Valentine's Update

There are fair trade flowers available (Valentine's day and most other days) at Eternal Abundance on Commercial Drive, by the East End Food Co-Op, Grant Street, Sweet Cherubim, and whatever else is in tht area.

More Dreams: A Scene Revisited

Beyond the inlet, over the sharp upthrust of the mountains to the south, there is a lake. The altitude is very high, mountains upthrust abruptly from the ocean like craggy granite teeth, and the highway climbs doggedly up over that crest to fall to the lake. The lake itself is a deep green-blue, that alpine colour, even in early March. This geography exists on no map in the real world, but I've been here three times in dreams now.

Last time, in my dream, I'd made it across on the ferry and managed to get up to the top of the crag. There is a little bustling community there, tourists and the vendors who feed on them and who feed, too, on the people who get out of their cars during the traffic jams and seek a little food, a little shopping. It's a very dry climate. All the rock is sharp red granite, upthrust in spikes and loose in rough sharp gravel underfoot. Nothing grows.

This dream I was in a shopping area up there, all made from fitted and polished red marble, and there were people I knew. We spoke with each other, and I went outside. It felt like a warm March day anywhere, the air thin and cold but the sun on me hot wherever it touched. Veins of blood-red ran through the sheared granite.

This is a dream I have in spring. I wonder if someday I will reach the lake? It was so bright, below, with that powdery aqua colour of high lakes.

Concision

The wayfarer,
Perceiving the pathway to truth,
Was struck with astonishment.
It was thickly grown with weeds.
"Ha," he said,
"I see that no one has passed here
In a long time."
Later he saw that each weed
Was a singular knife.
"Well," he mumbled at last,
"Doubtless there are other roads."

-Stephen Crane

One-Two Punch

Exquisite poem.

Self-Improvement

Just before she flew off like a swan
to her wealthy parents' summer home,
Bruce's college girlfriend asked him
to improve his expertise at oral sex,
and offered him some technical advice:

Use nothing but his tonguetip
to flick the light switch in his room
on and off a hundred times a day
until he grew fluent at the nuances
of force and latitude.

Imagine him at practice every evening,
more inspired than he ever was at algebra,
beads of sweat sprouting on his brow,
thinking, thirty-seven, thirty-eight,
seeing, in the tunnel vision of his mind's eye,
the quadratic equation of her climax
yield to the logic
of his simple math.

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Sometimes we are asked
to get good at something we have
no talent for,
or we excel at something we will never
have the opportunity to prove.

Often we ask ourselves
to make absolute sense
out of what just happens,
and in this way, what we are practicing

is suffering,
which everybody practices,
but strangely few of us
grow graceful in.

The climaxes of suffering are complex,
costly, beautiful, but secret.
Bruce never played the light switch again.

So the avenues we walk down,
full of bodies wearing faces,
are full of hidden talent:
enough to make pianos moan,
sidewalks split,
streetlights deliriously flicker.

-Tony Hoagland