Ceilings II

I've been staring at ceilings.

Remember, I told you

I adore this house? It's turned against me.

Something haunts me.

The muse and his red guitar

won't stop. The walls press in.

So I hanged him, unfinished business.

I hanged him.

Fur

Haven't you noticed

my fine new coat of fur? I'm over

with bare naked skin and a throat

laid open for all

and any

one to seize.

A ruff is what I need,

no nape exposed and tingling

to the sound of footsteps over my grave.

He didn't like hearing that.

A set of claws will save

me. My hackles rise

and fur runs quickly down

and up my spine.

Friday Night Chasms

Friday night chasms,

between two bodies prone on the sheet

in the dark of a blackout,

or a thousands tiny lights

in your room.

The long curve of your back:

I can't forget

the horizon of your shoulder to your hip.

A line,

it made me need you

in the next day and weeks that followed.

Words would send me crazy

but that slope of your shoulder

brought me back

home, your body, your

bed, your

nesting cave of wonders,

blinding lights,

magpie's generosity.

It's still your voice that reaches me,

your sigh

of greeting, as if every

meeting face to face is for the first time.

Your eyes, marrons glacees.

Your voice

breathing embraces

for my ears alone,

and every other one

you meet.

The same

serene tenderness for strangers,

and the beautiful angry cook,

and me.

Shells

Never sink again into desire,

warm vertiginous drop

and the flush that follows.

Never again. Do not drop

the shield the ice queen cometh.

Warm and easy smile, she holds

a stone between her palms.

A heart is the size of two fists,

one in the other,

in the centre a pearl.

A stone between her palms,

to keep it warm.

To harden her hands.

To move her shell inside where she needs it most.

Soft skin gives way

to easily.

The Muse Plays a Red Guitar (Albatross)

i)

The muse

play a red guitar, skin like ebony,

deserts me feeling

forlorn. Foregone

conclusions leap about and all that's

missing is the proof

for all that

talk

takes us nowhere.

The muse looks blue when he's beautiful

and rises in coils and flames

away from his face, bent

over strings.

His fingers pluck

and his eyes sing Hallelujah

to one more king.

ii)

Everything shows on my face.

What we do,

what we do to each other without looking.

I don't want to fight with you.

I don't want to fight you or be your wife

with all the trimmings,

all the trappings.

I don't mean to trap him,

though he feels it.

Afterward, after

words and his eyes are owlish,

bird caught in lime,

lines,

lime-light.

iii)

My albatross is heavier today,

wings toward morning.

Oceanic Eyes

I tread

the depths of your oceanic eyes

and was dry to the knees

tonight,

where before this flailing

limbs only kept me

inches from sinking.

The surface has shifted.

Rather, the unfathomable deeps

of water in your body, slogging

through arteries and clogging

them with dreams,

have lost their depth.

A year, almost,

after finding my ghost lover, one sad

beyond reckoning and smitten

with beauties only I could share,

I don't think he survives

any longer. I lost him

high on the tenth floor

between a gust of wind

and an upturned collar.

The air is clear

now, the nights are colder.

A season lost

and the wheel of the year has turned

to its long slow under-arc, the basin

that is winter

falling.

Creek beds

run sluggish in the heat,

slowly in the freezing,

and rivers

that only last year floated

ships in your eyes

come barely to my knees.

Perfect Service

Perfect service,
and the brush of a stranger's hair
on your arm.
And wanting to write like Hemmingway.
And wanting to write like Joni Mitchell.
And wanting to paint as if their words have stumbled somehow
from exhausted presses,
whose letters no longer say
but only mean,
to the biggest empty page that they could find.

Wanting to paint as if you have
forever to understand these words
not scrawled across the canvas
but embedded on,
embossed upon
its surface. Wait forever
for the perfect sleepless night to take you
out of skin and meaning
of the darker sky and room,
the bed too warm,
too wide.

Wade
across the stillness
of a house with no one in it
save for Ludo, and he's sleeping
to a painting full of circles
looking forward to the spring.

Home Barefoot

I walked home, barefoot in the rain.
I walked home barefoot, in the rain.
I walked, home, barefoot in the rain.
I walked home barefoot; in the rain
the ground was warm enough
when puddles soaked, stroked
and soothed my ankles,
and falling water whispered to me.

Falling water whispered,
to me of all people,
whispered to me,
of all people.
All people
whispered to me
of
water
falling

on the drum of my umbrella's skin,
on
my
skin.

The ground is warmed when exhaling.

Evening

Sex and the smell of lilies
or peonies, lurid blossoms hanging heavily obsene
in the twilight.
Your skirt riding high
over white thighs.
Bixies pedal furious
bat patterns.

Ten o'clock, and nothing calls
like bed and a cool home
full of silence.

Nothing like a warm drum,
a stoned drum,
an easy fuck between laundered sheets
and memories of the lavender
I keep forgetting to plant.
Was there ever such a thing as an easy fuck?

You Told Me

You told me
that artists come and go a little farther
than the others;
we feel it when we fall so much harder
than our mothers
ever warned us.

Artists see the light,
and musicians are jonesing for the perfect sound
and it's alright
that loving feels like I'm about to drown.

Across the Sheet

That fiercely empty
half bed and belly
where a man or child should lie are sharply hollow
and full of secrets.

Too far from the wall, the bed's too wide;
its distance makes my foetal
curl unable to cross
between myself and the destiny bred in my womb.
Girl-woman, turned on herself away
from the bare cold of a night
when the others are burning midnight oil for music,
when even the weight of a guitar on her belly
would be better than nothing at all.

Ice Bridge to America

Middle morning
and swallows are flying
everywhere over water
miraculous in its stillness.
You behind me do not move.

There's a canvas resting behind us, sleeping
at home in the dark
of my closed room, the pause
between the flick and stroke of fingers
and the scrape of charred wood.
You behind me do not move.

Girl at Myriad

Old pale lace and steam from your tea
combine. What are you writing,
lovely girl with your double-bridged nose;
what language are you learning?

''You know what they say about girls with red shoes,''
an auntie told me once.

If she only saw you.

Listening

Think of me
as swallowing all that you say to me.
I will take your words into my open mouth,
taste them,
feel their shapes, sharp and flat as river grass.
I will envelope these blades in my body
and they will be no more.

Bohmerwald

Even though I miss you, I'm better off missing you
than with you while envisioning
what I thought we could be.
I'm better off with others,
many filters for my fractured
sense of unity.
When your words are barbed wire,
and your skin is too distant to touch,
and the skin of your arm is this cool,
and your eyes are cold,
and your voice is invulnerably male,
I crave the middle distance
of a day without you.

In the fragile middle distance
of a room behind closed doors, I listen in
to conversations
when you don't know I'm there,
or when you've overlooked my presence
like so many times before.

On your way home late this evening,
I'll be singing under water.
As you wander in the darkness
I'll be passing through the glossy wooden

hall. You turn the handle
of our heavy wooden door,
but I'm already sunk in shadows
in the green room, Bohmerwald.
Behind the forest's door,
the middle distance calls.

The Wolves of his Words

June 2010

18'' x 40''

Mixed media on canvas

As If it were Yours to Give

May 2010

48'' x 30''

Mixed media on canvas

Twisted Conversations

Fragments of aching loneliness echoing down the hall,
when the only one who can comfort me is the one who won't,
when the song is right but I can't,
and my voice is clutted with words I'm forbidden to speak,
and my limbs are crippled with places forbidden to lie.

His voice down the vacuous hall
is calling,
and he wants an answer,
and I have dozens,
mais aucun n'est l'un qu'il veut.
Old story.

'Are you okay?'
It's alright, I'm only singeing
and the noise is only burning
from your voice acrosss the yawning
chasm deep into my throat
where words float, encumbered, in potentia,
and I'm sinking into sleep.

I'm not sinking, only drowning,
lying face down on the sheets
my mother gave me. She embroidered
tiny flowers on the pillows.
This quilt my parents' wedding spread,
frame my father built
from rescued parts. It's not enough.
These close familial charms
will not protect me when his arms
are all that can keep the wolves of his words away.

I need an apotrope.

Green Medusa in the no-man's land
of the middle rooms, the only rooms
where we can meet.
In all others I search for you and am lost.

In yours I am a child.
In mine, an exile.

Watchers

Eye draws.
Eyes draw me into your line of view,
your lens sight where I see you clearly
or as clearly as can be
between the wishes of hand and eye
and another blank page flaring white at noon
in the sun
over Phillips square.

Page as pale as the whitest hijab
I've ever seen, strolled by me,
and a woman all in blue beneath.
Electric blue silk,
and the river rises from below
to swallow the square and the ankles of all who stand
or sit on the edge with our legs dangling
in the lake we haven't noticed
rising slowly, lapping steady
north of every old high water mark
of floods from seasons past.
The waters rise. On every back, on every collar
blue is cool against our skins, and even higher,
when your mouth is open wider.
Let it in. Open wider,
and let the river in.

Photograph

This is a camera's click, a
paper's flash,
a lens flare,
and your face is no more, my dear.
Your closed quiet face is no more.

This is the blotted
page, the mottled
stain, spreading fast, ever still on the square
of illusional silverprint locked in a drawer
where I once found a silverfish scurrying dear,
and I once lost a lock of your hair.

This is a number, or seven.
Odds are even
now it wouldn't fail to reach your ear.
When the meaning isn't ---
and the past is a deafening cadence,
there's enough time between us for silence.
Enough is behind us for --- .

Ludo, my Insomnia

Have you met Ludo?
Inexorable, and therefore made at home,
I'll never be alone
at night, eyes open wide,
with Ludo by.
Dreaming of a home I'll never find,
of arms not mine, Ludo laughs,
and forgives me my follies.
Yet Ludo forbids me my night's errant pathways:
"Save them for the day,
don't think of it 'til day."

Ludo, I have carried you
from one room to another in this house,
and then another, until you know the place
almost as well as I. Please try
not to hold this against him.
But after all,
who know better than you the turning routes my unconscious takes
when it's past the end of yesterday,
and tomorrow is too far off? No wonder
that I drag you from room to room for hours on end.

Ludo, my insomnia.

This Battered Night

Tired body changes
before dawn from animal to woman;
body's skin slips on again,
pulled from reluctant corners,
resistant and harbouring, along with the hide,
seven consecutive stages of sleep.
Skin slips on again,
fits like a second layer of,
still loose, raw in patches,
not yet attached to body.
Skin slips on again.

This battered night and tortuous waking,
to seven stars still low
on the horizon, wet with fog,
and you are missing.

Offer me this morning
as if it were yours to give, this rising
sun as if held in your hands, enormous orange
in a country sick with solitude.
Give this day to me in spite.
In spite of differences, we rise
under the same sun.

All my suns are on the street.

Her Eyes

Her red hair against the green,
her red-amber eyes from the shadow of the porch
watch all,
are seen in return,
don't mind.

She raises cups of strong sweet coffee to her lips,
sets them down again on blue and white saucers.
Drinks to hide her thoughts,
the smile and scowls that chase across her lips
on the very edge of St. Joseph.

Her pale winter skin,
white hands,
flaxen forehead, eyes of silk
left too long out in the sun.
Her stilled voice,
sighing now but what she
says you can't understand.
Her ancient forest voice,
the rustlings of sap, brambles reach,
and every tree is woken.

Following the Wake

(Written in the early morning, February 15)

How long
since I have seen this light?
White light, mingled only
with the blue of latent evening,
early morning,
daylight shifts receding
into twilight. Slips th'abysmal
thread of lucid admiration
onto fingers white with plying
river waters. Under chariots,
under bridges run the tendrils,
gellid fingers, run the marvels
of a winter early dying,
of a February morning,
of returning, of the past.

Of the past, and of the passing,
as the snow is briefly falling
over aquaduct and thicket,
spent the summer briefly waking,
spent the autumn bearing berries,
spent the winter spent, and making
up for time lost in the turning
of a tertiary season.
'Tis the season.

Winter, call me.

Ceilings

Late morning Saturday,
late February,
late winter in the month
before rejuvination, motion
to the new old house, seeking
always to be home, to come to this nest of pillows,
music soothing from your cavern to the south.

A creature of the north, I adore
this house.
The ceilings call me,
after many nights of gazing
in the gloam of early morning
at their ragged, crannied skins.

Squalls

The wind has changed direction.
By the flag over the house acoss the street, I know this. Blowing from the east,
a storm is coming. Is it true
that squalls against the city threaten more than rural hurricanes?
Someone wrote that once,
a Parisian.

Napping and Dreams

Napping
February 21, 2010
5'' x 8''
Pencil, coloured pencil on paper

i/
Dreams

of reading together, glorious uprooted passages

purring through the cave of your belly to my ear,

through the cavern of my larynx to your fingers on my throat. Know what matters.

Know that the pattern,

the precise colour of late-afternoon sunlight from the south,
pollen-yellow,

faintly apricot,

I will not say gold,

is so much more essential.

ii/

Know these things,

and why I want to live here.

Know the purpose of a canvas on the floor.

Know that doors opening inward

only beckon. Know that

the ladder on a balcony only ever leads up,

while the mountain only ever leads down.

Know which streets call us away,

and which ones bring us home,

and which chords are always warm,

and which words heal me.

iii/

Know the reasons I sit up late

in the front room, barely rocking,

watching early-rising walkers on the street,

with a paintbrush in my hand.

Know the textures of the floor against your back,

against my thighs, sitting childishly,

while everything important

hangs in the air between us.

Everthing important,

in the ocher coloured air.

iv/

Dreams, sienna dreams

of henna tinted home. Words flow.

And in the early morning, have I woken?

Have I slept?

Does it matter? Mist is fading.

On the street, the early walkers

hurry out against the thinness of the day,

but you won't rise for hours:

'Below the thunders of the upper deep . . .

The Kraken sleepeth.'*

And so, until the end of days,

or else this afternoon,

which I would argue is even farther off,

the sun and I are lovers without you.

v/
A room for dreaming outward,

and one for dreaming in,

and all the other moments of our house, in the spaces in between.

* Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 'The Kraken,' in Tennyson (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 42.

Mendicant

February 28, 2010
30'' x 60''
Paper, coffee, tea, gold foil on canvas

Self Portrait - Right Hand

Spring 2008
4'' x 4'' and 4'' x 5''
Pencil and chalk on coloured paper

Is This How We'll Be in the Spring?

February 4, 2010

48'' x 30''

Paper, coffee, gold leaf on canvas

See Far Poles, part ii for the reference.

Room 1051

From the tenth floor, I see no difference between animal and ♂. I know that what you've given me is no accomodation of both.

From the tenth floor, I
wait for all things personal
to arrive, in taxicabs, or
walking on the street, or
slipping satin dressing gowns
from sunburnt shoulders. I
fail to see the good when it arrives.
I wait.

I wait for change, an end to waiting, for
the next, the very next car to
come around that corner to
be the one which bears you
to my door, and all your colours flying,
and all your colours flying
in the flaying, thrashing wind. I
cannot bear the wading
any longer into spring, cannot
take the subtle merging,
without borders, without
soul, without soil on which to claim,
''Here I stand, come high water,
come the fever, I remain.''

On the tenth floor, I am barren; I am
February morning. I am
February burning. I am
water, I am dust.
From behind the parted curtains comes
a crooning, comes a whirring,
comes a steady billow blowing
through the ever-present window,
where the omnipresent shadow
hasn't yet made its terrain.

I am burning.
I am burning.
On the tenth floor, I am yearning
for the onset of the rain.

Plateau Waking

Change, time of
turning 'round the earth's solar axis, I weave
circles in my study,
in my study, winter body
seated firmly on the floor
beneath your window, under mountain,
on the yellow-sided mountain
where the murmurs of the morning
pause to hear the river growling.
Far below, the ice is breaking
on embankments, on our door.

Far below, the city waking
to the smells of sun returning,
climbing surely up the hillside,
frozen hillside, ice is leading
farther north. I follow, brushes
in my hands and in my pockets,
weaving circles, tracing runs among
the brambles and the thickets.

Farther north, I hear the calling
of the ancient sun returning,
of the streets below me moving
to a more familiar rhythm,
weaving motion over soil,
over pavement, over stone.
The rustle of a million
sets of footprints, city breathing,
beating slowly in the morning,
in the thawing, in the cold.

Goblin Fruit

Goblin Fruit
February 3, 2010
5'' x 8''
Pencil on paper


i)
I loved you because you were sad,
damaged goods, lost and
(ir)retrieveable.
Am I really one of those ♀
who yearns to find and repair old broken souls?
Soothe, stitch it up,
wish,
wish,
wish it was up
to me to make everything right.
Me to make you right.

ii)
In some villages, in some
times, there was some-
one called a sin-eater, struck
dumb by the weight of
sorrow ingested
along with the meals she was offered
to consume the bulk of the departed
one's crimes.

Times
have changed, you say, but still
you pay
me with sweets, sullen meals,
grudging generosity,
to swallow,
and swallow,
and take in your misery.

iii)
I loved your poet's eyes,
musician's hands,
I loved your nineteenth-century soul, so full of
aching empty spaces.
I dreamed you an enchanted lover, tree spirit
of the ancient dark forest, your
bed a nest, your
room a cave.

iv)
Ah, child, but child,
you knew
you've heard the stories,
how those who enter the wood
in autumn, time of turning
too often lose their way
and stray
unknowingly down, under
root, under
ground,
and to once taste the goblin fruit
is to stay.

Ah, child, you slept in his nest, you
ate of his sickly sweets, you
ate of his sickly sins, you
stayed.

And Worried by My Calm

And Worried by My Calm

January 28, 2010

48'' x 30''

Coffee, paper, gold leaf on canvas.

See 4th Act, part ii for the reference.

Far Poles

Melancholy at canvas at two in the morning, will I hope desperately in vain for the creak of floorboards from the far end of the house?

i)
There is no greater distance than between the far poles of our house,
I spinning at one,
while at the other you turn in your sleep, unaware,
every drip of pale tinted water a prayer
(if you can believe I'd believe in prayer).

By the time each makes its way undeniably down the canvas
I've lost you all over again.
Calling is to lose you.
How not to want you?

ii)
Is this how we'll be in the spring,
me sitting spinning at my canvas while the earth slowly turns you
irrevocably away
toward morning,
the time of unravelling?
With each day passing, dawn comes sooner.
One morning it will break before me,
before I can make my journey
across the floor,
through the night into sleep.
One day dawn will find me still weaving
spells among my circles.
Will I be turned into stone?

iii)
Knowing you near me is no consolation
when the distance to be crossed
between your door
and I on the floor
is as great as between the earth's far poles.

4:30 AM

Twelve hours until another man,
and I'm thinking of you.

My distraction,
my proposed distraction,
is sick fallen ill
feverish
null
void
neuter,
and I look to you for explanation.

I do not look to you for explanation.
I cradle the means, reject it.

My proposed distraction
has left me void.

Your Front Room

Given enough time, and space in which to write,
a poem will emerge.
A poem will emerge in space,
given time. While
giving you your space, I
face a window north, seeming always full with white
sky, buildings grey, street and grubby
snow
underfoot under feet,
window white as.

Window white as
the page on which to write
'I love you,' that message
stamped in a bank
into the night
outside our window, brave feet declaring.

The Things we Fear

January 19, 2010
30'' x 24''
Paper, coffee, gold leaf on canvas board

'What if the things we fear are
Leonard Cohen covers, or
coats made of chagrin,
well worn and unintentionally
the right size;'

- Katia Grubisic, 'Baffled King Collage,' in What if Red Ran Out (Fredericton: Goose Lane, 2008),16.

Tender Butcher

'He is the tender butcher wo showed me how the price of flesh is love; skin the rabbit, he says! Off come all my clothes.'
- Angela Carter, 'The Erl-King,' in The Bloody Chamber (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1979), 87.

September 12, 2009
16'' x 20''
Oil stick and charcoal on paper

Mendicant

The presents
he gives are his payment
for sins real and imagined,
and his mark of generosity.
'Look,' he says,
'here, where I lack.' This lack
is his martyr's palm.

That, and the stories he carries
with him, just under his skin,
one corner always flapping loose,
to taunt,
to tease,
to tempt you in.

Beware. The tragic hero,
mendicant, purveyor of his own past,
dealing most dangerous drug of all:
romance of someone else's pain,
his pain.

Whispers of heartbreak pass through his lips,
his tender childish lips,
while his fingers pluck,
and his eyes sing
'Hallelujah'
to one more king.

Enamoured of his tragedy, he pulls
and pulls
and pulls you in.

Snow

Shh, don’t think in words.
Sense of wonder, Marion.
Snow.

Snow flying down long
stairs in the metro, and now
fleeting in cast light
across black counters
so near the window
that outside
enters.

Glass
no more exists than the idea of glass,
as in between in and out,
out,
out where cold is.

Out, where ice so soft
You smile to feel it land on your lips
(red, swollen, cherub rose-hips)
falls in wind, in wind, in wind,
in sound and street

until

idea of panes, invisible,
impenetrable,
unreal,
intervenes.
Snow still falls,
but silent,
immersed in black counter reflected
to the final strains of
California Soul,

so near the window
that outside
enters.

4th Act

i)
Motion
out of thinking and into simply
knowing
(by a change in barometric pressure,
though human barometers are known to go awry)
(by an alteration of the light,
what light there is)
(by sickness, by
blood, by
blood)
that we've entered the fourth act.

ii)
'Nothing's changed,'
owl eyed at your guitar you gaze,
sleep-soaked,
ruffled
and furred,
and worried by my calm.

And worried by my calm.

While I know
that in that time apart
a part parted a -
your apartment
lost its valour,
its properties of longing.
In that time apart I ceased to ache
for anything you had to offer.

'Nothing's changed,'
as if by alteration
(Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds)*
I meant a loss, or hurt, or break, baby, break.
You spoke as if accused.
I meant no accusation.
Standing in your doorway,
one foot on the frame,
testing,
resisting,
resting,
I offered only information:

'Something's changed.'

iii)
The windows
in this room are white
outside as well as in,
grimy light
filtered through thin
transparent veils.

iv)
All this morning,
whether by snow, or hunger,
or strange pale light,
passed in a state of wonder
under the sign of:

'May you perish before midnight,
you little whore.'

Orange peels scattered
on blue,
and for once,
standing poised in an outer door,
as my hand entered into
its black leather glove,
it was not about you.

*William Shakespeare, 'Sonnet 116,' in The Works of William Shakespeare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938), 1239.



4th Act
January 2, 2010
8 1/2'' x 11''
pencil on paper

Reflection

On the outside, looking in,
his belief is in heat. His belief
warms through
what you
won't or can't see, in your solitary cave
where shadows of things
may enter.

He peers
from the fraction of a space between panes,
complete in all dimensions though touching
neither, hovering
on the boundary between
starvation
and desire.

His eyes are cavernous.
His mouth is too broken to speak
any words but the words of his loneliness,
too broken to sing
any song but a psalm to his solitude
in the surface
of the glass.

Let him in?
But where would we put him, this friend of yours,
with his all-encompassing sadness,
his melancholy so deep it reaches
above and below his flattened frame?

Anywhere, anywhere, any
where small things can slip away
and be forgotten
until found by some new pair of
arms, some
reaching eyes
first entering.

Witch of the Hawthorn Wood

Her eyes are through you,
eyes of the hawthorn wood.

Brown-crimson
from too much inner sight
and old, old blood on white
skin, white as snow.

Beware the witch,
witchy eyes as eat
when you thought she gave so freely.
Hawthorn russet eyes will soon prove all-consuming.

Eyes and damaged lips,
and ivory skin,
bruised beneath the jawbone,
vulnerable,
enticing.
Trust not.

For every knight who enters
of his own free will
discovers later,
a critical instant later,
that Lamia, Lamia
lies coiled about him;
scales
secure his fate.

Softly crooning hymns to the dying, she writes
poetry and spells on her
inner wrist
to ward off evil.

Beware.
Hawthorn-russet eyes will soon prove
all-consuming.


Witch of the Hawthorn Wood

January 9, 2010
9'' x 12''
pencil and coloured pencil on paper

4590 St. Denis

Magical store full of cupboards.
Go back there when next you're
feeling lost,
to lose yourself
in the labyrinthine folds,
wood upon wood
until, reaching the heart,
you stop.

Until reaching the centre,
all doors open into
nothingness
but grain and a greater or lesser coating of dust,
and packets of silicone gel
in forgotten corners.

All doors open into
everything
a broken heart desires:
nooks, irredundent spaces,
and accessory
crannies in which to place your sadness,
a string of red stone beads,
in the back.

Where few will seek is safest.

Until reaching the heart
of this maze,
so much larger within
(Your home, my love, was larger
within until it shrank)
than without,
all paths call onward
in any and no direction,
with ever more interiors to
expose to your wandering eyes.
Your blind fingers guide
you over skins soft as inner bark
laid bare to the voices
of the wood, of the skinned and striated wood.

Until, reaching the centre
(There is no centre;
the centres
travel with us unseen),*
you stop.

At the heart
of the maze is a monster,
not toothsome nor horned,
but simply
dormant,
vacant,
void,
and a perfect fit for your heart.


*Margaret Atwood, 'A Place: Fragments,' in The Circle Game (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1966), 75.

Leaving

A canvas which took several tries to finish, because every time I thought it was complete I was wrong.


Leaving

December 2009
40'' x 30''
paper on canvas


Leaving

January 10, 2010
4' x 3'
paper, coffee, beet juice on canvas


Leaving

January 14, 2010
4' x 3'
paper, coffee, beet juice, gold leaf on canvas

2AM January

What if
the invisibility on the far side of the glass
contains neither stars,
nor light,
nor the immense density of its absence,
nor any indication that there was once such a thing as an outer
space?

What if there is no far side
of the glass?

Statement of Intent and Bibliography

I'm creating this blog as a cache of images and writings, poetry and songs and prose reflections. This is not a diary, nor is it a record of my life as I live it day to day. Consider it rather as an insight into my inner reality, changing in response to, but separate from, the outer real.

Bibliography

Atwood, Margaret. The Circle Game. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1966.

Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber. Toronto: Penguin Books, 1979.

Grubisic, Katia. What if red ran out. Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane Editions, 2008.

Shakespeare, William. The Works of William Shakespeare. New York: Oxford University Press, 1938.

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord. Tennyson. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.