Wednesday, January 2, 2008

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.

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