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.

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.

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