| volume 5 of time remaining: 2017 january-july | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
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Part 1, snowed in, reading poetics, reviewing winter on Saturna Island in 1984, two new sketchup models. Part 2 revision of the years with Jam. Part 4 able to work in the garden at last. Trips to buy fruit trees. Considering whether to risk a gallery show of the sketchup models, clueless worry. Painful knee injury. Part 5 two California visitors, high summer in the garden. notes: Roy Foster WB Yeats: a life II The arch-poet, Bachelard L'air et les songes, Günter Ludwig, Heart of darkness, How green was my valley, Vendler Our secret discipline: Yeats and lyric form, Shaun Inouye on Trapline, Heinrich's Mind of the raven, Bacigalupo The formed trace, Pound Cantos, Midsummer night's dream, Jamila Ismail "News of the universe": Muan Bpo & the Cantos in Agenda 9:2-3, Dorothy Richardson Pilgrimage, Stich-Randall singing Telemann aria from Machet die Tore weit and Bach Verzage nicht, Habegger My wars are laid away in books: the life of Emily Dickinson, Dickinson's friend Samuel Bowles, Ezra Pound and music edited by Schafer, Cynthia Shearer The wonder book of the air, Cookson Guide to the Cantos, Rachel Cusk Transit, The West Wing, Robert Richardson Emerson: the mind on fire, Axelrod Point of vanishing, Fromm Dorothy Richardson: a biography, Gevirtz Narrative's journey: the fiction and film writing of Dorothy Richardson, David Austin The English roses, Dineson Winter's tales, Adam Nicolson The mighty dead, Wiebe The blue mountains of China. mentioned: Daphne Randall, Cassandra Dolen, Jim Campbell, Jam Ismail, Paul Epp, Peter Epp, Susanna Epp, Maggie Shore, Doug and Gail *, Mary Epp, Jennifer Flower, Louie E, Luke, Joyce Frazee, Robert McLean, Rhoda Rosenfeld, Trudy Rubinfeld, Margo Macleod, Chris Kennedy, Aimée Mitchell, Peter Dyck, Bruce Davis, Hugh Mackenzie, Frank Doerksen, Alan Burger, Dr Rohit of Merritt Family Dentistry, Lindiwe, Adam Gray, Isaac Newell, Tom Fendler, Jeremy Ball, Yvonne Lorde, Peter and Teresa von Tiesenhausen, Leslie Davis, Jerry Reznick, Russell Kildahl, Michele Smith, Michael Hayward, Don Stewart, Stepan Jilek and Ivana Matousova, Gloria Moses, Dr Lyttle, Courage Eigbike, Andy Wyman. 1890 Granite Ave, Brambles Bakery, Breezy Bay on Saturna Island, confluence of the Coldwater and Nicola rivers, Kentish Town Library, Kekuli cafe, Otter valley near Tulameen, Grand restaurant, Tufnell Park, Hacienda del Sol, Glorietta Canyon, Okanagan connector 97c, Art Knapp's in Kamloops, Desert Hills in Ashcroft, Coquihalla Highway, 5a from Kamloops to Merritt, Highland Valley Copper Mine, Garcia and Voght streets, emergency department of the Nicola Valley Hospiital, Midday Valley Road, Coyote Valley Road, MacLeod's Books, Blenz at Hastings and Richards, Shackan Cemetery. Endeavour series, Toibín Lady Gregory's toothbrush, Willie Nelson's City of New Orleans, TIFF, CFMDC, Women in Focus, Brooks and Shields on PBS, Sons and lovers, Albinoni Adagio, Clynes Sentics, Tagore, Soundscape, Northern Lights College, Hang Jun Lee of EXiS Festival, Mary Moody Emerson, Whitney crabapple, Alnwick rose, Graham Thomas, Therese Bugnet, Blanc Double de Coubert, Climbing White Dawn, Harison's Yellow, 104 days in the life of J.D.Farrell on RTE's Documentary on One, Wavelength,Trapline, Sissinghurst, Mycenae, Piazza di Spagna, Les Baux. |
7 January 2017 Pink smudges over a faintly lit sky. Grey steam wafting and drifting from, dissolving as it rises out of, St Michael's tall chimney, an ever-changing ethereally sensitive little region of notice in the motionless day of snow and bare trees. 8 Paul put his expertly chosen executive-level luggage into the trunk of his big black rented SUV and drove away from the curb where I was standing to see him off. Then here is the house back in its usual state, not shut down but put away. I had been a good host. Provided a chair at the kitchen table and tea when the traveler arrived. A quiet bedroom with a good bed and a warm rad, a dark blue coverlet printed with golden sun and moon, a flowering begonia, two Kawabata novels. An armchair at a window onto a street. A wifi password. At night a tall ficus casting shadows on the ceiling and a little spruce tree sending starry reflections from a shining floor. A bathroom nightlight for a guest whose prostate gets him up in the dark. The PBS Friday night news with Brooks and Shields. Braised steak with a baked potato. Fresh orange juice. Riesling, Glenfiddich. Memory. Informed regard. Something I didn't know: before they escaped to Canada Grandpa Epp was forced by bandits, Whites or Reds I'm not sure, to dig his own grave. He begged for his life and somehow succeeded. Oma hid in the barn under hay where pitchforks probed to find her. Thick silent snowfall on the corner. Parked headlights suddenly outside my window - still snowing, thick clumps falling straight down. Sound of some churchgoer scraping his windshield. 9 Bit before eight. Man in a toque tossing shovelfuls of snow under a fuzzy arch of pink cloud, crossed branches of the Russian olive against a quarter-sky of open space below it. Brightening. Couple of crows chasing and playing. Blue spruce holding a lot of weight. I must go out and shovel before the highschool kids need the sidewalk. 18 I'm reading through Bachelard, I mean I don't accept his terms but I am taking pleasure in his motion. When he says 'imagination,' 'imaginary,' I suppose him to be talking about cortical ethers and their changes. I thought of the motion of steam from St Michaels chimney and then of Tom as he lay in his bed seeing colored eddies behind the cars he heard passing in the street. A sort of poet who is aware of working with cortical dynamics. My brain so immobilized or I should say steadied by the kinds of work it's done in its responsible years. The half-life poem says it was earlier. Says it is immobile and mobile at the same time. Two weeks ago I stepped forward with that. Cortical images. I've left so much forgotten in suspension. Dust & soul. Soul is the etheric electromagnetic net! I didn't quite get there. He seems to say it but not quite. There weren't Hubble images in 1943 so the whole vast articulate dancing of plasma wasn't as envisioned then, but he does say "The power to imagine becomes one with the images when the dreamer touches upon celestial matter." I'd say what's imagined resembles the means by which it is imagined. series of images will be shown to have a clear, orderly, rapid pattern of growth As if a poem could bloom, I mean a poem following a motion that actually happens as it happens, a true poem. 21 Digital granularity and smoke. Murmurs. Matter dissolves and reappears. In writing such a narrow line between dullness and falsity. Bachelard is so often overblown that I read him pulling back my skirts. But I'm also seeing in his company that what I want, what I want to be and make, is an elemental reverie. The evenness of clouds' motions, both motions, their translation and their transition. Two kinds of motion happening at the same time and at the same or different rates. Lately sometimes so much dislike of the words there are. Their ugly look and sound. How ugly 'ugly' is. It's a dishabituation that if it stops to consider wants hardly any of them. So then any writing seems to abdicate attention. Skates over. Yes clouds can look like touches. Others so strongly grown. 23 Couple of days drawing a house for my âme local. Symmetrical. Room on the right for cooking, sleeping, reading, talking by the fire. Room on the left an office with storage space for work. Room in the centre is the studio. It's big and has a large curved window facing north as if an open back of the head. [kitchen] [east from the studio] [studio from outside] [office from outside] 25 Clicking through image pages feeling art is the best life and the flimsiest - anything less than the best work is unjustified - anything good can only come of longer than I have - any good artist's extraordinary things sit there among their piles of junk 30 Why poetics at all. Because it's about grip and charm, making something people want to keep. Openings in the air. 31 Openings in the air doesn't say it. I was thinking of
Writing in such a way that the thing, its shape in the brain and its shape in the intervening medium are all felt. Its shape in the brain and the shapes that are standing around its name. 1st Feb Titania. I have my lyric scraps and I have judgment now but do I have power, what they called imagination. It's more than lyric scraps, I have a quite marvelous notebook. 3 It snowed all afternoon, is snowing still. I came home from Cassandra's opening at Bramble with her sea wolf print and was shoveling in the white dark. Loose glitter, muffled wheels, woodsmoke. A dark van passed just now with a thin plume of loose snow trailing off its roof. 5 The Saturna cabin. First some days figuring out proportions and assembling it rather than just drawing a box: 2x4 studs and rafters, 2x6 joists, 1x2 battens, windows that drop into the walls. Then finding furniture, remembering detail - nails on the bedroom wall for hanging clothes, old aluminum coffee pot, enamel basin in the sink, curtains on a string under it, firewood stacked in the porch, water pail on the counter. Then finding the background image that shows it as it was looking west through trees to the water. This and that I'm not sure of; it's maybe too wide, the counter's maybe too long. Can't find the right kitchen chairs. [cabin from the north] [cabin from the south] [kitchen] [work table] [porch] [bedroom south window] [kitchen's view] 10 Edged out 8 - working with it partly as if working with someone I don't know. In the blinder reaches of the text, the better blinder reaches where I don't know, where I still don't know, I'm wondering whether I could just go on in trust of blind recognition whatever it is. I know I want to work with what she was more than I am, and can, am able to help her finish what she was wanting to do. Edged out means more than one thing: excluded but also living valiantly on my edge, on an island edge. A lot of it realistically is just shapes of language maybe useable, recognizable, by someone - it's a collection of abstract recognitions not primarily about me and not necessarily recognized by me except in being maybe recognizable by someone - and then sometimes bursts of personal love that sing out with characteristic lightness. There's forming to find - it's another isolated winter - a collaboration. 13 This morning the sun is far enough north to shine on the chair. - This is something new just now, the understanding that the self I am and feel myself to be is the genetic self [not the accidentally deformed self], and then the understanding that other people don't know or imagine that, which makes a disjunction between who I am and how I'm seen that is puzzling to me and often also to them. 14 A better transfer of Trapline, Aimée and Chris persisted. Mid-afternoon looking out at weak sun on the spruce. The spruce is such a tower of particularity. I can take it in only so generally: it exceeds at every scale. - There four small birds alit on its four top-most twigs. The birds are the right sort of thing to be there, the size and shape of the cones that oddly encrust just the top six or eight feet, reddish brown. - There five black bits flow sideways off the canopy. - There nine more. A bright patch now on the hill's lower half. Broadening upward on a billboard of snow. 18 Pound wanted to speak for and to western culture. I want to speak to just one of its errors and of one sort of its heroes. Forming and deforming of a body within the large forming and deforming of universe. 19 What I'm seeing at the beginning with Jam is an ambitious ferocity. I didn't want the connection to endanger my push to be more than I was. I wanted a superb companion and I intended to remake her. She was coming from Sandy, who was sloppy; she had a pompous habit; and she was obtuse about women. She was also more and better than I could see then, but that more and better wasn't what she wanted to offer me. She wanted to bring me her dazzled adoration of her mother, a child's struggle to seem a husband. I didn't want anything to do with that foundation of love in her; I fought it. She equally was blind to the foundation of love in me. We were at deep cross-purposes. What I'm seeing is that my technology of friendship was wrong. The first rule should have been work with the foundation of love in the other person. It's about wise competence rather than ethical struggle. I didn't understand 'working with' - neither does she even now - I thought the only options were resisting or caving, in this case caving to male dreams of femininity. 20 Did I make better people when I was teaching? It says yes. How. Sometimes by liking the love in them. By rejoicing in their giftedness. Sometimes by tweaking a misunderstanding. Sometimes by asking for focus. Sometimes by naming their conditions. Sometimes by giving them a framework. 28 Meal I like most these days, a potato baked an hour and a half, split, mashed up with a lot of butter and fine-chopped sweet onion. It has to be a medium-sized thin-skinned beige potato with pale yellow flesh. Oh the scent when it's baking. March 2nd There's a desolate moment that comes almost every night. When I've lain down and wriggled around and put my arm around the pillow in the dark I find myself in a dim anguish of fear. Then I'm afraid the fear will kill me so I herd my thoughts away from where they are wanting to go and imagine Mac standing on his terrace early in the morning looking south over his warm dry grass. It means my isolation and idleness is a mammal stress worse than I let myself notice during daytimes. My best small satisfaction these days is here, when I edge a phrase closer to right, meaning both exact and clean. 6 Do I want to say anything about this day. I posted a photo of a blaze of light on the ficus and the red chair that gave people someplace to hang their birthday notes. 30 Writing anything I'm aware of the sloppiness of the first phrase I hear. I have to stop and consider. Writing dreams I feel that if I'm not accurate the dream can't say what it might have to say. At the same time dreaming is so unstable it isn't remembered well enough to be written accurately. I'm aware of skipping and gliding, surmising. Saying this in the aura of Richardson's paragraphs which are so packed with phenomenology I hardly ever read them fully. Miriam is always struggling to express or feeling she can't express because people won't understand. April 2 Sunday 6.24am. Grey-blue dawn. The thermometer says zero. Pavement wet, my new clean beds dusted with white. Good for the wildflowers maybe, a slowed release. There's a sun bow just a dab in the sky above the linden, dissolving and returning against a slow cloud. - Now it has stretched, is brighter again. Has risen. Then fades. Glitter lines along the northern edges of twigs. Eaves dripping. Snow on the hills, white breath above them. 3 The Golden West. Months when I was back in San Diego in 1999 wrestling with Tom and the where system. Being about and The Golden West are a pair and both are at my far edge. I worked to understand mind and I worked to understand love. If I could write them as one work in a publishable accessible way I'd have stood up in the world as my most complete self. It's a better story than Jam and I have more platform in it than I do in poetics. 20 Two surprising little birds jumping and pecking on the dark wet ground, yellow caps, blue-grey backs, black and white bars. They're exquisite. Sibley and Cornell say yellow-rumped warblers. The garden is a place now, dark rows of beds, currants and gooseberries lined up, and best and most, two trees facing each other north to south, an apricot, a crab, each with its flanking stakes and the crab with attendant cherry shrubs on either side. There's a shape. 22 Rereading Fromm's biog of Dorothy Richardson angry where Fromm ends the book, "in spite of her great gifts she did not achieve greatness." How dare she imagine herself qualified to make that judgment. She compares DR with Joyce and Woolf as if to hedge her own reputation - 'I gave all these years to an author who isn't great but you'll notice I'm not deluded.' I hate that. Then she says DR did not achieve greatness because she wasn't able to choose between art and life, which Woolf was. That is nonsense. Woolf never had to choose between art and life because the life she was born to was a life of art; within it Woolf chose life more than anyone did, she reveled. It's true her books are more shaped, but DR was doing something else, she was advocating for fringe possibilities of state. DR was great as a specifically feminist experimental artist working a phenomenological edge, none greater. 25 Day on the road. As we drove west the spring came on fast. Halfway to Spences Bridge the first saskatoon almost in bloom, bit further a flash of balsamroot. By Ashcroft leaves out, fruit trees pink and white. We stood on Callie's yard again smelling the balsam poplars, hearing the river. A train hammered past on the far side of the river. Home through other kinds of marvels on 97c, Highland Mine's still-iced copper-green tailings pond and vast long shelves of crushed colored rock, everywhere the exquisite tints of shrubs coming into sap - yellow, bright red, hazy pearly pink-grey. Then as we sank into Merritt's valleys all the subtlety of bud-clouds around trees. 30 Fair winds, compadre. Wherever you are. One plum blossom open but it's too cold for bees, cold wind. Eight crows in the yard, smooth glossy blue-black little hustlers waddling over everything poking and peering, shoved sideways by the wind when they flap up to the garage roof. May 1st Pound claimed epic. Epic is men, his epic is his claim to lineage. DR claimed pilgrimage instead, but is that accurate: she meant to tell the story of coming to be herself against temptations and limits given. She meant Bunyan I guess. Pound claimed all history, she claimed Edwardian mostly London March 1893 - autumn of 1912. Seventeen to thirty-six, not quite her own period, she compressed because she was lying to Alan about her age, but anyway the pre-war. What do I have, what am I. I can claim both parents but what's my DNA from each: phenomenology from DR, lyric from EP. Light from both. World from world. Cosmology and neuroscience from the last twenty years. La Glace, old Ontario, London, Valhalla, the Pacific northwest, California. He claimed deeds and declarations, she and Woolf claimed the uncon, facts and reasons hidden by doers and declarers. Yes. Someone described Woolf as spiteful and malicious. No, she confessed spite and malice because she was interested in herself as a sample human, she noticed spite and malice on principle. Pilgrimage in DR's sense is psychological and epic is self-blind blundering-on as men have done it. 3 It was the first day the boiler was never turned on. The verandah was warm. I baked rhubarb. 6 What do I love in Pound. His paganism. His defense of body and sex. His love of light. His intuition of network and wave. His intensity in research, his dedication, his huge responsibility. His inseparation of art and politics. His rhythms of course. His spacings. His naturalness in multiple tongues, which is familiar from when I was young. His sincerity though not his goofiness. His energy. His wish to have everyone come along, which is to say generosity. His walking tour in the south of France. His irritability. His capacity for adoration. His affiliation with rock, water, animal, plant. The way he kept the whole arc of his life in mind, kept his loyalties. His confidence that carried him so much further than my diffidence can. - An hour later the pellucid light of 6:30 on church and trees. I must have plant genetics in me I am so thirsty for light. So avid for the gestures of my fellow plants. 14 I moved compost with the wheelbarrow this morning and then drove straight up to Canadian Tire and brought home an Evans cherry tree. There it is held firm between two stakes at the end of the second-last long bed. It has such bright leaves. Evans cherries have a story. An old woman near Edmonton had an orchard of sour cherries that had been surviving those winters since 1923. The trees are quite small but are said to bear heavily. Need another pear for pollination and still need a damson and a greengage. I'm being reckless with money but I'm setting up my last years. These trees will time me out. Staggering with the wheelbarrow or at Can Tire today carrying the tree I'm aware that I have to do the heavy work now. Later I'll just be poking and plucking and wandering around with a pruner wearing a white Tuch like Oma's to keep my hair from drying out. 16 4:37 dark, raining. I open the back door and the air smells deliciously of leaves. O'Brian likes air the way I do. He likes to live in 1799 for its stately cadence: he gives himself a time when he can please himself with nuance and exactitude: its language allows him to call up more of the world's qualities: he can give play to his great general knowledge and fond sensory presence in a way that makes most novels seem so thin they aren't worth writing. - He likes colons, is that cadence too, musical measures. 24 Yesterday I kept thinking I might have to die quite soon if this goes on. My whole left leg hurt, up into my hip, and then shoulders and sides too, and wrists sometimes. In my house I'm hobbling the small distances from one thing to another. I can't shop and am running out of food. I can't do anything in the garden. I thought I'd have ten years but if this doesn't get better or if it keeps happening it might already be too late for this place. It's cold today, still and grey. The crabapples are out but they look a bit patchy and lurid. Schoolbus with Similkameen on its flank, that charming word. What will I do all day, all day. 27 The night before last I kept wanting to be dead. Shooting pain in my knee so bad I was whimpering. Couldn't sleep, couldn't settle onto one side or the other. When it was morning and I had to get up to pee I crept the few steps holding onto walls and drenched with cold sweat. Sat on the toilet dry-retching. Could not possibly have made tea. Kept thinking maybe it would be endless, or maybe that is how it is going to be sooner than I know. This morning I'm walking and hardly hurting but it's too soon to try anything normally hard; little weeds that have jumped up all over the garden after a couple of days of sun will have to wait; but I can totter into the verandah to water the squash and cucumbers. 28 It's a bit after 5 on a Sunday. I'm in the white room in bed with tea and my knee on a pillow. The sky is white tinted rose at the horizon and blue at zenith. It's dead still. When I lean forward I can see the crabapples full out and the silver tree in full leaf. Last evening in the west there was a golden sickle suspended in golden space. The radio is giving me beautiful Irish voices. magic, herbs and metals Why does that list need its first term. It's set up as if a list of categorical equals but in fact the first term intensifies a resonance inherent in the combination of the second two. 29 Run-on sentences, why do I like them. Because they're correct for a specific slant of logical relation. 30 It's a softer day, vapour and little clots. 5:07. Silent. There's the silver tree stirring its little tips as if by own motion as slight as breath. There the crab twins stolid lumps of lace. And you blue spruce my winter saviour ragged-edged black and still against the light. After sunset I was on a cushion on the porch with my back against the house. It's a good spot but I couldn't arrive, it's still too much of a mess and the ugly street is too present. I fasten on things to do. June 3 This aft I drove the back way into A&W's take-out window and then took my ice cream cone to sit on the river bank. Lombardy poplars and a fine big willow standing in water to their knees. The river is full up, an opaque creamy pale brown moving as a sheet swift in the middle and geared slower at the sides. A fascinating motion, why. Its even relentlessness, the way it is a sheet of surface holding flat and reflective amid all those anchored things, the grass bank, the chokecherry trees, the fence slats of houses and the roofs above them, and at the same time sleekly swiftly inevitably always coming and always gone. Headlong. Look at the silver tree frolicking. The blue spruce doesn't frolic, it has a firm spine that gives it the dignity of an elder - maybe it's the way its many arms sway sideways that reminded me of the Salish women dancing in West Van. 12 June wind from the south. Russian olive tossing like young excitement. Motion indescribable, never freezing, never repeating. What happens at the apex of strong gusts is like an ecstasy, the windward side of the tree folds north so its underleaves flash polished silver. I feel it as a thrill in my solar plex. I can't believe how marvelous it is. Staring at it I'm on my edge of vision. It's partly the structure of the tree. The canopy is loose and complex, like Tom's eugenia a lot of long flexible trunks themselves branching into many long flexible branchlets so there are a lot of independently moving parts. At its feet the crab canopies are stolid in comparison, thick and simple. 13 Drove the fast fierce Coque, drove and drove lost in the city, curved and uncurved and rose and fell on graceful 5a with engine growl and wind whipping my hair. Wound home among slopes blue with lupin, verges sparkling with long grass and small daisies. 14 This morning Midday Valley Road through pines and flowers. High ledge winding above summer vales. Yarrow, toadflax, daisies, mustard. Planted the plum, replanted the apricot and nectarine. Hyssop seedlings. Grecian foxglove by the other yellows under the lattice. Oriental poppies. Oh the plum - I keep looking at its stalwart little shape with arms outstretched along the fence. A south wind again. Bowl of strawberries on the table for breakfast. 27 I drove Jerry the glorious loop west on 8 to Spence's Bridge and then north to Ashcroft and then back home past the mine - green valleys, colored cliffs, sage slopes, pine forests, hills swathed with lupin, the Nicola, the Thompson, Ashcroft's old streets, the mine's subtle tiers - and when I asked what moment in the day he had liked best he said the nursery in Ashcroft because it was unusual that it was out of town. He didn't ask what moment I had liked best but I told him it was in the Ashcroft cemetery sitting on the bench above the Thompson looking at its green surface faceted with silver and the pale olive reflected by the opposite shore. Its entrancing wide mild murmur of sound. I liked the driving too, sun and little traffic and 97c such a good road I was wanting to race. 19 5a home from the airport yesterday, radiant grass along the verge, radiant green slopes blue and white and yellow with lupin, yarrow, mustard. Fresh sage. Shining clean-edged road with its new yellow stripe loping ahead past lakes and ranch roads and aspen declivities and cropped ridges crowned with pines. 20 The Chapman fence-bed is solid California poppies at the moment with baby-blue-eyes and little white things hidden among them, an impressive declaration of personal quality it seems. Along Granite the ground is gravelly and dry but red dots of flax have opened among sparse spindly cornflowers. 23 It was 93 degrees. Warm enough finally to sit outside. 27 Vancouver Left at 6:30, industrial driving, forest, forest, change lanes, change lanes again. Get off at Clearbrook Road. Is she asleep? Her bed's made. "Have you seen Mary Epp?" "She's having breakfast - are you her daughter, you look just like her." She's a little thing huddled in a wheelchair in front of what they call devotions on TV. I wheel her outside. She's chatty, keeps it going. A scrap of a thing, round belly, no breasts, rough thin hair parted on the left. I've told her who I am. "I don't think I knew your mother" she says. I say she does, but she doesn't know me so she imagines I was abducted. "How old were you when they took you?" 30 Streets leafed over, glimpse of the harbour at the end of a street, last evening the beach a streak of silver water with long freighters in parallel against the mountain shore, the downtown towers an always denser mushroom heap in the distance. Scent of trees, dark thrum of freighter motors. Riding through it feeling estranged - that approximate word - as if I am not in its present time. This sensation is hard to remember exactly enough. I haven't been here for almost two years. Seeing it after bare Merritt it seems a mythic city of luxury and concentrated will. Thronged streets, better bodies, a marquee with WAVELENGH and TRAPLINE running across it. Macleod's Books such wealth, books stacked deep in the aisles, good books, chosen books, Don Stewart beautiful as was, older, Michael Hayward older too, another beauty, both men older in the way of smart gentle men, thinner-faced, fine heads a bit shabbier. I wanted to feel Don would remember the young woman who brought him books to buy when she needed money. He bought them with a gentleness that seemed to me to say he understood it was a matter of some desperation. The air. Also the sense I have now of the ephemerality of human lives. As if each body passing were to shift through its whole time as it approaches and dissolve in an instant. July 2 Canada Day long weekend traffic dense and steady though it was early. A glittering day. Through the Valley roadside clover whisking past, daisies, chickory, buttercups, spiring clumps of fireweed. Then the Coque's long smooth climbing loops with cars like beads slipping on a wire. When at last I came down into the Merritt valley - a scatter of settlement below after all the forest miles - I saw the grass had begun to yellow in the five days I was away. I was home by 10:30. Pulled up at the gate, how's the garden. It's alright, they've watered. 8 Heat record yesterday. Fire along Highway 1; Ashcroft, Boston Flats, Cache Creek evacuated. Sky here whited out with smoke so Hamilton Hill is a barely visible pale blue outline. It's thickening fast. Can smell it and feel it on my eyes. A nice filtered light in the garden. Hundreds of little mason bees in the California poppies. Hollyhocks I planted last year gracefully white and red along the fence. First cucumber. Am proud of the silver chairs on the gravel pad and the perfectly lovely thing I've made of the old non-wicker chair. 10 High filter this morning. The kind of pink sun there was in SD when there were fires up country. Creamy pink light on the white hollyhocks at the window. 16 Four-thirty dawn, white sky, east tinted palest orange behind that quietly present couple, spruce and linden; street light against the paleness a glowing golden drop. In the right-hand window a darker scene, fibrous grey cloud, the silver tree thrashing mildly, a white hollyhock peering in with its yellow eye. My young Czechs came Friday evening. I was the old woman with the garden. Made them dinner, gave them my bed, humored their young self-disclosure, liked the company of their lovely young skin, she a retiring sylph in a silky little slip of a red print dress, he a confident gusty spider-limbed East European with a mephistophelian beard. When he wanted to take my picture I said I don't like to have my picture taken because I wasn't always old. "I'll give you a photo from when I was your age." He put on rubber boots and cut the meadow at the front of the house. She raked into neat small European haycocks. 17 Late evening in the garden under thick pale sky. The smoke has lifted some, I think; can't smell it now. Surrounded by vitality. Mid-July is this it seems, sunflowers wherever they have planted themselves standing to their knees in foamed-up green, dill stalks presences too with their layered clouds of yellow heads, burgeoning squash plants with already-formed fat noggins under their leaves. I pluck strings of red currants and run them through my teeth. The yellow gooseberries are ripe, the red not quite. Neat light green romaine lettuce heads. Dark green parsley. The nectarine is looking content after a couple of ragged weeks. How about the others, my trees. The apricot is thick-hung with soft dark leaves. The crabapple is a stalwart thing, grown all over. The filberts' leaves are crisped rags. The Evans is scarecrow-shaped with spread arms. In its corner the Cox is a graceful maiden, a meliad. The greengage hasn't had time to do much but I'll go look ... it has exceptionally strong single leaves, not many but held with clear intent. The pear always looks a bit unwell because its leaves curl but it has new growth. Hollyhocks along the side of the house are where they should be: Hollyhock Cottage. Slight second flushes on the Iceberg, the Alnwick, the White New Dawn. Paul fell over onto the Itoh with the wheelbarrow and broke one of its expensive stems. I'm eating potatoes, onions, cucumbers, orange tomatoes, lettuce, parsley, currants, raspberries, gooseberries, rhubarb, peas, dill, oregano, radishes. In vases: nasturtiums orange and yellow, sunflowers, lavendar, frothy oregano stalks, Queen Anne's lace and purple cosmos from the wildflower edge, sometimes johnny-jump-ups. The maroon double oriental poppy volunteers are vulgar things but I'm tolerating them for their seeds. What else is blooming: Calif poppies, Iceland poppies, white and purple salvia nemorosa, yellow daylily, stargazer lilies, mauve thymes, baby-blue-eyes, purple wallflowers, shirley poppies in masses pink and a few white, corn poppies, purple campanula where I allow next to the plum's trunk, anise hyssop, hidden squash and pumpkin and cucumber, climbing beans on the fence, borage, alfalfa, this little pink rock thing. [Lewisia.] It's dark now but I can write by lamplight falling from the kitchen window. Mosquitoes. What do I like best. The white oregano flowers next to the white salvia. The little nectarine held to its slender stake with a shoelace. The two sunflowers at the gate taller than passers. Hollyhocks white red and burgundy along the fence. The delicate shell-petal shape of the Alnwick rose. The porch platform with the silver chairs its height, the way it's a pause overlooking the garden when anyone comes out of the door. The proud tall dill. The concrete squares marking the path's beginning. The fluffier artemesia with purple anise hyssop. This pink rock plant in its thin concrete circle. The way the gravel has sorted as it's been watered. The simple fence with its wildflowers, an improvised exuberant elegance like nothing else in this town. That there are hard-surfaced paths though overgrown. The rhubarb's shapely pile. The plum tree's improved profile. This slightly raised edge along the gravel pad's west side. The compact bright cabbage-shapes of the romaines in their skimpy row. The lattice's white strips crossing the red compost-box slats. The new sour cherry jars. 21 Have been thinking how comforting my small kitchen tasks are, standing at the sink washing a few dishes, moving the chair to sweep under the table, replacing flowers for vases around the house. In the garden I carry water to each of the trees every day. Yesterday dug potatoes and carrots for lunch, cooked them with peas and chard, slathered butter and ate marveling how delicious they were. - Emptied one of the compost bins into the cold frame. Tired. White sky, an overcast evening. Rained a bit. The silver tree is looking quietly blissed-out, almost asleep. What do I mean. It's moving but just a bit. All over the canopy leaves that are tilted to the sky are lit but not bright, and shaded leaves are the same olive green just a bit darker. It's as 3D as a cloud but so gently and subtly and in such fresh matte color. - Why is it worth trying to write what can't be read. Only because it helps me look. 23 Greece, the pagan Mediterranean, the gods, the dry shores. It has made me remember the Sunday I woke alone next to the gate at Mycenae and in the afternoon - today I realized it must have been the same day - found myself at the end of a road looking down on a tiny cove, white sand under calm green sea. Just that moment. I went in, stood to my chest in the perfectly mythical warm green crystalline tide. I can see what I was wearing too, the bikini there'd been in the window of a shop at the foot of the Piazza di Spagna steps. It was a sort of pale tan sprigged with little flowers. I'd furtively swopped bottoms for a size larger. I slept at Mycenae and at Les Baux. Even then I was claiming affiliations. Paul left me The blue mountains of China and in it I understood the Plautdietch, recognized the old Mennonite sentence rhythms, remembered the religious forms, liked knowing my grandparents' stories in more detail, admired how much Wiebe had put together, but I don't claim any of that, I don't want it, I don't belong to it. My genes go back further: they must.
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