londontown, 2009

“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”

- Leonard Cohen

I met her in a farm house. Followed her through the wildflowers. Past the cross in yard — her husband’s grave I’d later learn — up the wooden stairs and through the doorway where the scent of fresh-baked bread embraced us like a hymn. We settled in the sitting room. Books, blankets, pottery — blazing raku, fresh from the kiln — scattering the windowsills, the shelves. I let my fifteen-year-old shoulders fall from the weight of holding my city-self together and kicked off my shoes.

We began to talk. She passed me the journal where here words lay stained on page. Grain. Like the Albertan butter fields clamouring all around us outside. Here, miles from Hythe, the closest one-street town, my adolescent heart held court with a real live poet.

Her name was Dymphny. A name that sings. The daughter of a potter friend of my mother’s we were visiting the summer between grades nine and ten. For 1,200 kilometres my brother and I enjoyed a private symphony from the upholstered back bench, a yellow sport walkman for each.

A steady stream of Frente!, Counting Crows, and Cranberries flooding my eardrums.

“Oh, my life is changing everyday… In every possible way”

Knees tucked uncomfortably against the grey minivan door, eyes set on foreign fields, my pen scratching instinctively along the lines of a dollar store notebook. Angst-filled love poems, prairie snapshots, fits of inspiration, filling the page.

And here, Dymphny. Her poem, a confession. Painting the starkness of afterbirth. The coolness of sheets. The blue of her dressing gown. The child aborted.

Without naming regret, painting the avalanche of devastation on a white paper page.

I took a copy of the work, creating next year’s final art project around an image of a child in womb — a black and white sketch — surrounded by a flurry of colour, children of all colours and ages flourishing around this loss child. I carefully copied Dymphny’s words on the back of the poster board. I kept that collage until well in my twenties.

Her words that day, words from a young widow, words from an artist child:

“Never stop writing.”

And the carry of her voice has never dwindled.

And two weeks ago the Literary Review of Canada notified me that my poem, days end, will be published in a future issue of this distinguished Canadian journal.

And today I am reminded that dreams can come true.

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”

- Robert Frost

A Song of Jean

by SIBYL RUTH, 2008 winner of the Mslexia Poetry Competition

Let my tongue and keyboard both proclaim the power of Jean.

For in the meeting house, Jean gets to her feet often and ministers
with a voice that is a clanging gong.
She drives away false peace, awakens us.
Teach us not to fear becoming caught in the long diversions of Jean’s thoughts, lost in the ring road of her speech.

When appointed hour is done, may we engage Jean in conversation
and not run away from her in the lobby for some invented reason.

Let us acknowledge the aging of Jean
who doesn’t enjoy being eighty
but wishes to go on as she did at thirty.
Allow us all to accommodate Jean’s fury,
listening with tenderness to her shouts and rants
Jean’s demands for help. Her refusal of help that’s offered.
Those cries of No. No I can do it. I can manage.

May we make time to watch over Jean
for she mislays her spectacles, her watch, her keys, her purse.

Help us to worship the Spirit that shaped the hands of Jean,
hands that once tied knots, hammered tent pegs, peeled thousands of potatoes.
Jean’s hands now in their fleecy gloves, their knobbly, twisted, arthritic fingers,
hands that can no longer do buttons, whose buttons are done wrong.
frantic hands that keep on searching bags and rattling papers.

Jean has been diminished, yet we shall magnify Jean’s name.
Lead us to esteem properly the engine that is Jean’s body
the darkness of her teeth.
the hairs of her head, white and coarse as dune grass
her stertorous breath
her bent back
her slumped chest.
Also let us praise Jean’s black-handled stick that likes to slip from her grasp and hit the floor with a great clatter.

May we remember always the muchness of Jean’s mind
Her mind that carries those seas from which we crawled in the beginning
that holds those caverns which shall open to receive us at our end.

May glory and honour belong to Jean, and every day that remains to her be blessed.

___________

for all of us will grow old

a blessing for those we love whose hands now flow blue

for my grandmother who lies again in hospital bed with fractures

The final piece, now hung in our office / art room. Paint, India ink (Sabrina’s lettering, my words,) and collage on craft paper. I originally thought I was making a piece to be cut into pages but decided in the end I liked it too much whole.

_______

Closer…

[Grab images and drag to a new window to look closer]

[poetry / freewrite]

I am here today to give myself

permission
to take all of the twine
the knots
the dirt-sand-rock-thorn lines
and bless them
smile with my mouth
my eyes

what I mean by that is

I want to live open
extend my arms
out
give way to the new things
lift eyes to grey skies
lover’s hand
and grasp with the strength of a giant

last wednesday

I sat with my one-year-old
reading the ugly duckling
the ripped pages
painting a pretty picture on the floor

and we danced
cheek-to-cheek
on whatever was playing on the radio
her warmth to my warmth

I am craving

more of this
the untethered moments
the knowing
that this is life at best
life at present
life given
life to be grabbed
life not foresaken

and I want the beautiful

when I was little I wore

dresses that matched my sister
and it made me proud
I wanted to look the same
next to her olive skin

the colours were

pink, white
sweatshirts with happy and sad faces
dresses in fuschia and aquamarine
there were yellows — warm

I remember how

we’d go to the playhouse
dad built in the backyard
the one with the real house windows
that opened and closed
we’d sit on the black spackled roof
and laugh at our brothers
dressed like batman and robin
jumping from roof to lawn
and be secretly jealous of their bravery

I wore my hair

long then
but I’d liked it short
the time I cut it in my friend’s bathroom
with paper scissors when no one was looking
and wore it the same way to my dad’s wedding –
a perfect tomboy in a pale blue dress

Beach, Bowen Island

i am not the mother writer who pours out lines like quarts of milk. i loathe her, the everyday blogger/writer/mother/poet, though i know i shouldn’t.

my lines rarely come in a flourish. i am a one line wonder. sometimes, slowly these words make their way into form. often they remain alone on the pages of journals, on scraps of magazines/napkins/bulletins i place in piles with care.

i often wonder about poets’ process. i thought it might be nice to show you how a poem might begin.

like this:

a line that came to me while looking through the bedroom window lying in bed one morning.

I have been spending nights with The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English. Margaret Atwood’s poem, You Begin, published in 1978, is startling, buoyant, and sombre all at once. I’ve been rereading it for days.

I have copied the poem below. What do you think of it?

: : :

You Begin

You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
that is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye.
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.

Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colors of these nine crayons.

This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.

Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table,
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.

This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.

It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.

three years since our hands folded into one. it isn’t easy, i won’t lie. but every day is worth it, unfolding our broken, broken pieces and saying yes to them, over and over. i am yours.

today michael and i celebrate our third anniversary. we are spending tonight at raw canvas, sipping, sampling and painting. i can’t wait to see what we create. together.

::::

only hope

[a poem for the one i love]

I want only to struggle in your arms
you in mine
pummel chest with marble fingers
erase
scars fortnight left
fortnight forth come
I want to writhe in your arms
only
because
I mistook apology
for

I want to take nail stabs in my palms
smear the bathroom vanity
across the cool of toilet bowl
into waiting tub, where her rubber ducky reigns

I want to dance on 5×12 patio
above whistling suburban thoroughfare
the view is fine
reduce the space between chest freezer, rusted-out barbecue, now gone
solidarity declared beneath the dead hanging basket

we’ll need it on the islands