| aphrodite's garden volume 14 part 4 - 1992 july-august | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
14 July 1992 I have Rob in my bed in my first home bedroom, it's winter night, knock on the door, it's Louie, drunk. Take her into the living room and try to talk her into going home again. I'm taking her onto the road but there's Rob standing at the window, he's got dressed and is signaling. I hope she hasn't seen him, am behind her waving to him to step back but he doesn't. Last night he phoned, hadn't talked to anyone about Sunday. "Do you want to do something tomorrow night?" I say. "What do you want to do?" Embarrassed, laughing: "The usual I guess, unless there's something else you want to do. Can you?" "I can tomorrow but not by the weekend." He's ready to say 'bye, then. His voice has a private happiness in it. Not communicative, I mean, it's for himself. I'm warned not to praise him. On Sunday I was taking care not to be seen with him. When he phones and she's here I'm frightened of the sound of my voice and cut him short. He's never whined, demanded, campaigned, or sulked. He's glad when it's his turn and has other things to do when it isn't. He's patient. And not cut off, he still opens his chest to me and calm light comes out. In bed Sunday night - she's liked her weekend, Saturday she was at the garden all day without panic, Saturday night Rowen slept downstairs with the TV while we talked and slept under the roof - but I'm aware there'll be a crisis if she doesn't get a fuck before she's back at work on Monday. I'm not up for it. Is she falling asleep?! She was, but she felt my relief and that woke her. And then there's a long wrangle that'll cost me the whole of the next day. I do fuck her, why not, it only takes a minute, but then I'm so sad, so anxious at having betrayed myself. When I find the name of it I'm better, it's fear that she's controlling me by making me afraid of her fusses. I start falling asleep quite wonderfully. But she's wound up, accusing. I say I was stupid with Jam, I was giving her my best but it didn't work because it was what I needed to give not what she needed to have. That depresses L and I mean it to depress her. And so on. It's true that when I get into a panic I know a way to get her panicked instead. Weds 15th Uneasy. Why. Cos I don't know if Louie knows I was out last night. Because I'm not working. Fri 17 The high bed on the top floor [of Mei-lin and Hava's house]. Yesterday we woke when two vertical bars of sun came on side by side next to my pillow. We were looking far down across the Narrows into a treed valley in clean air. It was five thirty. A deep clean sleep after we'd been lying together in the unpartitioned gold buzz, when she'd been sharp and lucid and told about being angry and I suddenly approved. Last night - I saw myself from outside - hair is longer than I thought, face dull and passive. The desert plain, hillocky, black and white, stony. Near the road a small house I think someone has built to live contemplating the sight of it. I like the thought of living there. - Broken down, partly, a house built inside a broken barn. Barbed wire and paths beaten as they are around a ruin. I find an entrance and run into a young man, two young men. The wood stove is giving off heat, they're camping here. The young man has come back to the house his father made. A man who built to his own taste, wood in curves, a bedroom tiled with soft plates. I find always more rooms. Feeling how little I live with will. It says there's a fast way and a slow way. The fast way is a strong opponent, the slow is by small decisions. 19 Walking north toward the river, in dockland, very early. There's a beautiful light, strong and diffuse, a little misty. Wide strong yellow air. I walk in a long black cape. The only other person in this morning, a workman, says, You must be wanting to buy needle drugs. Not at all! This is such a beautiful light. Then in a flat being demolished or renovated, a part of a wood frame I see slides forward over part of something left on the wall. It was a drawer. There are little things I'm finding that I like, small things, pictures and stories in a magazine. I like this, it's not so old, how old is it? Strong yellow cover, August 1966. [Paris] Last night walking out of the house my stomach grinned: I don't have to spend another minute in this. On the way to the car I felt an instant of summer night. Today she smiled with her mouth shut and was beautiful. It's those teeth it seems that make me feel I'm in bad danger. A Sunday. We were under the vines. She can hear the worst of everything in my journal and still gleam. Yesterday the moment when I knew to put my arms around her and hug her tight. Whenever she's like this it's only that she wants me to love her, it said in me. Didn't sound like me. When I hear the real story of a crumble, the parts of it that are visionary, beyond knowing, frightened, I'm interested. But I can't see it if she doesn't tell me, I see a brat demanding I should feel something because she wants it. Monday 20th If an older woman and an overwhelmed girl go together into a night room whose walls dissolve, sit back to back on a rug, call down a hawk who cuts figures above them, and becomes one being, fear, fearlessness and decision - if, at the door they have asked to be useful to intelligence - and then if that one being writes - The invention of the story thrills me. Takes me to where I can remember my frightened time. I think I know what I'm doing. It's telling me again the myth Louie is. Why she loves me when I write. It's also the story of Jam and Ellie and of Them, grey hawk and deep kid. It's selfconscious tho'. I say I'm doing this to build a state, it's an invocation. 21st Getting a glimpse of a point where I got stopped - screen - grain - overlay. I don't understand - the winter pages - Louie had a welling of tears after, she said because of the person listening in them - she went to a reading at Western Front and sat alone halfway up - Jam asked how she was and she said lonely for a friend, "someone who'd hate this as much as I do." "There's a real spark between you and Ellie" said Joyce. The seriousness and innocence with which she read and wrote letters that winter, happy and sexy. Her smile up from her head on her arms. Her eyes and the corners of her mouth. 22nd Robert MacLean is here with his little girl. She looks much younger than five and has a black eye, a yellow-green eye. Am I going to lie down with him? What I want to know in this life is why I'm compelled this way to spend so many hours obliterated - in junk-reading and TV - and hungry, off balance - and worried about it. Many days I give up on, go to bed. There's nothing I can do to save them. There was nothing in the day but shame. Tuesday 28 Between Nighthawk and Tonasket. [drawing of barn] China Bend on the Columbia between the border at Paterson and Kettle Falls. Th. 30 vipers bugloss - yarrow - Alberta rose - tormentil - wild bergamot - campanula - foxtail - dark purple clover - white clover - yellow vetch - yellow daisy-like - purple aster - pink cranesbill - stunted poplar - wild garlic - brown-eyed susan - furry purple vetch - like a short leopard's-bane - magenta tuft - yellow dandelion family - silver ground - yellow like cistus - white mushroom, buff gills - silver shrub - yellow not exactly daisy - small mauve curly stamen, liatris? - round petalled tall pale yellow daisy - artemesia - woodruff - delphinium - saxifrage? - jacob's ladder - flax - dwarf juniper - scrub saskatoon - scrub pine Wardner outside Cranbrook. Blue-green river, green grass, silver gravel, strips the same saturation. Dry cloud puffs of a stalky flower like baby's breath, shades of lavender grey. Deer, hawk, little snake so subtle there was a moment when I cdn't see whether it was there or whether it had just been there. Foothills. Dry and wet. It's earlier summer here say the flowering plants, but the Rockies are naked in their stripes and blocs of velvet: washed-out pink, tan, purple, orange. The way I have to haul myself upslope by scrub saskatoon stems and tufts of grass. Dry and wet visibly on the slopes. Cropped dryland forb like deer skin over waterless old muscle, and in the cracks wooly dark green, scrub poplar. Sometimes a soak with reeds and mint. The architecture of campanula, 'bluebell': ribbed. As if the world's the outcome of a painter's calculation: I'll set loose these silver-greens, these dark greens, these small dark blues, bright yellows, whites, tans, in these material kinds, and they'll organize themselves into perfection. 31st [Three week camping trip with Louie] Kinds of misery. On the first day an anguish I wasn't given a reason for (but it sang It hurts to be in love this way). It was maybe anguish about the journey, its danger. Second day terror about the car, not knowing whether the brakes are okay, being responsible on the mountain. Since then tension about sex, stupid discussions. The times I'm uneasily fretting about her lack of physical sense, the way she cut cheese, dipped a greasy bowl into the wash water, left the keys in the trunk. Knowing it's something else, but what. Like men's irritability when they work with women. The way it releases me to yell and made her weep for an hour rolling through green fields without trees to the horizon. It's power differential, but what is that. What was it with Jam, since this is its reciprocal - it was that her consciousness interested me more than mine interested her. Louie's consciousness is likely more interesting than mine but her talking relation to it is not. Here I went to the story of grey hawk and deep kid and how she smiled with her shiny eyes and mouth corners the day before. (There she is by the tent thinking words whose final syllables are pulled shut like little purses: mos kee tow.) What is to do with hate? ("Hatred after loving days. Smoke blew downwards.") It's wonderful here. Where the cliff is cut it shows nothing but sand, no rock. I should say what's forbidden: what I'd like about traveling with a man. The privacy and objectivity. Him looking after the car. The way it's not at an angle to childhood. Dependable sex. Short frets. Being the girl and not in this way something verging on a father. My father is not a father to be. It's a soft word - like feather - "both hands to its warm feathers." What happened last night. I don't know how their bodies think they're going to get a baby out of it! I said about lesbians, furious, when she said how swollen and ready she'd found herself. She brought it up: I don't understand the anger. I tell her what makes me angry. Telling it I'm angry again. I'm compressed like a blade from side to centre down the length of my body. I say she hasn't found the core fantasy in her sex. She has the feeling but keeps a veil over its content. I'm as if cornered and she's pressing, pulling at me with hypnotic touches that make me rigid with resistance. How did I find the core fantasy. By fighting with Jam. I'm aware I'm sounding like Jam. What I have in mind to say but don't, is how Jam in the end didn't want to touch me anymore because there's never any baby. I don't have Jam's end of the fantasy, it's more as if I know how to impersonate sexual fathering because I know the quality of what I want. But I have no heart for it, in the end I resent her falling for it because my fantasy is nowhere in it. I needed the experience of competence but there's nowhere for it to go, sexually. Is that true? As if Jam's complaint that there was no baby was a complaint that she never got to her own infant bliss. (This is a new turn. What's that relation between being a baby and having one. What's the division of responsibility between being willing to be the baby and being willing to look after a baby. Here I heard T, "It's Cheryl's turn to be the baby.") In a way I was being the baby and she was outside me, rigid with resistance the way babies can be. "I'm being careful not to let you hurt me, because you're in something where I think you're very hurt." At that I quit. It was true I seemed to be hurt, the compression said so, and she was right to take care, but that's as far as it could go. I shut up. She said, This is as low as you can get. A moralistic habit that spoils her concentration. It might have been close to my lowest but to take it indignantly was a misreading. Time to quit for the night. I go out to pee and see large clear stars. Lie down and hear her wanking juicily. Yes that's what we need. I think my mother was baffled by anger and withdrawal. I seem to expect it. - [Louie's dream] The neighbours, peace and love in the air a ... goldenness from dust kicked up ... will I run after them ... yes, I will ... go, fast and light ... "The reason I ran after them is to tell them about the air, what it looks like from where I am."
"My writing won't go away. I'll be better company to myself." A rock moving gently upstream. And what would it be for her - oh the color changes all the time - she'll be baby all the more, and learn what more she can do in it - (she'll betray what I've told her, her history will twist) - transfer adoration - and so on - that isn't my story anymore (my soul went away and joined those who were willing to eat it) - but I'll be somewhere and released. 3rd August I have an envelope I'm taking to my mom's. 170 dollars. The story is she's looking after the baby (it's Luke) while I work and go to school. But when I find her place on the other side of town Luke isn't there. Other children's toys on the floor. Where is he?! They've left him at the daycare. They brought him once but it was too much trouble with the other kids. I rail at her. Yesterday there were wide light brown roads raised like platforms, fenced corridors through extents of brome grass, clover, young wheat, shortgrass prairie without trees to the horizon. The car slogged through gravel leaving a powder of soft brown in the air behind it and on the dishes in the trunk. There were sometimes farmsteads with stunted caragana and some larger tree. Outside one of these the rotted tailpipe went and I heard what I knew was the muffler dragging on gravel. There'll be a man in that farmhouse with baling wire and a wire cutter. Two dogs, farm dogs, not worried. It's Sunday dinnertime. A fat little boy at the front door screen. "Is your dad here?" "He's sleeping." The woman's a while arriving. Through the door a mattress leaning on the wall, a dark room with a television screen. She's a type, young for three kids, trashy, glasses, white and squishy. "My husband'll look at it for you." The front door won't open. "Come to the side -" "My dad's awake now!" The little fat boy is proud of his information. A tall man old enough to be her father, putting his cap on over a damp naked forehead with the farmer's line between red and white. "I know farmers have to sleep on Sundays." I'm apologizing for being too ignorant and unequipped to fix my own muffler. He doesn't reply. Strides out quickly ahead of us. Broad hips, low jeans like many farming men when they're older. Neck forward. Kneels on the gravel to peer under the trunk. Sees what can be done. When he comes back with wire and wire cutter his mood has changed. "We were lucky it happened here," I say. "Further east it's quite dezolate, it can be thirty miles between places." It's his first full sentence, an accent surprisingly soft. What's it a trace of? I can't tell, but it makes him look younger. He lies on his back in the gravel and wriggles under. It's a tight fit. I lie down too, forward of the tire. "If you want a hand with anything just say." I see I can hold up the muffler while he gets the wire around it. He winds the wire, cuts it, ties on another strand. "Are you going through to Saskatchewan? I wouldn't go through too many big towns before I took this to a muffler shop. It'll hold but there's some give at the other end. It'll run a bit louder without the tailpipe." We're standing behind the car. I know the formalities. "Can we give you something, for - ?" "Oh, no, no." "Well thanks a lot." There we still stand. I like his speech and want to hear more. "How are your crops this year? How's the weather been?" He's willing to tell. "We didn't get any rain until a month ago. The wheat didn't start coming until then. It's coming good now but wheat needs ninety days. We'll have to get to the end of September without frost. Some years we do and some we don't." "The grass is looking good now." "All that's come up since the rain. Before that there was nothing. I had forty cows on four and a half quarters and they couldn't find enough to eat. Before I took them out to the community pasture I had to bring them in and feed them." And more: "The grass will cure and calves need the greengrass to put on fat. Oh they'll be alright but they won't have the weight." We're standing in silence. "Good luck" I say awkwardly. He breaks into a smile so sweet and shy I've written this whole story in order to tell it. A cut to the heart. And then more miles, thirty miles of these soft roads between hard fields. A white-painted community centre. A white school. Pendant d'Oreille Cemetery a near-empty square framed in scrub caragana - the stuntedness of the caragana told me something precise about how much harsher it is here than at home - with a wrought-iron name-arch over the gate. A dozen and a half graves, two with scrub lilac knee-high around the stone. Another stone had a hot little fore-space of bare earth, and from the grass beside it came a dry rattle that sounded once, listened, came again, listened, warned again, unmistakably a voice with an intent. That was thrilling. And then closer to the Cypress Hills the beautiful dignity of dark brown unpainted farmhouses, small windowed boxes completely unsheltered in the plain. No tree, no barn, no shed. At Manyberries the worst of what's left of that unremitting life, a café so bad it was like a visit to corruption. A fat woman proprietor with hateful eyes and servile set welcome, a grey-faced old woman in cowboy dress too drunk to remember the orders. Above the door a plaque: Thank you for allowing us the pleasure of serving you. Please come again soon. The cook apparently drunk too, "fried chicken" for $5.95 meant two dry wedges and a heap of roughly chopped old lettuce without dressing. And I have my own corruption - or what? Such anguish about the car or being unsheltered. Mostly about her, the way I look at her and don't love her. To her it isn't evidence yet, she won't see it 'til sometime and then she'll say, Ellie knew it months ago. Meantime it shocks me every time again. What should I do. Go through it again with Joyce? Fight them away? Forget strategically until it's clearer? Encyst? Let it get to a point and then fight? Go away for the fall and see what happens? 4th 11,000 years. Stone circles, cairns, stone alignments. Stone effigies. Vision quest structures. What little we could spare we offered to the bad spirit to let us alone and go to our enemies. To the good spirit we offered feathers, branches of trees, and sweet-smelling grass. offerings at waterfalls or rapids, at passes in the mountains, at trees or rocks that stood solitary, at every place that seemed in any way dangerous or uncanny. taboos at certain seasons or at epochs ascend a hill at daybreak fasting and ceremonial purity, particularly at adolescence symbols of these increments of supernatural power, bundles a father could not speak harshly to his own son the pine hills, sweet pine hills, the beautiful highlands, thunderbreeding hills source of knowledge is sun, as passed down through feather woman 5 Here's the day. A white clover. A dragonfly. The water just at this edge a polish of sky. I see that the beginning of the trip was marked, a moment so decisive. I saw it but not honestly enough. I fled. How did they do it and why. There is no help, from her, from Joyce. The next stretch is quite desolate, perilous. The poplars a screen of winking dots. But what else do I see. A descent into attention that can make me block again. 6 A man minerally handsome. The police want me to tell you he seems to be after you, Ellie, sez Muggs. I don't want to write this stuff - threat of murder, Rowen gone, house burnt and replaced by clinic built quickly by police and firemen, car stolen, everything gone, my work gone. Muggs with tears on her face, her father has died. Eastend Saskatchewan. Cypress Hotel. Male giggles at the other end of the counter, Charlie's Café. "I'm happy it rained again." "How much'd you get?" "I got seven tenths, Les says he got too much!" Heh heh. What we saw yesterday, hours of driving and nothing is ugly. (A man in a cap comes past the counter on the way to the coffee machine, a customer I saw last night in Jack's Café. "D'you want a refill of this?" He's the one I said was my age. A man in a turquoise golf shirt walks in behind the counter, rinses his cup, hangs it up, another comes and reaches himself a pack of smokes, puts money in the till. It's the bus station too. Charlie wearing a phone on his belt. "There's something owing on it, no, just the freight.") Not much to say about those miles. Clover bales in the ditches. Stock comically deep in saskatoon scrub in a coulee. Wheat in combed carpet close-fitted and dividing over a curve, radiant emerald green. A yellow weed concentrated up against a curving edge where cultivation or weedkiller has cut it off sharp. The even slate blue of rain at a distance, what to call the way it stands earth to sky, not a stretch, not a fall, not a drift. And the way with nearer clouds I could look up into the complicated space among them, black white blue grey, stretched ripped edges, towering things carrying themselves heavily and airily, very unsimply. Yesterday: I said we turned a corner. Her book spoke fearlessly. Such a thing, her book. To hear it and then see her fall into something like a dwarf demon of blame and self pity was making me believe the Buddhists, ego demands agreement with its complaints. The Olympics, Sylvie Frechette. Men in their farmers' caps watching. Monday 10th Drumheller Yesterday's wind, on the other side of the Texas gate from the park, wheat is bounding away from the road. Barley comes clashing toward it, breaks into a froth of oats at the greengrass rim of the ditch. I have the heel of the super-8 camera balanced on the car roof. Bursts of wind toss me too. Then outside Val Marie we go drunk with pleasure at the sweep of color up the ditch, alsike dark purple, white clover, foxtail, red dock in seed, and the centre band blazes yellow: prairie sunflower, gumweed, coreopsis ("common tickseed") and what's that dandelion-like one on tall stalks, with fescue froth. And after that something happens again. I'm very tired, is it. Writing is like pushing a weight. The many things I saw and haven't the energy to say. 'Cutting off.' There's life I have in my own company but the cost in tension all day. Battery boiled and the right rear wheel had a scorched smell. The way dinosaur skeletons stand. [address for Rumsey Wheel] 14th As if my brain's asleep though I'm sitting awake with the passenger door open waiting for the café at the Seven Lakes Motel. In Edmonton the old University Hospital was lying behind a fence in a rubble of bricks, plaster, crumpled metal, striped ticking mattresses, emergency firefighting hoses, as if they knocked it over without emptying it. At home my land was for the first time no longer there, the pasture bush was gone, there was no lane, little poplars had grown forward past the caragana, and caragana seedlings beyond that - a gully where the lane rise wd'v been, deep fescue with broad blades, a mystery why they haven't cultivated the yard yet. We have to push through deep wet grass to get to the pump, which brings up bluish water. What made it mine it seems was a shape between the house bush, the pasture bush, the willows across the road, and the north fenceline bush. With these in different relations the hill is a different shape. And what's lost when my yard is no longer broadcasting its shape into the wind - what's different for people whose people keep their house. And past Valhalla when it was already dark and I was watching for the red and white house turn-off not sure at all I'd recognize it, wraiths of fog were rising off the road and blotting the windshield. In Hythe the hotel had vanished. I drove up and down the streets looking for it. I disbelieve the number of years - telling Rudy Wiebe "Fourteen years ago you invited me to stop by if I was ever in town." I was last writing in Seven Lakes Café eleven years ago. It's much longer than any interval has been but so unreal as an interval. Rudy kept saying how long ago it was and I could tell that for him there has been so much doing that the book he was writing on Alberta in 1978 is not worth remembering, 'a life of achievement.' What that conversation was I'm not sure I'll tell. A folly. I came back from the campground phone and lay on my back and cried. Mennonite patriarchy had not moved over to invite me in. And why had I forced the decision again. And the land is giving color after color. My friend next to me seeing it too. A dark blue storm we saw long off, lightning's minute on the horizon. Wanting a really wet rain, the road fuzzed over with white vapor, later shone all over with the yellow of headlights. On the home road between Sexsmith and Buffalo Lakes the sun got low enough to find a slot in the northwest and came through with rainbow, thunder sky, gold grass and supersaturated granary red. That doesn't say the white clover's wire and ripe red clover's rust in the ditch. Sunday 16th In this house hating her again. Who. What's the just description. She says her book says to stop talking for three days and then she tells me she lied yesterday about a dream about Rob. He was looking at her breasts and wanted to be with her. What she told me is he couldn't be trusted. In my dream I said to Tony Nesbit you've been the man of my life. We go to his house, he wants me to live with him, Louie and his girlfriend have got there first, a grass slope with something like artificial flowers, I'm leaving, the fact is he drinks too much. She says Rob is the man of my life. I erupt bitterly. I wish he were, the way she keeps insisting he is is like a mockery, it's as if she wants me confined with him in my undeveloped youth while she makes off with everything I've worked for since and becomes herself the woman of stature in the world. I listen to this angry paragraph wondering who I'm talking to. Who tells me he's the man of my life? I do, beside myself. Myself who's twentytwo. She does. He does in his way. My self with men is younger than I am. Then there's the crossing-over with Jam, I'm here in this house which is now a house returned-to, which no longer sees the lake, which again has no glass and stands possible though in a few ways more decrepit. A well-made classical house. The fluff of an owl out the upstairs window (or off the roof). John Tofteland come out of his sleep lends it gladly. Jam's ink bottle, her milkman's apron, her leather glove, the two-compartment tier of her aluminum cooking stack, my name in her handwriting on a box. How cranky and crazy she was. The way I looked at a Chinese fairy mentat when I looked at her, and stretched wanting to be interesting enough. "I thought she'd be mentally at home with them. I was afraid I wasn't smart enough to interest her. I can see now that I was lonely for someone I could be mentally at home with. "You're jealous of him because you're lonely for someone to be sexually at home with." Then I hate that she says she thought she could be sexually at home with me - the greed that's willing to think itself at home if I'm not there too. Jam's struggle was to make me say I was a sexual woman. My struggle was to make her speak from feeling and body and about envy and competition. My struggle with myself was to make myself a writer. I don't know what was her struggle with herself. Louie's struggle is to make herself a writer. Her struggle with me is to own me sexually. (I could say I wanted to own Jam intellectually.) My struggle with her is to get her to own herself sexually. And what's my struggle with myself - to have depth and marvel and movement and work again. Depth and command, sex and mind, what for each pair would be a third? Work. [E] "What if there were a man with whom you had good heart and sex but not learning, and what if you'd committed yourself to live with him." [L] "I couldn't sustain it." "Why not." "I couldn't handle the security." "What couldn't you handle about it." "You know." "Come on." "That it would fail." "What would that do to you." Then she's suspicious and wants to know what I'm doing. (Why my voice isn't warm and supportive.) "I'm tracking, I'm concentrating." It's happening already. She's crying I take it but I keep my eyes closed. "And what did it do to you." (I'm aware she seems to be speaking for me / also maybe.) "It makes me conscious and it makes me a fragile identity." I have to keep trying for that. "Do you mean you're aware all the time that it can fail, and always being uncertain gives you a fragile identity?" "Not exactly that, wanting the security I had and knowing it's false." "Wanting it and not wanting it?" Now I'm seeing what it is she projects, it's the wanting or getting, with a man, so she can be safe in not wanting and not getting. When we've got her there I want to wash my hands of it. She wants reassurance. Check it out check it out sings my voice. I lift grass finding the courtyard rocks. Follow up she says. That's right but why am I reluctant. She's feeling very bad. She feels I did something very bad to her, so bad she wants to go away and never see me again. What did I do. I put my ghosts onto her. "Don't you want to be found out and find yourself out?" It's true there are ghosts. When Jam opened the seal on deep sex and babies I was furious this way - a trick - and tracking Louie was like Trudy tracking me. I wanted it done in love but it's done in exasperation. What follows from that. She wanted me to enfold her and I wanted her to look after herself. Why. This little girl so well taken care of by her family, socially so secure, given a body she can use for anything, sentient, popular, and on top of that she gets me to help her make these crossings, she helps herself to my time. "I feel very freaked" she says, looking a picture of dejection. "It's because you're not looking after yourself. You should go and lie down so you'll have support and breathe right to the bottom and if you feel freaked look for where in the body you feel it and watch what comes up with it." What happened. Her anger tells me it was a real find. What part of it was found. Grief of the betrayal of security. Her sense of con is right too, the con is that I'm not feeling it alongside her. Because the story of all stories must be true also of me. 17 It's quiet. Caraganas allow nothing to grow under them, down their length there's often a corridor with a clean soft floor. The grass stands so deep - brome - fiery green blades, red-brown banners of seed swaying above the mass of blades in a separate second layer. Summerfallow clean and velvety showing airshimmer against its even nap. Fenceline with shapes of a thin cross-section of a grove. Saskatoon bush, like a poplar stand, has this year's top growth showing thin individual branch-shapes jutted out of a solid curve. Nettle. Raspberry. Flies. Squirrel's rattling footfalls in the house behind me. Fireweed's spent pink feathers with white fluff glistening at their base. The rolling grainy line of a motor traveling far away. The very dry light clacking of some insect under the caraganas. A quacking protest from the lake. Dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee says the little bird now hung upside down from a spruce finger. There's the car basking deep in grass. I found the pump handle somehow thrown off into the grass. Fireweed seeds release themselves and sail singly momentously against the light. A spider's wire holds tight between two blades and flashes a fine line. Was that a car turning on gravel. The way the chickadee dips in its flight. A moth. A breeze. A white-pink crescent of shine below the sun. Tiny cracks of caragana pod splitting and little rattle as seeds are flung against leaves. A bite in the sun. A powdered dark blue strip of ridge right across the north. And all of it together. Oh there a bird with wing-edges translucent falling toward the top of the spruce. Kee keee it says sharply from another place. Dead spruce to be cut down for firewood, willow die-back to be broken out. I have to hold myself in the strange fact of time, which is visible only in spots: in three verandah rails fallen out of the row, in the maturity of two poplars that were pretty kids. In the way the lake view has closed over. In my pigtail, and mostly in Louie's presence, anachronistic, like a vision of a future I don't believe. There is her mother's eiderdown on her bed made on the porch. I mean she is not real to me in the way the place is, tho' she's close-by: the anxiety in my throat. (Phoning Francois, doubtless.) There's no way to see the rattle of the poplar leaves without seeing the leaves - 'the rattle of the leaves' and some remembered feeling - a sensitivity like nothing else, they're individually hung on springs so a puff on an edge will give them a push and then a flapping recoil - maybe. Alright, what do I want here - The night at Rumsey Wheel. Nearing sunset when we came, car left behind the dugout, we arrived separately over the other near hilltops checking them for stones. A rockpile at the crest of this farthest most likely one, with unheard-of poplar grove sprung from amongst the rocks. There's a fence square around the dome of the hill, but the wires are down in this corner, and in that one too. There are mosquitoes. Dry shortgrass stalks standing up singly out of dry lichen and moss in the horizontal light. The stones are pink - it isn't just the time of day. One of the poplars quite thick, tho' stubby, the rest babies. Dry raspberry canes. There's a clear ring, small rocks with upper faces showing from out of a depth of sod that has grown up to lap firmly around their bases. The ring is incomplete on the east side but here's a flat circle of stones. It's the effigy's head and there are the arms raised like the snake goddess's, and a bigger rock at the heart. A skirt or legs maybe, but disturbed. Parts of something sketched on the northwest. In coming around again to the hot slope of pink rocks on the east I hear a loud electric buzz. This isn't esoteric but it might be. It's coming from the rocks. Two notes she says, a low one under the shiny shrill. It doesn't vary. It's like the sound of a hidden hive and I'm cautious. Is it these tiny wasp-like machines hovering almost inside the cracks between rocks? I want to get the car before the light's gone, because of the cameras. Strong pink light and then fading. The farmer's son to deal with while she's free to move around. When he's gone every moment has to be taken. A surprising amount of light still on the slope facing west. A lichened pink rock glowing in its sod socket. Near it a larger grey one. We have the near dark to wander separately in. The moon has risen in the southeast and is coming up behind the poplar clump. I see with love and recognition the deeply cut cowpaths making for water - the lines of buffalo and Indian with a common culture on the plane - cow tribe we watched passing in procession toward its night pasture, two nervy longhorn heifers, brindle, with beautiful faces, a young shorthorn bull trotting along oblivious to us, his nose stuck to a trotting cow's rear end, all of them walking with that short jerk upward of the muzzle with every step. Older cows alert, stopping to challenge us (it felt) with stares. They seemed to stand reading us with massive concentration. Yearling steers several together. Sometimes a cow with two calves of different ages. Families visible, red or pale creamy tan. Another bull, a heavy-headed Hereford. All with skeletons more visible since the dinosaurs of the morning. I knew I must sleep alone at any cost. Made two piles of bedding fearing a wrangle. There wasn't one. We have to each pick our spots tonight. Where. Not certain how to decide. Toward sunrise? But dreamers face west. Oh - yes - by the rock that shone. But inside the circle? I try. It isn't right. Just outside it, feet downhill toward where the sun set. The good rock at left hand, head nearly on the ring. Make up the bed with wool jacket under. Such a long way to see - we're the highest point in all directions. A hill far to the northeast, something, lights (Three Hills) on the southwestern edge. Single lights here and there on the rim, farm lights not town lights. It won't be dark, the moon's two days from full. Mosquitoes. Not too many. She's unfolding things in the sunrise direction (in the stream between the two buzzing clumps she says in the morning). I lie down and pray. Urgencies. To settle the long struggle with them. To get clear with Louie. To work and have will. To not lose motion. For depth. (As if I shouldn't say these - why?) To be thinner. Only the bright stars. The Dipper, the W, the Swan. When mosquitoes have gathered I cover my face with the sheet. Through it I see a bright streak. It's a meteor. I jerk off the sheet to look. The streak is still there - standing. A thin green line, vertical. Aurora in a form I've never seen. It fades. Then there's a band of the same pale green standing parallel to the horizon in the north. White meteors too. I have moon shadow from the trees shaking over me. The rest of the land is bright moon day. I dream it's dawn and a pickup drives up near the wire. People get out. In my dream it's hard to wake, like pulling myself from a depth, a long haul. Looking over my shoulder I'm surprised to see the visitors aren't men. Two young women are creeping around the other side of the hill hoping not to be seen. They came for some sort of dawn ritual, offering smoke, something similar. They're new-age-ish. I see the older woman's face quite clearly. She's following the other one back to the truck. Something awkward about their movement. I wake and it's deep night still. But a wind has come up, blowing from the southeast as if it's springing out of the grove. So clean and live a wind, warm, like a complete goodness. I want to lift my arms to it. I could lie on my pillow in this wind, in this light, sloped facing sky and earth, all night, peaceful and thanking. Stars fall. I see the sky has turned. The moon has come sideways out of the grove and I'm out in its uncolored day. Before dawn I see it sink very orange at a point out from the end of my left arm. I like that. And later when there's outer fire in the northeast it seems the sun will rise down past the end of my right hand. She has another story. The most remarkable part is that she spoke to her book without the [physical] book. It said to her, five times, I love you. ("Did you see the moon?" she says to it. "I was there." "Are you the moon?!" "I'm the way you see it.") - I want to know, why am I enraged by what looks like self-pity? The way when I mocked her drooping shoulders yesterday we both cracked up tho' she was deep in tragedy 'til then. Like Rowen sulking in the kitchen and when I don't respond moving the show to the bedroom. Puts his head down on his arms at my desk. Finally comes sobbing to my pillow. "You don't even care if I'm crying do you." Sometimes it's real and I'm moved. What I want to know is, when I'm enraged is it always a con? You're such a BABY I rage. Seeing her walk to the car perfused with dejection that won't look at itself. How can you refuse information you have to have? ("Is Ellie bad?") Something so wimpy about you. (But now I want to talk about some of your faces. There's one who comes in misery that's like none of the others, a different family. I call it a Janzen, something sharp in the eyes, longer in the cheek. Sometimes quite a blunt boy-face. The polished pretty girl.) (Joyce: when you have someone in front of you how do you read the other faces that come as shades?) I remembered, crossing to clean the cooler, what it was like to feel slow witted when their play ran past. I remembered that if I'd have to see her with them I might see her do that with them, racing. I thought it because of something that happened at a corner in the supermarket. She draws the scratch of a match, I hold it up and blow, she laughs. Rapid but wrong because I was signaling candle - but that's their real speed and I don't put myself where I can have to feel it. That's the rage at her slowness presumably, lame-brain. I made you feel it yesterday didn't I. Who did it to them. What makes it come at what kind of moment. A pent exasperated moment. Take some responsibility here! Sit up and get some focus! The lame brain of Christian families too damped to be swift. But if I can't do it I can still love it - she can - the one who sees the moon. Is it true there are people in me who don't like each other? The way her voice said I love you to her worried one. But someone at odds there too and it's pressed on me. 18 Reading this over and looking up. The voice of the grass. Peter Epp's bench good for writing, an edge to set my sole on under the table. Slept on the summerfallow east of the house last night. Warm. (- The sight of her squatting about to do yoga. I hate how perfect her body is - the turn of her legs and bum in leggings.) Often waking. Nothing hurt, it was like waking in warm water. Closing my eyes again. When I opened them on grass steeping into color I knew to look east. Hot transparent yellow. Clouds to catch it. At the cultivated edge the brome stands straight up in a brush: green, copper. Nothing moving. It's the copper that catches in this first light. And clouds so water-rich, belonging to so rich a country, deep fibrous things bluegrey and white with palest blue sleek behind them. That steep of ruby dawn in brome green and poplar green with dark bluegrey behind it, nowhere else. And the pink on poplar stems, and the sharpening of black shadow, when the sun is up. You friendly color god - I made the fire today and sang Gott ist die Liebe / Lest mich er-losen - Gott is die Liebe - er liebt au mich. (And also: Ich lag in Ban-den / und konnt' nicht los -) Went joyfully to communicate it. It was wriggles and squeals, more? More. More wriggles, a deeper unwinding squeal but as if I'm using her to release it and don't want her to be who she is when she might have something to tell also. Or it's that she's not telling - hiding. Likely that. Hiding that she didn't want to be disturbed. That's the stress - the stress of bad feelings. So elaborated and feared. Heart - dear tight heart - I know you're protecting me but please tell me from what - When I came home, before I trusted her, she was grabbing me, hungry. She hadn't the sight or care to wait, she thought starvation love. Tight heart protected my honesty. Protects it now. But that anguish in her presence. The squeeze of worry that I'm holding out against the only one who listens to me. Here I mean Mary, whom I saw when I'd closed my eyes trying to stay with the tight heart of refusing to lie down with L. I want to get up and run. Talking is running away too. Why there isn't depth. What 'depth' means - the body open under the feeling, I think - all the way down. Depth, and comprehension, and contribution and perception. Dear you, I'm thanking you for what you've given me possible these years. 19 There should be notation for the differences in "I" - the I of present feeling, the I of inferred structure, the I of a past state. The I who made these distinctions would have to be noted as the I of present feeling. Living with the puzzle of alternation, or obliteration - Fell asleep blissfully up here but when in the night I heard her moving downstairs, such instant anguish - But I can leave it now by looking out the window - at a bird in fireweed or the look of orange pods in thick tooth-rows on the blue-green caragana. She looks so frightened of me.
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