Greenstorm's Journal

I fall asleep early
As the sun goes down
And wake after midnight on my forgotten laundry

Towel loops are etched into my cheek
And the moon shines bright enough
That I check to be sure my headlights were not also forgotten

Against the window my breath fogs, chills
Doesn't quite freeze

The counselor told me it's hard to accept
That nothing lasts
It never was before but
Now in the middle of the night
I move slowly to stoke the fire
Boil water for tea,
Stir in honey
Heat the oven
Put in bread--

Everything I do now is placing
One stone
On top
Of another. Rebuilding
Because nothing lasts
And because, like a child laughing at destruction,
Someone has swept an arm over my castle
Tumbling my stones.

Rebuilding.

One stone at a time,
One log on the fire at a time,
One cup of tea at a time,
One long look at the moonlight when everyone is asleep:
Rebuild the castle
Because nothing lasts
And because no one is entitled to a castle

Or even a pile of pretty rocks

Nothing lasts
And so in the moonlight
one stone on top--

so many nights
building
rebuilding
so many pretty rocks

no one is entitled but the rocks deserve--

one cup of tea
a fire
rocks to build with
and then sleep.

For the third day ash rains from the sky
It's someone else's ash
Lives burnt far from here and carried by the wind

I dreamed about a woman writing poetry
In the dream I was crying
And by the end we were friends

For the third day the sky is the colour of cement
It's my sky
To which I wake after dreaming of poetry

This morning each muscle is delicate but elusive
My body a stringed instrument
Which I never learned to play

I lie back in bed and pretend
The ash
Is a cage

Been posting a couple ad hoc poems on fb lately, everyone is doing poetry month. Collecting them here for future reference:

a small poem

wind rattles
and frost hasn't come for three nights
this late in winter
i wouldn't have thought
there were leaves left
to
fall

****


they say go big or go home
but at home it takes
all seven acres to hold me
and when I leave
they say I'm too big
for my britches

****

loved by you
is waiting on the ground
for a leaf
slips sideways
rises on the current
skitters into a dust devil
but inevitably
comes to rest
here with me

my heart slips and skitters with it but
the dance
is more beautiful
than the fall and clunk
of a stone

***

according to need

for you
the sun darkens
signifying the fragility
of life

for me
raindrops fall
signifying hope
for continued life

I didn't expect it but it's perfect
Surface inviting
Like a sponge invites water
A little yielding, a little resistance
A perfect canvas for my pen

My carvings look like flames to me
And between those flames I place
The sparks of hearts
Dense in the center then
Float, dispersing, up to the sky

I don't expect it but it's perfect
Surface inviting, except--
My hearts get stuck in my ribcage
Once I would have written
so many places
so many times
and among it all you:
what awe, what wonder

Surface perfect, surface inviting
The pottery doesn't break
Instead it's my own heart
Watching inscribed hearts spark
And fade into an endless sky
Without a word.

Obscurity of grey
snow sifts, erasing mountains
While birch catkins swell

Tonight my muse could be apple trees
Never dreamed of in the last hundred years
Each one as unique as any human
Unfurling in the spring sun.

Tonight my muse could be the first leaves of the year
Born from my intimacy with generations of green leafy parents
And creating intimacy with generations of ancestors
Blessing me with their presence.

Tonight my muse could be time
Like an elastic band
Drawing me tighter to my dogs
Who improbably sweeten with every passing day
Before the band snaps and they’ll be gone from me forever.

Tonight my muse could be security,
Four safe walls for the first time
With the paradox of an expiry date drawing near.

Tonight my muse could be surface
Obscuring interiors
Revealing shape
But distorted by tricks of the light.

Tonight my muse could have been love
A building, a painting, a song that one person alone could never create
A staircase climbed
A shared aspiration

Tonight my muse is the saying
Fool me once, shame on you
Fool me twice, shame on me.

Tonight my muse is the song
99 bottles of beer on the wall
Take one down, smash it around
98 bottles of beer on the wall.
**

If I had a kiln I would name her Persephone
Womb of transformation
Alchemizing a little dust
Into red rock.

If I had a kiln I would name her Persephone
Home of the mystery
Of how fire either destroys
Or transforms mud and marks into something quite different
Into something that will last forever.

If I had a kiln I would name her Persephone
I would hand her my feelings
Writ in dirt
And she would make of them something beautiful

If I had a kiln I would name her Persephone
And she would transmute my recklessness
Half into death and destruction
And half into hungry flowers resplendent in the spring light

If I had a kiln I would name her Persephone
Neither of us would be able to see the future
But together we could make it
Into something beautiful.

If I had a kiln I would name her Persephone
She would be the warmest thing I knew
Surprising me with my own images
Bright and not yet broken

Not with the rod

But the way a bird builds a nest
Secure
Creatively brilliant
So that everyone
Wants to come live there

This is how I aspire

Not with the rod

But with duck confit wrapped around the pill
With time, and tasty-smelling treats in the trailer
With slow movements, a step and a breath at a time
With more toys and friends inside the fence than out
With a heated pillow in my favoured spot

I care for them
As I wish to care for myself
My own animal

Not with the rod

With my own nest
Coating my own pills with sugar
Trying for time, and tempting myself with treats
Scattering places to breathe at every turn
Full of friends and toys
And a heating pad in bed

Not with the rod

I husband myself with softness
With a beautiful and creative nest
And with as much security as anyone can offer themselves

Sunbeams?
Who needs that tired old trope?
The garbage truck rumbles downhill
Silks to a stop
And glides through a left turn into a perfect opening
On a busy corner.
Up top, sunglasses and messy bun:
As she rumbles on with traffic
We exchange victory grins
Brighter than the sun.

The mechanic writes his notes in Arabic and says
You're doing your farm all alone, you tell me what you can afford
And just pay that.
While we go back and forth refusing to name numbers
He fixes my headlights
Casually
Without even asking.

On the way home I scroll through my playlists
Find "it's ok"
Pull off my mask
And sing along in the stinging smoke for the first time in a month.

When I get home my new dog
Learning quickly, forbears to take my arm in her mouth
Instead she somersaults into my lap
Upside-down, legs splayed,
Panting with bright eyes.

The whole time I fit words together
Discard them
Fit them again.

There's no graceful way to say
Sometimes I want to be loved just suddenly,
Without asking.

Writing poetry is a tide. It sweeps me up in my own lens onto the world, slightly blue tinted and distorted by the thick curvature of my experience. When I write I have the voice that human communication denies me: shade, nuance, tilt, perspective. My whole life I've lived in the minds of those around me. Every moment is, how are they thinking about this, what motivates them, what do they want, how do they see this? That's how I'm allowed to approach.

Sometimes people have approached me, but rarely. Poetry is where I take my own hands, my own voice, and exist outside of what people want to hear from me. My double vision, always looking at this thing and that thing or rather the relationship between-- always arcing, like a wire that's worn through but not quite enough to go dark.

That is to say I'm sitting here listening to lightning, with fires all around. The lightning isn't showing up on the website in front of me even though sometimes it flashes through the window: its truth is unanchored in the human-made world. It's real and I'm real, but perhaps no one else in the world is. Wind that used to be cool against the heat is a precursor to smoke now, carrying the scent of campfires and evacuation as it fans these literal flames around me.

How am I supposed to put that nuance into human language? It used to be relief. Before that, before my fat protected my core, it was frustrating and made me shiver. Even two weeks ago I was saying how grateful I was there was wind. I'm in metaphor again because how do you talk about that relationship without it? So many things in life are like that, beauty and lightness tinted and then obliterated by new context. Which way the wind is blowing matters now: towards the highway, to shut it down? Towards my house? Or back onto the already-burnt area of the fire so that it may starve and dwindle and lose its power? How do I know which it's doing, to know whether to relax and enjoy the wind?

I felt more like myself the month I wrote poems everyday than at any other time. It faded as I stopped. I enjoy things now: walking the dog in the back field and learning her love language of snuggles and holding, baby ducklings diving into the water as I pour it into their bowl, the weight of my body against the acupuncture mat that lets me relax into it. I wouldn't say I enjoyed poetry. But I thrived on it nonetheless.

Today it's started coming to me again, especially at times when I can't write it down. My mind is waving near-invisible tendrils through my experiences, grasping them and connecting them insistently. Watching firefighters out the back window. The feeling of being rooted so deeply in this land and the way roots tear when you pull them out of the ground and the whole plant is got and it dies, or conversely when the top pops off and the roots are left to grow. Which am I? Offers of help that-- you know, sometimes it's just stage-managing an experience for other people so they feel like they helped, so they won't feel bad and they'll go away. Actual help, well, when the anesthesiologist was putting me under he was gentle, he was taking care of both my body and through his kind explanations of my mind, and I cried and felt like crying was ok in front of someone. I don't cry about the offers of help I've got lately, except maybe one.

Writing this the wind comes up sharply and blows the tin off a roof. It can only be fanning the fire and I don't know what direction it's coming from, I'm inside and it can only spill in through the window. Is it pushing the fire away or bringing it towards me? How can I not write in this? Everything that happens is a sign, is a portent, is an explanation of my own life's map.

Writing. Just writing. To myself?

Of course. There's no one else here.