Spring Song

Everything suddenly golden still, the sun a hovering golden bird.  Nothing moves.  Soft clouds wait like floating houses in the sky and the storm beyond the horizon waits.  Planets stopped in their tracks as if forever was now and the grass roots knew it all.  

But they don’t you know and here I am with both hands high under the skirts of the world.  Trying to figure it out. 

Everything rearranged itself from is to was.  The white moon tracks her silver self across the purple night replacing time with a celestial hour glass.  

Al Purdy

Lament

The texture of a life devoted to poetry is activist, in the deep sense.  Quite often it is not activist in the superficial sense.  You come at poetry with the momentum of having failed.  It’s only when other communication is impossible that a poem HAS to exist. 

A response to the catastrophic situation were in.  The suffering has gone beyond what the mind can manage.

Alice Oswald 

Be softer. Be rounder.

Attend to the voice inside me that opens towards curiosity and exploration.

Don't listen to the dark voices that say that I am too old, or an imposter.    (Zak Foster's newsletter)

My design wall in Mexico xo

 

4:00 am

I thought about what Ned advised me.  Only do what I want to do.  So, I’m in my studio.  I’ve got the phone timer on for one hour and I’m going to figure out more for the blue circle piece.  It’s got a lot left to do, and it’s what I WANT to do.  

Not paperwork.  Not re-sizing and gathering images.  

Hold your mind empty and tranquil

 In 1979, Agnes Martin painted The Islands, a set of 12 paintings, very very pale.  Each of them 6 feet square. 

the beauty of the green earth

 In my window, with the sugar plum tree and the snow on the deck so high, I can hardly see it.  Tomorrow we go to Toronto for the opening and a lot of other things.  Today, I need to get ready.  But first, I’m putting at least an hour into my circular tree everlasting, the beauty of the green earth.  

Cape of Rain

The Margaret Atwood references for this title are actually two poems.  One of them is about survival. The other one has the line: I pull about me running, a cape of rain.  In my mind, I put them together.