Oldie

Surfing through the CBC archives and found this. Woo boy. People sure have changed.

Very jealous of the hair.

Oh Peggy. I love her throaty laugh.

Wet Weather

It has been raining for the last few days, inside. I've been struggling with how I view myself as a poet. How others view my work, and why I choose not to publish anything I've written in the last two years, less a rare poem here and there. I am unhappy, really quite sad in fact, about my work, particularly concerning my lack of want to even approach the pen. I seek perfection, which is impossible. And so I remain unimpressed with my own writing.

And there is more. For one, I have not had time to focus on my writing. Taking on another Major has restricted time to even relax and enjoy the small moments. My intensive language class is coming to an end, as is my intensive 10 therapy sessions, as is my 10 hour per week research job. All done the second week of July. The first two weeks of August I am finally going home, to New Brunswick, to kiss my ocean. To try to locate my missing, supposedly dying, mother. Perhaps I will even find time to heal. When I return, there will be time for 14 days of putting myself back together before another intense year of school begins.

And I can't stop crying. I'm tearing up at everything, finding it so sad that I have such little time, and what I've been leaning toward lately--talent--for writing. And I so desperately want/need/desire to put together what I know is forming a crescendo in my mind, in my sleep, during my walks and dreams.

So I pulled some books from the shelf the other day. I've been randomly poking into them when I have a free moment, hoping they'll jog me into picking up that pen, waiting, beside my bed, on my desk, in the kitchen. I've been working so hard this year. I need a break.

In other news, I bought some fabulous shoes to cheer myself. And there's a tango festival hitting Montreal in July. Been taking lessons. Fantastic dance.

I popped into the WORD bookstore here in MTL a couple weeks ago.
Found a couple of books.
They'd belonged to Artie Gold, sealed with an AGold in the inside corners.
Delighted to have them close.

Currently reading Frank O'Hara, "Meditations in an Emergency".

Dontcha just love Frank O'Hara.


Aus einem April

        We dust the walls.
        And of course we are weeping larks
falling all over the heavens with our shoulders clasped
in someone's armpits, so tightly! and our throats are full.
    Haven't you ever fallen down at Christmas
     and didn't it move everyone who saw you?
      isn't that what the tree means? the pure pleasure
of making weep those whom you cannot move by your flights!
      It's enough to drive one to suicide.
    And the rooftops are falling apart like the applause

of rough, long-nailed, intimate, roughened-by-kisses, hands.
Fingers more breathless than a tongue laid upon the lips
in the hour of sunlight, early morning, before the mist rolls
in from the sea; and out there everything is turbulent and green.

I think I am very naive. And that's all I'm going to write about that.

Here's what my day looks like:

-took pictures of a lady slipper I (rescued) from the woods during a trek in Sutton QC peering at real estate I can't afford (at this time...)




-found the most glittering of rocks along a forgotten path near a wonder of a mountain stream





-watching my cat soak up the sun on the back patio



-tending to my flowers, tomatoes and herbs, tenderly



I am now making pasta salad for a picnic with my love. And then I will hit the library for my research job. Later, drinks with the girls (the goddesses). Lovely day.

Another rejected pome. Someone else's words.


Full milk moon

One can apply the sublime art of consequence
to keeping a nest of bees captive
             while

they love against a cool crumb of honeycomb.

The modest appetite of the apiary sustains a long
brumal season,
social and solitary they balance,
            honey clear as broth.

One must avoid the hive, Apollo’s hyperborean
cousins;
let to rest well in their waffled cloth.

Later, stored honey is eaten across from a platter of winter
cakes
            while

the colony of bees balance in their homes,
fixed and taciturn,
adjusting the current of frost and immaculate breath.

We bargain for spring, sew fire poppies inside the house; beneath
our beds they seed, take
            root;

mole into the bedrock, lodge tendrils during our
listless sleep
            mornings
of clamour avoiding the pell-mell
of web and flourish.

Nocent dregs of air populate the last myth of season;
the kitchen warmed, and the smell of heated jars.