Me, I’m still taking escalators. Waiting to sprout my coloured wings. Wings that I pray will also look like Georgia O’keefe paintings.
The piece is called Flying. The artists are John and Kathy Hooper. The sculpture lives in Toronto down in the financial gulches and gorges–where hopefully it gives inspiration to a few passers-by. A place that no doubt needs both inspiration and beauty.
Thank you to poet Wendy Morton for shooting it and sending it over.
The sun is coming up over the roof of the cabin. Light through the trees, trees in half-leaf–and through the spruce.
I’ve just revived the fire that I banked up last night with green poplar. I turned over a log exposing hot coals, threw on some kindling and with a few lung-gusts flames leaped up like happy dancers.
It’s church here in the cotton woods. I take my coffee in an old Christmas mug and watch the fire and feel the sun and know–like William Carlos Williams knew about the red wheel barrow–that somehow, so much depends upon the blue-headed axe buried in the chop block. And the green canvass chair beside the wood pile. And the cooking grate leaning on the sap-loaded spruce tree. And the blue-jays, nut-hatches, and the chickadees and their black-caps.
And my Co-op cap. A cap my dad used to wear. A cap I had retrieved from his cabin after he died.
My dad would like it here. He’d understand about church here. He would sit in the green canvass chair and wonder, brood and ponder, while the smoke would shift and sift up and around and through his black hair and cap.
in the dry valley
wild from autonomy
parched from seclusion
flayed limbs desire sinew
bones long for flesh and place
a kitchen with a window
brown wooden chairs
a chipped table
friends
gin
Under the Oregon blue sky lives the Pacific. At its edge–between scores of capes and smaller spits of land–are broad 20-mile swaths of white sand. Batches of beaches.
And just off shore are the needles and sea stacks–mocking endless waves with their basalt personalities. Eventually they’ll succumb. But in the mean time they give lodging to puffins, black oyster-catchers, cormorants and murres. There’s a whole promiscuous community that shacks-up on these rocks.
The most famous sea stack is Cannon Beach’s Haystack Rock. Eroded by a million photographs, Haystack does enter the wonder scale. It’s a massive piece of volcanic detritus. And walking the beach it acts as an ocular magnet–perhaps an oracular one as well.
I’m ready for oracles. At long last. The mind mist has cleared and I’m back in love with the earth. Back in love with all the things you can’t own, and happy things are that way.
Also, here among the sea lions and sea stars and anemones, judging by the signs, live a group of scrambling real estate people. Signs of the time perhaps. Cottages are the first to be released. But the sweet thing about Oregon is that there is no private ownership of any of the beaches. The sand and cliffs are for everyone.
The tourists (funny how one never really thinks them self a tourist) are only now beginning to splash the byways. May’s smattering will turn into summer’s haul. A necessity for the small towns along the coast. And that’s fine.
The Bella Espresso in Cannon Beach steams out a hearty Americano so I’m not thinking about the down side of anything. I’ll leave that to another time.