II - The View from the Lake

In the offices behind me, activity, jobs, maintaining the flow of business, for increasing or keeping profit margins, including the wide net of support staff, is fierce. Perhaps it's like the fierce lake with its patches of squall or sun and its endless flow of mist. Everyone works hard and everyone is tired at the end of the day.

I think of letters and numbers, words and money, invisible, flowing, like the continuous traffic on the highways splayed out before me in all directions, transferring, shaping. Do we corrode the landscape with our civilization?

From the Island View Room with its antiques and Persian carpet high in the corporate bank tower the sky is an opague pale grey; it has stopped raining but is thickly overcast.

In the distance the Scarborough Bluffs are lit by sun and look like the white walls of a white city of vision.

How do we fit into the landscape we have so crudely carved?

River of Light

From high in the corporate tower, in the dim distance, in the atmosphere of drifting fog, the curving highway, everybody driving home, a flowing river of light.

White blood stream of the city.

Fog Lights

Through the fog, forms. Other buildings, sky. It could be the corneas of my eyes.

The corona of the sun is hidden.

There are no sun spots today; no solar flares, no solar storms.

The world is quiet. Lying under a blanket of mist. The wind is absent. If the birds fly, they fly blindly.

Do you have your fog lights on as you make your way along the snaking highways? Somebody stops or swerves in the flow of cars and there is a pile-up. Buckled metal and torn and broken lives, but not yours. You are caught in the stopped and slowed traffic and are late.

Not to meet me, but the others.

I am behind the fog.

Am I seeing anything other than dim forms and whiteness?

Lies

Again, it happened. Out of nowhere, envy, its clout. Why is it that you often don’t know who is competing against you? Lies, demeaning. Set up for an ignominious fall. Only what is sought, those daggers of hidden stealth, is of no interest. Uncompetitive. I am filling the place of, not seeking to fill.

Today envy wore black hair and a black blazer with a red chiffon blouse and a smiling demeanour in the office tower that could be anywhere in the world.

Disguise

Sometimes one has to pretend to be who one is to be who one is.

If I disguise you in metaphors, it is only to reveal you. Or myself. Or the interconnections that interweave us.

November 28, 2006

On the afternoon of that day I.

The time went by too quickly.

When I saw the date, I knew.

It was very strange, this feeling.

I could not know what it was all about.

But I knew the day was significant.

It had arrived; such long waiting, and now it was here.

What did it mean?

Tide-Line

They disappear. They always return. The men who love me. It is too early to say if it is a pattern.

Sometimes I feel like the woman in the sea-cottage who holds the tide-line tight in her hands. Then I don't drift in and out like the moon-pulled sea; then I remain, present.