When at first you set out

When at first you set out, your feet do not know where the road will go, or how.

The head thinks it knows, but it may not.

(After all, in the thick of winter, the leaves were supposed to have loosened, to have fallen. What then of such insubstantial strength, such golden light?)

Who can explain our brittlest survivals? Or the beauty of ice, in a broken space?
It befalls us: inessential, necessary, ordinary--as uncomfortable as prayer. 
What is the meaning of life?
Why are only some days full of light? 

For those of us already living, what matters in a new year is to perdure, to endure--there is no experience without an undergoing,  without perseverance, without suffering.

Lightening struck, we stagger, try to be like that tree that groaning, still stands.
Noble beyond reckoning. Beautiful in every cracked and shattered limb.

All hope is here: not in what is absolutely new, but in what there is to learn from those who carry on, blind as we all are, but abiding, open-hearted.

Pinched (ex voto to Frida)

 

Upon
being told her
right leg would have to be
amputated, Frida Kahlo
sat up

shouted,
"feet, why do I
need you? If I paint wings, 
I can fly." Thus, every loss lifts
her up.

Not so,
you. Heartsick, your
humerus fractured, you
rage against the night, suffer her
wild love. 

Notes
An ex voto is a devotion, an offering to a saint or local god, given in gratitude for healing or deliverance from adversity, or because a sufferer seeks grace.  (Ex voto is a shorted version of the Latin phrase, ex voto suscepto, "meaning "from the vow made.") Some ex votos consist of tiny stamped tin charms in the form of an arm or a leg or a heart--indicating the body part or attribute to be or that has been healed.  Other offerings might include small paintings with an illustration of the affliction, and a legend explaining what has  happened. In Mexico, such ex votos are often painted on small crudely cut out rectangles of tin. Frida Kahlo both collected and painted works that drew upon this vernacular tradition.  Here, Frida is the saint to whom I make this offering for a friend in agony.  Can she help? I am not sure...

Cinquains, again.

Photos were taken in Mexico. Of course. And this entry blogged from a laundromat in Canoe Cove, on Vancouver Island.

A poem about

"Can we put in orders, can we be patrons? 
I would like a poem about--
where was the line I
crossed but didn't notice? Your 
first botany notebook.  
Hot taste of homemade raspberry 
pie; picking berries in the
summer sun. How 
rocks get old. The hum
ming of Glenn Gould. World in
black and white. Molecules of 
chocolate.
Do we all have a wall of 
prayer? Where?"

Notes
These lines adapted from a letter from my friend and demonic patron saint, Marie-Therese Blanc. I will answer her orders. Somehow. In the days to come. I am grateful for them, and all of the strange dreams they invite. But first, her requests seemed to me to constitute a poem themselves, so here they are.

Images were taken on the West Quoddy dock yesterday; lobster season opens soon.

There Where You Are Not

The hardest thing about death is the way your senses are trailed by ghosts.

For a very long time, maybe forever, a dead one whispers into your surround and you think you see this one, there, over there.  Or you pick up the drift of her scent, the timbre of his voice.  The corners of your eyes, the backs of your ears, the edges of your palate, sometimes even the insides of your elbows are in haunting collusion with the dead; together they conspire to keep you on the switchback between sudden hope and crushing sorrow.  Even today, nearly 15 years after my friend died in an airplane crash, I sometimes think I see him, in a city where he'd never been, striding down the street in a lemon yellow raincoat, hair flapping over his eyes, grizzled rain on Halifax sidewalks.

Love conjures these ghosts; we look for those we miss everywhere. Unceasingly, as if in prayer.

We returned from Mexico to a house without Linus, but her shade is with us still, in every creak and crack and wail and cranny of the house, in sunbeams and on blankets, in our gestures and responses, our habits of listening, of moving; she remains sewn through the motions and spaces of our daily living.

We will learn new habits, but we will never entirely lose the spectral sense of emptiness that particularizes these places, here, there, where she was and is home no longer. 

This is how we feel the proximities of each death: again and again, our hearts rent like fabric, a patchwork of tearing that can only continue until we too, will die.

Images
Linus spaces: chair and blanket, sunbeam and radiator, edge of the bath, food dish for raw liver, chair and bear, cat-clawed chair