FelicityFor her 90th birthday1 Happiness: among the tea things and stacks of books and drowsing pets, the English garden without and the Canadian wilderness remembered.2 The ability to find appropriate expression for one’s thoughts: the regard to fill space with the thunderstorm, the grace to leave space for the snowy owl, the care to capture […]
This poem, originally published in Cloud Lake Literary, vol. 5, was inspired by this painting by my friend, Kim Nilsson. The painting in turn called to mind the island setting of one of my favourite short stories, The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World. The result is a poem about peace, about choosing life even
Now is a Good Time to Write About Roses Read More »
November calls me to write from my grey mood, my desire to hibernate with a twice-read tome, cling uselessly to the felt nothing-newness of my late middle age. No. Go outside and look more carefully. Note the fresh-newness that is there in every minute of every day in the world outside my head. Embers. Trees
Remembering Wash Mary ‘Mary came to wash for Mother every Monday.’ Emily Carr ‘Outside the open window The morning air is all awash with angels.’ Richard Wilbur Wash Mary’s soul slips in at dawn no showy, blowy thing but true two-handed wingless seraph (the
the laundry goddess Read More »
Who can I tell of this sadness? What can I tell of it? It arrives, unattached, on two tears. It blows in like a brown leaf onto a window screen. It rudely intrudes, like the sudden bloody sight of roadkill, asking, why? Where is the story that bid the
Another poem springs from silence Read More »
The word ‘Luddite’ lands with a thud, a thick necked hick of a word, with a bad rep and rap. Let us call it a ‘passive resistance’, a relaxing into the soft nostalgia of witless but wonderful technology; a typewriter that won’t pick out your mistakes in red, a camera whose shutter makes a real
The Ides of November brought hurricane winds and a three day power failure. I stood at the kitchen counter preparing dinner before it got dark and watched several of my grandmotherly pines bend and bend until they snapped, rebounded up and crashed to the ground. It was a good time to stay inside by the