Greenstorm's Journal

I wrote all my words into poetry. Now I can't remember how to write like an everyday person. It's like trying to push the intestines back in with my fingers after they've spilled out.

Things happen and life exists. Trees fall, plants grow. It gets warm and cold and warm again. Yesterday was a little heatstroke from rendering lard in the house on a warm day. A goose is nesting outside my bedroom window, three stories down, and her and the gander sing to each other every morning at first light around 4am and wake me. My tomatoes, yellow and scrappy from living in small spaces and cool nights, are going in the ground and greening up within a day or two.

People come and go from conversation. Sometimes there are pictures.

I'll finish my poem-a-day transcriptions here, leaving the relevant one not under a cut.

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#60 A poem a day.

A poem a day. A poem a day.
But life is an avalanche of poetry
Every experience–
Every human experience–
A poem a day. A poem a day.
So many words and I run after them
A butterfly net in a lightningstorm
Sometimes I even catch something.
A poem a day. A poem a day.
“Words, words, words.”
A poem a day. A poem a day.
A poem. A day.
An avalanche.
A word.
A poem a day. A poem a day.
Every day is a poem
A poem within a poem within a poem
Words.
A poem a day. A poem a day.
Every day is words.
A butterfly net on paper
Soggy in a lightningstorm.
A poem a day.

A poem a day.
A poem.
A day.
A poem.

#53 F3

It’s just us two here:
Me, and the whole wide world.
Humans didn’t stay,
One of us was too big for them.
Last year I ripped up flowers
Bending the tiniest part of the world to my will
Cradled my offspring under lights all winter.
The ravens watch over me
And take their share in exchange
A reminder that flesh always tears
In the end.

I am the meaning-maker,
My stories stitched together to support
The weight of my demanding mind
My life bigger than the compass of my memory
Glutted with years of joy
And honed by solitude.
I always watched across the room
Watched you,
Watched myself,
Told stories as kindly as I wished they’d be told about me.

In the beginning I named myself
And like any good spell the name remained
While the world burned the rest away.
In the beginning I named myself
And like any good self I remained
While the world burned away.

When the story is complicated there’s an ending close behind
No one can abide uncertainty
At least I can’t, and the wide world isn’t talking.
The flowers I ripped up last year are growing.
It’s just us two here.
Humans didn’t stay.


#54 Global warming as a failure of relationship 3

Humans once said they yearned
For the nature they actually spurned
They judged it by looks
And wrote lots of books
Any wonder the atmosphere burned?


#55

There's something about that last glimmer of light,
Sky some sort of deep aquamarine and bright enough
To show up the wind-tossed aspens as they hiss against it.
You don't understand, it may have been light this late,
Until an hour before midnight,
In the city too. But if it was
There were too many streetlights
And it never made a difference.

The sky is glimmering. The aspens are hissing. The fan tosses white noise and breeze into my warm attic-shaped room. Summer is beginning, and I am home.

#48

Sometimes a trampoline
Sometimes a blanket
Some days a cage
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#42

Maybe it’s only that the geese include me
As they circle the yard in a group,
Speaking softly among themselves:
Hello! Are you there? I’m still here.

Some days I write twenty pages
And some days my throat closes
And words escape me. Even then
I want someone to say, I’m still here.

Humans like consistency and I do too
But it’s not something I can provide.
The geese don’t mind
If I join their slow circuit or not
But when I do they say softly,
Hello. I’m still here.

#31 62 pages of poems, or, a breakdown in which I can only write poetry

When I can’t scream I write
When I can’t sing I write
When I can’t write I write
When I can’t write
I write poetry


#32 Place.

It’s where you hang your hat.

Incidentally where you meet
Your mother father sister brother lover
But it’s not family

Bring your children there
And raise them with your utmost care
But it’s not responsibility

Live there,
Mind and soul and daily routine
But it’s not in thoughts

Eat and sleep there
Body tended and pleasured
But it’s not of the body

It’s abstract
Lines on the mortgage document
If you rent maybe just
An instinct and a relief.

Not a relative,
Not an obligation
Not an influencer of decisions
Not origin and destination of your flesh

Two poems from the same seed. This is one of the sets I was nervous about posting: one, because of the subject matter and how personally it touches my life, and two, because it’s one line that I wasn’t sure what to do with, so I tried two very different approaches: a pantoum which is very very formal, and free verse. I’m curious if there’s one of the two you like better than the other? It’s neat how the pantoum drives a particular message and led me to think differently about what I was trying to say.

#26 Vancouver 2: Pantoum

My city is a mother who eats her young
We shelter ourselves from the truth
We take our lives in our hands if we run
Believe nowhere else can we find a safe roof

We shelter ourselves from the truth
Only her people are safe to live among
Believe nowhere else can we find a safe roof
Those elsewhere must all be shunned

Only her people are safe to live among
Too frightened to look for proof
Those elsewhere must all be shunned
Once we feel safe we hold aloof

Too frightened to look for proof
We who tolerate this, what have we become
Once we feel safe we hold aloof
While so many fall unsung

We who tolerate this, what have we become?
We take our lives in our hands if we run
While so many fall unsung
My city is a mother who eats her young


#27 Vancouver 1: just words

My city was a mother that ate her young
Spit the vulnerable in the streets
And turned to smile in sparkling world-class recreation,
In green forests and towering mountains to the rich.

She courted me with the promise of,
If not riches, then some kind of security
Trading time for money and money for
A roof over my head.

She said she had the only friends that were good enough
That elsewhere they’d hurt me, they wouldn’t understand,
Those same friends seethed at strangers
If they were greeted in the street.

Every year I planted a tree and moved
And planted a tree and moved
And waved to the trees I’d planted from afar
As they fruited in strangers’ yards.

I do regret the compromise.
So many times I stayed
When I should have hopped on a rainbow
And ridden right out of town.

My friends stayed long enough that displacement is invisible to them.
Relief not to do the work of moving,
Relief not to find a new place to live,
They have that, but no one mentions roots they’re torn from,
A home they wish to know forever,
The desire for familiar walls.
Whether in dark comedy or enthusiastic compliance
They displace themselves yearly
Crossing the oceans and celebrating how they are not at home.

I stayed long enough that displacement etched into my bones.
Later, when I found my home
And the wildfires came so we left for awhile
I couldn’t imagine a homecoming and was left
Arms wrapped around myself
Lying on the carpet
Willing my soul out of my body
So my body could finally be returned
Could finally be laid back in a home. In my home.
Just so I could return somewhere for once.

My city was a mother that ate her young
And the scars of her teeth will always be on me
I escaped her and when people ask I tell the story
With a light smile at parties because in this she was right:
Though these friends welcome strangers it’s true that
Elsewhere, as within my city, people don’t understand.

Not posted to fb yet, but there will be two today. One written a couple days ago, the other written today.

#15 Threshold-my-home, or, the trauma from years of displacement begins to ease.

Cloverhome
Scents of bees and safety and mom when I was little
Summer beckoner of lazy shade
And misty mornings with glimpses of glades between trees
Greeter-with-roses, pink and five-petalled and fragrant
Giver-of-bounty, grass and geese and aspens and apples
Wintersafe
Cedar cave of warmest wood
Ship’s hull that cups me against the wind
Place with warm fire’s beating heart
And the snore of sleeping dogs
Your walls are my living skin
Your fields are my tendrils of thought
That lead me
Back to the door
Way
Of
My
Self


#16 First smoke of wildfire season

When I write I think about displacement
Every day.
When the fires come I think about it
Every minute.

It’s a hot spring and my body is tense already
With the memory of wildfire smoke
And fleeing with trailers of animals
And that’s when I had somewhere to go.

Tension that came from years ago
Fleeing poverty from roomshare to apartment
Trading freedom for a roof over the head
And a couple months in the same bedroom.

Someone always helps me in the end
But it’s hard to trust the world without a system.
What happens when I’m not pretty enough
Or smart enough for this charity to fulfill my rich friends?

Whatever soft space once existed
Whatever joy peeks out and runs wild
In clear summer air is scarred
With drifting smoke awakening every old terror.

Land of my land of my land of my land of my
Heart of my heart of my heart of my heart of my
Body of my body of my body of my body of my
Memory of my memory of my memory of home.

You for whom the earth is not your body
You for whom the walls are not your skin
You for whom the seasons are not your heartbeat
Save me now
I’m curled under the bed
Hiding
I’d be crying if it was safe to move.
Bury me here
So my body can finally stay home.

#9 Highway of tears on red dress day

Discarded red dress
Weather-beaten, rain-faded
Never forgotten.

Abandoned red dress
Ignored, highwayside, until
Marchers lift it high.

Discarded women
Red dresses line the highway
Marching in hope


#10 Wedding Morning

Fertile soil, they call it
I check.
Hand thrusts into the earth.
Is it moist?
Is it soft?
Does it accept my touch?
I plant my seed slowly and deliberately
Or sometimes I scatter it by fistfuls.
I ensure
The burgeoning earth
The continuance of my line
So that those after me may be
As those before me were
Wedded to the soil.

#11 Survivor Bias During Breakup Season

Every year I write a poem about
Breakup season
Because
Breakup season
Always comes.

Snow always melts.
Ice always cracks
And gets blown clear to the far shore.

Every year I write a poem about
Breakup season
Because
Under the snow there are
Always
Flowers.

#5 Neurobotanical

Brains tilt in favour of similarity
At least most of them
At least so I’m told
The bandwagon effect they call it
I can see you all on the bandwagon
It’s a party
You’re talking about that Marvel movie
Or your kids’ soccer practice

It wasn’t lightning that struck me
When I learned Erasmus Darwin wrote poems to plants
And epics about evolution
It was a very small bandwagon:
Nikolai Vavilov searching the world, not for a lover
But for his plant families
Rowan White singing to her seeds
And hearing them sing back.

Those of us whose brains don’t tilt
Like flowers opening towards the mass of common interest
But instead stay rooted in our own domains
Take heart!
We can still be struck,
Unexpecting,
Unaware,
By a tiny bandwagon of our rare kindred.
It feels like lightning and then
There has never been a better party.

Written with warm thoughts to William Schlegel.

#6 Probably normal

I don’t cook with molasses in January
Not without warming it up first
I save my patience
To lift protesting muscles
One at a time
To soothe my mind as I rest again
Caged heart fighting with rib-caged lungs
It’s a draw
Gradually they quiet
Time to stand, to
Lift protesting muscles
One at a time.
Take a step. Rattle the cage.
Lift a bucket. Rattle the cage.
Combatants awake.
Heart thunders into motion, lungs heave themselves into the ring.
Time for another round.
I sit.
I wait for them to quiet.
I draw on my hoarded patience.

#7 A life where I say no to everything

The woman who never said no suggested
That when I was three
I said no too many times
So Dad stopped loving me.

The lovers who never said no suggested
That I couldn't love them:
I said no to the wrong things
So they stopped loving me.

The heart which always said no broke
And, heartless
"No" the only word on my lips
I said “no”
to saying no
to myself.

Ecophysical / You Keep Busy

“You keep busy” they say,
Looking at the plants growing from my skin
And the geese nibbling my hair
As if my body wasn’t a glorious dance
That happens despite my best efforts.

Their daughter has hockey practice
And before that they need to make lunch
So they leave early: there’s grocery shopping on the way home,
Work and school lunches to pack,
Dinner to plan,
And were they out of tupperware? Add it to
The List. Don’t forget the
Hair appointment after work
And better shave today and everyday
So coworkers will be friendly
When spoken to with the designated greeting.
Of course that greeting needs research
Sports teams, that current bingeable series.
Weather is less relatable.
Dishes before bed, sweep the floor,
Quick scheduling discussion about next week.
Is there time for a load of laundry?
It’s tax week, should they skip
The weekly ritual gathering.
Is it gaming, where you shop and research the rules?
Wine and social performance?
I admit I don’t know what their ritual is.
I haven’t shown up.
My plants keep me
Too busy.