Twitter Pieces

This is cool. (What gives you the idea I've run out of things to write about? Whaddya mean? Say it in 140 characters or less.)




His coldness a nuclear chain reaction in me begins and then his desperation and ardour
.
It's clouding over and we don't want to go out grocery shopping and so we're yelling pizzazazhaha, but we won't, not in the morning, no
.
We grocery shopped muffins & juice & coffee on the patio & filled out forms before we went in, filling hunger then filling a shopping cart
.
Ate t-bone, o moan, begroan, dog thrown bone, what to do? What to do? A situation. Avoid? Allow? Be flown with the blowin' rain?
.
Tinkle chinka of change in the silvered tiny square purse and the chugata chugata ... awhhhh sorry, laundry drums spinning round unbound
.
Fast 5km dog walk under 200 year old trees, cool sweat, huge nearly round moon, Oscar Peterson's Night Train, stepping out of stepping into
.
Black Snake Moan. O groan! T-Bone! Rocking scrunchies of laughter!

the exposé blurb

I've joined Facebook, MySpace, and now Twitter. Why? Oh, that's a good question... just 'cause. Perhaps to explore, keep in touch with friends close and far (if you're on any or all please send an invite).

And thus the era of the exposé blurb begins!

eating huge homemade oatmeal cookies lush thunderstorm crashing rivuleting glass and streets aflush water

reading the interaction design article Will sent as exciting as huge sweet cookies and thundering sky of flashing white veins

Night of an Electrical Storm of Rain

I purchased an air conditioner, but taking out the screen and the glass and the window frame was an unbearable task and it was returned. What I'd like is an indoor air conditioner, which will have to await funds.

Oppressing each sweating skin cell, the undersides of one's hair continually damp, this is how it is in the heat.

I can only wear a loose cotton dress with my long hair tied up; shorts or pants suffocate.

Place the small fan on a pedestal over the screen of my bedroom window to get a little cooler air. With a wall of windows facing West on the second floor without tree cover, the apartment is an oven. Like anything steamed, we wilt.

Though I like the heat, it must be 40^oC! I bring home a large fan and hang it in the front room with string since there is no window ledge, and the beating of air through the paddles of the fan helps.

No-one wants to cook, my son goes to work and my daughter and I go out for Sushi.

The thick clouds have an underside of glimmering red like tropical fish chased by a shark. An anvil of clouds are upon us in the middle of the night and lightning like white veins slice the sky and rain beats on the new fan spraying the room.

In my room, which faces East, I remove the screen. It is fresh outside, and cool. I lean out to breathe the cooler air. The CN Tower's lights are flashing strongly, mesmerizing with the glow of red, then white, then green up the length of the concrete pin. Nothing else is visible on the skyline from where I am downtown.

The sound of heavy rain falling on leaves and rocks, the large tree in my bit of land out back and the pebbles that cover an adjacent parking lot. It's a luscious sound. Water hitting the earth. This bridal veil of rain. Drenching richness. How long do I stand alone in the darkness, in my white cotton nightdress, by the open window, leaning out, breathing rain-filled air?

I sleep finally lightly and wake a few hours later at dawn.

I wake loving the world, as I always do.

At the Window

The wine
of love fills us.
We are inebriated
with loving each other
distantly.
I can’t gather you more closely
than this.
I am a chalice
of red lace at the window.
You are intoxicating
blossoms bursting
colour over the landscape of my
heart.

Video of poetry reading of Veils to Clothe Venus

A test, an experiment. I bought a laptop and made this recording with the built-in webcam. It's fuzzy, oh so fuzzy. I wasn't able to figure out how to edit in Windows Media and so it's as is. It's not going to stay up for long - I do have a video camera that will record a person in motion, and seeing this is enough to make me dust it off... more poetry experiments in the future!

Oh, I wouldn't wear my reading glasses, no, no, so I was using a large magnifying glass to read the poem - it's soooo funny. And don't ask what I was doing with my arm at the end, who knows.

Notes for future recordings: memorize, stay in focus, and anything else you the happenstance reader who might bumble upon this site might add if you come by before I delete this, blush, clip.

xo

The Woman Who Lived in a Closet

Nearly a year! I read it with surprise and admiration when it made the world news. But how hungry she must have been to take food from his refrigerator, risking her invisibility in his household.

I could see her, worrying, but unable to starve any longer, and not wanting to die in the storage closet she had taken up residence in, and so she crept out like a stowaway, like a church mouse, and helped herself to the offerings.

And thus left evidence of her existence and was ultimately exposed.

Which may be just as well, perhaps there is a home for her in the state. Or perhaps someone will write a book about her and share the royalties with her...

Incredible story of desperation, daring, courage, and finally surrender.

___

(There is a part of me that is still so very 3rd World and who sees life and what it sometimes takes to survive from a different vantage than many people in my culture, I think.)

Venus like a Visitation

'the state of love in the world...'
...................she whispers

.........tendril of a curl curves
around her cheek, brush
stroke of honey-toned
watercolour; her eyes, full and
frightened, water saffire

..........her lips, parsed & pale, she
hovers on a scallop sea shell
above the waves, though she is tossed
to & fro by the windswept whitecaps

..........her voice a lament,
a soprano singing the ending of
Mahler's Ninth, grief disappearing
but never leaving,
the wind blows more strongly
until she's gone, a pearl of the sea
into the white horizon

..........echoing in the conch shells
held to our ears, her voice
ringing over rising waves, 'we do not
put each other first'

Films that Inspire

Lately I'm smitten with Wong Kar-wai's movies, oh, what a man he portrays! And every frame is a painting. Beautiful, beautiful women and men. Vivid colour - who else does blues and greens like Kar-wai? Or those florid reds, bursting passion. And his films haunt me for years after. And Tarkovsky, my first love. "Nostalghia" being my favourite film for a few decades, and "Stalker," and "Mirror." The water, the light, the beautiful profound characters, the struggles, the massive sets, the epic proportions of ordinary lives, the poetry of his films I am fully grateful for and can't live without. And Wim Wender's, "Wings of Desire" - this movie has shaped me, my understanding of love, of the scope, the scope of us all. "Sex and Lucia," by Medem is a poem of sensuality, a full moon of wisdom on our fertility - the island with no roots but an interconnected interlacing of tunnels swimming with salt water. Not to forget Hero, by Yimou, lord of the Oriental martial arts movie, that burning story of the unification of China, painterly scenes of airborne dancers and bright coloured fabrics blowing in the wind or the spirited dance of candlelight, and wisdom and its knowing sacrifice. These are among the directors and films that inspire me.

In the Discretion of Inspiration

It's been a long time since I last painted, about a year and a half. Why did I give it up? I think I sacrificed my art for a relationship where it may have been problematic but now I realize not painting was the real problem. Still struggling with issues of creativity, in other words.

I don't mind the painting, quite like its bright colours, find the women a bit detached from one another, but then they are separate poses by the same model over the course of a few hours one evening at a lifedrawing session. If I did them again, I'd like to paint them with the wings of angels... and, who knows, may.

I realized that the figures have composed themselves into pairs - the two on the far right I don't particularly like - the colouring is too thick, but then again they're more earthy than the others, more ripely body, hence more sensual. The central two I rather like, somehow reminding me of the centuries of art looking out at me, it's hard to explain; one looks straight at us, I left the features of her face deliberately delicate, not forceful lines, and the other I happily left with her head in the clouds, almost sculptural, and she's quite androgynous too, sort of like 'The Thinker.' On the left are figures growing out of the swell of sky and earth, colours themselves. They remind me a little of Michelangelo's 'Slaves' who are both emerging from and yet still part of the marble, but my figures are free and lithesome, like flowers dancing in the breeze. There is one rising like a vivid plume, too, who echoes the far right one with the walking stick, herself a figure, in my mind, of the Australian walk-about medicine woman of earthy potent power, bald perhaps from illness she's gone through, but she's there, an onlooker, a protector, one who cares for the soul. All the figures are sensual to my eye. They blossomed on the page like flowers in a wild garden, nature spirits, fertile with the creativity of nature and spirit.

This little painting comes out of the womb of life, the women who are like flowers in the garden we all play in through our years of living.

Overall I'm pleased with this renewed effort to paint again. I have already bought a sheet of paper for the next one...

This is how to do it - to continually have something 'on the go,' bit by bit things get done, you just have to keep dabbling, keep reaching in, taking a moment here and there to add a line of paint, or a phrase, or a little prose poem, and then you find you have a book, or a set of paintings to show.

Inspiration is in the moment, in discreet, distilled moments of time.

I happily share my journey with you.

Women In Spring, process of a painting

Tag at Flickr: Women In Spring - I wonder if it'll work?

Sketch of Sketches



It's really pale, I apologize. A pencil sketch of sketches from a lifedrawing session in, oh, Nov 06, that's how long it's been! Feeling like painting again...

(25.5" x 19"; 64.7cm x 48.2cm on textured ivory Strathmore Artist Paper)

Women In Spring, first wash of paint



Women In Spring, 2008, 24.5"x18", 62.2cmx45.7cm, oil wash on paper (click to enlarge)

In process... who knows. Not what I'd thought I'd do. Painting, like life, is like that.

Colours dart at me. Touch, and pull their washes back.

Can I shroud you in the colours of the background, so you'll fit your pattern, so you're not cut-out from it.

I'm not different from the scenery I surround myself with.

Look closely, there I am.

With my addiction
to you.

Dreaming Truth, detail



dreams are infallible, accurate, true for that situation, that relationship, things change, dreams reflect the changes; nothing expresses the truth of life like the dream; the dream is a clear representation of our reality;

the dream is a clear representation of our reality.

dreams never lie, the dream doesn't lie: it foresees and predicts, even forewarns
encapsulates; explains; never our enemy - nightmares are our fears, turn and face them

the dream conveys its messages in metaphorical language, images that shock, or bewilder, or uplift, that astound, are vivid, direct

dreams guide, our helpers: offering insight, mystical information, a panoramic perspective

ancient wisdom calls to us through our dreams, where our intuition is powerful
prescient

Dream Truth...



Painting Corner



How little space for painting! This is the corner. You can see the original sketches from which I composed the composite image of The Women in Spring. What's nice is that if I don't like the way the painting turns out, I can create another one. The painting on the board is influenced by the one on the wall, isn't it. I did that one in Vancouver and it's quite large: Celestial Dancers, 2004, oil on canvas, 4' x 5' based on late Medieval relief figures of the temple art of Cambodia when it was in the midst of a shift from Hinduism to Buddhism. The smaller one on the wall to the left is Celestial Dancer II (31"x35", acrylic on canvas, 2003) based on an image of the Hindu God, Krishna. This nook is about to become all desk as I move the futon couch out and create a workspace for painting and writing...

Women In Spring - finished!



Women In Spring, 2008, 24.5"x18", 62.2cmx45.7cm, oil wash on paper

It's relatively easy to swoosh paint, Zen-like, and let the image emerge however it does. Only now I sought to include detail, painted lines, to put effort into the composition. I wanted the women, who are one woman, drawings from one lifedrawing session placed on the same page, to be colourful like tulips in the garden. The figures appear in varying stages between perhaps more painterly and a reliance on drawing, and I don't seem able to move away from that, not yet anyway. I outlined boldly in paint tonight, resisting the urge to use coloured pencil, then wasn't sure, then knew that from across the room there would be more definition. The final criteria - can I live with them? Who knows?

The grouping; the way they create the space around them; their relation to each other; the view they allow the viewer; some emerging out of the washes of colour, or disappearing into...

The fecund forces of Spring, who can define it?

Potter's Trestle

Like a potter's lathe that spins. Keeping myself from the position of the shards in the corner of the studio. Reach into the freedom of wet clay, loving the act of love.

Shaping wet rock in my fingers, I resist despair by suppressing memory, reworking the images, a quiet optimism. But it creeps in during the firing. Hidden behind the grate of burning heat, lies spread like cracks in the glaze.

Flashbacks. Stressors break the pots I am hewing for the paint that will colour my life. Angels wings are torn, become iridescence in the glaze. We are forged to be free.

The ground of being out of which we are born and into which we die, this fixing of the centre of the trestle. The making and unmaking spins smoothly.

The heaven that was closed to us by angels with wings of broken clay, when you fell and cracked, opens elsewhere in the scenes of etchings, and you are restored, whole.

It's a magical playground, this studio.

"You better start swimmin', or you'll sink like a stone," sings Dylan.*

The stone turning on the lathe
sings.


___
In "The Times They Are a-Changin'."

The Angel Poems

Gravely, like grated chocolate on the tongue, sensual, erudite, but friendly, warm, inviting...a tang of citrus, oranges, and mango, O yes mango, sweet, ripe, dark chocolate embedded with orange and spices, silken, and I can feel your throat, a sonorous quivering behind the speaking, hum of life, quiet, symphonic in its own way, the miracle of your voice after the malignancy was eradicated, almost a delirium of reciting poetry as if into a lover's ear in the early hours of the morning, like the massage of holy angels soothing us in our sleep in the paradoxes in which we live like babes...

The chocolate a little bitter mixed with honies to give it a quality of sweetness to produce bliss on the tongue, the caramelized orange bits, oh. And so very, very good for us...

This voice, your speaking, thank you dear John.

On the Self-Portraits...

I was born in the middle of last century. The years wear like veils of washed light. Perhaps that's why people dissolve into light as they age, in their eyes, their whitening hair, when the blood that fills their veins flows under their skin like the pale light past sunset.

My brows droop, but if I lift my head high and open my eyes wide so my forehead wrinkles I can see. This is how I took the photos, in the bright sunlight eradicating the crows feet, the jowl, because I wanted to see my own eyes. To read what was there. To read myself.

And I found myself impenetrable. I couldn't put the cross-currents together, how I am composed of opposites.

All I could see was bursting light in the room, flooding the walls, the carpets. The being in the photographs is nearly incidental. Sun on translucent skin. The windows of the eyes filling with flooded light. Solar prominences. Sun-washed fields of light. Disappearing into a brightness of the flaming dance of love.

Self-Portraits

Inner changes? I'm feeling depressed, most uncharacteristically, which implies withdrawal of energy, transformation of the depths. What I'm feeling is a strength and a softness coming, these already as I define myself - independent and sensitive - but more so. Whatever anger I once had is long washed away; I am one of those people who loves to laugh. When I took these self-portraits today, I wasn't sure who I was seeing, pensive, yes, but lightness too.



Sunday morning: It's passed, only an evening or so, but uncharacteristic and thus important to pay attention to whatever newness is arising. An older layer of thinking passing away for a newer, fresher, more innocent self to emerge. If that makes sense! I edited the blurb to better reflect the inner process... I like the image of going to the depths to find the light, yes, the shamanic, visionary journey, and each time the depths are different and each time the light is a more complete spectrum of understanding.

There is a negative conventional view of depression. It's not seen as part of a larger process of the psyche in communion with its depths, nor the deep changes that may be occurring because it's seen as a problem, as anger turned in, that needs therapy and/or anti-depressants, and so the whole process of inner discovery is truncated. How can we develop wisdom when we are afraid of our shadows?

The sadness has always been in me, it's there in my photos as a young child, it's still there. Yet I am one of those people who loves to laugh, good deep belly-laughing!

I think I'm moving away from any sense of judgment, of applying systems of thought to people's actions, events, the way things are, that layer of thinking is disappearing, dying, thankfully, most thankfully, and a greater strength and softness is emerging.

The moment of 'depression' has passed and I'm feeling my usual quietly exuberant self today, ready to continue manifesting my dreams.

'portrait' & 'in the café'

portrait

colour scores your skin
like massage oil,
almonds & apricots,
mandarin
& magnolia.

I paint you with strokes
of my heart.

*















in the café

bushel of gold apples,
........some darkly bruised;
bushel of dark purple plums,
........ripe.
gourd of stone vegetables
........fired in kilim
...............zucchini, squash,
......................yam.

polished granite tabletop
woven rattan chairs.

sultry jazz.

custard tart glazed
strawberries, blueberries
kiwi, peach.

sipping espresso
& cappuccino
coffee.

the late hour
our intense bond.

The White Ocean

She stopped to rest.

Momentarily, in the field of pure possibility, her position unfixed, indeterminate.

Without hovering, or insecurity.

It was an image of being in the vast field of life.

Without knowing. In a position of unknowing, positionless, I suppose. Existing without location or momentum. Vibrating with possibility. It wasn't exciting or fearful, just what is.

Nothing is fixed or certain, though there are always solutions to problems.

Then she continued on.

She didn't doubt her certainties.

Still painting...

How little space for painting! This is the corner. You can see the original sketches from which I composed the composite image I posted last week. What's nice is that if I don't like the way the painting turns out, I can create another one. The painting on the board is influenced by the one on the wall, isn't it. I did that one in Vancouver and it's quite large: Celestial Dancers, 2004, oil on canvas, 4' x 5'.

(click to enlarge)

The Waterfall is Truth

A moral universe?

No!

Nor a religious one.

The will to truth is different. Where stated actions and actions match. Where the description of the deed and what was done match. Where there are no discrepancies. Where what is done is what is said was done. No lies, deceptions, hypocrisies, veils. There is something that wills clarity, a force, a power, a drive towards.

This will to truth that's inherent in the structural energies of what composes the universe, oh, how I must sound!, who knows what to call it, is evident in the Scientific Principle. Verifiable truth. Then it's a trustworthy knowledge on which action can be based. It's there, and it's strong. I feel it everyday.

Call on it! Call on the truth, it'll come. What was obscure or hidden will become clear. Truth will expose the lies. It's a trustworthy force.

Two and two equal four because truth favours clarity, predictability, stability. Truth is a will and an organizing principle. Listen to me rant! Me, who loves 'shades of grey' and thrives on paradox!

Truth isn't ultimatum, nor is it like light opposed to darkness. Not like that at all. The real workings, that's truth's domain.

And perhaps it's the heart's view. The beating heart needs truth.

Gates of Truth are a Waterfall

It's always seemed normal. What everyone does except me. I don't because I can't. I've seen consequences. It's against my ethic to knowingly create situations where others will get hurt. I want relationships of integrity. Love means too much too me to play around with it. An intense woman of intensities, I don't need to take more than my share.

It's been around me all my life. Nothing new. I'm blasé about it.

And then, finally I understand betrayal, this particular humiliation, pain. A breakthrough. Increase in understanding, empathy. To know how it feels helps me to be sensitive, more so because experienced. How a kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome takes over as scenes of deception are played and replayed in their horrifying truth.

I think there is a will in the structure of reality, something part of the energy of the universe's being, towards truth. In all things. The way it works; what really happened. It is not the nature of life to hide its realities. Revealment, over and over of the secrets of nature. Of each other. Of our atrocities.

I think it is there in the core of my being, expressed in the archetypal imagery of my dreams, represented in me thus.

The will to truth.

When I encountered her as the strange and fragile Maat, the ancient Egyptian goddess of truth I understood how old. Always ultimately the truth, a tallying in the hereafter, in the karma which determines the future of the soul.

The ledger of life. When dishonesties are exposed.

The universe has a force of
truth to it.
Incredible. How this is.
But it is.

II

In my inability to comprehend
myself.

I feel like a collection of attitudes, beliefs, feelings, thoughts and sensations which are in constant flux.

Whatever is now is all, and it can be diametrically opposed to yesterday and not seem inconsistent.

When I say I love you, I do, though it is a complex unfolding.

Leafless vines cling to the walls, ready for Spring, the verdant carpet. The concrete waterfall is a melody of its own. Pigeons hop along the top to drink and bathe where the water crests forth. As I sit nearby on a bench, my notebook is sprinkled and I look up to see a tiny wren on the naked branches ruffling its tail feathers. "Little bird!" It shakes a few more drops that fall on the cement walkway in front of me before it flies off to my laughter. My baptized book.

This little notebook
of my truths.

New Café on the Block

I'm at a new coffee shop that hasn't quite opened yet across the street from where I live where I have been given a free Americano with frothed milk and it's delicious. They sell Bodum here. A little pricey, but the coffee is excellent and while the shops are a bit distracting outside there is a good view of the magnificent sky. It is the sky that I need to see when I write - which made writing a challenge in Gideon's basement! When I had the money, I went to an Italian café nearby and wrote. That's a little far now, but perhaps this café, where I am now, will be my "spot." Here's a cell phone pic to show you...

(click on photo to enlarge)

Still Life

I would never have left, that's how it was.

But I am shifted into the expanse of light.

There's no attitude I can think of to express this.

The streets are busy, and I walk them, Spring warmth. I can't say if it's love. It's very strange to be here, where it's incipient.

I'm not sure how we stay together when we do, or how we fall away from each other.

There are many ways of being. It's pointless to talk about singular, unitary things. Fluxes and flows. There is a trajectory, though. That's what's most surprising after many years. A path in the pathlessness.

I don't know how I ended up there, or why it was over. Or why we never spoke. Or why there was a significant effect anyhow.

It makes me aware that most of life goes on under the surface.

Which is strange, when the pathways map these routes to and fro.

Nothing was stable, but everything remained as it was, only more so.

I don't mean to sound vague. All the things I thought weren't close to what was unfolding in the underground ways that it was. We didn't understand, but we knew this had to be.

I can't fathom a design, but perhaps there is one in an absent fashion.

An inner directive.

Of which we're hardly conscious, except in retrospect.

Nothing stays still.

The Path

Now where?

The life of the writer!

Agility, especially in uncertainty. Move nimbly when required.

There is nowhere to settle, at least not for long. The path continues, and it must be traveled, step by step.

Resting. Missing. Mourning. Dancing over the edges.

Adrift

Out of the fertility of the ocean, sea tides within, rhythms following the moon's wake, I sought you.

My planet of fire.

You'd disappeared into steaming mist. I lost you in the clouds. Perhaps you'd transformed into the raptor flying overhead. Or the dark loam of the shore looming.

You were always only figments,
imagined.

Pink roses
falling in the wind.

What could be fired her desire, kept her enthralled. Only now she sees what is.

For love is beautiful and painful, this is its nature. "A great love carries within it a mourning for love." [Edmund Jacobs.]

The way the processes of love unite what is disparate, the longings and communions, and hold us to our wanton paths amidst the fluxes of the heart.

Venus
adrift...

Titles

Sometimes I have trouble with titles. The Red Flower was the only one I could ultimately use because those were the first three words of the poem (which I hope you get, how it was written I mean), and that's okay when you can't come up with anything else. The Red Flower seems to be part of another series, a 'Vishnu, The Preserver' series perhaps, who knows if a theme is developing. The Venus Poems are continuing to develop. Mostly I'm fine with the titles I choose. Though In the Throes of Love... really was a bit much, sort of 40s romance, or I thought, this morning Venus in Lament would I think be better, since she's left being Celestial Aphrodite and entered the realm of Pandemos, where there are no rules and it isn't altogether fun, but why give away the last line? Oh, it's so impossible, this naming of the words of love that poetry is...

The Red Flower

(I think this poem goes with what may be a "Vishnu" series, the first of which is Vishnu on Chinese New Year.)


The red flower spirals
or it's a fractal
folding.

His heart is a window
box with a red flower

Beating. Petals spiral in, or out,
Magritte-like.

A map in water, a warehouse, snowblue.
Lost pink dancing slippers,
a church in black and white,
a chorus singing carols.

Quarantine. Insolence. Defiance.
Burlap and cold steel.
Madness in prison.

I heard the message,
its jumbled sanity.

Fragments of patterns,
like this poem,
torn from the epic.

Worlds within worlds.

Bullets and blood, the heart floods.
Five billion dying in biological warfare.
What was that movie where he dreamed his death,
unable to save the world.

Saviour, the preserver.

We'll all be saved on a microchip,
says the prophetess.

In the Throes of Love...

If there is a ground,
it is a quantum of vibrating molecules.

Like walking on water during a storm at sea.

No guides in this emotional terrain,
it's new.

I don't know where I'm going or how to get there. Logic has failed; intuition, senseless.

Furies and lies and deceptions blow like crazed winds everywhere. Nothing can be trusted to be what it seems or purports to be. The stories you are told aren't the real ones. Secrets are everywhere. The underside is sleazy, riven with seething. And you wonder how you missed the way through, or if it ever was there. And when the revelations come, and they do, like light through the floods, you don't know how to survive them, and if you do, what direction you should be travelling in now.

Rudderless, without navigation.

How can you find ground when there is no ground?

What is continuous in the discontinuous?

What lasts in impermanence?

What is it in the wavering flame that doesn't go out? Even in the storm I travel though.

Perhaps on a scallop seashell, a Venus in lament.

She Who Came Forth

The Embrace. Their children couldn't emerge into the light. He was heaven and she was earth. Uranus and Gaia, his wife, who he loved and refused to separate from. Creation waited. The embrace was tight, intimate, sensual, blissful, deeply in each other, unending. Cronus, his son, time, cruel time, cut off his genitals and threw them into the sea. Heaven and Earth separated. Out of the foam, Aphrodite was born. Love.

Aphrodite, who she was to the Ancient Greeks, though she was older than that, and linked to Ishtar-Astarte, and probably brought to the Greek islands by Phoenician sailors, Aphrodite, who later became Venus to the Ancient Romans, is one of the world's oldest divinities.

She was born from an act that separated Heaven and Earth. An ancient divinity present at the beginning of time. She Who Came Forth at the birth of the world.

Or, this is Hesiod's version in his Theogony. Aphrodite represents pure and spiritual love. From her foamy birth the Three Graces received her and wrapped her in rich garments and decorated her with gold ornaments.

The Goddess of Love.

Aphrodite Urania, or Celestial Aphrodite.

The Venus Botticelli saw, painted, understood.

Oh, there was another one, Homer's in his Iliad. Venus Pandemos or Common Aphrodite. She was born from Zeus and the Titan Goddess, Dione. This Aphrodite was baser, lust-driven and associated with physical satisfaction...

Humanitas, the flowering

Venus - 'Humanitas,'
guiding force of the Renaissance
precious fantastic spirit
which transformed Western
civilization

Allegory of Spring

Spirit of the Renaissance

Out of the Dark Ages
with the rediscovery
of classical antiquity

Herald of the golden age
flowering of arts and sciences
under her tuteledge,
the great goddess
in her many
guises


What if Venus bucked
her symbolism as
spiritual value and
swung her scallop
shell around and
dove into
deep seas,
an intensity
of dark
passion?

Eostre, Or Cross of Sheer Light

Click here for an MP3 Recording of Eostre, Or Cross of Sheer Light(2:25min)





Eostre, Or Cross of Sheer Light

I found myself ebbing
away, and so I fasted.
When my commitment to
life renewed itself, I broke
my fast.

If you've ever been dead and come back to life,
been hopeless and found a way to continue,
thrown yourself into nothingness to find meaning.

An elusive tune,
slender wash of light,
bare opening in the wall,
a sliver, crescent through which.

Or what's a moment but a casting through.
If you've been too tired to get up and then you get up.
Filled with silent despair and then the will to.

Nothing's even, that's the problem. Many impermanent states.
All taking turns or colliding. Interpenetrating or scattering.
Flowing or stuck. Constraining or freeing.

I like to have clean thoughts because then I can live in my mind.
Sometimes the dust, anger, grime.
Throw what's scathing out.

I feel your bright and beautiful presence
even if you feel like you've disappeared into nothing.

The edges of the sky hang like an aurora borealis of silk.

The trompe l'oeil of the moment. Discreet packets of time.
If you didn't tell me I was going to die, I wouldn't believe it.

And then the scaffolding crashed, blocks fell apart,
what resisted melted, and it was time to resurrect.
Passing beyond memory into. Or the rising.


©Brenda Clews
Good Friday, 2006 ( A repost of a poem and image I wrote and created for Easter on Friday, April 14, 2006, but recorded today, two years later.)
----------------
photographic path: a photo I took of sheer fabric over light, cropped, layered on itself, rotated, made somewhat transparent; then I may have used a marque tool to crop the uppermost layer to better reveal the brocade ribbon below, or was that one of the trajectories I didn't use; various marque tools to crop the right & left edges of the uppermost layer on right angles; the stamp tool to fill in a line that was left over from who knows what process; the burn tool to darken the upper and bottom right corners for visual balance. A collage I composed after writing the poem...

This is a photopoem: I've digitally embedded the poem in the image along with copyright information.

Psychic Moon

I couldn't sleep and saw the full moon in the West when I rose but after I'd made coffee and let the dog out, it was gone. A full moon on the Equinox is auspicious, and I saw a light of mystery and psychic radiance that the clouds swirled over in the night sky.

It's been a Winter of great snow, more than in half a century. Toronto is usually warm and wet, it snows and turns to slush and melts. This year the snows fell, and fell, and fell. We haven't seen ground in months.

The parkette onto which I gaze is like trampled sugar icing with a coating of ice that makes it shiny.

It's been a Winter of shocking revelations for me.

A month ago I fell on the ice, straight like an ironing board, only I curved a little and protected my head while my hip took the impact.

A bruise the size of a snowball turned from brown to black to red to purple and is still present as a pale ochre shadow and I wonder if I will always carry it.

Slowly dawn melts into the sky.

The light is bluish-grey,
the colour he once said
of my eyes.

On the Mystical Theology of Spring

*the consequences of
what the composition is
centred around are of
great importance*

theologica mystica
the deep interior

Botticelli's Venus, innocent and flowering, beautiful
and fragile, a powerful goddess and
untouched maiden, a blossom of love
that is the garden itself...

Who is the
birth

of

Hidden Masterpieces

Botticelli's Venus
like pure meditation.

Sky and sea and shell.

Fabric of wind blowing.

Is she a heliotropic metaphor, painted by a man whose preference wasn't women, who presented an idealized version of woman without her dark burning orchard?

No contrary opposing forces
dark intrigues, smoldering
passions
erupting
like the fire rock
that buried Pompeii.

Nor is she a poetry of free association, drifting over the waves opening out towards non-meaning but fully signified: beauty, love, goddess.

She doesn't point us to the conflict of the unrepresentable, but to a representation of
beauty, a solar vision, of innocence, of love.

Botticelli's Venus carries no arrows, or armory.

A surface of
sweetness
idyllic.

No lusty, passionate,
vengeful goddess.

Appearing fragiley
on the ocean's
horizon.

Thin layers of translucent
paint.

The Birth of Venus and the Primavera kept from public view for almost five centuries, and then she rose like the morning star, radiating feminine beauty far and wide.

Pallas & the Centaur, Primavera, and The Birth of Venus commissioned by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de'Medici in the late 1400s for his Villa di Castello in Florence.

Secret, hidden masterpieces. Not seen by the public until the 19th century.


Venus, the spiritual birth of Humanitas.

Lofty ideal. Hunger of hot desire
absent.

The messiness of reality
can't be faked.

"the soul establishes itself
through loving itself in the ideal"¹

______________________
¹ Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love (Columbia University Press, 1987), 110.

Poetry & Fruit

I'm sure I didn't look like that, and I don't know where all the people are. Strange. I travelled on a crowded subway and walked amid streaming crowds on the way to work this morning. A stranger snapped the photo. I said it was because my briefcase wasn't full of business papers but poetry and fruit. He hurried away. The subject of the photo is the briefcase, not moi, for surely that is what is important.

Days of Tears and Laughter

It passed, on the 7th, another year. By not telling, it was easier. My birthday and Christmas are the 2 days I miss my father most and so there is grieving. Only now I allow myself time to miss, to lament, to offer remembrance and praise, to understand perhaps a little more of the mysterious universe each time I enter sorrow, its spirals of loss and redemption, of endings and continuance, of knowing what is gone and what is to come. I offer myself time to remember, to feel instead of the denial I lived for years and which caused unexpressed despair on 'my day' and the day of festive giving. With recognition of the depth underlying these two days, allowing grieving, they are much happier, take on a glow of warmth and love, a radiance that they lacked when I was hiding sadness under a veneer of gloss. Oh, perhaps a half hour alone to weep, to be in the place of dissembling, of loss, of the irrationality of death, then the rest of the day is lighter - fun, joy, sparkle, and laughter.

Which it was, along with the chocolate truffle chocolate mousse chocolate cream cheese cake from Decadent Desserts and the company of my son and some fine white wine...

The Green Wire Shelf

It's a rickety wire corner piece with soldered leaves trailing in green over which I hung a couple of strands of small white festive lights. It fits in the tiny corner of the tiny room. The bottom shelf has a few scattered printed poems that I read into his voicemail, not that he should be the only one to receive them, and you should know that, and manuals for the Tivoli stereo and radio and the Bang & Olufson headphones; the middle shelf holds a refurbished black plug-in Northern Telecom phone with good unfuzzy sound, real retro; the top shelf, a small stack of articles and art books on Botticelli.

When I meditate I unplug the lights, and after lie down and close my eyes and let the silence take me deeper, when I come up from the depths I roll over and place the jack of the lights into the plug on the middle shelf, the one with the retro phone.

Oh, the books have fallen a few times. I know I should have fixed the wobbly wire garden corner shelf to the wall but I didn't have a large picture hook and the store I went to didn't have that size.

Of course it happened. The books tumbled and rolled and fell onto my head in the dark while I was trying to attach the plugs for the small trellis of lights.

I was stabbed by the hardcover corner of my favourite one, the prints are so lush, and I stare at them in the evenings wondering how the Renaissance master painted them.

I have a bruise on my right cheek bone. It's pale grey, and slightly sore. I cover it in a little tinted moisturizer.

My Botticelli bruise.

frozen seas
currents
hot and cold
intermixing
where Venus
wrapped in shawls
of frost
treachery of winds
is this cold
reception
poetry
in the world?

a la scallope

innocent and lyrically sensuous, fragile, beauty,
powerful goddess and untouched maiden, a blossom

of love

figure of spiritual ecstasy

incarnation of love under a paintbrush, in a vision, a feeling, expansive,
a Botticelli pink rose, Venus in her purity, born from the seafoam, coming into
being, music to ears that hear the seawinds bearing her
towards us

Ocean of Ice

Ice floes, sharp, jagged icicles. Hidden, floating icebergs. Tearing, sinking, drowning. We struggle amid snow squalls and tears of fire burn our cheeks. It's a dance of avoidance in the avalanche of the Arctic waters. Do not freeze, or turn to ice.

Ice moves quickly, unpredictably, in response to ocean currents and wind. Ice, like tectonic plates. Frozen earthquakes and ice mountains, ridges and blocky ice rubble. O be wary, what impales the heart, tides of ice.

Ice floes surge and spin, ice moves in packs, networks of cracks and patches of open water, pushing broken ice, loose chunks of ice, and ice jams. Icebreaking.

But the currents are intermixed in this strange painting of love, surging warmth and rigid cold. Where deceptions occur: what looks solid, isn't. And then the ice so thin it's a mirror down into the depths.

Venus comes aloft on her scallop seashell amidst the ice floes; the Zephyr winds are cold and northerly. The Horae await with a cloak embossed with delicately beautiful ice flowers, as fragile as morning frost. Where is the warmth? The sea is awash with cold and hot waters, whitecaps of ice or steam. Which currents are to be trusted?

Sun-washed Blossoms

Ishtar's high priestess, Inanna, queen of heaven and earth, of the rising and setting star in the East, Venus, sexual mystery of the darkness, not the sun-stroked beauty of Botticelli's.

Unclothed, unashamed but virginal, an untouched goddess of love blown in by waves whose whitecaps are like flocks of flying white birds. Botticell's Venus not the sensual 'come-hither' of Inanna and her Shepherd-King, Dumuzi. Or she of the Song of Songs.

Botticelli's Venus is the Virgin in a pagan landscape of delight in the beauty of the world. Fragile becoming on the wind-washed shores of our being. Her beauty not lustful but ethereal; the innocence of unblemmished spirituality.

Only, Botticelli, man who remained like a monk, single, dedicated to art, and art alone, your gorgeous muse causes all of Nature to bloom in your paintings where it bursts out of your canvases, the Birth of Venus and the Primavera.

Where is the sultry goddess of the dark gleaming gold temple of love?

Valentines Day

Those of you who have been reading my latest series of poems will understand the humour in this image, I say laughing. You never know where she will appear! Happy Valentines!

Temple of Love

Venus, star in the night. Love in the darkness. Your breath. Ecstasies of the body, erotic touch. This temple, its sacred creativities.

O, the goddess of love awaits, inviting. Sighing, and moans. The gleam of the god of war, his helmet golden red in the night.

When Anteros - god of requited love, "love returned," and the avenger of scorned love - came, wings beating like heartbeats, you knew me. For the first time. Anteros, brother of Eros, god of lust, love, erotic union.

Fire gleams in your eyes, volcanic. You didn't see me before though you had known me a long time. I was hidden in your life.

I'm tired of restrictions. Let's change what we have meant to each other. Like angels lying in a bouffant of chocolate and roses. The convergences on the public holy day of love, Valentine's.

Great art presents itself as presence in the world, alive, shimmering.

What the heart holds, for it prefers secrecy.

birth of beauty

times of decrease, recession, turmoil, depression, upheaval, war, loss and degradation, fear and grief, the unpardonable, what can't be retracted, the birth of love borne by beauty on the waves of the sea

Savonarola's body burnt in the Piazza della Signoria, it is 1498, he who convinced you to renounce the sensual pleasure of beauty - The Mystical Nativity painted in 1500 so different to when

you and Leonardo da Vinci, a friend who you studied with in Verrocchio's workshop in the 1470s

those angelic visions

art historians speak of spiritual tautness in your work, of the grace of line and that your figures are holy heiroglyphics

she appeared under your delicate sable brushes in 1492 and disappeared for centuries until the Pre-Raphaelites resurrected her and now she is a definer of feminine beauty in the modern world

with my curls, when I was a young woman, people used to compare me to 'Botticell's Venus'; I, too, have borne her...

rising from the sea

the rush of waves in my ears

listening to you


beauty, fragile, on the lip of, edges, knowing loss's inevitability, a flower blossoms, fragrant perfume and soft vivid colour of petal drifting away, it can't remain, you knew, Sandro, and

yet, she is, borne by the Zephyr on the scallop-shell and wrapped in veils of flowers by the Horae

washes of colour, seaspray of roses,

translucent robes

poetry we weave ourselves with

Divine Message of Beauty in the World

I write on vellum with sea-scalloped edges.

Birth blueness is everywhere, that particular nascent colour.

You bring the simplicity of writing with you.

While I wear a cloak of flowers, a shower of roses, lyrical, fragile birth, beauty, this flowing cape of words

That the goddesses of the seasons have woven for us.

___________
Botticelli's Birth of Venus hangs in the Uffizi, in Florence. It was painted in 1485.

Oceanic

If I knew how. The swirl-over. In the bank's marble concourse, the ocean wraps you in its currents. We are never far from sea-salt, the briny wind, even inland.

The gentle breezes, long before Sandro, before she came gliding on the fan-shaped scallop sea-shell under his paintbrush.

Before we clothed her with poetry.

The birth of love in the world.

Veils to clothe Boticelli's Venus with

A poem arises catching the energy, imparting meaning, hestitatingly, faltering for words, images, rhythms.

My love for you.

Slowly through endless revisions,
shaping this love.

Disparate layers emerge, an undercurrent infiltered with strands, approaches, understandings, memories, hopes, desires, the way the sensual mind composes.

We create ourselves through each other. It's more complete,
who I am with you.

Not a version of reality but a veil of being,
the poem of love that is
a transparent garment we clothe ourselves with,
our metaphors and concepts of a world

which resists
our gaze.

Writing is a deeply
meditative act.

A language of love.

A listening.

Drumbeat

The palm drops
on the inside
of the skin
animal drumming
beating on the drum
drumbeating the night
beating on the eardrum
drum drumming deeply
drawing the heartbeat drumbeat.

My body is the drumbeat
drumbeating my skin
sweating, hot,
drumbeating my body's
percussion, rub, snare,
pounding, colliding of
musical pulses
lyrical sinewy
or staccato modern
or wild shamanic
hair flying
free.

Red shiny satin clinging,
wet
sweat.

The djembe hip bag that I scrubbed, suede dyed to emulate Holstein cow naugahyde, in black and cream, with a wild boar bristle brush and saddle soap because of the dark streaks, smells of animal hide.

I hold it to my nose, and smell. Animal. Hide.
The drumming of the jungle.
An animal skin.

Taut.

Primal beat bounding
resonating, resounding.

You gaze at me, though you haven't looked at me.

I am in your gaze without your seeing me.

It is my hunger you remember feeding,
that you want to feed.
Our heat burns hotly.

Drumbeating
the rhythms beating in us,
the African djembes
dance us.

__________________________
Lately I've been dancing to fabulous drumming. I'd like to thank the drummers at Toronto Tam Tam at Xing Dance Theatre, Shara Claire at 5Rhythms™, Gary Diggins, and Kwanza Msingwana at Tribal at Dovercourt House in Toronto, all in the last 3 weeks.

As a lyrical poet, I use the I-Thou relationship often in my writing. The "you" is a muse and doesn't refer to anyone in particular...

The Walker...

I passed her in the alley on the way home, large, in clogs without any socks, grey hair dyed blonde, the rain turning to snow with a wind rising, cold, gingerly braving the asphalt, hanging onto her walker, out, exercising, steps barely felt by numb feet and legs but each touch of the ground and forward motion an accomplishment. We crossed the road. Opening my door, the dog ran out and greeted her, which lit her face up. But where the pavement curved to meet the drain she fell. Sideways, on her hip. After assuring us she was fine, a neighbour and I lifted her to her feet. The ambulance was already flashing behind us. "I'm fine, I'm fine, thank you." I placed her purse on her walker and she began her slow step forward. Her hands couldn't grip the walker, it was uneven, the ground, and she fell again. The snow falling on bare skin, I pulled her top down, a small dignity, as the paramedics came and spoke to her and then lifted her and gently took her into the ambulance... perhaps diabetes, I didn't ask, only blessed her and wished her well and waved good-bye, and then came and wrote this, a sketch to remember her by.

My daughter's photos of moi...

Photos on the blog are one way I keep track of myself, I suppose. The composite shot happily imbibing from a usually-packed away Waterford crystal wine glass that's one of the few remaining from the gift they were 30 years ago was taken in December on my daughter's birthday by her with her new camera. The Krishna-blue lady was also taken then, as a black and white photo and don't ask how I managed to colour it so, call it an act of 'soul force' through Photoshop, the path of filters and colorations I have forgotten. I'm not sure if I've shown it to her, but I like the blue skin and hair of fire... creative collaboration, of sorts.




A little self-portrait reflected-in-the-mirror from September. The thing is that top is a danceskin and my legs were bare and so I had to paint in a dress -you know how it is... :-)

Back to regular programming shortly...

Rising from the Green Ashes

Needles follow the crinoline green tree like a wake as it is dragged out, on this day of unseasonable warmth and a rain that is barely more than mist. I know now. Comprehending in its enormity.

A criss-cross of green needles on the floor, over the carpets, down the stairs, so profuse the woods are overtaking. They crackle underfoot. They exude the intoxicating aroma of the resins of pine trees.

Were there lightly brown brushed earth and a firepit of dancing flames and a wide-starred sky. In the moment that the place buried in the core of the city turned into wilderness you came, and stayed. With your wild-boar ways, your genteel touch. We all wore our hiking boots in the small enclosure because the green was growing. We found half a red bird, shorn wing, lying, torn from the tree, while the other half flew around the room alighting on the couch or desk at whim, a red decoration, a whirling flame. Today was Epiphany, and it surprised us.

When you let the green in your veins flow instead of blue, verdant, fecund, rich. When we find the wilderness within the endless procession of us, passing by, layers upon layers of meanings, fluxes, the city crowds, where the wild where the red-feathered bird is whole, and sings like any decent phoenix.

I expect you to rise from the green ashes.

Is that tree tinsel, glittery, like pyrite? Be wary, the city offers satiations, pleasures, whatever you want. Is that what you're searching for? With obsessional focus? The tracks, pine needles stuck to your boots, falling off as you go, that I follow deep into the wilderness of your mind, where you dwell in loneliness mining yourself.

Bliss Queen Poster