Enjoying: a bouquet of flowers, delphinium, foxgloves, old roses, Siberian iris, daisies, long strands of fennel, peonies, mint, yellow flag iris, brought to my book launch on Friday by my friend (appropriately) June. I came down to make coffee and saw the jug of flowers on the blue tablecloth, a stone fish swimming by, flicking its tail.
Listening: not yet but as soon as I’ve finished writing I’m going to put on the music I was hearing in my dream, Eliza Gilkyson’s “Songs from the River Wind“, in particular “Bristlecone Pine”, a love letter to an ancient tree, and I think of the huge Douglas fir on the little beach where I swim most mornings now that it’s spring, moving to summer, and what I might say in a love letter to this beautiful tree, its roots stretching out under the sand brought in every year, its thick bark, generous canopy of branches — when John doesn’t swim, he often sits under it, in sun, in light rain.
For as I would slowly return to the earth
What little this body of mine might be worth
Would soon start to nourish the roots of that tree
And it would partake of the essence of me
— “Bristlecone Pine” (lyrics by Hugh Prestwood)
Remembering: Friday afternoon, just before my book launch at the Sechelt Library, wondering if anyone would come, and then seeing the room fill up, old friends, new friends, strangers, and warm their presence felt as I read from The Art of Looking Back, as I talked, answered their questions, and asked a few of my own.
Loving: the green shade of the west-facing deck, the one where we take our dinner most evenings, sitting among the orchid cactus, under the dense covering of wisteria and grape. Last evening John called to me as I was doing something in the kitchen and said that huge bumblebees were entering the cactus flowers and disappearing inside them.
Surprised by: the swift flight of a kingfisher as it skimmed over the surface of the lake as I swam the day before yesterday. A few years ago, I was swimming, as I do now, and I’d see the kingfisher, sometimes two, and I thought of the missiles hitting targets in Ukraine. I didn’t know what else to do so I wrote about it. I sent the resulting essay to many places but no one was interested so I put it up on Medium. I’m not sure it’s still there. But here’s the final section:
I remember driving along the Rybnytsya River, from Kosiv to Yavoriv, hoping to see a kingfisher. Not the belted kingfishers we have near us, but Alcedo atthis, the common or river kingfisher, green-blue, with rufous underparts. Instead, there were washed fleeces, white, ruddy, creamy yellow, grey-black, hanging on the bridge leading to a small farm, a woman weaving lizhnyks from yarn rich with lanolin, a wooden church, villages high in the mountains with smoke rising from chimneys and the scent of apples coming in the open windows. Earlier that day I’d found a quiet place near the river to pee, thinking myself alone in the kalyna bushes, and then noticed young boys down in the water, splashing and laughing in the sun-spangled air. They turned and turned in gleaming river light, 15 or 16 in 2019, old enough that maybe now they are in trenches near the occupied territories or in coffins draped with their country’s flag. I always thought I’d return. I never dreamed missiles would skim the air, that atrocities would be committed in places I’d visited, that rivers would flood fields and houses. 26 year old Margo speaks to the dead.
When I swim these early September mornings, almost always alone, I am aware of time passing, the wings of barn swallows just above me as they pluck insects from the surface of the lake. One, two, five, seven, swift as a thought. In the old stories, they stole fire from the gods and as punishment, the middle portion of their tails was singed, resulting in a deeply forked tail. They brought fire to humans and when I feel the whirr of their wings, I wince. In the haze of smoke from the great fires still burning—Central Okanagan, Shuswap, Caspar Creek, Stein Mountain—would I notice a swallow carrying fire? As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame. All the dangers of the world, what’s happening now, what’s coming, and I am swimming in cool water deep enough that I could drop down and never be found. Some days I want that, to turn away from the world.
In the Cave of the Swimmers, the bodies are alive in eternity, animated with caput mortuum, ultramarine, Chinese white, brown ochre, and raw umber. No one will remember my morning swims, when the world has burned to a husk. In green water I have left no impression, though the actions of my strokes make transverse waves, felt perhaps by the mergansers feeding near the shore. Maybe a dragonfly will pause as the water swells. I am swimming into a future I dread.
The kingfishers rattle and cry on a dying branch of cedar. Let the world stop, in this moment, as I watch them, their crests blown back by a light wind. Each mortal thing does one thing and the same. Some do a thing for which they can never be forgiven. Bakhmut, Soledar, Maryinka, Kreminna, in ruins, burned. Villages in the High Atlas Mountains reduced to rubble, farms underwater in Thessaly, boreal forests become ash. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.
And this, the place I have loved.
Anticipating: a reading on Wednesday night with Keiko Honda at Munro’s Books in Victoria. I remember Munro’s when it was on Yates Street across from the old Carnegie Library, the first library I knew as a child, and I remember buying books at that Munro’s as a high school student, maybe even the first copy of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, the book that encouraged me to become a writer myself. In the tangle of places and feelings that is Victoria to me, that store, that library, the wide lanes of Yates Street as it leads down to Wharf Street, the last block where Carnaby Street used to be (and Goodwill too), and where I bought the peacock skirt I wore the first time I met Jack Wilkinson, the painter at the heart of my new book.
Drinking: my first cup of dark French coffee, the one I look forward to every morning, usually in the green cup Solveigh and Joe gave me one year for my birthday, and look, it’s finished. Time to go pour another.
