or local author.
A highlight, among the many highlights, was listening to the winning CAA authors read from their work. The Literary Award winners were: poet Asa Boxer for The Mechanical Bird, dramatist Colleen Murphy - for The December Man, Mark Haroun won the Emerging Writer Award, history writer Robert Wright for Three Nights in Havana, and fiction writer Paulette Giles for Stormy Weather.
Technorati Tags:
Canadian Authors Association,
CanWrite 2008,
Asa Boxer,
The Mechanical Bird,
Colleen Murphy,
The December Man,
Mark Haroun,
Emerging Writer Award,
Robert Wright,
Three Nights in Havana,
Paulette Jiles,
Stormy Weather,
Audreys Books,
Elie Wiesel
Front Porch Pictures
