tarakelk

I let go of a broken heart
I let go to an open heart
I let go of my broken dreams
I let go to the mystery
I believe in the miracles
I believe in the spiritual
I believe in the One above
I believe in the one of Love
And take one step closer to you.

- The Weepies

…
 

Rainy day, one more back to school September.  Again?

Students rush the sidewalk, standing smoking in my way, new best outfits and flirting glances. Everyone looking at everyone else.

I slip by unnoticed, not part of them, but not part of us, either.

...

I have started to forget which season it is. Really – ever since I’ve been back, I find myself struggling to remember – is it spring or fall? Just for a second, and then I remember. But, it’s the strangest thing, and it sort of scares me.

...

I wish I could remember how to remember how.

I can’t go back now, here I am,

yep.

...

The only steps that matter are the ones you take all by yourself.

You and me, we walk on.

.

Favourites from T.S. Eliot

It must be essential to know at least some of Eliot's best lines. They apply to so much of my life's moments.
(As always, best to be read aloud)!

...


Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,

I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

...

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

...

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.


.

Victoria, BC.

Rain is falling. It's mid-August and today I wore my raincoat.
Sitting in a coffee shop with my laptop, writing my 'six-month report' -
Change of scenery from the stifling office.


I haven't written in a long time.
Time flies.

Last year, now, i was there.
Oh,
there.

It hurts my heart to think how close i was, there, there. i could touch it. it was mine. everything i ever wanted.

must. get. back.


...

when i am alone
when i've thrown off the weight of this crazy stone
when i've lost all care for the things i own
that's when i miss you,
you who are my home.

here is what i know now:
in your love, my salvation lies
in your love.

Well I had a dream i stood beneath an orange sky
with my brother and my sister standing by.

(orange sky - alexi murdoch)
...

Mystic Beach, Juan de Fuca Trail:


Vancouver Island is a beautiful place to be. I know I am home, here. I belong.
But I do miss it, everything, everyone, ohsosomuch.

I rediscovered Dave Matthews today, my all-time favourite - but forgotten for the past year. It's even better than I remember.

Our babies.
I've been thinking so often of them, lately.
If I could be there now, I would spin them in circles as much as they wanted.







-Photos courtesy of Aric Gutnick's facebook album.

Tonight you just close your eyes
and I just watch you
slip away.

How close am I to losing you?

You own me.
There's nothing you can do.
Lucky you.

www.youtube.com/watch

a storm is coming, but i don't mind.
people are dying - i close my blinds.
all i can do is keep breathing, now.

i want to change the world, instead i sleep.
i want to believe in more than you and me.
but all i can do is keep breathing,
all we can do is keep breathing,
now. 

- Ingrid Michaelson

This is my all time, without a doubt, read-it-a-million-times, favourite poem.
It gives me the shivers every single time.

I have not had much to write about lately.
But I'm still here.
I'm still figuring it out, day by day.

I feel it all.

Purdy says it exactly the way I feel it.

...

The Darkness

- particularly in Renfrew County
when I chased that porcupine
from cellar to woodshed
from lawn to road with flashlight
and felt affection for it
that I couldn't explain to myself
but do explain
as if it embodied
all the lost
doomed animals crushed to death
on highways or swallowed and eaten
by fiercer animals - by man
Why should some comic beast
like a briar patch on four legs
be anything but that?
Anyway I'd stand there
beside the porch when bugs were gone
with everyone else asleep
looking up at that great ocean
that place where you're able to think
father than you're able to see
billions of miles - or think you do
for surely observing light from that distance
is having your mind touch its source
having it brush against stars?
my smallness therefore conversely important
my heart beating across that void
a tiny pump supremely unimportant?
Then I laugh
how ridiculous to invent methods
of receiving yourself or pretending
you touched the far edge of the cosmos
Only settle yourself on the shore
of this bright sea this glittering enormity
and close your hand on a scrap of it
the darkness the massed nothingness
say I have grabbed some and held on
Surely if that frightened porcupine
could represent all dead animals
then I may I allow myself this conceit:
to feel with hands and heart
the black reaches of light-absence
and the whip of comets
pulsing like swift little fish
when lights leap like car headlights
gleaming on wet pavements in the sky
What this comes to is religion
not the conventional stuff
but some sort of lost kind of coherence
I've never found in people
or in myself for that matter
only in the unhurried natural world
where things are uncrowded by things
with distance between animals
star distance between neighbours
when the grouch irritable universe
fumbles with understanding
and a god's coherence
Look down on me
spirit of everyplace
guardian beyond the edge of chaos
I may be a slight reminder
of a small tribe that occurred to you
when you were thinking of something else
even tho I am of little importance
and conversely of great importance
I am waiting here
until the dark velvet curtains
are drawn and the scrap of darkness
I clutched in my hand
has changed to light.


- Al Purdy

An instant of white roses. 
                Inbreathing.
A black butterfly's
                twitch and determined
collapse on a yellow round.



near the white Tanabe
narcissus
near Layton's Love
daffodils
outside     falling on
the pavement
the plum blossoms
of Cypress Street



the yellow chrysanthemums

                   (I hide my head when I sleep)

a stillness
in jade

                   (Your hand reaches out)

the chrysanthemums

are

         (Job's moaning, is it, the dark?)

a whirlwind!

Eros!    Agape      Agape



Her sickness does not ebb
anyhow. it's not a sea
it's a lake largely
              moon-ridden.

I can see her perfectly clearly
through this dusk her face
the colour of moonlight.

Maybe my body, maybe I?
But when has my love
                         ever been
offered exactly
and why should she be an
                                    exception?



walking in dark
walking in dark the presence of all
the absences we have known.       Oceans.
so we are distinguished to ourselves
don't want that distinction.
I am afraid.   I said that.   I said that
                                               for you.



My white skin
is not the moonlight.
If it is
tell me, who reads
by that light?



a curve  /  broken
of green
moss weed
kelp   shells   pebbles
lost orange ring
orange crab    pale
delicates at peace
on this sand
tracery of last night's
tide



I am listening for
the turn of the tide
I imagine it will sound
an appalled sigh
the sigh of Sisyphus
who was not happy



Hieratic sounds emerge
from the Priestess of
Motion
a new alphabet
gasps for air.

            We disappear in the musk of her coming.



I hear the waves
hounding the window:
lord, they are the root waves
of the poem's meter
the waves of the root poem's sex.
The waves of Event
(the major planets, the minor
planets, the Act)
break down at my window:
I also hear those waves.



The dead dog now
the one I saw last night
carried on a man's shoulders
down to the beach
he held it by its
dead crossed legs



I have given up
complaining 

but nobody
notices



"That ye resist not 
evil" falling
limp into the arms
of the oppressor
he is not undone
by the burden
of your righteousness
he has touched you.


Phyllis Webb


...

Last night I went through all my desk’s drawers, crammed full of papers and things I (at some point in the last five years) thought should be kept.

Class notes, essays I was proud of, an unopened package of 16 different coloured threads, tapes, pictures, birthday cards, cords from old computers. And my old course packages. I was so excited to read through poems I had studied and loved and couldn’t find again. One of the packages contained a bunch of poems by Al Purdy – Orchestra, After Rain, The Darkness - another had Phyllis Webb’s Naked Poems, which I’ve spent years searching for.

I sat on my floor and read aloud to myself for hours.

I want those words to be a part of me.
I want to hold them in my hands, to taste them in my mouth, to have their imprints on my body.
I want to consume them, to be consumed by them.

They make me feel, they make me alive, they make me more.

It’s snowy, still, in Victoria.
But wet, slushy snow – April in Montreal.
I like sitting indoors, warm, and watching it.
I hate wet, cold feet.
I like wearing leg-warmers.
I hate chapped lips, split from freezing, dry air.

I love perusing sites of poetry on my lunch break.

Thanks to G., for – as usual – exposing me to a new writer, poet, love.
Jeanette Winterson and her exquisite thoughts:

I thought you were disappearing - the white snow wrapping you. Your outlines wavered. You sparkled. You had stepped inside an ordinary phenomenon and you had turned into a miracle. You were not disappearing, you were landing. Where you landed was me.

…

I have given up wasting energy where I can’t change anything or do any good. I don’t mean I need to see results or instant whatever – it is worth pushing on with something almost forever if you believe in it, and results don’t matter in a direct way, but still you know you are making a difference. But there are places, people, situations, that are a total waste of time. Leave them.

Don’t let your need for control get out of control.
And thank life for life. Where there is life there really is hope.

…


Words

Be careful of words,
even the miraculous ones.
For the miraculous ones we do our best,
sometimes they swarm like insects
and leave not a sting but a kiss.
They can be good as fingers.
They can be trusty as the rock
you stick your bottom on.
But they can be both daisies and bruises.

Yet I am in love with words.
They are doves falling out of the ceiling.
They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap.
They are the trees, the legs of summer,
and the sun, its passionate face.

Yet often they fail me.
I have so much I want to say,
so many stories, images, proverbs, etc.
But the words aren't good enough,
the wrong ones kiss me.
Sometimes I fly like an eagle
but with the wings of a wren.

But I try to take care
and be gentle to them.
Words and eggs must be handled with care.
Once broken they are impossible
things to repair.

-    Anne Sexton

…

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

My swirling wants. Your frozen lips.
The grammar turned and attacked me.
Themes, written under duress.
Emptiness of the notations.

They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of wounds.

I want you to see this before I leave;
the experience of repetition as death
the failure of criticism to locate the pain
the poster in the bus that said;
my bleeding is under control.

A red plant in a cemetery of plastic wreaths.

A last attempt; the language is a dialect called metaphor.
These images go unglossed; hair, glacier, flashlight.
When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say; those mountains have a meaning
but further than that I could not say.

To do something very common, in my own way.

-    Adrienne Rich

.

Yes.

.

How to be
where I am:
...

but there is more
                      what falls apart is held together
                      each
                      atom aligned

- PK Page

...

Tonight we do the tree.
It's snowy and bright, like my winter last year.
And cold, cold like I got used to.

I still feel stuck here (sometimes):
frustrated each time I get 'meeting minutes' that were written without me there,
sad when I can't reach friends because of time differences,
far away from so many people who I want to live next door to.

I try to remind myself that if I was there, I'd be missing here in the same way.
Wouldn't I?
I guess that's just the way it is, now.
I complicated my life when I moved last year.
I can never be somewhere without missing someone,
but it's better than never knowing them at all.
And I do want to be here, in lots of ways.
I just hate feeling so far away.

...

You always stole all my last words.
Here's no exception then, one more for me to send,
and nothing happens in the end.
I'm thinking of you less, more concerned... and more is less,
I guess it doesn't matter now.

So here's the last one I have left:
We fell a little deep, I watched you fall asleep.
and nothing happens in the end,
but I remember when I could remember when.
Seems like a long time ago.

- The Weakerthans

.

Intuition

And it came a heat wave
A merciful save
You choose you chose
Poetry over prose
A map is more unreal than where you've been
Or how you feel
And it's impossible to tell
How important someone was
And what you might have missed out on
And how he might have changed it all
And how you might have changed it all for him

Did I...
did I miss out on you?

- Feist

...

That is not what I meant at all,
that is not it at all.

.

Spanish

Moonlight. This milkiness along your thigh, your arm.
Such royal skin. At midnight , you're translated

into tenderness. Say this in Spanish. Cariño . Repeat
the word that means the whole black sky, and the word

for a gorgeous net of fishes. Silvery, leaping. Imagine
the Mediterranean , a coastal village. Let yourself

go. Say Granada . Barcelona . Under the hushed vowel
of moon, the darkness whispers that you're beautiful,

and even if you don't believe it, trust the way night fingers
your throat, telling you what it likes best, and how, and

for how long. Say it again. Say how you want Cassiopeia's
radiance under your tongue, how you want the stars undone.

-    Anne Simpson
…

I’m happy. I still miss you – every day - but I have settled.
Just don’t forget, okay?