a fledgling bird of passage

music: fallen from the sky, glen hansard & markéta irglová
mood: raisins, almonds, red river cereal

fairy-sized tomes of
fairytales hidden in the
children's library.

lucent, lucent - the word is lucent. it slipped away and i sat abandoned in my english class, my mind wandering through the parking lot. there was no question to be answered, just a blank in the phrase i was thinking. and as hard as i looked (behind tires, the camouflage of snowdrifts) there was only a gaping nothing, a literary scurvy. i panicked (hysteria, a swivet, calamity), though i'd stayed calm all during this week's chance encounters, itineraries, fragile afternoons. the professor's hand waits at the chalkboard demanding synonyms, playing terrible guessing games with meaning. "scott's characters cannot communicate," he says. "society alienates them from themselves and from each other." we read 'the painted door,' where the inner monologues are broken conversation with voices too afraid to speak and nobody who listens.

i haven't seen you for weeks and moving toward you on the street today, i felt so motionless. our smiles do not mean anything, do not mean nothing, simply are. (were we always this stagnant, you and i?) you introduce me to your brother, i ask about your play, there is silence and the bus yawns by. tangible and almost february, i am not (do not want) what you have told him (once wanted) and this is strange. i look away because there are no lost words, nothing dormant or undiscovered.

i spent an hour at the comic book shop, waiting for another 'persepolis' ticket to arrive (dad has announced a visit next weekend). at jwd, i bought a dictionary in three volumes (webster third international english, 1986) and a beautiful copy of baudelaire's petits poèmes en prose: le spleen de paris. (marbled paper, embossed covers, the mustiness of a book well-read.) there is such a promise of possibility i find it impossible to resist. historiette, historify, historio-, historiographer, historiographership, historiographic, historiography, historiology. it is $40 inexpensive for all the infrastructure of our past & every word i will ever say. i carry six thousand lucent pages home in my arms like the heaviness of memory, like the body of a child.

in the attic of intentions

listening: pieces of string, alela diane
browsing: travel photographs of strangers, my old journals

from people i will never meet but these places will be mine & soon. my fingertips trace maps, my feet will print the ancient streets. i am possessive when it comes to memories & adventuring, utterly insatiable for the world. normally, i feel contentative but this winter is the most glowing i can remember. it is rainsnowing, my coat lined with ribbons of purple satin. on weekends i count quilts past midnight, i forget the keys & open late. my life is longings satisfied, featherweight.

this charmed existence is fortune that is built from my own abstractions. (everything happening in the way that it happens.) i am not worried -- problems seem always to untangle, uncomplicate before me. i wear silk scarves, carry only quarters in my pocket, borrow coveted books & dripdry laundry in our bathtub. we have currencies our own - market lattes for fresh marshmallow, a smile for the remembrances of a streetcorner, your words like algebra for mine.

on a costa rica morning years ago, shaun & i lounged in the synthetic bookstore crispness (the emerald scent of jungle, the dog asleep in the rancho). we talked over fresh-grown coffee & she read a poem she had dreamt reading me the night before. it lingers, the phrasing wrapped around all my patterns. it sits on my shelf in a self-bound volume, the pages dog-eared. the cover is a portrait of our great-grandmother.

i am having lunch tomorrow with a new arrangement of friends & borrowing tea-time with one who still leaves me unsure. it will be alright; it will be all right.

rivers ever so tireless
shaun sellers

though i am at rest
like a sky-lit jellyfish,
the ocean carries me.
as my heart rests
like a quarter overboard
glinting and snug
in starfish and
oyster's realm
(a leaden wish)
still the shivery
movement
of continental plates
vibrates and
shifts undeterred
by my quietness.

the spinning of
one axis on this
axis and then gravity
and that axis
and what else but constant
spinning spinning of my own
mitochondria and cellular universes
spiraling such
that my own movement
would seem
insignificant.

i have no longing to do
more than revolve,
ponder the moon
and its steady inertia,
powering cycles of
the orphic and the mundane.
imagine what galaxies
or dragonflies
or loved ones would
be profoundly moved by any
subtle hand stretching or
hair brushing on my part.

perhaps it is safer
for all
that i just
rest.
for now i will be carried
like a child through
a museum,
everything unfolding beautifully.

folding the circles square

listen: winged wicked things, sunset rubdown
lyric: "and chaos is luck and like love and love blind"

statistically speaking, january 21 is the most depressing day of the year. we suggest the wearing of polka-dot undergarments & eating strange fruit (a quince in quarters, rock mountain clementines) at 12 pm sharp. actually, it is highly encouraged. this will starve off apathy, this will make your heart smile.

the silence of a silent film

reading: the diving-bell & the butterfly, jean dominique bauby
listening: deloria, valery gore

(i am going to make a camera obscura)

the dancing pianos of silent film are not for monotonous ears but to cover the whir of gears (the clicking projectors, bicycles). snowy lights flicker for a pause and we rethread the reels. watch this quiet resound.

i donated blood for the first time on friday. a small thing but mostly, i was not ready for its physicality: to watch auburn branches coiling away from my body. the plastic tubing is cool on my skin and fingertips begin to spark, i can feel my own weakening. they pulled out the needle just before it finished; i was about to faint. "you are new & sometimes, your body needs to adjust." the nurse had kind eyes & brought damp cloths and cranberry juice.

i've been dreaming about music; i strum my ill-tuned guitar and wish for black and white keys. tapping imaginary on the tabletops, fragments from long ago (when you know the sounds, you can make up all the rest). i have been playing or playing at bach & re-reading l'engle - they are both strong against the indifferent & unsettled.

humming redolent with the past

reading: not wanted on the journey; timothy findley
listening: serenade for strings in c major, op. 48; tchaikovsky

i slept twelve hours last night and i am still sleepy in a slow, heavy-limbed way. i dreamed of my grade six english teacher, sailing-ships, of kites, and not a wisp of you. as soon as i publish this, i am going to climb into warm pyjamas & read until the weight of my novel pulls it from my good-night hands.
when we finish classes, we have been sitting on my bed and movie-watching (false mustaches & inspector clouseau), knitting & parsley days (the quintessential halifax film), once. i am reading atlases, picking destinations for traveling, dreaming, working in the days to come. everything, everything at peace.
tomorrow, i am going to a ball beside the train-tracks. perhaps because it is the annual event, it always seems a measure of how much has changed, is changing, under night air and the haze of balcony lights. i will wear a lace skirt as a dress, a top hat with feathers and a mask (japanese paper, pages copied from blankets & persuasion).

sunday brunches; monday classes

music: a poem on the underground wall, simon & garfunkel
mood: weakening, resolved

in my first new class, french cinema i, we started by putting out the lights. i could not see the pages to write & it was good to sit without my constant taking note. we watched all the 'freres lumieres' films. this is my favourite.

in canadian literature, we are studying imagisme. pratt & pound & words, complete.

in a station of the metro
ezra pound

the apparition of these faces in a crowd,
petals on a wet, black bough.

also, this story breaks my sometime heart.

the winter birds

sight: "the spirit of the beehive," 1973
sound: caving in, kimya dawson

today was so frozen that molten snow turned solid and i walked for miles without leaving footprints behind me. documentaries & letter writing, browsing gallery shops with m. (masks for the masquerade), polaroid cameras without film, cold tea.

(gran & grandad, kingston photographs)

on sale: a christmas cactus & clementines

mood: turning back hours; beginning afresh
music: sarah slean & the art of time ensemble

over quebec, daylight fades into the whirring dark & family peels away like steady shrapnel (the blunders of old age & deaths across the atlantic). my often eager travelling feet are reluctant to leave, straining to keep this place safe and close. but the harbour lights glint amicably and i can hear my city's soft hello (grown-up here, so young there). i sit in the front passenger seat while the bus driver tells me his stories and all the eastern gossip.

the skylights seeped rain, our neighbours broke in the back door, plants were accidentally watered, the floorboards turned topographical. the house smells of mildew, i burn incense like a madness, cooking slow & fragrant recipes in the afternoon.

and i finished a story that i set out to write for the first time in years. it is terrible fiction, borrowing all my facts, but life has seemed so literary. it is too close for me to judge its goodness. i have pressed print and now i wait patient, letting the words steep.

i've lost track of my holiday reads but right now: time was soft there: a paris sojourn at shakespeare & co, walt whitman, stephen spender, l'engle's the love letters, the journals of john xxiii, coffeetable books by andy goldsworthy.

ice & mermaid footsteps, aubergine bruises on my hip. the mornings full of resolute runners, napping and spreading salt against cement. and when i called to disappoint all your expectations, i did not need to say the words; you already knew. on new year's eve, i stayed out late and behaved shockingly. it was rather grand.