| aphrodite's garden volume 14 part 5 - 1992 august-september | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Friday 21st August 1992 Beaverlodge Stone circle on the summerfallow. Cold. Worried but looking up, west, north. Color. Simple trees, grass, house, earth, clouds. Few kinds in many lights, many changes of air. Ice-bite wind from the north, grass running in another direction. What is it in the sound of wind in grass and in poplar leaves. Seeing it too. Clean color running and speaking, it's the look of a feeling I like best. Waiting in the circle crying because of leaving it. Primary beauty, that's there when I want it, never not there, I can go away and read a newspaper but then I can come back. (But now it's too cold to live in the house without glass.) We set up the circle to ask what's true, moved it under the eaves and slept in it, and in the morning what we found is that I have to say out loud that I love Rob. I was crying down the sides of my temples because of how I betray him at the garden for her - "We made the garden together, it's five years of his life and of mine too, that's what we did with it." Why don't I. Because of pride. What would happen if I did. A sexual ache thinking it. But what else. Would I have to be guilty when I don't like him. No. What it is, is I have to declare it to her. I was crying simply. Since Cheryl it's the only place I've had a simple heart. That isn't exactly true but there's something it means. I'm required to be faithful to it. Not only it, though, I have to be faithful to what I want to call solitary self or best self but there's a working self that discovers things with her - solitary self is often lost in trash - so: committed self, as if with anyone I give up on everything real, because accommodating them I haven't a hope. What I knew before about not accommodating, keeping concentration. That's what to ask for next. Does it mean what they do, social mania? - A longhorn head in the café at Manyberries, black and white brindle, wet black eyes, stretched neck and conscious chin like Nefertiti, so beautiful a being. The morning on the northern rim of the Grasslands valley, we sat with our tea just over the gully's rim where there was a steep grassed slope getting sun direct, figuring out why rape fantasies, incest, seduction fantasies work - because there are permanent tensions about these things and fantasies relax them and that by itself is sweet. Why I love Rob: the tension needn't hold (what tension holds with her - what fantasy would tell me)(what fantasy has told me). So many days with everything gone - The bison: I looked up from the east porch and saw them at the fenceline in the neighbour's field, grazing north the way they do in movies, more cohesive than cattle. Stumbled across the summerfallow to them. Cows stared - great prehistoric masses overbalancing toward the front like an animal designed to charge and flatten. The bull turned squarely toward us and stared us down so six strands of wire didn't convince me. Hansens have their best quarter in fescue-bison rotation says Rudy: on the third year, when the fescue seeded, they got seven hundred and fifty thousand - was it. And global warming says the Edmonton Journal will bring shortgrass prairie well north of here, trees will die, there won't be this water and color in the air. And Natives got a self government agreement yesterday. [Functional grammar notes: "The language itself - the system that lies behind the text - is of indefinite extent." In other words you could always name more distinctions. Functional meaning is the way it is because of how it's used. Two kinds of uses/meanings, social action and (------). formal-functional distinction Grammar is 'syntax' in formal linguistics, ie a level of coding - syntax and vocabulary more coded than semantics, less coded than phonology.
Functional - language interpreted as a system of meanings accompanied by forms to which meanings are then attached.] Halliday M 1994 An introduction to functional grammar, 2nd ed E Arnold 22nd She feels me wanting to be alone and panics. "What does the panic say?" "That we'll never be able to work together in a room." "And what then?" "I'll never have it anywhere." "And what then?" "I'll never be my best self." "You'll never get to be it?" "No." "Tell me a story about two women working in a room." "It's too close to the story I told you already." "No, make it like a fairytale." "Neither of these people are you or me. The one can write and the other can speak. The one who talks dances, has any lover she wants, men or women, is a body. Her weakness is that people can't see she's smart. She longs to have the means to show them. The one who can write likes books but not so much for the ideas as for their dry smell, their grain." "What does she do for a living?" "I don't want to tell you." "She's some kind of a scholar?" "She wouldn't say that. She's a writer." "What does she write?" "She's a poet." "She writes short dry pieces?" "Subtle." "How is she about sex? I suspect she's kind of chaste." "She has a conflict." "In what way?" "You know." "I have no idea." "About men." "What makes the conflict?" "She's proud." "What else does she do?" "Music." "Plays it or listens?" "She plays the cello, she learnt it but there was interference from her principles." "Oh she's principled! (Laughing.) What kind of principles?" "Political, about class. But she plays." "What does she play?" "One note at a time, very simple. Classical." "More classical than classical maybe, Renaissance?" "She plays this." (Sings what sounds like Bach, with the strings stopped at the ends of the phrases.) "Can you give them names?" "The one who can write has a Greek name, it's Praxis." "That's wonderful." "The other one is Neara, n.e.a.r.a." "What do they want from each other? What are their weaknesses?" "Praxis loves Neara's body." "Doesn't she want to be a body herself?" "Don't bark up the wrong tree." "Alright, what does Neara want?" "You know." "When you say that it means you don't want to know for some reason." "I do know." "Not altogether maybe. What does Neara want?" "I'm tired of you having so much power." "Come on." "Neara wants Praxis to teach her how to write." "Teach in what way?" "To believe in her and support her." "Is it enough for her to just be in the same room?" "Maybe. And to read it after." "To be a confidence in the room?" "Yes." Her right side: brown, winter, deer, twenty years old, wave motion, the present, calm, message is go slowly and calmly. Left: dark cherry red, summer, eagle, between forty and fifty, prehistory, an oscillation, east, message is an eagle sitting on a --- in a red sun from the east, "Be warm and strong." "Is one of the sides faster?" "The left a little I thought." "Imagine what you'd feel if you couldn't get into contact with Neara." "I can't imagine it." "You can and you don't want to, just do it." "I was like that once." "When?" "When I was twenty. But I wasn't Praxis then." "Maybe you were in a vacuum that came from refusing to be Praxis." When I woke, thinking of hun and po, self and soul, the dry soul. Why anyone is so jealous of the image of two women working together in a room. She/Neara is afraid I/Praxis will have everything. I/Greyhawk am afraid she/Deep Kid will have everything if I help her. We aren't told dry and wet soul are jealous of each other and compete. She noticed how she was balanced in Jam's house, Praxis was working downstairs. The way Jam makes houses to attract her version of Neara. What it means to live with someone. I haven't had to think who it is Rob wants to marry. I'm thinner and there's Chinese classical music from the kitchen. 23rd "What sort of friend." "He wouldn't ignore it" (it tends to feel like he). "He can see everyone as beings, what it's like to be them, he'd see what it was like to be that. He'd see the perfection so he could see what's lost, he'd feel what I've lost, he wouldn't be thinking about it all the time but he'd feel it at least once. He'd be practical, he'd see when I was having a moment of shame and he'd take a practical attitude, psychically as well." "What would it have been like if you'd had such a friend when you were a child?" "Everything would have been different! I would have had someone to teach me how to run, how to play ball, how to handle myself, how to dress. What to do with people who only see that, what to do with people who pretend not to see it at all. How to resist the temptation to ignore it myself." "If he saw me walking in a fantasy he'd see me walking the way I do walk." This came from something this morning, she telling how her book talked to her about a vision from overhead here at the red and white house, onto fresh long grass. (Overview means insight it says.) "You are seen walking through, leaving a path. Then I follow." (It interrupts: You aren't following, look again.) "We alternate time after time leaving paths, making paths. Moonlight, an owl hoots from three directions." (It announces a death, it says.) "We are seen in speeded motion so we seem to be running around the fire in a ritual way. We stop and are in the frame together for the first time." (For the first part in this time, it says.) "That isn't the end: then we see the sky, night day night day flashing alternately, all the days and nights of the path-making." She had a dream that's like the next part. Where the fireplace is, a table with two shoes flaming on it. I'm inside the house. A bellow of grief comes from me. It says: the shoes are my red ones. Fire of passion not destruction. It's my grief of the day. She should stop walking in my shoes. These frighten me. I take it to a fright I've announced before: she'll take everything I know and be it as a normal person not a lame one. What I've made to make me even with the rest will take her over the top. I'm aware that I'm not convinced it's that but I should probably stick with it. There's some true bitter thing, I know from how I draw myself straight and sit on my heel. Walking back to check out of the hotel I see my shadow, the thin jerk of my hip, the way the little right side hangs and is flung. We drive back. I've said I'll come back to it. We sit on the grass by the car where it's dry. I'm exasperated she doesn't know what she's on the trail of. Don't want to have to tell her. Clam up when she's on the wrong track about stealing. "It would be like this anytime I had a student who was bright and aggressive and tenacious, I'd feel they were stealing something as long as there was something they didn't understand. If they understood, it wouldn't be stealing." "They'd have to understand what it cost you to get it." "That's half of it, what's the other half?" She's stumped. I'm furious that she's stumped, don't want to tell her. Clam up. "They'd have to understand what it means that you had po-llio." "NOT WHAT IT MEANS THAT I HAD POL-LLIO" I yell through my teeth, "WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE THAT NOW. You think you handle it very well but in fact you can't handle it at all, you ignore it." She asks me to imagine a person who'd be able to handle it. "He's been through something himself, he's seen his way through it, he isn't afraid to look at anything. He sees it right away but it isn't all he sees." "How would you feel with this person?" "I'd respect them, I'd trust them more." She's guilted and doesn't see the next step but I do - what do I have to say to the one in me who ignores it? "I say I've come this far as I am, I haven't got many years left, do I really want to spend them changing myself this way. The good friend wants to know if I'm gutless. No, I'll go for it but I don't know what to do next." "Look into people and see." "All I can think of is staring at Larry Resnick, I can't see a thing." "It might take quite a long time." "Yuh." "What I could do about shame, walking past my students in the hall." "Do you feel it?" "Not exactly, I register it, I don't know how to feel it and not show it." "Feel it later, don't read newspapers instead." 24th I'm supposed to look after the old woman's old monkey. She's showing me how she massages its hand if there's a knot. "And then maybe I'll do this," massaging the skull. I'm disgusted at how she's fussing over her little old animal, she's one of the silly people who's like that with their pets. She leaves and I'm going after her, bounding on hands and feet. This is an easy way to move. The snowy sidewalk ends, squeezed up against a protrusion. I have to stand up and walk. People behind me, a child, remarking I can walk too. On the other side, dead winter park lawn. I can bound again, but I remember I left the monkey outside. Have to go back, will it have run away. An elderly man friend of the old woman is just putting it into her apartment. I go in - oh there are little dogs I have to walk too. I won't run after the animals, they don't know me and they'll be wanting her. I'll stay here until they come to me. Somewhere in there I remembered she'd given me a key. I wonder how much she'll pay me, it won't be more than twenty although I have to be here all day. I don't like the monkey because it's old and depressed. When it was young it played. A different job - the students have to have a garden. Why. An image of many men standing in what will be a vineyard stretching vines. They are like pruned vines themselves, with their arms stretched to either side along the wires. The foreman's instructing someone on tightening short lengths. A fast passing glance at my arms, "You're strong enough." What did Alice Walker mean when she said there are so many people in a person it takes a long time to integrate them. When I got back from walking in the field south of here she was cold. I said go for a walk and I'll make salad. Made a fire and cooked vegetable soup, almost ready when she got back. Put it in the two black bowls with butter and a café box of French dressing on top. We'll go sit in the car to eat it. If you hold this I'll drive the dining room over to where we can see the sunset. Swish car belly over deep grass, bump bump the edge of the west field summerfallow. A simple incandescent one. The hot spot in the northwest has a half circle of rose pink over it, distinct and blended. On the horizon an unexpected vivid band of blue. What kind of blue, it's far-hill blue but stepped up in relation to everything else, like new paint. Looked as if there was turquoise in it though there wasn't, a cupboard blue or a milky tourmaline. The kind of turquoise that's without green? I was thinking of Pound's China for some reason too. The reach of summerfallow, its textured simplicity. Serrated rising falling tree interzone. Then hottest yellow spread on either side of the hot apricot at the center, a green band, sometimes a dark band that might be a contrast illusion. The pink dome later drew out into ineffable rays, were they? Yes. Easier to see out the corner of the eye. There are wing beats and trumpetings from the lake just now, some of them have arrived though it's early. The whisk and scrabble of our rodents over the porch into the grass, back into the front room behind me. When we came in yesterday after three days away there was a feather upstairs I know wasn't there last week - unusual grey fluff, I think maybe an owl. Does she bite squirrels when they rattle across the floor. "Ah Louie you're so little you're hardly worth bothering with. But you have beautiful eyes, so brown," I said, and we laughed. Did I finally earn somebody able to work, it seems. I wouldn't touch her 'til we'd got to my crux too. - There I looked up and saw a squadron of fireweed fluffs lofting away on a current. Alight. Brome's such broad blades arced over toward the sun. Nettles' dark green looks a potent concentration. What element do plants belong to - stone, water, fire, and air is their motion. I'm seeing plants more exactly than ten years ago - some. Then went with the camera eventually to this side of the slough. Willows - different ages - the older ones are coloring slightly to different degrees. The round integrity of willows. A lit-up baby with the bulk of its dark mother behind it. What's billows of grass for a floor - it's life life life - what's a froth of grass riding on top of it - it's being there happy as this - so in love with willows, especially willows. (I like carragana too, it's so at home.) The stems of willows, bright when they're young. The rooms under adult ones, clean floor with only willow-fall. A wasp silent on my neck. I'm thinking of these images as images to creep into and make something from a fairyland no one has found - it's holding a breath and creeping into the grain - this morning the thin end of my breath where it ran through a stroke of sun was completely resolved into particles - white shining specks flowing suspended in a maybe-silver medium that spaces them. 25th Weds A man's voice called hello. Liz [sister-in-law] was staring around the fields. Called again. We see him small and coming quickly through the thickest of the lane. "It's probably Peter" I say to Louie. I'm holding Adam sitting on my arm as if it's a chair, handing him over. Seen holding a child. I mean a sexual awareness that immediate. Here comes someone I won't recognize but know. He's overjoyed. Little jumps forward and back. Will he hug me. Eliz is interested. Will I hug him? Oh sure. "So she will give hugs on command!" says Liz. I come out of a muffled embrace hearing Louie, "When she isn't commanded." Ironic. There are too many people with us. There's too much oiling to do, I can't feel him. What I can see is a broad slightly red man whose front teeth press so tight together they look as if they'll buckle. He's not compressed or oiling though, he's eager. When they've gone I'm jangled, standing on the summerfallow in the sunset still buffeted - by Liz's Pan-demonic Luke, and by what he left me, which is a blind bolt of sex given it seemed without the smallest fear of his unbodied wife. "I come here often, I've been here five or six times since you left." "If I were a painter I'd want to paint willows superreally - marshes, grass, wheat's translucent copper, that blue hill color, the blue on the track behind us when we drove west." Lis's movies, city depression. "It sounds like you want to live here and be a filmmaker" Louie said. "And garden. I'd want to use the colors and not necessarily the shapes." 26th Here this morning having to get that visit out of me before I can begin. What is it about his paintings. He's very sexy, not complex, can draw. He's grounded - he bought the bush quarter off his dad, his playground, the tall pine whose dead lower branches came round them in an embracing wall, the game trail running below the ridge. Coming into his lane there's a stone wall for pleasure, old tractor backed up to it. A house like other people's but prettier, with a hop heaped on a pillar and a window that sees through to its paradise green glow. Dieses Hause war im Jahr 1982 gebaut, that in a scroll on a painted band below the ceiling. An elegy painting of his father, pure beauty, a small man pressed into the edge of a large armchair reading, pushing a finger against the bridge of his nose above his glasses, deep in an attitude that's often his. The padded chair back shows in complex black and gold sections, freely exactly painted, his thoughts beside his head. A couple of small dark nightfall pictures with a good felty mass of cloud. The woven poplar sapling fence. And a workshop, for thirty thousand dollars a workshop with huge high white plaster ceiling, machines and wood, gigantic mammoth tusk the heavy machine operator unearthed in the gold fields. Studio upstairs where it's warm, window over the field his father cleared. Oh my poor old sick weedy field, he says. What does that mean? The two old horses have trodden it, there are too many rocks to mow it, small trees are springing up. But it waves fescue fox-brown on thin sparse stalks (a tower in Saskatchewan: he saw wind run through barley like flame). What does it mean that his foregrounds are often so bad? Valhalla Lake the first painting he showed me. An opening in the sky above the lake. Bivalve, I said. "Ellie's lake." Later I saw what he'd meant, there's a hole in the sky, let's get out of the car and go. But facing it, this shape: [sketch] with, this side of it, a horrible mash of black and orange. The near - neara - what's he afraid of in the near of what he faces. "He wants Ellie" he kept saying so implausibly of Magnus. Not hard to guess what in his world would be Ellie - Ellie's lake. "I can't get enough of looking at you." He's fine on the horizon (she saw without my saying), so that he's fine with tops of trees against the sky). "What were you thinking when you were painting this part?" I say of a murky green with senseless pink strokes clawed over it. "I was wanting something to relate to this color" (the pink above), "... - that's an ugly green that's hard to work with." But what can justify the crudity of this bottom two thirds. Well - below the neck. He's gorgeous below the neck - sort of - wears shirts like an idol, with the collar up. It would be selfserving to say he needs some dangerous sex to take him into foreground with vivid order. He's psychically unknown. Materialism he says contemptuously of his house. He does struggle with foreground. The huge boiling cloud of his seven foot canvas. "I'm trying to get a feeling." Assume he has got it - "There's something there." "What do you see at night when you're falling asleep?" "I work on paintings." "He just melts me" he says of his baby boy. "Those are the rules" they both say to him. "Don't show off - too much." I want to show him Stanley Spencer's woman's skin, he's living on the shore of his deep water of matrimony. Paint me Peter, stand in your studio and paint what it's like inside me - give her more, so there'll be more inside her. "A blank canvas" he says. I say nonsense, nothing is foreclosed when you paint the first stroke, nothing is foreclosed when you finish it. What does it mean to think of painted canvases as ruined possibility? The brush stroke's a commitment - the second one no less. Some of yours aren't the commitments you want though. Paint your mother (from a photograph) and make it true. "I'm getting more aggression into them now." A big canvas. What does horizon mean - it means the eye, a concentrate like a photograph - the eye's even. What else is today. I couldn't come this morning - hanging offshore - couldn't begin anything else until I had. Pewter sky toward the sun, with such fine pale fibres of vapour sliding reshaping over. The polish the polish this sky has against the sun - pewter in different lights, brown or pink as we were driving west. Blue, grey. Something else for PT - draw plants, like Dürer - draw the humble ones as if they're sentient - draw their motion. Talking to him today I'm off-center. It's not a great conversation. About the super-8 camera, zoom lens sees what I look at. What can be done with wind motion. 27th Still thinking about you, painting boy - materialism - what you have here is creation - you've made something that's expressive in detail and in large - it's readable - it's made in love and concentration - a basket enclosing your family, a hooded gate you by yourself walk through to the world. No gate at your gate, the horses go anywhere they want. Your walls stand here and there showing themselves unable to hold you, you can build them without fear, you make them powerless. Your woman has clear eyes and knows what she's doing. She isn't dangerous, "a good mother." "I need someone to care for me and it seems like she needs to care for someone." "I do Peter's paperwork." A team though you're the fame. I need to keep humble, you say, but I say you don't mean it, that's not what your yard says. Your yard says you need to be a baron and why not. You're building on inheritance, you'll be what it requires, old country not left out, you'll quote and include, Bavarian curves in 2x8 spruce. You don't read. You haven't the option of building heterogeneously. It roots you in what you've seen. You're orthodox. Your workshop is your beautiful thing. Its clean ceiling, the room above your head. The studio's kind of a corner, what a lot of junk. But it has a loveseat in the window and it looks at your father's field. What father-field is sick in you? The one he cleared - is it something to do with mind? Something thoughtful. Your painter image likes to be kind of dumb and sexy and innocent. Where's the thinking in you? It's materialistic. Can you stand in front of these canvases and think? Think what. Think about foreground maybe. What is it in foreground that gives you trouble. Why your brushstrokes are chaotic in them. why they're disordering your pictures. Why you aren't letting this precision of love into them. Okay that's it. 28th She says take responsibility and I wake sad. Dreaming pink moccasins, fur-lined, beaded, made in aboriginal Arctic. Someone threw them away, it was Christmas, my size, I took them. An old bull who was there with flabby skin, sharp horns, when I looked up at the edge of the fence. In Rowen's school, in the next room, a boy painter. My school, blocked. A boy I want to be with, he's in my sister's place in the bed, I lie down gladly, my mom coming in in the dark will make him leave. Coming into high school worried about grade twelve, I realize gladly I have a degree, they'll have to let me through. Washing in a dump, dirty water, I go to the deeper end to wash my shoulders, tea leaves in this section. Pumpkins growing in the trash, a small one going red. And more.
Oh I'm sick of worrying about Louie. Today I'm just helpless altogether, aching. It's cold, I can't sit at the table with warm feet loving fireweed fluff. Today I don't know how to live. I'm not interested in any of my attachments. "To have depth and marvel and movement and work again." Now I see 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. I am / a wo / man in / love / and I'd / do an / y thing What 'depth' means, the body open under a feeling, I think, all the way down. Depth, and comprehension, and contribution and perception. 29 Ditches in Alberta. Green strokes with a red streak. Pinsel. Light the way it burns through the greens and reds but not the buffs and browns. I like a midground or foreground in focus and farground treated as color. And sky sector that isn't sky but functions as. Down in the ditch there was a perspectived stream of red streaks. And what - she tells me she walked up back along the shore and it's another world. I'm struck so hard with envy. She's in my country feeling it more than I can. Looking the way she does too, with her blue shirt tucked in, a body, a body, and with a wise voice found, and with writing that can start anywhere and find something. Oh sore. Nothing I can blame, she didn't steal it from me, it's native love she'd have anywhere. She had in spite of my worst. I'm jealous of your pleasure. And knowing it, what. Really it's an agony. How to think of it alone. 30 We drive to the west field and watch a silver sky wiped and blotched with grey and white. I tell her the story of bad envy and heart knocking me sideways so my head's a pendulum. Talk about sins, states that are their own punishment. "Oh I do love you" says Louie. "You have to give me a good reason or I won't believe you." Silence. "I have a good reason. You ask more questions than anybody I know." "Give me an example." "What is it about this emotion? What is it about this plant? What is it about this light?" "That is a good reason. I believe you." Really comforted. When she came back from her walk and found me sitting in the sleeping bag on the grass and saw my face, her face took on not the feeling I thought I was showing her but the worst of the feeling I was in while she was gone. "Don't take my crying away from me!" "Sorry," and she uncrumpled. "You're an astonishing empath, astonishing." Dreaming of a little house, looking at the way windows are framed in this one, the way the verandahs are made. 12x16x8. 1st September Waking at night hearing farm dogs barking on and on in a tired insistent way, thinking they're smelling the bear that's coming past our house. Ways the country's wilder - Liz this morning says there is a cougar in her bush. Deer tracks, these sharp incurving pairs of crescents, in the car tracks after a damp night, on the lake edge, in the beavers' channel. An eaten-out hide laid open in the willow bush on the other side of the hidden slough - rough hair, long for such a small pelt, inside of the skin clean like paper. I found a place yesterday I'd never gone to when I lived here. Louie'd been there I assumed. The fenceline west of the summerfallow field behind the house - there's an outer line of young trees, then a lane, then the real fenceline. Two strands of rusted wire, slack, running over rock piles, in another line of trees with oat stubble beyond them. The lane is a mysterious track with no function clearly defined, without wheel ruts. Nothing but grass and small weeds will grow there. It's like a remote past with a spell on it - there's been a little furring-over of the form, but it's been very slow. Going for the first time further back was more powerful than I'm believing at the time. There's a house in the very tight grass island in the stubble, not a house I like, a careless sagging rotting house. I go through it hurrying with distaste. Living room floor rotted through, on rotted joists. Kitchen cabinet doors at miserable angles. A horribly made narrow staircase up into an unfinished upper floor. I read in it a man who hated his family. When I open a small drawer quite high in a cupboard there's what looks like a mouse nest. A loud buzz coming from it. I leave in a careful hurry. Then there's the rainbow edge where the swather has sliced through brome grass invading the crop: green yellow green pink brown in clean-cut layers from the bottom up. I'm looking for a peninsula into the hidden slough. Tall poplars would tell me. The willows haven't an open floor here. A bit further south there are game trails clear though faint: light animals. I get into an open area under poplars and that's where I find the open skin. I plod through to the reed ring but there's a further ring of willow I can't see past. The ground is very hummocky under the reeds. It wrenches my foot. Coming out, there are places without trails where I have to push through brittle dead willow. There was a place that seemed a boneyard for willows. Grey skeletons still on their feet. Renee said to Elizabeth "One of them's a lesbian and the other isn't. Louie is - I could see it in her eyes." That's like being demoted. Is it. What do I exchange for the delight of deep tail. But. "If she doesn't command your sexuality" said Cheryl. Your lovely breasts and squeaks and kid underpants and sleepy hair that I'm feeling as a rival's not as a lover's. That's a fact. September 2 [visiting my folks in Grande Prairie] He was at the counter washing dishes with his back to the door. Mary introduced Louie. He turned. "And here's Ellie." A soft surprised kindly look as he came forward. I say hi and escape around the corner. The trailer brown and full of stuff, miscellaneous surfaces all ugly. A holy wall with the kids' pictures on it - Paul central in a frame next to the pencil portrait I did of him - a face quizzical on the right, anxious on the left. The child face is his right profile, a sober steady being. Above are Judy and Rudy facing each other on the left and right. Below and to the side are Jennifer, Akasha, Conrad. I and mine are not there. But my perception is there locked into the child portraits she has to have and doesn't see. She standing in the obstructed kitchen passage an extraordinary shape in tight pink pants that mold her narrow hips and girdled stomach bulge. Breasts jutting above it. A bewildering tight small bulging jutting figure, a Rumplestiltskin of confined rage. He too is small, but loose, hips spread sideways, round stomach hung forward on his belt, shambling in wool socks and loose old clothes. Eliz takes him over, isn't she good. "So the cougar didn't get you?" he says. "You wish," she says. He laughs. He does wish but likes her for knowing. He interests her more than Mary. Mary is left to the kids. These beautiful kids with fearless eyes. We go riding with the cowboy. Elizabeth in old pink flannel shirt and moccasins ahead on Goldie turning her head, pigtail down her back and mouth open. Louie's neat rear posting on Shadow - little jean jacket, little white takkies, a good little girl carrying herself well on a horse. I couldn't get a balance on the saddle, kept having to press on the pommel and squirm to untwist the spot in my lower back. Bart was said to be the great horse but I had no sense of it - liked the way he'd scramble up a hill as fast as the horse ahead allows, though. "Rest your left hand here, it will make you more relaxed and the horse will feel it." He says it in a friendly way - a nice cowboy, spurs and rusty moustache. "Jim Finch is a good man with horses." What I find at times is a trot light enough so I can lift my elbows like chicken wings and hang from them hitting the bumps wildly secure. And Elizabeth: she intended to take us over and show herself doing so. She took me over more than I thought - I'd hear myself in the truck sounding like her, her shape of a lively sarcastic sentence. Even without her, playing with Louie. Ed back at the trailer collecting the kids. He sits in the living room expecting to be acknowledged. Louie doesn't accede. He studies her playing with Levi. A nice little mama, intelligent, he's thinking. Whenever I get up and cross to the bookshelf I feel him studying the way I'm moving. She's deteriorated, he's thinking. Sits there with his shabby skull trying to dominate by silence, looking like someone who's got observant thoughts. If I don't petition him he won't address me I know. I sit with Eliz and Louie on the sofa defying his look of exclusion. He gets up and sits at the hall table were we can see him looking left out. We haven't asked him a respectful question. That he hasn't asked us anything either doesn't occur to him - extraordinary. Liz sends him sympathetic glances. She'll dominate him by sheer free speed at the next occasion. When Mary brings the tea he has a slave in the room and can come back. He comes up with a device to command our attention. Grandpa will take out his teeth for Levi. His hand is reaching for his mouth. I only have time to know I mustn't look. Turn and stare at the jars in the cabinet. "Fake teeth" Grandma is saying. "Fake mouth, fake ears, fake penis" Levi says. "Levi do you remember what I told you about private things that you don't talk about in public?" Liz is conforming as fast as she can. Howcome. "Except with people your own age like Rowen" I say. Rowen has been mentioned, a blow struck against fake penis. But oh I'm tired. "Liz let's go home soon." "We'll go soon" she says but dawdles. Bombing west on the highway we're running under the rainstorm and come out into dazzling light. Look at this. Oh look behind us. A rainbow spanning the pavement more intense and complete than any we could have wanted. A full double bow with darkness in the arc between. Judders of second colors under the primary. Bright streaks enclosed in the half circle. One foot on a near granary, the other on a bluff. We've pulled off and unlocked Adam so he can stand in his seat and look. A high transport tractor comes rocketing up under its bridge, flashing blue and chrome and spraying glitter. 3 Why trees against the sunset are immediate, why it takes years to see the ditches as they are now. Trees against a red sky are womb memory, the colors of the shapes of small plants are paradise of the present. Built slowly over years. Not that paradise is a garden, paradise is gardener's attention. Ken Burns and The civil war on a PBS channel last night in the hotel. The texture of old photographs is like plant texture in the details of slides. He had silent tracks and pans, touches of sound - a rattle of wagon wheels hardly there and fading immediately, small amounts of voices in differing accents. Blanks between sections, titles. A texture and speed overall of most peaceful love. Of materials of war: American good war of emancipation, legendizing. Our video could take years. The narrator's peaceful thoughtful voice. We watched it on the bed, I with my forearms over her shoulders, hands on her chest. What more to say - the way sitting after breakfast with her I grew a dismay - I have to run. Was it the way she leaned back with her arms behind her head showing her breasts to the Native man crosslegged at a table behind us, not knowing she was doing it. "Are you ambiguous about your sexuality" Joyce asks, years ago. "No" she says. What about that would make me want to run? It's when I realize I've been confluent with her imagined self, a dangerous place. Such intimacy and it puts me to sleep. What of it. Was it a younger sleep. Real intimacy covering momentous rivalry. Complicated. She's lying about wanting me but why. So she can get near my men. Daughter and mother at the same time. This has to be about Mary and why I hate her, having found her intimacy to be false. I traded something vital for that intimacy and it was fake, a control. For her at some moment maybe it was the same. Then she took up the pleasure of adoring a son. 5th What are we doing! We have moved to a new place, she across the hall. The woman who lived here left all her stuff, I'm tackling it object by object. It's not a good place, she seems to have dropped everything and gone. A box with an angelfood cake in it - she reached in and pulled out handfuls. In her cutlery drawer short forks and spoons with ivory or bone handles. If I take down the laundry line there'll be more space around the windows. It isn't a good place, badly constructed, bad materials, but the other rooms I notice are quite large. Open the door into the bathroom. The toilet is boiling! An airtight heater piled on top of it. I can see its base wiring is overheated, red hot, shorting probably. I should run down and tell the landlord. Foot of the stairs. Neighbours but no landlord's address. From outside I see where the apartment is - second floor of one foot of a bridge, a city overpass. Later I'm in a wide new polished expensive apartment I've made over, Louie with me. I'm sitting next to a man with a beard, tweed suit man like some kind of professional. Touching him along my flank. L sits on his knee or on the arm of a chair. His hand I see is stroking her arm, her knee. Then we're all day lasting out the cold rain - why don't I want to write this - the country glowed - we made a room upstairs - is there something urgent? Louie blew fuses. I told the story of Roy. "You wait until you're in a position of power before you leave, that scares me." She has her book, her wise perfectly loving witty secure companion. Is it all happening for her [and not me] is my sad cry. The cold foot physical pain of these days. My country - have I given it over to a secret devourer. I go along with hours of blab, have taken no mind, she's had it her way, 'relating.' She'll say it's not her way it's mine too, going along. Left me with no defense but the old one. Breaking 'up' I know is breaking up into something more exacting. What am I afraid of. It's like a sick fear, helpless. She's had it her way, in intimacy. I hold out against sex. That I will not do. But live without mind in a miasma of emotional give and take, that I have done, a life not my own. Adjustment. Mad laughter. She gets me with the laughter and listening. What's this bitterness. I don't feel a life ahead of me, what is there to go toward. It's Saturday. Monday is the last day, so cold, we'll leave. Oh sad. She has the eagerness of her learning. I've suspected I may have to learn this position, a cleaning up, but it's not an eager position, it's like a resigned endurance. No I do laugh, but somewhere - it's dark. I don't feel a life ahead of me. The way death haunts this journey, I think it, car accident, bison bull, bear. The sadness of moving to so poor a place, why did I leave East Pender? Seeing the blue stripe. Because of Roy, he manoeuvered me out of it. Power struggle. She fights with the sodden sponge of depression. I want an inner friend too. Do I have to be desperate first?
Monday 7th Never know it's going to be little writing 'til I see it - night on the lap of the house - galactic band rotated, Auriga's forgotten 4-star curve came overhead - Cygnus nearing the horizon due west - I was awake with a blanket on my head looking up - it's not a perfectly clear sky - pulled my head into the sleeping bag to touch myself, came out to find northern light advanced over three quarters of the sky, uncolored like mist but moving sometimes like light from a wood stove thrown on the ceiling, othertimes in stable faint clouds, one with a serpent current marked in it in black. [sketch] Wednesday 9th On the other side of the continental divide. The Dawson Hotel, Dave's Hard Times Café. A good room, I in one bed, warm soft bright Louie in the other. Last night the smell of steak venting somehow from the kitchen. Low frequencies from the tavern thumping faintly. I fall asleep while she next to her bedlamp table finishes I never promised you a rose garden. It was the day we woke in the York Hotel [in Grande Prairie], loud growls of a street cleaning truck before dawn. Brought the Coleman upstairs to make real tea. Leaned on the windowsill singing Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling in two languages, watching for Judy and Paul to drive up in a rented car. Judy across the table a remarkable face, long, twisted, smooth, evenly pale as ivory. Holds her voice remotely formal, hides her hands, lights up when she laughs. Paul in black, bearded, is just Paul, loved and warm. What else to say. There we sit looking. Judy tells us she was director of something. When she goes twice to the washroom I flash at the flat lapsed look of her bum. Look at their bodies surreptitiously in cracks between speaking, assume they're doing the same. Judy's forearms and hands slightly swollen. Their rings. Paul's meaty hands, the slight forward roundness of his stomach. Her slump at the waist, breasts don't show though there's a glimpse of white lace through the button gap of her shirt. What about Ellie. She's handling the old folks through refusals they don't seem to be taking hard. I won't speak compliantly to Ed. I won't touch Mary. I won't be in the family photograph. I will not drive in a convoy to Sexsmith and La Glace! The moment I find Paul in the living room with Ed, his forehead pinched up in anxiety. I will sit down in the zone of dread with you and ask you about your son. You're struggling with those first sentences but you'll get easier. Out the corner of my ear Louie has come in and Ed is doing his number. "You could be Italian but there's something in your profile." She's being semi-obedient I suspect but I don't have time to watch. Paul has indeed got easier - Conrad wanting to know where the water comes from. He's a good father. Another moment at the dinner table. "Shall we sit in a row?" says Paul doubtfully. The three of us across from Mary and Ed. "In a row facing the music" I say. Ed laughs but in fact the music faces him. We talk about Peter Epp. "I didn't know he was left handed. Three of us sitting here and each of us has a left handed child." Paul says he barely remembers him. I say I can hear his voice. Judy says he gave her two dollars. "That will have been the only time" says Ed, who we know thinks his father mean. "Not at all. I think of him as very generous" says Judy. "He gave individual attention, he gave me a piece of wood" says Paul. "He gave me a whole branch of cherries" I say. "He gave me a whole branch of cherries too" Judy says. What we're united over is our preference for the gentle being Ed distained. Judy of how Mary ignored her, "She used to come and sit on the edge of the bed talking to you, it was as if I wasn't there." And the books in the hidden back room bookshelf (front room bookshelves are Christian living junk), Little women, Eight cousins, all of them seem to have my name in them though she read them over and over. Do I want them? No, take them. Paul's taking home the encyclopedia. I am snaffling Grandpa Epp's bench though Paul wants it. "I'm the one who saved it" I say, and it's in the car with bedding stuffed into its cavity. We escape fast. "Bye." Paul Judy Mum Rudy in that order around the corner. Ed stays where he is. (Does my boycott reduce him for them all? I wish.) Then, after Hythe, we have the most beautiful colors of all our days, ditches green blue yellow orange cream mauve rust brown magenta coral buff in orders exquisitely logical, textures exquisitely emotional, flares, drifts, floats, dabs, spreads, furs, blurs, flames, mists, generally we know invisible. A heaven we get for being ourselves. Nothing we could photograph. The fact that we're both there seeing it makes us seem to be the same person. Friday 11th Lillouet. Last night at the Billy Barker in Quesnel. Haven't told how in the skid row smell of the York a BBC oceanography film brought us transparent blue creatures angelic and extraterrestrial, motion propelled by the skirl of a silk frill. Little things lift into the frame and cross out the side, another of the same kind an instant later. Empty frame. Creeping a distance over moon surface sometimes. My creature friend crouched on the floor. Watching together with me in a bath of goldy love that has currents through our hands. Yesterday in heat on Jean [Waite]'s bench of flat ground edged with three colors of hyssop above the garden plunge into the lake. She emerges from her front door tall and straight, slower, padding as if she has slippers on, considering the energy cost of every act. A blear of the eye. "I haven't swum for two years, I don't know how the water is." "You must be wondering how old I am. I never tell, but I'm very old." From a chair in her kitchen we see through the screen door a stone basin on a cut round of wood, a birdbath. The orange of a robin's belly, the shape and the faded orange of leaves on a bush behind it. Dark-dusted color of shade. In the living room a Jumbo heater, the most beautiful of kinds. Lichen-green painted floor and bookshelves a good color for old orange and white Penguins. Green the color of sagebrush. From Lillouet the cut side of a mountain, dust wearing off, slumping into crevasses, building a slope colonized by sharp black firs. An orangey-pink triangle. Grey strata sloped and velveted near the crest. A single patch where a pollen-yellow dusting says poplars have meltwater and are advanced into autumn. Four raw streaks where cliffs have fallen recently enough not to have gotten an oxidized skin. It took all day coming from Williams Lake to Lillouet by the back roads where junctions aren't signposted but all the ways seem to tend toward the same few places. Alkali Lake where the Native girl in the store asked if I had a status card. "Does anyone in your car have one? I'll put it under my name then, so you'll qualify for the discount." Between Alkali Lake and Dog Creek we climb into an area where there are strange ridges cut off sharp as dams. One with a hanging garden of colored brush. The road tops off on an edge hanging above the Fraser, steep terrifying corners looking across far and deep to the west side of the canyon, a gigantic wall so subtly cut, so complexly colored, so softly velveted-over by atmospheric blue that it's a struggle to look and to not look. Terrors are exhausting. I came down into Lillouet at dusk vibrating in crossed rhythms, Louie letting the car drop down through the loops of good pavement far too fast. I knew I was over the edge and wouldn't say slow down but had my left arm stiff pressing down onto the seat and she with enough extra to be talking to her book about Wende's psychology! Then a single bunk next to the engine room of a steamer in Conrad's Malayan seas, heavily up the swell and down, in sheeted moonlight. "There is a nice face in front of me that is going to disappear very soon." Nine o'clock. Somewhere in the night I'm awake when the engine is cut. Silence in which I come to feel that I'm ill, an aching back and forehead and queasy stomach. It's the ordeal the day was also. Speak to it. A motor slow to catch in the parking lot. Roaring as it's warmed up. Someone starting a journey before dawn. L's book Saturday night, Sunday morning:
Plunging into the sorrow and fury. Crying. It says she can hold me. "I don't want to be held!" Louie knows nothing, touches me with ineffectual little pats that don't help, what is it about that sensitive useless pressing she does - it's that she stays the child even when it's her moment to look after someone she/the book has led into the knowledge of sorrow. "I don't want to bloody well adjust to it I want it bloody well FIXED."
Fury that she doesn't like my body. If it were true it would be a reason, it says.
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