"I Drew a Map of Canada, with Your Face Sketched on it Twice..."

I sit in full lotus on the grimy station floor, little white headphones in my ears... humming Joni Mitchell as I wait to board the London train.

I feel happy.




I am still leading a surreal life -- hovering between nations and suitcases (linen skirts and poetry). I feel content here, in this state of suspension -- more content to hover than to land.

But it seems I am landing -- gracefully, like a weightless dancer -- in the second land I've grown to love; Ariel has asked me to return to Toronto in October -- to love and live with him -- and I have agreed.




For several months now, I have been thinking about the nature of love -- feeling gratitude for my loves (past and present). I've grown so much with them, and in such unexpected ways -- just as I have also grown (in different but harmonious ways) in the spectrum of my solitude.




I'm agnostic, with no desire for illusions of god, fate, or destiny. I do not believe in "soul mates" -- cannot imagine that each person has only one partner they are somehow "meant" to find. I simply believe in the love, friendship, and trust that two people can mutually construct over months and years. I believe in passion -- and (atheistic) transcendence.




And I know of at least two men who feel like part of me -- who I love more deeply than my jagged tongue can say. Each man is so much of what I want (close friends... romantic lovers... intuitive artists... trusted companions...) and so much more than I had really hoped to find.




There is no right choice here -- and no wrong one.

The fallacy is in the choice itself: the insistence of monogamy, the dichotomy of "lover" and "friend," and the fear that imposes limits on ineffable love.




To the one I couldn't choose: I love you. I do. And I'm sorry...

9:48 PM: On a Bus Bound for Toronto

I am living up to my "postmodern vagabond" nature: flitting between Toronto and London (Ontario), a few days in each place, living out of suitcases and backpacks. Much to my delight, each time I travel I feel compelled to bring fewer items with me.




Years ago, I could not "travel light." I carried thick binders of creative notes: sketches for paintings... new stanzas of poetry... pages of in-progress theatre scripts... collages and mixed-media journal entries... and sentimental relics from people I'd met during my journeys.




And now: an electronic revolution!

A modest library of music CDs (and a series of French-language lessons) fits onto a player the size of a deck of cards. My photographs (and some raw video footage for a short film I'm brainstorming) fit on a tiny memory card in my camera; most of my other creative projects are on a laptop computer. With the exception of a bulging folder of random text (scrawled on coffee-splotched napkins and the thin white borders of newspapers), most of my creative life is now digital. As a result, the weight of my creativity is a mind-bending eight pounds...

Butterflies and Gnawing Locusts

After six months apart, we met on a park bench.

I sat in the sun, a flowing pink skirt brushing against my calves; he arrived with a guitar case slung over his shoulder.

We embraced.




And then -- what exactly?

It's so difficult to say...




We spent seven hours together.



He played a few songs...

We shared a picnic on the top of a hill in Riverdale Park (fresh multigrain bread, seasoned olives, Canadian brie, and smoked fish) while children tossed baseballs to each other on the fields below...

We trekked through the Don Valley, charting new paths...

We argued -- as we so often did.

But we stayed -- as we also often did -- and found points of connection: the words unsaid, and the real sense of words we'd each spoken.



I am learning to live with less certainty -- and more trust.

Poetry, Elliptical Orbits, and Heliocentric Lives

This was a truly lovely day.

I saw Ewan, after he'd been away from the city for a few days... and it felt so nice to take his hand and wander around the Annex streets. We stopped to sit and talk beneath trees, on campus benches, and in a small courtyard with a chessboard inlaid into the concrete tabletop...




He's delightful.




I want more of this: more poetry, more kindness... more afternoons with dark chocolate... more moments of connection, of slowly drawing each other back to the sun...

David and Manjit at the Gladstone Hotel

A few shots from David's wedding reception at the Glastone on Friday night...

"His Eye is on the Sparrow"

We intersect at Bloor and Yonge: an accident on the corner. We watch medics pull bodies from broken glass. I try not to stare.

Fingers light on my wrist, you guide me down a quiet street. The barista greets you by name; you carry our lattes out the back, smiling over your shoulder from the fire escape.

I lean against the café wall beside the vent from the roaster (gentle smoke, deeply aromatic, arousing as any scent) and watch you pull a moleskin journal from your bag.

I am squinting in the sun as you recite Catullus – a translation you wrote this morning. Two millennia incarnate in your voice: gentle as the sparrow you tease from my breast, pecking wistful hands…

In your measured cadence, your sonorous voice, I hear us make love: rhythm of tides… ductility of gold… spinning of stars over hemispheres...

(I hear you moan, one octave below: content in my taste and your sweat.)

You’re closing the notebook, your hand touches mine, and we fly.

I Could Not Take a Photograph

thick fog:
streetlights twine
through maple leaves

softly, in pace,
past teens on the swings:
(2 a.m.) pendulums swaying...
haze of the night
like stratified time

(your hand in my hair)
(knees damp on the grass)
(overexposed)

moment replayed:
lines overlaid

This is What Inspiration Looks Like

Earlier this afternoon, intending to continue editing Fragments, I pushed the novella away (for what I imagined would be just a few minutes) so I could organize a nearby stack of poetry into the table of contents for another book.

I had been contemplating this second book for several weeks, because although I have occasionally written fiction, my primary literary conduit is poetry -- and has been for most of my life. Each time I've mentioned Fragments to someone who has known me for years, they show interest -- and invariably, they also ask when I'll publish another collection of poems. (I self-published my first chapbook, Candied Nothings, in 1999.)

So -- this afternoon -- intending only to select my favourite poems, I soon found myself laying them out in a possible order -- and simultaneously matching them with photographs I've taken over the past decade. Working on the graphic design, each facing spread became a post-it note scribbled with poem titles and quick sketches -- all arranged (and rearranged) on a window beside my desk.

Then: thinking about the trajectory of the poetry, as well as my intent to somehow use this work a symbolic companion to the novella, I brainstormed titles... and found that three titles obliquely reference rituals of the winter solstice. (Since I am still contemplating, I won't list the options here -- though I may announce a working title sometime in the next few weeks.)

Now, after a couple of delightfully-productive hours, I have the foundation for another book. It's time to turn off my laptop -- change into a flowing skirt -- and celebrate!

I Wrote "I Love You" in the Sand (as Titania Watched and Faeries Frolicked)

I wrote "I love you" in the sand.

You built our castle.



This is no crumbling edifice -- no dreamt midsummer night -- no tempest in a cup of herbal tea.

This is simplicity -- divinity -- instinct manifest.

This is the innocence of swing-sets by the slow rise of a waxing moon.



This night is a white kitten on the sidewalk by the park...

tofu and bean sprouts on the pavilion steps...

and an orange tiger lilly in a water-bottle vase.

Still Life with Fireflies (and Einstein)

The fireflies are swarming.

On my arms like preludes to approaching rain, I feel their tiny bodies ricochet.

Most dive and recover, arcing off my skin; others land, stunned, and crawl across follicles that are nearly half their size.

Everything is relative, it seems -- their obstacles are thin as filaments.

I strive to walk slowly...

I don't want to impede their flight.

Five New "Fragments"

I've just posted five chapters of Fragments:
* Magnolias
* The Musical Term for the Process by which Out-of-Phase Elements Slowly But Deliberately Come into Synchrony
* Entrainment
* The Front Moves Through
* Then

All can be read on my website (on the main page for the novella): Fragments of an Intended Life, Whispered to an Absent Lover.

Acute Triangle Degrees: An Open Letter to a Former Love

Dear - - - - - - ,

Twelve hours with you yesterday, and still I feel free from the logic of time.

We loved as deeply in our arcane affair as we had four years ago -- yet with awareness that we both were lacking then. What mystic gift has brought us here again? You mire me in contradiction: an atheist who feels we loved long before the fissure of the (nonexistent) soul.

I relive our ecstasies like clips of art-house film, spliced into a soundtrack of Susan Voelz, Jimmy Dale Gillmore, and Counting Crows. I see you sprawled across the bed, your exquisite form framed by the arched rail of the spiral staircase. I feel your back beneath my hands -- prone on a lavender sheet spread over dry pine needles. And your eyes -- pale sapphires that intuit me more truly than I may ever see myself -- I fall into your image, swimming inches from my own, through tangled strands of hair that land between our lips.

You revive me. Twelve short hours of your touch and I breathe deep again: the phantom limbs that ached intangibly are becoming real, aroused and opened by your love. You conjured up the bliss of all we had -- and all I now know I could be.

I want so many days like this -- even if we must wait months or years to alter angles of our geometric world. I will await more nights with you, sleeping entwined on wrinkled cotton sheets, making love in the space between dreams.

Obliquely Referencing Horizontal Planes

I don't want to bathe -- can't lose how you've seasoned my skin
while whispering nothings (sweet somethings) that pulsed like the sun
on our soft-blowing hair as we picnicked out under the pines...
so grateful for all that we shared and all left undone.

“The Silence of Snow” -- An Homage to Orhan Pamuk

The journey
to the outlying districts:
poverty and history

In the New Life pastry shop,
the first conversation
between the murderer and his victim:
love, religion, and poetry

A sad story at Party headquarters
(police headquarters)
and once again on the streets –
a nonbeliever
(blue)
who does not want to kill himself

Happiness
and a walk
through the snow;
the dinner conversation turns
to love, headscarves, and suicide

At the National Theatre,
one describes his landscape
and another recites
his poem:
a revolution:
a play about a girl
who burns
her headscarf

The night of the Revolution
(the six-sided snowflake),
he slept;
and when he woke
in the hotel room
(cold rooms of terror)
the next morning,
a short spell of happiness:
fusion of military and theatrical careers

In Frankfurt,
he urges another to sign a statement
to the West
on love, insignificance, and disappearance

The mediator
(fear of being shot)
in his cell,
bargaining
(life vies with theatre,
and art with politics):
preparations for the play
to end all plays

The final act
from his point of view
a few years later:
an enforced visit
at the hotel:
the missing green notebook –
the first half of the chapter –
the silence of snow.




This is not a poem as much as a collage; the phrases are excerpts from the table of contents of Orhan Pamuk’s phenomenal novel, Snow. In the first moments of reading Pamuk’s words, I was struck by how little they resembled a conventional table of contents – and how much they felt like poetry. Re-reading them a few days later, I sensed the shape of the poem – and felt inspired to cut and shape them to bring out that poetry, adding only a few words of my own.

I cannot claim to be this poem’s “author” – I merely assembled the poetry that Pamuk had already written. Please feel free to compare this poem to Pamuk’s actual table of contents; then I urge you to read the rest of his novel.

I am just beginning to read Snow, and it’s gorgeous. In his opening lines I felt an elation like the rapture of falling in love: “The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus driver. If this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called the thing he felt inside him the silence of snow.”