Poetry Interlude

Tin Ear

We stood at attention as she moved
with a kind of Groucho shuffle
down our line, her trained music
teacher's ear passing by
our ten- and eleven-year-old mouths
open to some song now forgotten.
And as she held her momentary
pause in front of me, I peered
from the corner of my eye
to hers, and knew the truth
I had suspected.
In the following days,
as certain of our peers
disappeared at appointed hours
for the Chorus, something in me
was already closing shop.
Indeed, to this day
I still clam up
for the national anthem
in crowded stadiums, draw
disapproving alumni stares
as I smile the length of school songs,
and even hum and clap
through "Happy Birthday," creating
a diversion—all lest I send
the collective pitch
careening headlong into dissonance.
It's only in the choice acoustics
of shower and sealed car
that I can finally give voice
to that heart deep within me
that is pure, tonally perfect, music.
But when the water stops running
and the radio's off, I can remember
that day in class,
when I knew for the first time
that mine would be a world of words
without melody, where refrain
means do not join,
where I'm ready to sing
in a key no one has ever heard.

-Peter Schmitt
from Country Airport

Greys

The light's all grey in the morning here. The words that come to mind are: pearl and dove. There are darker greys too, charcoal in the corners of the white walls, a little tawny splash from the sarong I'm wearing. It was six thirty when I got up.

I haven't really written for a long time, and I'm still not entirely sure what I am writing, here. There's a lot of catching up to do. I've been putting it off because the web in which I'm enmeshed requires some care, it needs me to be gentle when I touch it. That's something Mouse tried to explain to me, but I hadn't yet discovered the pull of community, and so she couldn't do anything except try to place arbitrary restrictions-- at least, from my point of view that's what it was like. Now I understand. Some things you need to say in person before someone stumbles across them in a self-absorbed tangle of words; it's better that way.

I'm trying to find a balance right now between community and self. Now that I've discovered these connections to others I can't live without them (overdramatic? Perhaps) but I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel timewise. What is need here? What is want? What do I really want, anyhow?

My move is upon me. The idea of moving again makes me feel physically disgusting, like there's slime on my skin (not that I mind slime normally) and very avoidant. I go crazy to avoid thinking of it. How many years have I been moving, with the longest stay about a year? How many years has it been since I lived at home more than away? I've been home, nights, for more than two weeks now. Home is a futon tucked into a cozy lair in a spartan room with two cats and my love, both officially and psychically. Home.

Before the permaculture course, I hadn't spent two weeks worth of nights in the same place since... Can it have been three years?

Rooted in people, in community. Now to root in place. I'm only a block or two from Cottonwood community garden, I have a story to tell you about that one. At one point someone thought there should be a community garden in Strathcona Park. he put up some caution tape and a sign that said, city permit # something or other, etc. HE started to build the garden. After awhile, the city noticed that it had never issued a permit. By then other people had taken over plots in the park too. He Argued that obviously there was need and desire for the thing, and the city agreed, and that's how the garden came about.

Someone's turned on a light in the house. Yellow light is spilling in. It's daytime, waketime, time to get moving. Yellow light in the summer is meaningless, but the year is changing now. Vegetation is dying instead of growing. Things are ripening, but ripening is just another mechanism by which tissue is sloughed off so the plant doesn't have to support it in the colder nights and shorter days. I work with these things intimitely, I see them change.

It's a little bit sad, but I do love the fall. The air at night feels right now. I can't wait to get out on the water.

Love to you. Enjoy the smell of the air as the season turns. I'm still around somewhere.