Month: November 2022

1.

I went out to stand for a moment under the blue sky. Behind the garden shed, a dead cedar, brought down on Wednesday by 3 men in the rain. A living tree died, its length bucked into logs, each one so beautiful I want them to stay in this gallery of open air, green salal, perfumed by the resin. Forget the fire, forget the trip across rough ground to the woodshed. Behind the garden shed, a towhee is searching in the new sawdust.

2.

Take a minute to rest your hand on the surface. Run your finger along the edge of the heartrot, its spongy decay. You could count the rings. If you’d ever kept the kind of weather notes you meant to, you could match the rings with drought and rain. (A tree is its own notes.)

3.

Behind the garden shed, there is a portal, a view of time released from its vertical tyranny. You kneel in your nightdress, under blue sky, and look through.

From this window, like the moon
I keep sending news secretly. (Rumi)

This morning I was updating a list of quilts I’ve made and reading it, I saw a kind of lyrical obsessiveness. So I thought I’d see if it works as a blog post. I didn’t take photographs of finished quilts until maybe 5 or 6 years ago. There are days (this is one of them) when I want to be reminded I’ve done things. Not dusting or dishes or enough laundry but things that will last.

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Quilt Inventory

1. Corduroy and blue prints, squares, rust backing: Brendan has it.
2. God’s Eye, green and pink prints: in linen cupboard here.
3. Pink and green squares with cats and butterflies: Angie
4. Squares with fishing flies: Brendan
5. Blue window with three panes along the top: Forrest
6. Ohio Star, light blue prints, unbleached cotton: here
7. Zig zags inspired by hot air balloons over Provo: Liz
8. Red tulips on blue background: here, on rocking chair
9. Small log cabin in blues and yellows: here, little kids’ room
   
10. Nine patch with japanese prints and olive green squares: here, little kids’ room
11. Batiked fish and red japanese print squares, tied: here

    

12. Tulips and flowered print: Penny’s 50^th
13. Table runner, rusts and blues: David and Diane for caring for Spike
14. Log cabin, blues and yellows: Mum and Dad, 50^th anniversary, here (because they died)
15. Log cabin with saffron sashing: Forrest
16. Yellow and blue stars: Solveigh, 50^th
17. Pinwheels, Kaffe Fasset fabric: Brendan and Cristen
18. Stars: Brendan and Cristen
19. Autobiography of (purple) stars: Angie
20. Blue and yellow stars: here

    

21. Yellow stars, red border: here
22. Fish squares, indigo: Forrest and Manon

    
    

23. Fish panels, indigo: Angelica
24. Many quilted pillow covers, including an Ohio Star for Edith Iglauer, patchworks for Cristen, silk squares for Angelica, some indigo and linen for here
    
25. French patchwork: Forrest and Manon
26. French patchwork: Angelica (Christmas 2019)
27. French patchwork: Cristen (birthday 2020)
28. Blue patches, tied: here
29. Patchwork: Kelly (Second birthday, 2016)

    

30. Single cloth fish and stars: Arthur (third birthday, 2018)

    

31. Kite: Henry

    

32. Euclid’s Orchard: Brendan
33. Dark Path: here (2019)

    

34. Two single cloths, indigo dyed, one backed with red flannel, one with red broadcloth: here

    

35. Log cabin, greens: Anik (2020-21)

    

36. School bus with clouds: Eddy (2021)

    

37. Rivers and vascular system, here (2021-22)

    

38. Structural, Japanese cottons, here (unfinished, 2022)

    

39. French patchwork, in progress

For the past month I’ve been working almost daily on a long essay, or series of essays—I’m not sure which yet; I have some ideas of eventual form but it will depend on what I find out, where the ideas lead me. It’s writing that takes me back nearly four and half decades and some of it is painful. Things happened and I’m revisiting them. For a little while, it felt like an aspect of myself was taken from me, if that doesn’t sound too dramatic. In the back of my mind, for years, there’s been a small voice asking me what I’m going to do about it. Something extraordinary was given to me, too. I need to say that. And over the years, what was taken and given has changed. Sometimes writing is like swimming in deep and unknown water. How deep is it? What else is there? What about the currents? A strong swimmer knows she has the ability to stay afloat, buoyant in the turbulence, if it arrives. I’m not a good swimmer but I am strong and at this point in the writing, I am ready for the deep.

I said I am still figuring out the form for this work. Because it’s about paintings, I might trying to “curate” the arrangement of sections to reflect how they might appear in a gallery. But chronological or thematic? Sparse or cluttered? And it’s also about time: then and now. 1978 and the present, with pauses along the way. It’s also about perspective. Two voices, at least two, talking through the decades. Maybe three voices. A call and response? I want music in this writing. In some ways it’s a fugue. It’s contrapuntal.

I gave a presentation a few weeks ago on the essay and when I read my notes now, about essays in general, I see that in some ways I was working through how to organize this writing in particular. It doesn’t matter how long it is. Essays can be brief and they can go on forever. They can start with some paint on the tip of a brush in 1978 and like a fugue, they can introduce the subject, in several voices, in several pitches, they can provide a connecting passage or episode, the voices alternating, building, repeating and returning, false entries, strettos responding and interrupting, and then they can conclude with a coda, reminding us of the themes, the variations.

This different seeing allows us to find essays in unlikely places. A mode of expression rather than a genre? Can a poem be an essay if it attempts, if its thinking is reflective, if it pursues the shape and restless nature of consciousness? Can an essay be embedded in a novel, a libretto, an oratorio? Can we borrow the term to use when we find ourselves reading something that is finally essayistic in a field guide, an instruction manual, notes on maps or finding aids in archives or museums? I think we can. And if we are resourceful, we’ll tuck these bright scraps into our carrier bag, our gathering basket, and wait until we have critical mass. The gardeners and magpie quilters among us know about accumulating materials in our compost bins and our stash baskets. A red square, three lengths of blue, yellow flocked with provencal flowers. A piece of ticking. Comfrey leaves, the mashed remains of grapes after making jelly, long curls of apple peel. We look and look and then one day we see something of our lives. The yellow cotton becomes the stars over our houses, the compost is an autumn’s worth of kitchen scraps – the dinners we had with friends, jam making, the pears we forgot to eat. Maybe like John Muir, we recognise that ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.’

How is it that you can be two places at once, awake and dreaming? How can you be in the house you built and love, and also on a road coming down from the Carpathian Mountains where you swam in a pool just at sunrise, mist in the valley below, on the road coming down from the mountains, feeling such sadness at leaving? You remember how you felt. As though you’d found a missing strand to your complicated DNA, part of the twisted ladder of your self, the molecule that allowed you to sit at a table under the apple and pear trees at the farm you passed each day on your way back to the hotel in the mountains, talking quietly about the harvest. It could have been Tiudiv, Kryvorivnya, Bukovets, Yavoriv. You are allowed to stroke the white horse’s neck. Someone else goes into a church to prayer. Stooks in the field. The scent of burning spruce in the chimneys nearby. It could have been another life. Yours.

So you read the poem someone posts on social media and you begin to weep.

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

What will happen to the man with the white horse, the hands that shaped the hay, leaning on rakes part way through the work to catch up on the news? You cannot be two places at once. You are in your kitchen, blueberry muffins in the oven, wisteria leaves falling quietly on the deck. Three days in a row the young buck came to your window. Everything is white with frost. What will happen in that life, in this one? Those mornings you swam in cold water were a kind of ecstasy, chickadees in the sunflowers black with the coming of winter. Looking down into the valley felt like falling.

Oh my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

Note: the lines of poetry are from “Encounter” by Czeslaw Milosz, translated from the Polish by the poet with others.

1.

I was at my desk, writing a sentence that wouldn’t end, when I looked out to meet the young buck’s eye. He was eating periwinkle at the foot of an arbutus. He is the one who arrives with the bigger doe, he is the one who stands in the grass as she races into the woods when I come out to swish them away with my hands. Is he her son, her lover, her autumn companion? They are animals from a story, high-stepping across the moss. Swished into the woods, it’s not long before they return.

See, they return, one, and by one,              
With fear, as half-awakened; 
As if the snow should hesitate           
And murmur in the wind,      
            and half turn back;     
These were the “Wing’d-with-Awe,”         
            inviolable. 

2.

A sentence that wouldn’t end, taking me back, back, to the year I was 23, unsettled, trying to find a place for myself. A sentence that holds clauses, agreements, too many verbs, an unhappy subject. I walked at night under the old oaks along Rockland Avenue, trying to find the most direct route to water. At the edge of the sea, foghorns. Were those stars in the distance or freighters waiting to be guided to shore?

3.

Some nights I lie awake and listen for owls. A single barred was calling down towards the lake. I keep paper and a pencil by my bed for the sentence that won’t end, won’t ever let me finish it, sort out its punctuation, Who cooks for you, who cooks for you all, moonlight through fog, the dreams I had when I was 23 still troubling my sleep, the sentence, the one that goes on forever, asks to be mapped, changes its cadence, invites an oboe to sing obbligato, who cooks for you, half the call, then nothing, a few drips of water falling from the edge of the roof above my pillow.

And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all other stars in the loneliness.

Note: the first lines of verse are Ezra Pound’s, from “The Return”. Rilke provides the next couplet, via Robert Bly, from “Autumn”.

I was tidying my desk yesterday, simply to be able to use it properly–laptop in front of chair, room for the stack of letters I pulled out of my file cabinet to use in this current work I am doing, box to my right for notes, and all the bits and pieces sorted (with an eye to discarding some of them, although I almost never do)– when I found a piece of paper with something scribbled on it.

There are people in our communities who have more than one echo in their homes.

I scribbled this years ago, maybe after I’d heard someone say it on the radio. I was taken with its mystery. Write it down, I must have said to myself. And then it got pushed between the books at the back of the desk, the ones I keep in place because I often use them: the Pinsky translation of Dante’s Inferno, Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho, my university copies of the Odyssey (trans. Fitzgerald), Pliny’s Natural History, my blue-cloth bound Concise Oxford Dictionary, Derek Jarman’s Chroma, British Columbia Place Names (the Akriggs, though I also have Andrew Scott’s Raincoast Place Names, too large to sit on my desk between rocks acting as bookends, one from the Skeena River, one from Sandcut Beach; it’s on a shelf above the window), Margaret Ormsby’s British Columbia: A History, a few books by Gary Snyder, Godwin’s Greek Grammar, and maybe 30 more (it’s a wide desk, pushed up against a window the width of the room). It got pushed between the books and now I have it again to try to figure out.

I am a person with more than one echo in my home. Last night there was an owl, far away, but the call finding its way to where I was reading in my bed. There’s the sound (and the echo) of the voices I’d listen for in the night when my children were young, the sound of them dreaming, and once one of them, tucked in with me when his father was working in Vancouver and the children would take turns sleeping in my bed (they would have been 1, 3, and 5), anyway one of them sitting up suddenly, calling out like a boy king leading his troops into battle, clear and loud, but the language he spoke in was not English. Was it Persian, an archaic form of Sanskrit, old Norse? I have no idea. He was still asleep and I tucked him back under the covers, back into the dream, which still echoes in my memory. On spring mornings, there’s the call and the echo of the Swainson’s thrush, the tanager, the salmonberry song of the robins in June. When the loons call at dawn or dusk, it’s every year I’ve listened, echoing, echoing.

And today, the echo is the painter who has left me with versions of my younger self on the walls of my house, echoes of who I was, who I became. I am reading his letters, one phrase echoing over and over, and I can’t quite decide if it’s love or obsession. One sounds so much like the other in these letters. One sounds so much like the other in the paintings I am writing about.