volume 8 of dames rocket: 1977-1978 october-june  work & days: a lifetime journal project   1   2   3   4   5   6   In this volume times with Trudy and Cheryl have settled some, but the new connection with Jam is very fraught. Go on being spooked by Jam's claim that she is a man. In part 1 her cousin Keder dies and we go to his funeral. Near the end of part 3, am in Hong Kong with her for a couple of weeks in December. While we're there Jam finds a tiny lump below my armpit and in part 4 sends me into spiraling fear of death. In part 5 I make a garden in the driveway at 820A East Pender and get a Canada Council film production grant. In part 6 buy a 1962 Studebaker Lark and Nellie finishes teaching me to drive; first visit to Joyce Frazee, the therapist I continued to see until she died in 2001; and Jam and I go to England for a month, where I see Luke and read in the British Museum Reading Room. Part 4 reads as a continuous record of lesbian friendship in the late 70s because reading notes and summarizing excerpts were segregated for a while. They and photos for most years from 1945-1978 can be found here. transcription note: from DR8 4-8 I've transcribed as it was written, in lower case and often with spaces instead of punctuation. I use a margin hyphen between entries where I know they were written at different times, but often am not able to tell. reading notes: Juliet Mitchell Psychoanalysis and feminism, Jung intro to The secret of the golden flower, Yeats The Celtic twilight and Per amica silentia lunae, the Shakers, Tantra, Lillian Alman clippings file, Maxine Hong Kingston The woman warrior, Tibetan book of the dead, the Tao te ching, Ann Kipling, biofeedback, Artscanada, Ibn Arabi, Marlatt Zocalo, Castenada Tales of power, Gurdjieff, Celtic season lore. mentioned: Jam Ismail, Cheryl D, Trudy R, Joyce Frazee, Rosalynd de Lanerolle, Rhoda Rosenfeld, Robin Blaser, Madeleine Murray, Roy Chisholm, Marilyn Cox, Anne Holmes, Bruce Davis, Anne McLean, Marion Penner Bancroft, Daphne Marlatt, Roy Kiyooka, Diana Kemble, Judith Sandiford, Circle Lo, Esther and Percy Ismail, Nellie van Leeuwen, Sandy Rodin, Sheila Ismail, Lynn Hughes, Floyd Farnsworth, Rudy Epp, Elizabeth Gray, Judy Ritter, Josie Cooke, Kirk Tougas, Wain Ewing, Peter and Luisa Konrad, Sara Chisholm, Jill Chisholm, Sally Potter, Annabel Nicholson, JoAnn Kaplan, Andy Wyman, Tony Nesbit. Honey's cafe, Vancouver Cinemateque, the Princess Cafe, Woodbine Hotel, Astoria Hotel, Army and Navy store, Whistler Youth Hostel, MacMillan Bloedel Conservatory, the Mozart Cafe, St Joseph's residential hospital on Cordova demolished in 1978, Muckamuck Restaurant, the Haida Monarch, Press Gang Publishers, the London Film Co-op, the Hong Kong YWCA, Cloud View Road, Lantau Island and Po Lin monastery, Sissinghurst, Dillons bookstore, research library at Greenwich. Marie-Claire Blaise The wolf, Makara collective, Borges, Rilke, Tagore, L'Atalante, Little Orphan Annie, Tarzan, David Larcher, Dune, Hildegard von Bingen, Agnes Martin, Euripides, Lessing Briefing for a descent into hell, The Odyssey, CS Lewis The voyage of the Dawn Treader, Yeats on Swedenborg, Derrida, Colette, Cocteau Enfants terribles, Horowitz, gnosticism, Dali, Olga Broumas, The Mennonites in Western Canada, Tarthang Tulku Time, space and knowledge. [October 1977] The struggle to stay out of your language, your dead language that you don't mind. "I'm central because I have access to more than one level of being, any one of them feels they can tell me anything." It is unpleasant for me to bring my naïve visions and feelings to you and find you know all about them, as of long ago. You can quote from Plotinus. But you haven't been willing to feel them. It touches me, the way you have all the positions covered, I begin to see what you are and you are magnificent but there's no room for me next to you. You make so much of your fine perceptions of skin and flesh, voice. I look at you and see your face like a drawn blind. I have never seen such cold eyes. How interesting you are, at night suddenly finding the delicate girl. And yet that girl can only be a picture. I'm tempted by how interesting you are, I like to see the person shift and your range is wonderful, I'd like to study it, I was thinking in that separation that I'd like to learn to write that shifting as we find it. In this the I and you are foolish. I don't mean to constitute you as the bad one but it's here and it's the old form of parting. The anger isn't deep. Its other strikes up from under it, loving flashes. Yet I think I have to methodically invent a complete refusal. You are a pig with a princess in you. - Oh mentat, I fancied myself intelligent and couldn't help but compete. And blame you. What it is - that I only know you in essence. And so can't be comfortable. Will you learn not to do your tricks on me. Dominance tricks. My direction is toward obedience. Yours toward perversity. I feel that if you don't give up perversity your conventions will get me. - No, to write looking at the thing, and in this one, the you/you/ sliding. - My slides are a ghost's memoirs, memories, dreams, they are about death and disturb me. They are not the dreams of a happy person. - [Cheryl moves house] Moving the furniture, the quality of push and presence moving well, Rhoda most. She was attending to C, T excited, C coming gradually in, C in the dignity of turning her eyes with such a power behind them. The fuel, smoke and spirits, coffee, our relief today we can be together without war or coldness. The questions I asked: What was an artist in you, when did you see what they were. C said "All I knew was not that, not that, not that. I came to it very late." - What is it like to be with you, again and again your head and body are in my space, your head filling the space sometimes, your eye large. Walking next to me a joy. The black in the sweater and how your hair is. Oh this marvel, it could stop. Oh I had a joy in me, the world opened around me, but at a distance. When in acid our eyes closed holding /     opened my eyes alone and saw you the beautiful angel /     the small angel of smiling war. The black gleam. At the Cinemateque thrilled to hear your firm voice telling David to speak louder. It cut clearly in the dark. The small warrior stands lightly, it is an Islamic angel. Angel is different from goddess. The sight of transcendence. The angel of vision. - They came down into the black wind spaced rain striking into the room of the garden where they loved the moonlit shine of the television growing down into the ground. I lit with gratitude to their pleasure, giving Rhoda bits of smells broken from my private intimacy with the garden. There are bulbs buried here. She felt them. I told them the story of plants brought from other gardens, some of them that won't show themselves for years. - The moment when the body gathers the right posture and the picture is taken. They went to Paul's and looked at his work. "Was he afraid of you?" "He was but he likes it and is curious." In the back corner of the car with three dark narrow shoulders, the car going quietly dry, quiet a roofed little moviehouse, a formation, the four going through the streets held in a certain position. I felt a prisoner with alarming guards, until they came to my house and I set up my hospitality - Often with Rhoda I would see my foolishness and tonight I felt myself forgiven it. T was forgiven her foolishness by the liveliness she puts into us. R was being unfoolish. I think of her loneliness and truthfulness when I argue against the sense of shelter I have in you and then I remember how I see the possibility of being wrecked in my trust and am not saved. Oh risking the soft bed, risking a betrayal on a level where it would hurt past mending. "You want me to crack you? I can do that for you. I've done that for other people who've wanted it," [Jam] in a hard voice. Trudy dreamed both C and R going off with me and she said "But what about me?" And I came to help move and got in a car with C and R, and named J in the second sentence and noticed how my posture in the car embraced C who was preoccupied by the tasks. And was ashamed at the rivalry with R, who later was so generous and that because my rivalry with her was in automaton. - J's story, at breakfast we talked about how I resist the ready-made voice of her story until she tells the end of it and my pleasure in the shape of it overcomes my resistance to her distance from me. The friendliness and confidence. This morning I was dreaming her clothed going through the door into the other room with some numbers, I opened my eyes and you were sitting next to me. The number of Borges in the shelf, Rilke, Tagore. "Where did you get the freedom to say that you wouldn't do it anymore unless I learn to move?" "That freedom was there. Wasn't it?" (In the car.) - The secret life of comics. Little Orphan Annie, because she was alone and a traveler; always for some reason Dagwood, because it takes place inside a house and a family. C doesn't ever read comics, Rhoda and T do. The fascination. The row of mentalities displayed. Prince Valiant. Tarzan was very nice T said. - It's Monday the 24th of October, rained hard when we were first awake. When I woke I didn't know her. When I began to kiss her the kiss came through me like a snake lunging and fighting. The sensation of letting it loose. She was complaining that I kept something back, and I was, waiting for her to assure me. - Because something speaks through me that is not my attention, slips of the tongue - a dizziness when I see what I am. - Sense of C's evasion, T hiding her real respect. When they were here I kept looking to see is Cheryl laughing. R saying to J that she taught C and C used what she'd learned to take Trudy. J and C using a speech to cover their long look at each other. Being with and who is with and T calling everyone to be with her. R's presence in her light body, a greyness with a shine in eyes. Judith the bewilderment swimming eyes with firm little statements issuing. T spreadlegged fat laughing at everything, a merry little soul, alight going into absurdity and coming out by a last fling with something quite firm and funny. Look of defiance. C flushed pink glowing at the head of the table, often not laughing, interested in Diana and J. T says, Does anybody want my seat? Yes says Jam, I do (next to C). They exchange places. J's lovely conceit when they challenged her on stalking out. "If one of us had been there would we have seen you stalking?" "You'd have seen me striding, a stride is a short stalk, and my stalks are quite short you see." Watching C miss or double the wordplay. - The sense of marriage as it is clear in me: something accomplished, peace of relief. Now I can get on with my work, that task is done at last after its long delay. If it isn't done the work has to be about it. What actually happened with Roy: I met someone my spirit bowed to and was in apprenticeship with that magician. The same with T and C. And now it's to come out of it. I have to find true accounts of the centres of this life. The story of what the person was interested in. - In the gentleness of real fuck, the images. - It isn't for passion but as accomplishment. At last I have got that marrying done. After that they were no longer one mind but slowly became themselves, contracted and confident. In here is the sense of a life having epochs and one being the search for the mate. Now I find out what mate is. And find the deep fright of the rival and what I'd do is - refuse to fight. - Opened the door. Night over the sill, beautiful night. She read Yeats to be with me, and was shy to tell me. - In writing, or movies, the movement through states, and in that trying to see how to live. All of what's here and my desire to work hard in it, memory has to stay while the states complexify, that's it. - Roy on the telephone, he starts out saying he loves me, that irritates me, he's so transparent, he brings up sentimental pictures, he has little speculations, little rags he uses as self-praise. I scold him for his fabulous tags, quoting this and that, say why does he keep giving me that. "It's all I've got, Ellie," in a charming voice I like. - I have a panic sensation of regression, chaos, my brain decomposing, the fitful energy of this intelligence, the waste of it on incomprehension of my friends' lives and my own. An upheaval from under the confident development of its own knowledge and pleasure. I think of myself these days as living in another order suspended over a void fear of loss of myself. Times confused, knowing more and believing less, that means with questions that don't make answers. And suspended over the void of what we call marriage in which we try not to lie about mythology and its depth in us, and are in terror of selling another more evolved part of ourselves for it. Sometimes when I lie with this woman I grow warm and real in the simplicity of offering myself and trusting what is offered, and yet I am afraid that my thoughts may lead me to mistrust what I need so much. I travel between a marveling penetration and a dimness that sees only that this and that are not right. It is that I need to relearn to think. My friend leading me in her brown voice to imagine that riddles can be solved. The earnest detective with such a lovely sense and firmness in her way. Her beauty I needn't envy. This beauty next to me, that isn't for itself or for me, gratuitous, there when we have time to please ourselves in it. Offering myself and mistrusting: what I mistrust is that we want to complete ourselves and get on with it, we want to use each other and aren't testing as if our lives depended on it. You're here, I don't speak to myself anymore, I want there to be no separation and it isn't privacy I need. But there's such an amount of garbage in your life and mine, the detail we see, oh waking with you and telling the story of what the waking was. We repeat ourselves only recently / and forgive probably. Am I more interested in the trust than in her and again I see that it's alright. The nameless whose voice grows inside mine. The small pop-eyed person, narrow, and out of her comes such a large voice. The possessed lecturer / the intimate head / who isn't afraid / oh she wasn't afraid / to make herself absurd. I'm afraid to praise you in this way because I might turn you into someone I'd be afraid of and yet the inwardness with you dazes me, I'm not used to it, and in trust. It isn't to return to old ways but to make myself in the new. And to act inside the terms of the new, in some way I have to invent. In obedience there's such a lovely life. But fragmentary, so terrifyingly unmade. Like Roy in his half cunning senility not saying what he means and drifting in philosophical junk, lost in what he doesn't know, jealousy, envy, murder, pity, - Land. I wanted to be the barley field, and next year it might be oats. Snow in a curve. - [Whistler Youth Hostel] Last night a fury toward Cheryl passed through me, my arms clenched, I wanted to smash her head, shoot the two of them from a distance. An intense wave until I remembered it was information. Then it passed. Lay in bed imagining snow falling [right] then [left] then [zigzagged]. While furious with C and thinking to myself about it saw a single drop falling 18" into water and quiet rings opening under it. In the morning there was deep snow and grey lake, snow over yellow leaves, the colors of rushes, silence and ping music when it rained. We were in the canoe setting out gaily, shoveled snow out with the paddle. The joy that sprang into me when I thought of being a barley field / and when I researched architecting a house to a place / and imagined making something with you / and imagined being useful in that way I wanted so long. "You need a big garden." - Marry is river - 100 wakings I know you've been there all night you're my shore and mark I looked across your hair we move dimly toward the journey by line jumping into darkness off earth maybe there's not long to live you are shy of awe     I am dim in it I gape and duck pour love into the thought of work and you there to see and help it the good one you are and goodbye swimming in eros goodbye all you pretty lovers if I marry jamila I had my old cross love in my arms     deep home in your arms it's a strange place a brown polish warm wood I will make you a sunporch, you made us a silver-legged bed we stood in tears   "I forgot to tell you the guest bedroom" my iron bed under a tree   a doorframe with nothing around it   "how did you know?" "I saw it" window into the ground    well, a pool, room, a path oh girl of the highrise deep city your hands make me laugh I'll raise timbers for you keeping books it dreamed your valley, that you scouted out slipping through trees to my private house canvas roof on stilts the snow roof on a pulley, swinging down away in the old worlds make paradise gently as you know how willing the stream disappears into the window   scattered places    trails fires, mirrors, witches, education and sky   I set shrines, call artemis secretly to the sawmill   scholar drinks scotch in the library, I go out and stir the garden we come home for spring breakup - [with C] "You're a devil. You are still always between us." "From January to September we both knew the gods in us." Hooked the ears and laughed. Leather squeaks, the broadness back. Feel the head little head in the palm, I can absorb all your shaking. Pure bird. You're lonely today. We'll talk as if trusting and you're repairing me. "I felt I could be a good friend to you and at the same time I was acting very different." Caught up at the end of the long corridor, she'd turned off the lights and only touched my back bent to find the lock, with her forehead. And I'm willing. I was dim and it wasn't actually her there, her as she is without her friend. Are they weakened, apart. So when she shook and murmured up against me I had patience and something like kindness but it wasn't the home of my dream. And I guess never will be, I'm gone and will you now begin to show, stand behind revealed        the door you could have been, an arm holds it to hillside. Barleyfield. - The man on Cordova. "How're you doing?" "Terrible. How about you?" "Terrible I'm trying to raise the price of a drink." "I'll see what I've got." Give him fifty cents. "That won't hurt you?" (Safety pin holding coat shut.) "Not right now. At the end of the month it would." Feeling at home there. Well. - Rainy black night at Hastings. The neon floods over the road, moves as I run across. Car lights stopping for me. Wait for the bus with the umbrella up, there's a puddle in which the streetlight is with splashes, lines going toward it from all around the edges. Across the street the Woodbine Hotel with rows of windows a smooth-browed place. The Astoria and the unwindowed wall where the bar is. The newspaper metal box shut tight, steps going down to the parking lot. Buses. I take the first that stopped. Often the encounter with the driver is a quick aliveness. They look curiously if I have my strange hat on, even when I don't. Take the transfer, let the bus's lurch into traffic send me down to the back. The side windows have water on them in small drops, every window a different shape. It swallows neon and has the color diffused through its whole area. Get off at the Army Navy , walk on to the next stop. The Davie bus comes. I fold and shake my umbrella as I approach the door, sit near the front and find a newspaper-wrapped saw between the seat and the wall. Feel its shape, leave it there. - What happened today: I was going to the library thinking about calendars and blueprints, Jam in her car stopping fast. Upstairs I'm aware that I'm angry with her. I tell her I am. She says she'd noticed, and why. I remember that I'm angry with her because I need sharp talk. She said she wouldn't be able to be there for a year. Try to show her my work / she doesn't feel it though she looks at it. Silence. I begin to tell her my dream, it seems unreceived as I tell it. Then she leans over and pours milk in my tea. "Mind your own business" I say. Silence. "I don't like you today." Silence. I feel sad and my eyes start to fill with tears. She stares and I stare back feeling the water rising in my eyes. "Don't watch" I say. "Why not" she says. Silence. She packs up her tea and says "You're right, it isn't long enough" and goes downstairs. I'm pouring the tealeaves out before she's at the top of the stairs. I go out. She calls me from the porch. I keep going (to the library). Ezra's following me. I tell her to stay. My angry point lands on J who comes around the corner just then. I keep going. Ezra starts after me again. J around the corner. I notice her blueness, headband, shirt, jeans, vest, sweater, and stop for her and look at her. She says "I'm back now, I wasn't there but I am now." I look at her and see that it's true and everything is righted. We go in and sit on the stairs and we can't talk yet. The talking comes from somewhere not in the middle but when I touch her, although I am still thinking of going away, I can find the concentration. She puts her head on my shoulder and that makes me full of peace. We are peaceful on the steps. She reads Mary's letter. She'd said she was full of fear because it would often be that she couldn't come, because of working. I am not frightened, only pleased that my feelings were simple and articulate and stopped her and focused us after days. I loved her for the way she came and bespoke me. All evening I've had a love pleasure about how we did that. - "That gave me a hot drench at the heart." (That Mary asked.) hollyhock many wings a galley hollyhock many sails a parachute school - Oh my friend / and that's not true exactly / I think that when I'm with you best I could work best. You were telling about Euripides' Helen story, she was sent away (your lovely sense of narrative) to a country where no one was warring for her, they had a column of air. You were telling me your enchantment with the possibility but we don't go as far. Of course we do, we go far. But I want to live in her now, I plead. I mean, don't keep me out of her to be with you. Oh my friend / that's a dream, that friending, and yet we are setting ourselves to make it / as if. Yes, the days we spend. Could they ever make us meet closer to home than we've met already / no. The peace. Now I want to know more about hell. The kinds of time when it's locked out of everything but the sensation of needing to escape. I called it disliking myself but it's more like physical restraint. Is it old, I've got to get out of here, I'm dying in me, I have to get more space into me, and interest and free coming and going in thoughts and things and their thoughts. That desperation looks for religion, it wants a way out, not like a mummy but like a wide strong expansion stopped. - Your polite laugh. "I've got so used to layered speech, she only talks on one level." Scared me. - "... a silver grid in my skull. They call it a blanket." What was happening last night. Trudy couldn't go as deep as C, C and I can meet as we are safe to only in her presence, I was in deep touch (I thought) and had a feltshape (inscape) of how every soul is like every other soul, if there is more than one. Watching the meanings find their way into each other and not. The love supper where they eat and drink the holy food and go into another world with each other, there speak into, and then come out. Cheryl's pictures so beautiful. - [letter to my mother] Hello M, this is going to be an interesting letter - you spoke yourself in yours and now I'm challenged to speak myself. I told Jam you said to tell you about her. She said "That gives me a hot drench at the heart." That begins to tell you about her. Drench. It isn't so much about her as about us. What I can see about her is eyes, nose, mouth, black slippery hair, a short person with a tall person's voice, very small hands and feet that are centuries, maybe a lot of centuries, off the farm. Round staring spectacles. A stomping walk. Her habits are careful housekeeping, alert cooking, many books and papers being worked out/on at the same time, pieces of paper pinned to the wall with thoughts on them (these make up a two-dimensional thesis). You can see I've got interested in telling about her. Next month I'm going to an Oriental city to find out whether a rich family who are not only rich but also smart will approve of my being. They are people who say what they think, unlike us. At the same time I'll have to be in a strange place on an errand of my own, because if I don't find an errand for myself I'll have no being to be approved. At the same time I'll have to be watching carefully to see who my friend is in the place she comes from (for curiosity and strategic knowledge). So it would have to be a different sort of description that you got through my two eyes, which now ask different sorts of questions than they did when I used to write you long stories. A relationship that's simple, with love on both sides and little joys going deep. Oh you name it so nicely. It sounds like marriage that lovely dream. About us: we dream marriage, we imagining ourselves doing as is done in mythology (but in the myths marrying means marrying oneself), we are fired by the idea. Sometimes with each other we have had the sensation of being two clear beings in a wide open space. Then other times we are separated and can't recognize each other except as another impermeable presence we don't know what to do with. So no matter what we do we can only be married when we are. I've been very absorbed in it and we both hope for it to go quietly and peacefully into the background so that we can get on with our work. It's a sense of meeting like I haven't had, this person is often ahead of me. When I'm ahead of her I get impatient and fuss. The same, when I'm behind and can't catch up. So we look for each other and that's been work. How strange it's been for me to do this, which I haven't been able to do before and may not be able to do now, for fright. It's queer the way you married, so young and so finally. I wonder whether you think about how it was then and when you were first married. And since. Every marriage is such a story. We need good wishes. I realized that those when you send them will have to be based on what you see. If you want to visit after Christmas, I have a real bed with a real mattress now. I am struggling to come to a conception of the movie and this time is always hard and puts everything in question and is lonely. And I miss Luke's cheerful voice on the stairs. But on the 2nd of December we're going to jump into the sky and be in it 14 hours (maybe stopping in Tokyo) and come down on Kai Tak Airport, which because there's no room on Fragrant Habour (= Hong Kong) is built into the sea. It's the dry bright season there. Jam's pretty mother goes to the races every day. Her sister is a fashion buyer! Her father is a retired banker who used his brain to be a millionaire. And there I will be, shabby and staring, trying to hang onto my wits and remember that a poor, unemployed filmmaker can see as well as anyone, and trying also to see for my scholarly friend who's Chinese and therefore afraid to see anything that would make her feel unfilial. - This was a fine day, bright, long cold way home from C's house and the way it worked last night. They let me into parts I like and not in confusion this time, an exact view of what was understood or not, my voice getting lower through the evening. Sometimes with J it is high and I know I'm scared (by her man?). And the language I could find with C. "Did Jam ask you?" "I think I probably told her before she had a chance to." - J comes in greys and whites, leaves Ez and comes back later and I think to go to the glass bubble [McMillan Bloedel Conservatory] to see plants, the good air like earth in it, a nice man standing quiet watching birds, a birdboy playing flute, light on the web of struts. The birds, palms moving in the little winds, orchids? smell (closeup), the cactus, the grit, light ownbody. J in those neat white pants going quietly around. I wanted to sit close to her, in simple love with her, she not quite with me, a fraction of a kiss in the car made us both gasp. Ezra going crazy and attacking her, the sky that was spread for us when we came out. What do you look at when you come out? I'm not quite keeping up to myself with her, these days; it's C that sets me up for it when we've had a transfuse. - What an artist is and does, making as well as possible, is what to be / consciousness immersed in ferrying between worlds. That is why it's more than religion. Love and thought made into thing, the sense of responsibility, which is not initiating acts, but which makes a different life, by predilection / then. Put an almost invisible thing in the focal point, ripples in white. A near imbalance. - It's all apart and dead and you don't care and when you kissed at me I was gently revolted and remembered earlier revolts that I hadn't recognized / and Sandy's calling you by refusing you / and nobody can find you the way she can / and anyway you can't find me / and anyway we're giving up / and anyway I don't want to go to Hong Kong and all that's premature and we talked about marrying to keep ourselves interested and now that's done and you've made me come (however abstractly) and is it you're disappointed that I did (without you) and you can't talk to me about work and change the subject when I do and what were we flying on that we can't find now (open heaven) hope. Being fed-up with having our beings directed at each other, that's boredom, yet they are directed nonetheless, and that in anxiety. Should we separate we both suggest and can't say. Having a relationship that strange enslavement. What I know is this. I'm feeling that my being is fallen and therefore can't interest you, or my being is fallen because I don't interest you. I'm terrorized. In the competition I'm not winning. I didn't want a love affair I said, I just want to know what's so, and have a companion in that, I thought you had a passion for clarity, and you don't, you love it but don't know how with a person. - C saying every moment is a chance to know as much as you can. I was saying I think not every sort of mind is moral and that to go into something 'outside' is not wrong. We were defining positions. I to defend myself and she also. Ghost and dream are names for the same sensation. Always about fear of being a ghost - unconnected, lost. Saw C look a witch and wanted to know if she is scared of the thought of knowing. The look of a witch is the look of a woman who doesn't hide herself she said. Yes, but doesn't it still scare you. It's being scared to look like seeing. Also being scared of seeing what? Anything that has feeling. How do you feel it? Strongly. At least now you're talking about what you were always afraid of. Yes. A sensation of seeing. A witch is being afraid. She knows what you want to know but the sensation of being a witch is being scared of seeing what's forbidden. During the conversation cunt and breasts suddenly alive. What let it in. It was the pleasure of speaking out loose. Crying last night after helping the girl carry a shopping bag. The loveliness of the encounter of helping touched loneliness. They lend me articulation. - Of the voices that can be in me, which is mine. I look at the feel of experience and try to articulate it and have a private language and was speaking it. The self experience of not being understood and speaking anyway. When J speaks and I don't understand her I wonder if it's that she can't know or imagine where I am or whether she can't be bothered. 1. my spiritual ambitions, they're vulgar as they are, but the core is right 2. I am responsible for my child 3. I have to be free, she too, of Jamila and me cemented, the future has to stay open, we've been boring ourselves 4. I have to do systematic work and know I'm doing it 5. watch literariness 6. what is going on here and what can I do in it 7. when the edge is off fucking I can't do it - Going into Artscanada and finding the shamanic site/landscape pieces I was hot and cold and thrilled. But whenever I think of taking on letting myself into the powers I get scared and guilty. The guilt is as if I'm lying. My dreams of work like to be vague dreams, to go into a material is too long. My good work is casual, a moment's direct careless construction. - Josie was here. How she looked, refined and steady. Last night at Trudy's I was far away and incongruous but it went on without me and I knew when I needed my own world more. The slides of us looking at each other were like mirrors. When they look at me they looked pulled into themselves. I looked frightened. C at chess looked a vertical spear. R said to Josie, You've had a breakdown haven't you. - She doubts my stamina in making life together, I her courage to do what she knows. - When we were fucking I went down to a cold and dark place. - Thinking. J on detective story. Doesn't go through sentences. Tries out positions. That's the land of geometry. - My situation as I understand it in the other world. The anxiety is this: there is a certain look I need to have, and the state in that look is ease, pleasure, right existence, salvation. Evil. They don't want me to get away. - Tell everyone about my official promotion [Canada Council film production grant], watching it warp me. Whether to be more arrogant, yes. It would be noble to say nothing and all day I couldn't. Travel agent, Choy and Paul. "Really on top of it today, aren't you." - [In Hong Kong with Jam Dec 4-18 ] bone method, that is, the proper use of the brush Wing Bone-Setting - drew the officials of the Water Palace with crabs and fishes hanging from their belts mountain man who lived out his several hundred years on the earth, moving on, above, or inside it with perfect freedom. Hsing were superlatively light. It went to our heads a little, thronging the shadows about us with wings of scarlet and darkness. Pao sat on the edge of the table, ruddy and golden in his dark red pullover. bright emerald wheat and blue-green bean fields pain at the mouth of the heart the not-yet-wedded husband or wife feather rain - "Ga-fe." "Oh, ga-fé-a!" The Islamic cemetery, grandmother's grave. We sat on the next one. Confessed our dismay (easy) and then saw a green grasshopper with minute markings, one leg, long antenna. It jumped into the air and flew down. Some birds seemed to unsettle when it would have been near them. In the grit snail shells, small and large, a bone (from a finger?), two tile squares, rosewater bottles. A dug grave without a person, but a piece of cotton that made her uneasy. We both thought of falling in. Went to look for the small white flowers with yellow centers [she called fried egg flowers], that grow on those trees (like this) with big leaves. I found one from the description, she carried it, smelled it and left it here. They unwind from the center. Baby graves with rice for birds. Small seeds, seedcases, going into my pocket. She likes me finding things. I like her coming back when she thinks to. Hold her round the leg when the watchman and one woman go past up the stairs. I'm sitting beside a broken balustrade opposite ringed palms looking uphill. All the stone beds: brick, marble, made up, some in a little wall with tiled top. The interest comes into things. We look and smile, those are the best. The shadow we walked into at the quarry, it moved, we saw it was a dog's head. Quarry, road into a place, sides of rock piled with sorted iron and floodlit, matter-match. Dogs barking. Walking on powder good-smelling dust with blasted granite. Schoolgirls who saw us looking and made a festival. (This body,         a lump Jam found with her physician fingers, when we were in the hotel bed.) (Every day it's still there.) When I woke from the dream before I considered it I said it's about you leaving me. Lying on the bed tonight, the harmony of the bodies, we came in a taxi, I put the orchids near us, we were happy. She said things go so well for us, even when they're going badly. I repeated it to myself in the days after. We are not in a deep structure as in the summer. We're together in detail, the way the taxi driver hummed. He hummed a phrase, J consulted about where he'd take us, then he hummed it again. We laughed. Dinner with the mother and father. They thought she was going and called him. "They thought I was going." "But Dr Kent gave her a tablespoon of brandy." "I think I must have been weak." "And she got life in her again."   Ammya said "You, when you were young all you liked to do was charge around with a sword or stick, climb on a table with a quilt and pillow, playing some sort of mailman." "Or I liked to be an emperor." Doing dishes together [with Jam's mom]. She put the apron around. I make confidences that amount to saying what kind of woman I am. A mutual appeal. The moment saying goodbye, when the gesture hesitated and completed itself. - Built a large room inside my thighs. Not inside: around but with no boundary after the bones.   Uncle A.H. radiant simple smile. "Did you see the glow in the sky?" Percy took the end of the table for frog jokes. Jammi the important, declarative, loud. Auntie Annie. Her hair is an entity. Lan Wei the gentleness of stone I'm singing It's love it's love it's love alone / cause King Edward to leave the throne. Oh Jami for you / with you here I am in the world again. No more clairvoyance, not dead and not alive, babbling (not so much as sometimes) sticking close close to my friend's body. - We got on the ferry and stood all the way, saw islands, one with flat caves. J said "Look at the deep entries." Silvermine Bay, a bridge over a creek mouth, sand, a beach where we hid to miss our bus. We came out with it, we're thinking about whether I'm going to die. She was imagining herself going on and getting revenge, I've been asking myself whether I want to fight or not. We both don't know what this lump and my exhaustion are, but we both expect me to die of it, that's the strange thing. Our two tears in the hotel when we found it. It is the elusive marvel of good homecoming, but not that, rest. They are resting, the rocks broken apart by a line but not fallen open. The good rest of you. I wonder whether in the mysteries there are, you have taken me in to rest me, as I asked you to, because of all you know. And I must die because it's a filling of the hunger that drove me. But you, do you have one, is it to reconcile a lover with a family. That would mean you don't fail me but I fail you. She [Esther] knows I don't like him. The submission is because of the force of the hatred. Except that on the night when the dinner party was good we supported him and he was flying. Your obedience. You won't leave the dead to bury themselves and you won't fight them to wake them, what's your way, you keep them company as much as you can affectionately. What does it do for you, keep you undivided. The night after the dinner party Jami so roused because I'd been alright but it was wrong for me because it had cost me too much. I'd been a woman in it. "What is it about stones, that are split apart but still standing together." "I imagine it's just that." Getting into the taxi, "The three girls can go in the back, Jami, you and I will go in the front." - Scribes of the Diaries of Activity and Repose Detailed court record the emperor was not to see Traditions of impartiality, accuracy and safeguard from tampering, not literary, impersonal - A path on the side of the mountain, yellow. From it seeing down into a farm on the two sides of a ravine, the ravine dark green down through honey grass. Beds for green vegetables, thriving color, concrete reservoirs full and reflecting, walled like fields. The house has a vine over its roof. Two persons in the rows squatting under bamboo hats. The terraces wider and narrower up behind the house too. A bush with many purple flowers. Next to the house an aisle with orange dahlias. Chickens in a grove. A concrete sidewalk bridging over the ravine. One of the fields with yellow-green choy has the tops of a few boulders left in the green. There's the blond dry grass around. The hilltop boulders break through. The sea and a white beach below the farm. The path circles round the back of it and on, it's rocky, turns into a sidewalk and comes down to the beach. On the other side of the beach the sidewalk begins again and goes through fields. Choy, celery, carrots, wonderful finished plants, persons watering them by buckets with spouts hung from a pole across the shoulder. Handmade farms, new houses. The sidewalk, fields on either side of it. The sea. A woman under a hat encounters me. I say hello. She has a thin face and freckles of the country woman. She says hello in what sounds like an ironical voice and says something else after me. The first awninged café but I can't see any food. Where I buy grapes the woman smiles after I pay. Then it turns into a town with plastics manufacture, parts of dolls in sacks outside a room with family around a table. A boy cutting tiles to fit an angle. Children with white bread rolled up. The grandfather calls one back to give him his plastic pistol. I'm thinking of Luke and have collected bits for Daphne. In the low land, banana tree split ears, papayas hung down in a long bunch. I stop to figure out what they are, imagining J and I scholars with a white dog and maybe a boy, in this town, on the top floor of a new house, looking at the alluvial vegetables in their peaceful intensity. I liked the path through it becoming the path to other villages and beaches. There was a dish overturned near the path on a height, some mushed paper and other broken crockery on it. Under it a jar nearly buried. I took off the lid. White skull on other white bones, eye sockets turned up. I had time to see leg bones up against the side before I shut it quickly in case I was watched. Other jars further up nearly to the neck in rock and soil, but just next to the path with their covers sometimes weighted with a stone. - Woke. Eyes out the window, the clouds were small and pink. When I lifted my head I realized I was dizzy, and then quietly imagining being ill and what to do in it. And then quietly thought and tried ways to stop the faltering. And then got up to see whether it could be ignored. And Jamila had removed herself and just now I'm imagining how if I were alone and didn't give myself away, I could accumulate a hot quiet inner life and not need to be seen and so see. The place on the path where bushes made bright and dark walls high up on either side, the strong smell of cinnamon, dusty. Traced it to dull flowers. A tiled room, green and white, window with an iron grill, an outside ledge with one row garden, a propeller for hot summer. Chung Nam Café. Goodbye Hong Kong. - [letter to my mom on three airgrams with Luk Kwok Hotel return addresses] I'm in a room at the YW, Jami's parents are too bourgeois for me, he's a spoiled froggy patriarch and she butters him up as is the habit of kept women; she's fine and alert (Esther), curious and motherly, and J is very fond of her and so the two of them are always taking care of Percy so he won't feel how he isn't the favorite parent. The rest of the relatives are like relatives. The women see, the men are important. I have stopped going to all the dinners, but because J is filial and loves them all in her way I go to some. We are happy conspirators meeting to cry and laugh. I'm the first of J's friends to see where she comes from. The relatives are called Farouk, Abdul Kader, Roheema, although there's also Henry, Alice, Fannie. There are 70 orchids in my room not counting the buds, wide as yawns, blood pink with stripes on the flowers - it's just inside the tropics, every day cloudless all day with some soft clouds from the south, morning and evening the verge of melting but still form. [Jam and I travel to Lantau Island and stay overnight at the monastery.] On the bus the working women talking loud and how it was to laugh with them, gold teeth in brown faces. We did it behind J's back and it was fun to have her find it already made. Road, and how the sky's power. The mountain that had red light on it, we were among yellow stones and roadsides, the sun turned red just above the mountains behind us. When we turned it would have changed. Climbing, speaking. The sky's cut where it came down to the edges. My voice went clownish not knowing how to say how lovely, but it was true clowning in glory. A jeep came up the hill. I said "If it offers us a ride we won't have it." She said "It won't offer, they never do here." It stopped and offered. When we came to the steepest part, a curve, the sun was half, although it hadn't yet reached the mountain - was cut across by dark blue. We struggled, I went into the climbing breath and it took me very fast bent over forward. Meantime I had enough to see that the light had turned deep amber, like I've never seen it. Grass color on the yellow grass, the roadside falling off on the right. J had fallen back and I was carried on the lovely impulsion of will. When I got to the top, not far, I stopped and sat on a tuft and saw that it was night and there was the first line of new moon lying flat, just above where the sun had gone down, and J came up and sat with me. I said "Did you see." She said "Yes, she's new." Then we got up and passed the gate on the mountainside, opening in the sunset direction, and went past stalls with electric lights, and down an avenue in the dark and heard a fountain and came to an absurd new gate towering in concrete and so to the monastery. J shouts in Chinese and gets directions. We sit outside and look at stars, we're under the Milky Way, the dogs bark, a shaved headed nun in grey coat and grey pants tucked into grey leggings goes past and nods. They're looking for us for dinner. The last buses came and they'd closed the kitchen and now they have to open it for us. They grumble but they're impressed that we walked. After supper we walk a little but the dogs bark, the lights are going out, the moon has set, although it's no later than seven. So we go to bed. We want to cuddle but there's a guardian and we don't want to offend her so we make up beds head to head in adjacent upper bunks. Our guardian speaks so freely her Chinese seems set to a tune. She says we are not allowed to sleep on our quilts because they'll get hard, we have to sleep on the grass mat. Yes, yes, a hard bed. She likes to sleep with the light on but she'll turn it off for us. She gets up at three she says but we don't have to. When she's turned off the light she pads down the rows and tucks in our mosquito netting, She and J go on shouting affectionately as she settles into her upper bunk. J and I find a route under the net for one hand each. Then we lie the three of us each in our white gauze tent, in rows of empty tents, as if on shelves. Mosquitoes sing outside, each a bite on the wrist, your warm little hand. White gauze like moonlight, the house of sleep. Green light from the window and crashes in her bed. Our heads have iron bedheads between. The distinct dreams in which we were not together, but then you are in the last one, the three young ones who want to catch you up - "You're the kind who has tight ears, aren't you." "But they can hear small sounds." A baby has crept up, they didn't hear. Sometime during the night bells and gongs. In our half waking the gong so distinct we could hear the fine tuning of the air's waves. A kind of drumming also. Our guardian got up and J crawled in with me to say hello and then got back into her own bed. When it was light we were both up and off on different paths. From the garden I could see her on the scaffolding. The courts, with wells, pots of flowers, lines of mosquito netting hung to dry, smoke from cooking fires, vegetable gardens, reservoirs, paths, orange trees, bamboo, steps, round moongates. The ostentatious temples not as interesting as the courtyards, washing tubs, cooking pots. Some old nuns had black caps on their baldness. After breakfast (rice gruel and noodles) we went away on different paths again, yet the paths kept crossing. I saw her running down a path and then running up again with her journal. She said "See my house" - there were steps, a turn, and a walled place with a ruin, two stone tables, round, each with four square stone stools. There's Jam with her sweater on a branch scowling and writing, a big squash growing next to her pumpkin coloured boot, and there I am with my journal at the other table, and prowling with my camera in the ruins, which are of a temple. Hot sun, orange flower smell , garlic growing hung down from a roof. Somebody's kettle and bed in the ruin. After lunch we go down the hill and miss a ferry and catch one, and each go to our own home. On the ferry we look at rocks and clouds and have a very satisfactory discussion about stones. We're back on Sunday. I hope this gets to you for Christmas. - [Jam and her mother and I have visited a fortune teller.] Luke - he will stand out in what he does, after 18 - will be tall and there will be a lot of women, he'll marry and have a family - it will be easy to bring him up if I don't cross him - he may become mischievous and get into bad ways if he isn't educated - he prefers his mother and needs to live with her, it may take a few years to get him back - he's intelligent and not like a child. [About me] Takes risks, courage like a man, restless, but will come through them, have a long life, should not marry young (it won't work). The first marriage was not a real marriage, will marry two or three times more but they won't last, independent, like a monkey, others when they look at you may think you have everything but inside you're empty. After 35 you'll have more success and stability, you should try artistic because you have a talent. If you're thinking of something particular just before or after Christmas is good. You're poor and never will have money, even when you get it it just goes, friendship and personal relation is more important to you than money. You're ambitious, everything in your life so far has been like floating but now it will change. It has been false. Adventurous, conflicts. J - Thyroid saved you from worse, you were disappointed in love and now you're ashes in the heart, you're better to be alone. You'll never say, this is my husband, this is my child. You're best on your own but you should adopt a child, the sooner the better because it will save you from undirected thoughts. You'll be neither outstanding nor mediocre in your career, but you'll always be able to get money, after 40 you'll be rich. You're independent, you always know how to help people. (Her mother pats her arm.) [At the dinner table that night Esther says "The fortune teller says Jam will get married two or three times.] J help me keep what we know, said. [Back in Vancouver] Back in my house the life after death is here again. There I was years back and meeting you in another time. Alone here the razor is back, not stoned but thinking of making and materials. I've built something into this house that's mine but obliquely. - A crack tick in the air nothing around it Shadows begin to interest me. Large covered jars, sidewalk markings. Voices for writing. - A voice comes with certain thoughts, a solemn one as when I thought pictures of mating animals. That's the artist's voice and I don't like it. - The writing begins here in a room I can see but not tell. If the story needed a room I could make one anyone could see, but this one is here and I have it alone. It is full of pleasures, beautiful matter. All of it lies still and is there again. I can't tell you any of it. How beautiful it is. Green green blue red red black. Not in that order. Brass. Leaf.   Room alone. The wall closed where it is sometimes open. Windows with itself in them. Things set up to make me themselves. They keep out things I don't want to be, disorder, or only want to be infrequently. What is writing when time stops.   Writing. Single phrases. Conspicuous high overhead the square of Pegasus Silent night holy night all is calm all is bright Christmas Eve 1977 Charlie Chaplin died of old age, 88. [Phoned Luke] "When I went to my new school I wasn't at all shy and when I wrote a story in my writing book everybody crowded round." "I'm not so interested in war any more." I said I felt strange. He said "And I feel a little sad." "I would like to be magic and come to see you without it costing money and be able to be here and see you." "My eyes are a little watery." "Mine too" I said though they weren't, but - "I love you" I said. He said "Me too." His silvery cough and I knew it was time to go. We said goodbye and neither of us went. After a while he began to sing and I laughed and said "I'm still here too." I said "Send me a kiss and I'll send you one too and then I'll hang up." - Those lumps, there's something wrong with me. I wonder if I'm dying or not, whether she's doing it to me or not. With Jamila I feel we've made ourselves impossible and want to have to leave each other and so does she and under that both of us feel attached, at peace and safe. We want to feel unsafe and be alone to concentrate. We are alive in two kinds of time and always aware. We can tell by whether we're interested in our work. - Suppose, Socrates says, we were being listened to by a man of generous and human character, who loved or had once loved another such as himself. [Plato Phaedrus] no, to write looking at the thing, and in this one, the you / you/ sliding downstairs outcries     'portentous' you told the way odysseus unrecognized in his bloody rags raged to know where was his bed, built into a live olive     I was suspicious, you seemed to be entertaining me with a charming tale I was mad at you because you couldn't keep me in my body, I was such a distance and thinking all the while I asked if you'd watch out for me if I go underground and make sure I come back - 'name a consternation' 'sirius' the way the joke came out of me and we all got it at the same moment c, t and I at c's table with dope pernod coffee apples (noting the potions to make us same)     t got excited telling o'keefe and steichen     t's presence gives us intuitions of beings     c a possibility of abstraction     then t went to her drawings and I could look at c's brightness     we talked about recognitions     "they don't last very long"     "a split second," laugh     "they're not emotion"     "emotion is after, when you realize what's happened"   c's yugoslavian boy     he took her to a room where all the men slept in one bed and all the women in the other     she got in with the women and one of them put an arm around her     t said she slept 3 nights in a strange country c said of j and myself that j seems a friend, a stream, distinguishing it from eruption and trouble     I said she's a stream exactly but it's on the edge of being the other     that our knowing each other is very unstable     I liked to tell her about us, my sentences in her presence seemed clear like wire j's body was there round brown sleek the shape of the back of the waist when I can't materialize it in my arms does it mean she's not in it daphne on the telephone says she's reading two books in which women see out of the common world and go mad     I said it's wrong because what has to happen is that she comes back and makes a new order in which social and private are differently made     talked about the flash/clap images out of somewhere else     she said she had an instant of another time     talking to her I had a sensation of eternity but couldn't tell her, it wd have sent us into another order, we were still in the safe one ezra up the steps     I say I'm glad to see you to the person still coming up out of darkness in the stairs     I'm excited joke press in warm     luxury she says     when we're happy in that way we lie on the floor     she wants one detail from last night and I tell it     "stream," the sense of eternity, which she had in summer and in hong kong c on the telephone     you don't know what you have, what does trust mean to you     silence. I don't think I know that one     I don't think so either and I don't think you should learn it, you have such a wildness daphne said she had a fever and after couldn't concentrate for a while when we were in bed there was a heat at our bellies she called desert and it was sunlike     she saw a dark green round tip coming out of the desert ground josie said she dreamed an arch made of paper she built for me to sit under during my reading at the coffeehouse r and diana, the corner grocery people and that intimacy     the stories about it that spring into all of us, talking about when we run out scared of the work the unconsciousness of picture taking     d says marion's pictures, she's very aware of her light sources why didn't I say that I'd told rhoda the lumps, in spite of myself, because she was brave to lead me to it with questions library a trance of excitement reading yeats on swedenborg and feeling the next life     the chimney corner, a rest and she had it suddenly gathered in her, love, so we could and the awe of touching freely such a delicate loveliness     oh I must, can, act as if I'm allowed and it's true and t and c     c saying when she gets to the edge of what she knows how to do there's an awe     I went on about my sense of marveling frightened dissolution    c that when she gets into philosophy she resolves everything into paradox and is in one arm of it at various times - you want to talk about turning into a man you had a few tears when I said death had come into my life at the same time as it came into yours     you brave out your frights to see what will come of them     often I don't understand you     I love sleeping with my head next to you singing in the bathroom, combing your hair our earnestness together     I love it when you laugh! - j telephoning while there's a strong wind making clear brilliance over the mountain, she says tell me a story and I say what's wrong, do you want me to come? and go, with a taxi driver who also likes the wind     she's sleepy and breathing fast and loud, she thought she heard one of her spooks     I watched my visions and rode inside on them wanting to know who/what her ghost is     he'd be decomposed by now     early sunday was our name for it when we woke, a clear green over the mountains, clear air and a joy of light     inside lovemaking the gods instructed our touch and we slipped into persia, a couch with birds singing outside a wood partitioned window     I was thinking of the kinds of light in the ink paintings, morning, clear afterwards     we talked to check whether we'd been there together     oh jami! we were awake in a dream the airport sky with every kind of cloud, the colors     do eyes like certain things for themselves, she asked     the wet fields     our boots sinking past the grass     cowpaths, rail fences, a wet ferny bush     I peed, while she stopped and kept talking to me it got dark     I was entranced among the depths of different branches. the moon had got so intense we were drunk (she in driving)     it made a prairie by lighting horizontal clouds far away looked through the window saw the old people at the small table in their clean house. they had to tell us their epics first, and then they began to love us. grandma's story (her mouth quaking) of the so poor lady in the next bed, who cried night and day. then one night the crying stopped. a man came and closed all the curtains round and they took her away (she waved her hand sideways). she had a view of a room with small children, saw them fed, played with. they didn't cry or fight grandpa so beautiful in his usefulness, "now I'm the boss"     "and I don't care," she said the photographs, my mother's bright face, she's in her father's arms    in diptheria, papa ich hab' dich lieb, choking     the iodine glycerine swab prescribed by the veterinarian to open her throat    peter used it on himself when he had smallpox "and it came open"     grandma asking how far apart we live     "three or four miles"     "not so far," quickly passes the candy box our happiness got into them and theirs into us on the strength of our attention     on the way home we've seen enough and ruminate people are beings who can have the same objects in, another mirror     mirrors on posts set in gatherings - t being scared of her painting     being brave and saying one thing and then seeing more and having you reply to what I see, then I see other parts clearer     a love in the light, it was there brilliant black all evening     talked about fear of death always being there, "that was the revelation in acid, for me" she dreamed she embraced me and I left my body in her arms, she said hey because it had begun to sag daphne zócalo, author inscribed     her held story and mine, when we both told them, I still had heaviness but before we told them it was like a pulse daphne's phrase in sleep this afternoon: she is in the hospital chasing demons out of trees the child dream of falling headfirst into the field and that was dying easy and good     I felt myself go the journeys aren't allowing conclusions to be passive or unmistakable j wondered if she's killing me, was scared the day I saw tang [the acupuncturist]     we had a nervous night     in the morning she got up and ate breakfast alone and went for sheila     when she came back with sheila she was the frog professor and I was moving away crossly from her hands    then I scolded her for not helping me with writing and she went home she worried me by saying my work is like making a dictionary of my own and on from that how she doesn't like herself teaching and then we sat on the floor in the hall and liked each other until sheila summoned     we fell into conversation     no we climbed foghorn     hyacinth blue bed cover cool air radio squawking     these days I play piano long times sleep a lot eat many peeled apples drink a lot of milk and am not terrified     the moon pictures in nat g    iris strong scent new in the garden bare small oh brilliant loving luke - went to smoke and separated into a contemplation of my ghostly systems, the voice structures speaking against each other, and resisted you and watched your seduction     said I had to go away traveling soon because I'm scared of how fast we are making selves     she says she isn't scared     saw the windows become a screen for lovely shadows streaming across     briefly the world existed     she told me I was flirting with the idea of cancer and must go and find out she told me the different materials, stone, cotton, fur of my body and I had her briefly as a balinese thin-armed fruit-body - cheryl patiently got me out of silence     I was hesitantly speaking her language     the snow, the xeroxes and the library     archeological images     c taking courage to speak about her photographs, her humor worlds so startling       the very cerebral ones I can't read     the inspired knock/knock knock all afternoon I looked at her shape, get silenced by the lightness of it white light in the rooms, snow - 6 february sunday looking at her (except when we were with the whales) I was baffled, at night I try to get away from her, at the distance where I am I can't tell if I'm dazzled by suspension in metaphysics or if she is distracting me     in bed her difference, small head white face young thing and goddess     I was in simplicity of confusion     my death was her invention as much as mine and then she stopped me in it when c and t were here, I knew I was an embattled absence and wanted to be alone but thought maybe they'll find me, I felt myself without origination, stupid, rough false and getting violent, and their two contained     t looked funny, little white rubber face, c looked wonderful and began laughing at everything (she said because of valerian and being able to breathe)     she said I come on to her and she wants to be free, I did have a thrill looking at her     I admit it! I shouted     c was drawing me about my refusal of everything I do, said if it's big enough it could be very high and I shout that I can't find my judgment - the time I didn't note had a sunday     we went out along the river at fort langley, field with blond grass     the sky pink and fading     a countryside and a dump     we came home and lay in bed     fought about lovemaking and then went into it deep and real and together     sleeping she said help and that she loved me     next day worked on putting together the dark xeroxes, all day, intense concentration at the library, came home couldn't talk to nellie or to jam who was opaque and jowly and said she was mad at me, afraid she would not keep up thursday sun, I am unable to get to anything, eat acid, prepare it first by cleaning house and clearing the kitchen, am cushioned on my being free to watch the beautiful clouds piled up north over the mountains, and south blue gold moving     lying in the bathtub in beauty,     feeling sad for my companions j comes and looks to me like the troubled child     a prig     a doubt     a round belly     she seems completely frightened, brings books and lime jello     she can't tell I'm on acid, I tell her I'm sad about vocation and my early companions, in the acid I've felt their existence, wondering if they're going under     don, olivia, frank, roy (I cry about roy) now feb 15 smoked to pay attention to the black pictures, saw detail of which are something and which are not (judgment) the beauty of the house springs' sense of reprieve from winter's terror and sickness, maybe to rest and work, wanted to work    a bright strong body, not confused j says she's afraid of me, has badly lost herself     I talk about our lovemaking, she says she keeps thinking of what I said about the danger of it 16 I smoke and go out and notice the strange unphysical presence I have in the bank, the teller seems to be difficult with me, it is as if I am not as efficient or direct and so evoke from them a false presence that I then find ugly at trudy's I find trudy beautiful to look at, we are gradually loving and happy, I have to work hard at first, cheryl comes and I like her too and love to look at her but from the beginning we have a difficulty that I describe as her being mad at me I see the ghost of a door closing when t and c and I are talking about sleeping a lot and how it makes us feel we must be sick t sez that's how you work on something you don't know you're working on she sez she's been interested in shadows t's painting's of voluptuous carbon black lighted spaces, it's collage but so developed and strange especially the new one, the strange flesh-geometrical beings, she's moving so fast and inventively on the airbrush. there's something oneiric like in my xeroxes but it isn't a look like dreaming - except lately many of my dreams have been dark we got enthusiastic about night and its differentness when I left and was waiting for the taxi I had trudy's expression and posture and was wondering whether I'd left myself and if so I was jealous of how far she had gone into her invention and felt my own tentative and beginning     she said 'you haven't got your full particularity yet and when you do you'll be interested in the particularity of your connection with everyone you know"     I agreed and liked that she knew that and am trusting myself with both of them more than I have, I think. when I am with them I am deflected from myself and yet I am interested and like the way my days interest me when I can tell them to them the last sunday night j and I both confessed we wondered if the other was finding us boring. we cried a few tears each, then we made love very close to the white bones in black (what does it mean to make love close to death - yes, something about that - but why scared?)     then she fell asleep and suddenly cried out help and she was such a small face asking me to look after her and I loved that as if I'd been needing it, and felt grown up in relation to her for once, she doesn't come in simplicity often we impatiently wait for the next inspired time. is our lovemaking mediumistic you said transporting with t and c and you I feel how far out of my mother's life I am leading my own life you my friends of now are inspiring and are responsible and I want to be both and I'm scared of getting out of control when I am myself, so I'd have responsibility I didn't have the reach to do right the sense of black and white and night, t and my and daphne's work interior body what is the connection with death is it our imagining of death or does it represent a death we already are living in the sunday with j when we talked about the thoughts she doesn't think she has - my concrete researches and hers, being put to use - I said what if you took those images seriously - she said she sidetracks them into fantasies of manufactury - I said what if you studied them differently - riveted suddenly with excitement - the one thing c says that snags me is there was a spirituality about your sexuality, and then I remember the joy in it when it was I like best when we tell how odd it seems to us to have the particulars (body) we do have. the way she looks in her black cap. today it was as if easy after a while when she was talking her face went through faces I've never seen, a distant soul, a thought so foreign to mine, her, own, in privacy, and for once I could watch, the theories spin, she was a weaver t was trying to shrink me and still it was in its way familiar and a pleasure, so long from the old pain she would come into such brilliant focus     'we are here to be conscious in everything, preparing to die'     I was arguing that I don't want a theory about what life is for, or what dying is like, only its sometimes visits, intense, erotic, black and white fear and thrill 'trudy and I are more real and better friends than we've ever been' proprietary     bless my bright children I'm off back to my own life and it's a good thing I have one - 'you are a formidable woman!' in a voice I'd never heard     because I wasn't impressed with her tragedy     closed, it silts in you said, we're losing ground - on the sunday night, I suddenly thought, oh I can't write anymore (I mean the poise and then grab) and I turned flat away I imagined a book with interleaves     space truckers (us)     erotic travel     friend and street encounters     the aboriginal and goddesses   variations overlaps     physics, picture     the black images     etymological fantasy - She regularly had her Sunday puddings from us, but she liked to take them as a miracle. For March, there come violets, especially the single blue which are the earliest - go to the fisherman's café, the indian waitress is there, cod being put frozen into boxes with a 1-tine fork   men at tables behind and in front of me along the window, mountains coming out of dark it feels that westcoast feel when I woke, shouting outside, pale pink over the roofs haida monarch the black-towered strange ship   'on the radar it looks like a tug and three barges'    he praised her, the only one of her kind     'I've never known it to be so I couldn't have a full cup of coffee'    battered ballast tanks fill and they slide the logs off into the water slowly, over forty, fifty, minutes at the dumping ground   crew quarters aft     auxiliary at the bow, for turning her the little swollen-headed brass-nailed fish st francis gardens clean and empty     We have moved to 970 Union St these days I'm not in fear of possession iris from the garden single sharp shock opens to sexual crown 2x3 violet and tiger     a faint perfume slowly through the air     its delicacy - j and I fighting about whether or not she's a man! - A stone lay there. It was dark like the wall, but on it, or inside it, there was a number; a 5 he thought at first, then took it for 1, then understood what it was - the primal number that was both unity and plurality. That is the cornerstone said a voice of dear familiarity, and Shevek was pierced through with joy. There was no wall in the shadows and he knew that he had come back, that he was home. [Le Guin The dispossessed] [March 6] birthday 1978. when I see you work I wonder what you're running away from said jam, she herself working quietly and not asking for praise, but bending nails. and she smashed herself. then old paul from next door stands watching our rough work; when jam went inside for something he couldn't resist making a quick mark. the depth of my derangement about t and c and my birthday and then the glass landscape I got by looking and waiting for it all day reading I never promised you a rose garden crying in the mall library. he brought onto the counter a larger more wonderful peaked cullet, a wave, a range, foam, writing, grass, two suns or one a moon, cleavages, transparencies, outer surfaces looking like inner structures. I only had time for a dumb pleasure in its multiplicity and clarity, and then his big hand held it up and brought the bag down over it and I carried it home to trudy's house on the bus and set the bag down on trudy's table, and sat down    she said what's in the bag     I said water, have a look     she unwrapped it and we were both thrilled     she said it's fantastic what are you going to do with it     I'm next to the clouds and gold haze on air and water     I say I'm going to give it to you     it's mine? she said, clearing the place on the radiator for it, 'it's you at your finest, but what we have to go through to get to it' - blamed me cos only my friends could give me a birthday - the night of tension when I wouldn't be with j, , missing luke, hearing from roy, next day the letter from cc [canada council], shaking hand, with t and c laughter and pleasure - 18 march I smoked, was in the bathtub, thinking about how we are, the crisis, what it means, she arrived as if an apparition, saying the key, give me the key.     the drunkenness and desperation in the letter, demanding that I be her woman     now it's combat oh subtle one - I have a small joy in me since the grant, which says the world can exist again, solid, and not my dream     science, real astronomy, real airplane sinking on the horizon, real intersections of real and dream but the fight, and the call of dissolution trying to find strength away from the fright and superstition of the winter j saying the painful last month without connection has been fruitful for her and she's looser in her work, which no longer interests me because of its abstraction - retreat from the difficulty and silence of my real intelligence and eroticism I certainly went too far on that path, and perhaps farther than I was capable of, soon seeing myself forced into the motions of a mad person, being tired, provoked, ending up by being beaten without having succeeded in providing a meaning for myself. I am happy when I attain something that seems clear and lucid to me. But who can tell me that when the book is finished I will not once again fall into a kind of penumbra, becoming more dense, heavier, intolerable even? That is when the need to write might return. And then sometimes I am tortured by the good fortune of being as light as in daylight, afraid of losing myself in it. How can we find out what these alternations mean? a creature in the air, snowy owl, heavy fluff. I'm with one other on the ground. there's one in the water, a beautiful strange thing with whorls on its head. we are looking at the one in the water with sympathy. the one in the air plunges down and grabs the water one by the neck, bites, shakes, tries to cut through the neck, drops it on the ground, is in the air heavy with water. the one on the ground makes a note to us in water that turns rainbow colored, he ends it with a dashed line toward the underbrush, and rushes in its direction . when the snowy owl creature comes again. we are sympathetic to both. this happens at the creek. I am excited wanting to write the story of my times with cheryl and the creatures are part of it. the writing, the quick rainbow sign, is to ask us to follow - c     I kiss her head right back onto her shoulder and that makes me imagine going into her and through her / when I get my true rhythm / big hands on her arms / face into the scarf with its smell of another place / it's as if I overwhelm her, a big tide     later I just hold onto her, she's got a shake of her own, like crying     it's pebbles, it's beach     her long legs to my zipper and the touching pulls at belt loops mostly I feel why couldn't I have had it when I loved all through and every gesture had such a pressure behind it 3 joints, by herself, where did it send her, I had no idea, I was determined to stay in me, but opening my eyes after the noses I saw such a pointed starred face     she was robert louis stevenson, she was the peaked point-eyed one, so tamed so putting her head on my shoulder and I on hers - tell everyone about my official promotion, watching it warp me. whether to be more arrogant, yes, it would be noble to say nothing and all day I couldn't. a dizziness wavered the world, I thought to cure it with corned beef, delicious food, the war memorial park diagonal eating it. on the way home the sidewalk movie long shadows high grain beautiful greys, stone next to concrete, two legs, other legs, flashes, landscape, chasms. once a shadow poured from a shadow hose. daphne in her winter coat bent over oppressed home from work. holding down my pockets I run to get to her garden just as she does and I see her alone looking at her soil. she parts with some plants, the bamboo rhubarb so sincere and the rhubarb itself, cowled. and brown green chicory. and wine and she gets pink cheeked and bold-eyed. I say boo. you too she says. nice supper. I liked it best telling her mole molle and the mols including meal. roy with his hair down listening to the story of the hospital. the moment their conversation interested them more than I did. her hair when I saw it from above spins whiter/browner in such a depth of varied lines. what to work on, everything now is free play. - j can grasp me but I can't, her     'you're exquisite when you don't make noises' and in fact quite still, but attending to my own     (oh, I thought, yes, finding the other in yourself) - world, are you still there t this time     asking her for information about what it is that is drawing lovely people, she said it's an innocence in a woman's body. leaning against her was easy, warm soft and the body trusted, I didn't hold its pleasure down, and wasn't afraid of it taking me; allowed the kiss, that bold/timid swivel, yes 'before this, I felt that if I didn't change something in me, I would die'     t - the wheel barrow with young hay - pushing it across pender thinking about god and devil being the stream, the all of it, how working today I sometimes could remember to watch the motions themselves and how they used or tired the body, and that attention and truth are the angels that bring 'me' into presence again: every day I am thinking what is this? telling daphne the slippage is god 7 april when t said on the phone that she's been wearing black in the four and a half years since she has been with cheryl, and she has the friendship back now, I felt a release in my abdomen, expansion, warm. something true, and then t again in a baby voice saying she loves me, like a high school boy wanting a make. the scare of rhoda when a joint was lit, I'm going to be killed now. I wake up having dreamed a woman speaking behind my back of my lameness.     j holding me says you want to tell me something, you want to tell me your dream. I needed to kiss her toes and closed the door with the wrong sound the press gang party     smiling among the dancers, gently or briskly everyone jogging and bumping, I had my true love to be with, even to dance with, front to front or back to front, and the red shirt making me light. josie in wine red, moira in salmon pink, diana roses on account of arrow-eyed sandy who usually knew where I and j were too. the socialist band and two plain bold women singers. little j couldn't take off her plaid jacket. I was lightboned with happiness to be there with her and be able to dance with her after completion don't pause to admire yourself     especially because she could after all dance and home and me away, and how it changed when she touched patiently without willfulness, and the icy skin of acute love     her silence, how we went on until sleep, getting it right, descent taking time, where to take the attention and it becoming meditation, slighter and slighter     I stay still and don't make false love, as I used to, and am learning     what it is now the waking comes from further and then doesn't go away when she was cross, I said I would sometimes read to her and she was better already april 12 life has begun again; at the piano imagining how to work through every stop attention to detail and no limits, so much to learn, so far to travel wind shakes the house I wanted to write bravely: I exist differently, I have made a jump, if I am brave and careful I will know and see - we spent time again without concentration blabbing can we only be together when I've been to my other friends to be deepened and focused? I touch her mistakenly and don't trust that I don't want to - [May] the studebaker [I buy my first car, a cocoa-colored 1962 Studebaker Lark] - joyce. the coming into the room exposed and helpless. luke. tears. yes and it is me. she is the witness and will be given what j isn't brave enough - strangeness of seeing her mistakes and being patient with them, she's not brilliant and has tricks. '... first thing that comes up is the most incomplete shape.' the child sent away. fear of the car sometimes I feel ideas reassuring me, that processes are completing themselves if god is the world and the world is the lover relation with the world is originally relation to a person - this time we worked from her anger about my dream of her pregnant, through evening and morning of wrangling in ugly talk, until she cut down to something direct and spoke in a voice that went right into my body and inflamed it so I knew it had been true, and then how we didn't stay in that direct truth but felt our way through more and less focused language, not eating, sleeping little, to laughing and enough ease to tell that story - trudy said on the phone 'you're so far away it would take me hours to find you, I can't talk to you today I had a beautiful, glorious day, open, downtown' when I was separated from my mother, did I lose my self? langageless, into a strange place, and in that place, confined, subjugated, at the tenderest age, broken connection. at the tenderest age the little child is taken to a strange world where another language is spoken by rich children who know each other and despise her     but it is an interesting world     is it at that moment she leaves the present the body's exactness     by a little movement of your mouth I knew to ask you for what you were afraid to say - from that failure to the upstairs house, unlock and greet dog and take off jacket and the sleeper looks up, and get into bed, saying a little, but it's for the body, that so quickly greets, bites, makes itself dark sharp cavernous     rings now     I lie still and let you make it ring     surfaces and inner parts all dark     wet space night rain pouring     black window panes granulated wet every surface     there's my body cavity and then your back under my arm, that was the one thing we were     sensation, not many pictures this time this morning your breast loosened itself for my hand sweet little one alive hello little one     round it and round it the hard gaze of its focus, my palm riding over it in all this blessing I'm afraid and want to give something back - c straight sheathed brown bright     'I love you and I wish you well. say goodbye'     the stun     'she doesn't find you in your soul. she does things to your mind'     'she does things to my body too' 'you were always loving to me' 'you loved yourself with me' 'yes I loved myself with you and that's why I loved you' sexual ownership / what in what you said pulled me to you with such an open body, it was truth in your voice touching the bottom of the sea     but the world went to sleep around the body     the body became music and space we learned to find the other's sensation in our own making love to the world, is it that     touching the places of it that touch me her angel was there for a moment, when I saw it across the table I was shocked and frightened in my fallenness I think you didn't meet me somewhere and then I was lost why am I frightened of the sense (someone is stoned) of battle and what is wrong in the way I understand it. they try to capture souls. maybe I hardly had one but now it seems mostly in danger there are too many questions, I falter and don't know which part of it to be [Jam and I in London 22 May - 18 June, at first staying together in the Y near the British Museum, and then J stayed on alone in the Y while I house-sat an empty flat JoAnn Kaplan knew about in Woolwich] [international driver's license photo] A certain caravel sayling in the West Ocean, about the coastes of Spayne, had a forcibly and continuall wynde from the East whereby it was dryuen to a land unknown, & not described in any map or carde of the sea, & was dryuen stil along by the coaste of the same for the space of many dayes, untyll it came to a haven where in a short tyme the most part of the mariners, beying long before very weake & feeble by reason of hunger & traveyll, dyed. So that only the pilot, with three or four other, remained alive. And not only they that dyed, did not inioye the Indies whiche thy first discouered to theyr misfortune, but the residue also that lyved had in maner as little fruition of the same: not leaving, or at the least not openly publishing any memorie thereof, neyther of the place, or what it was called, or in what yeere it was founde. Albeit, the fault was not theirs, but rather the malice of other, or the enuie of that which we call fortune. I do not therefore marveyle, that the ancient histories affyrme, that great things proceede and increase of small & obscure begynnynges, syth we have seen the same verified in this fynding of the Indies, being so notable & new a thing. We neede not be curious to seeke the name of the Pilot, syth death made a short end of his voyages. Some wyl, that he came from Andaluzia, & traded to the Ilandes of Canaria, and the Iland of Madera, when this large & mortal nauigation chaunced unto hym. Others say that he was a Byscanne, and trade into England & Fraunce. Other also, that he was a Portugale, & that either he went or came from Mina or India: which agreeth well with the name of these newe landes, as I have sayd before. Agayne, some there be that say that he brought the Caravell to Portugale or to the Iland of Modera, or to some other of the Ilandes called De los Azores. Yet do none of them affyrme any thing, although they all affirme that the Pilot dyed in the house of Christopher Colon, with whom remained all suche witynges and annotations as he had made of his voyage in the sad Caravell, aswell as such thynges as he observed both by land & sea, as also of the elevation of the pole in those landes which he had discouered. From preamble of Richard Eden - I thought if I can just learn to sit out pain w/o turning it into anything but itself, especially not action, the sense that I have such an amount of wrongness to discover in myself and yet wondering if to pay attention to the wrongness is simply to make it and to make a world out of it; and rightness if I made a world out of it wd be a good home for me. I don't like the schism or the one dimension. this existence with other people just not wanting to be them. I don't know anything, I am no direction and don't know or love my existence. - I haven't spoken about the story with j since we were here airplane, her misery showing in awkwardness, ugliness, I'm contrite and don't like myself so placating, suggest the b & b in the country because I'm afraid of going into the city so painfully separate. at night we rage, it's still about how I rushed in and called the meeting and so got her into t's clutches because of how attractive t was in that panic of mine; I am scared of what will happen if she and t get together. I produce the wine and argue that I couldn't help myself, that I was furious t was taking something from c again, that I love c. in the morning I go for a walk and see a fine tree I don't know how to address, in london we look unsuccessfully but kindly for a b & b, but find the Y by an instinctive turning, I am dismayed by losing my way and making mistakes visible to her. sleeping and waking together is so intense I am unable to do anything else and go into a fog, lose the rest of the week, go with luke to the sufi farm, when we come back luke asks the right questions and I meet them right but roy and sara give me the creeps, and his voice with them. I am lighter with j and have the instinct to go to the river with her, on the way home torment close by. another week is lost, I go to sissinghurst, try to clear myself of the fog in us both, misery, intense pain in us both. next day go to find her and get the firm voice, I can have this firmness because I know she's hurt, say I came because I was in such terrible pain I couldn't stay away. I am believing what I say for the first time in weeks, the trees seem fine presences, the sky please me, I lie stretched on it free of her glamour and thoroughly confessed, she kisses me, it starts to rain. I am carrying the paper and we take it back to the hotel. a mennonite doctor, checking me over injects something into my shoulder I feel in my brain; he wants to do an eeg. because I have little raised dots (like on chest) on my scalp, I tell him about the acid, he goes off, I look for my shoes and can't find them anywhere, c's there with her new shoes I liked on account of the stitched soles, I can't find the shoes still, he comes back and I ask him about the eeg., he says "you really want to know?" in a humorous way. "it's terrible, I can't tell you more than that but it's terrible. never do that again." he says, "how's your academic work?" I say "It's fine, but academic work is easy. what I don't have anymore is my ..." to christina I said that what I fear to lose is the instinct of direction. june 13 woke having dreamed happiness with grandma and grandpa's house, and brain damage, pain and irresolution, helplessness. resolve to disappear from all my connections into a retreat where I would exorcise my frights and rebuild my brain. give up j. was going to give up breakfast but decided to invent less punishing discipline. fury at my helpless self, at j's holding everything back, crying, saying I have to learn another relation to pain, to sit still around it. j calm but I won't have her wisdom. dillons. salvation books, books for luke. roy meets me with tears in his eyes too, when I say I'm in pain, identity crisis. luke is glad to see me. r is honest for a little, then goes into quoting and entertainment. luke likes the books. jill chisholm invites. - found the space/time book; sal potter's rosy silence; jill's and my arms getting further from our bodies, she said and repeated, what you're doing is very hard; j on the steps under the eyes lizard and tired. - annabel nicholson sitting in bed looking lovely, she reaches for me as I'm telling her about Luke and pain. later she tells me hers, the eyes keep separate from the speech, her face shows itself more behind her hair, voices more and less polite, I wonder about learning a technology of relaxing my lonely friends, she liked to see me and yet the back and forth got posed and distant. oh ferocity, heaviness, fatigue, gaining. at the co-op the woman I looked at looking back thoughtfully. j at the door swollen and pestilential, what she called partial fucking, wondering why I am willing for the parts to connect while the talk is flaccid/unhappy/disliking. focusing close, it's not knowing what is a clue and what isn't. superstition and fright. reading because the structure of someone else's thought comes near to me, although their content doesn't. newton read the most mysterious writing by preference. worked out significations for himself by cross and lateral reference. elizabethan closeness to themselves in language. still when I come out of thinking to unpack the butter etc, I have a sense of being in the 'real' world by mistake or convention. [Back in Vancouver] the way the sky and its action, in clouds, thrilled us when we were lying down in the park, and then the light on j's white clothes, lilac shadows, the grass blades separate, ezra, a joy, like acid, I wondered what had happened while we sat there and after a while started to laugh. sweet back, the feel like what's in her fingers, but the doubt, leaving. june 20 one evening in london, stepping down a lane in evening light, bliss arrived, your upper arm, putting my arm through yours so I could have my fingers round your upper arm, the facades, we were alone on that street going to the river     we had left a room with a dormer window and its light     you wanted to live together and I couldn't stand your beauty, or to be wrong next to you she bought me tampax and put them with the food provisions     I said she mustn't but I was wrong / I was afraid of how weak I was, and then went to sissinghurst, and cooked up my independence and was in woolwich in frightful pain, but alone, and then she got sick from the separation maybe and our lovemaking wore us out     I was scared of the lovemaking, it seemed to exhaust and sicken us although it was glaucous and entrancing so little energy we didn't fight, just sickened the evening, summer evening through the church windows looking across to the west, it returns and I wonder why, did I make a promise, it's as if a whisper saturday 24th early, a bit of the alarm, asleep again, you're a downslope toward the light, shall we get up in a hurry, I lean on my arm over you to see the clock, 7, companion, it was good last night, a good current, as if there was a meteor shower, I have to tell you this, laugh, last night, the way I knew how turned on I was, was, when you got into bed and I moved over, I looked down and saw myself, and had a flash of lust - the brown car, proudly shifting to second and third, freeway, there's grass I can't look at, I'm not free, I'm forced to sit in the path of this constant road, cars, I only have time to look for danger, my foot shakes holding down the gas, less as we go on, may I kiss you? no absolutely not     I don't like my language with you     we're speaking alike pedantically with artificial hobble of your disguise, this language is too crude and big for us, ('like a glowing coal, a sort of warm triangle' 'for me it wasn't hot, it was very cool, and exquisite')     (I gave myself a picture, detoured my imagination so I could come, it, in, something white, in, I see it, I push it, you push it, light, pausing, your breath is changed as if the picture I made is entering you / me in, in, in a grab and a flutter, did you feel it?)     (was it because I'd been asleep and found the desire before you came, oh, my thoughts are there, that means I - yes, and we can - scratch toenail dog, eyes closed, head turned, hand open, two neat licks, I look, oh good laugh, why are you so cheerful? why am I tearful? oh - oh, because I've just had a bleachbottle coming into clearbrook behind the wheel the café, and a couple of owmches having a look at us, straw hats with grey bands, shirtsleeves and suspenders, eventually there are five, a pigeon babble, laughing, comfortably talking about der tod, the clean old men. I heard some of my father's story-telling tone, meantime jamila, jamila across, has taken the headband off and put her hair into an elastic and is the unhidden lovely face, steady, I'd go anywhere with her, she says when I go to the mirror these days I see this girl I don't know. she comes around to my side of the table and talks about how maybe the buddha gets everybody sooner or later, ananda and kuan yin, they were still hooked on love. what did they love? the buddha and the world. oh but that's different. ananda wasn't fat because he was running around being a wife in the laundry room at theY, a woman come back from katmandu, it snows lightly in the foothills, a spiritual place the M in her palm parking in the drive, I see a shadow moving right, then her slow walk left, we both laugh to have that private look. he's tired, I start to show the car but he's saying hello nicely to j. she's blue around the mouth, when we sit down she tells me the story, closing her eyes, the whole story from christmas onward, ich wolte nicht am weinachten sterben, ich hatte ein grossen willen, ich wolte leben. he has brought a book of mennonite history and sits on the arm of her chair in his dark blue shirt. his round stomach has shrunk a little, he's easy but tired. she speaks, closing her eyes. when she opens them I see fright, she's furtive and I see it only in a flash. we go outside, she says gratulieren zu dein neuen auto and shakes my hand, I show her the seat put down. we walk round the back and see grandpa and jam weeding, she and I pick some peas, leaving bruises on the bloom of the ones that aren't hard enough. we shell them, j and I on the grass, grandma's in the lawn chair in her cotton dress and cardigan. j goes to weed more and comes back with the hoe.     what do you call that? we call it a cheenez fork.     how do you do this? is this right?     he gets up off the arm of grandma's chair to teach her hoeing, grandma and I watch, when they're together at the end of the potato row I'm remembering the dream of him with roy ('I looked at you once when I was hoeing. you looked as if you were in mythic time.') (I liked looking at you today.) getting in the car with the round man and driving him to the store; in the old black dodge, jumping into the back seat and he would buy me an ice cream coming back aunt maryanne is there, swollen in her face, is she centred on my aberration and roseanne's? the anita bryant editorial in a church paper, 'moral confusion', 'deepest instincts.' uncle peter is as if afraid of me now. when he told the story of the woman who fell asleep smoking and set her chair on fire, 'they showed her being carried out, I think she might have been nude too,' we laugh a lot, especially maryanne and I, our embarrassment at his prurience proudly betrayed. later when grandma is raving about the tenants who broke windows - renters - and cut down a tree, I look at maryanne in my distress because I think she knows. while we're washing up maryanne saying (of the dishes) everything is so mixed up around here. peter jumping to talk about his first car and not letting grandpa tell the story of his, a '32 chev, in '48 accidentally finding townline road, a path, a track, a lake of grass, it's a lake! gravel, and a spot in front of plants red-stemmed coming out of it, green, many greens, with grass, and blue sky reflections, a few clover purples and next higher up the yellow flowers, oh museum, comfort, color, free, shine: goodness into my middle, lying down, the poplars clapping. she came near enough to touch, lying under cloud cover, a few drops and then more, why are you laughing isn't it raining on you?     this has happened before     that was different, bigger drops yah.     a purple grass with damp sandcolored beard of roots for diana, should I pull? going home driving starts to be bad, we sleep tight up and I wake hoping I never lose her, the way she pulled her hair out of the elastic by turning her head the last paragraph is after going to the garden and planting that grass, repentance, and then loving and looking as it got dark, eyes not sure of themselves, and walking through sweet night on hastings to buy candles     there are pink roses, all the trees have grown, feverfew and poppies, chamomile planted at the gate I can still feel the car's shudder j and I fighting and yet when our heads were together on the pillow I felt roses and falling asleep was in mythology grandma's face, it's small, has the eyes dislocated behind thick glass, the nose is skeletal, the rest soft     she's too interested in success, the way she shuts her eyes and when she opens them, the blue, it's a shock of someone else, a rodent, compassion says old and good, dispassion says she sold to goodness and oldness, the tyrannical right to bore, and I gave it too, thinking piously that if I listened well I could lead her out of her disguised fright     du hast angst zum sterben, speaking her language brokenly.     ich hab angst, das du nicht vertig sein wirst, ich will mit alle kinder im himmel sein.     but I don't want to be in heaven with all her children. what it is to be in front of just her face, who's luise.     (wir haben uns gleich geliebt)     does her duty, uses herself, she's frightened and obsessed but what's revolting isn't that, it's something (dann kann ich bischen herunter sneakin) small, it's old-child, I did well, see I was brave and strong, everybody says so, the doctors say so. I don't like helplessness. it's an expression of cunning and is as you called it an animal face 'I don't think my mother has an animal face, I think she has a human face' 'she'd be silly sometimes and he'd be silly too, then I'd be looking at them both and'   what I'm holding of everything she said is, I wonder if I'll still have the precision of language when you're gone