collage & bricolage
Elsie
Born without storm into autumnal gold, baby Elsie wore mystery, veiled in her caul, seeing only the love in our fathomless eyes. Dispatched with an angel’s kiss, she arrived in Thanksgiving’s low glowing sun. Yet the lore of the caul conjured mystery drawn from a shadowless night. Untroubled by her tumultuous journey into the light, a spirit safe-guarded, she drew on her mama’s settled serenity. Sienna and silk: sweet fleur-de-lis. Elsie’s first cries piqued heartfelt tears from her little big sister. Did she fathom a question in Mila’s unsettled lament – who is this? who turned this great wheel? With a foot in the spirit realm, could Elsie call up that first green unknowing? Her own cries subdue into little knit brows. Moon to Mila’s sun, soft autumn mist to her sweet summer dew, Elsie brings gifts from beyond, brings the beyond itself, to our earthbound wonder, and unravels our carebound unseeing. The veil slips: love arises.
This Land
on this wave of ten-thousand-year old moraine sheltered by grandmother pines planted by long-ago school children this land loved by the Anishinaabe bow down give wordless greetings silent thanks she who is bigger than boundaries greater than nations remember her honour her bend and weave as basket willow ripple flow with water and air listen for unlooked-for lessons attend the tender shoots’ teachings respect the elders cornucopians past they saw abundance if only at times in dreams from wood bone hide reed they dreamed into being drums and flutes to praise forest marshland antlered buck lands without title but not without name common and plain were gardens for human hands entitled settlers farmed tilled up the green teachers and sowed in their place rows of leggy beggars will I call the willow ‘mine’? can you own the water that washes you clean? the air that bathes the earth? may we own even the land that shifts and slips though it holds a stake for the duration of a few generations?
Six Rubies for Lyn on her birthday
Jo (so young) went west to wild rose country to Heart River country, a ruby red rose between her teeth the thorns keeping her silent secret, unheralded, even unseen, baby girl Lewis became, and became imaginary, perfect as the Hope Ruby Jo (so wild) sits in the silver square of the same moon all her girls were born under, night feeding, wondering whose wee ruby mouth is this? then in some government office red tape falls away from an old secret, and the world becomes small as a ruby’s inclusion every sunrise now starts as ruby, blazes noonward with the cardinal, with our sister hearts we are constellated like stars, like dew on a silky web, like Indra’s blood red rubies at the knots of the net that entwines us
Boxed
Locked in the windowless bathroom, she listened to water sing in the pipes, a soothing refuge from uncalled for noise, the bang of a door, or maybe the clang of a balcony rail. O ever blend sounds to dull sonic grey smooth out incomprehensible talk with thrumming wheels humming fridges whiney grinding air conditioners distant train wail a siren song tires flik flak flik flak on the tracks Not so long since, she counted the clicks that marked the ascent of the lift, the barely perceptible decibel shift as it rose to and then past her floor. With her back to the door she prayed to the grey. O dust hazy window show me soft shades of concrete shopping mall walls weathered wood sheds apartment towers drywall in dumpsters old folks lost in their coats blue beaming TVs the blank evening sky How long has it been she’s avoided the eyes, looked away from the girl at the cash, the stranger next door, the cabbie, no-faced in the rearview mirror, and busied herself in her bottomless bag? O always the eyes every day pricks of light shards of glass they mask an abyss to look in them and have them look deep into mine I don’t miss How long has it been since you last heard her song? Now nothing comes singing into her heart.
How long has it been since I wrote this poem? I noticed that my old Oxford Book of Canadian Verse had three poems entitled “Bushed” and thought it was time for an urban woman’s update of the Canadian notion that this land will defeat you. It seemed fitting to set it in shades of grey, with elements of decay.
stanchion
A year ago I reread Phoebe Wang’s poem Invasive Carp and was inexplicably taken with a word she used – stanchion. From the word and it’s etymology and associations grew eight pages of musings and stabs at scraps of verse. I’d also had in mind for many years a favourite old photograph of snow fencing along Woodbine Beach, and its negative strip, curiously a similar shade of cinnabar as the fence itself. (I now cannot say which of the word-image pair informed the other.) I worked on the writing December 2019, February 2020, this summer, this fall. In between, I retrieved old barnboard, that weathered red again, and made a haptic poem with pieces of barbed wire. Over time, the barnboard offcuts called to me – I made my long imagined collage of fencing, and it’s opposite, a fenceless study of the prairie, the big sky of Majestic Ranch. Bob Dylan’s line from Mr. Tambourine Man became the focus of the combined multi-media work, and Mr. Tambourine Man himself, my long-time partner, John, the dedicatee. And now, as the leaves depart, the fences again become visible, but meager, man-made and easily overcome. Can you say the same for your own fences?
Stanchion!
for John
and but for the sky there are no fences facing
Bob Dylan
more than a fence to slow the blowing snow
stanchionesque stockades put on a show
of guarding the shifting sands of status quo
impaling the hearts of the fenced
with ignorance made manifest
but for trees there’d be no fences facing
the tree alive teaches you to love the sky
it feeds its own leaves freedom to depart
laden with fruit its bending branch
bows down, earth-grateful, full of grace
but for lifeless fences facing in your mind
you are free to stand (buttress or blockade?)
free to bend and resonate, be lute, sitar,
marimba, flute - your song the limitless
sky - the freedom, unconstrained, to fly