Rigid

Did anything change?

I don't think so.

Once she was back in her unkempt house, where she was looked after until she regained her strength, the tirades began again. She said she was living out of a dumpster which was of course ludicrous. She lashed out at anyone who was younger, brighter, more beautiful. Which was most of the women in the world since she was old and on the decline.

The black habits continued. Dark and flapping with a cane at the seashore, she looked like a nun. Except for the florid red lipstick, the crimson suede gloves, the cherry red French lace petticoat under the thick layers of black burlap when the wind blew.

Liqueur du Feu

Driving me home, you softly asked, 'I'd like to lie naked next to you,' and I thought how warm and comforting. Only when our clothes lay on the ground you became fire and I melted into liqueur, hot sweetness all over you.

Driving

When we drove he kept his hand high on my inner thigh. Did I like it? Of course I did, Monsieur.

I - The Lake

From the wing chair covered in brocades of cream, through the variegated leaves of the pothos in the porcelain pot glazed with orange blossoms, the lake rushes in equal potencies of green, grey and blue. It reflects. Mist drifts steadily across in streams of softnesses with pale blue sky patchily appearing and sun that reveals its presence on the blinding whiteness of cumulus clouds over there. The sky is like a steamer rushing by. The lake is greener at the shore and around the islands in contrast to the band of deep blue towards the horizon.

In the distance to the East, look, the mist is broiling into a squall and the water froths with whitecaps and it looks as if the turbulent sky has fallen into the water, their boundaries disturbed.

Elsewhere, patches of snake green appear and disappear on the surface of the water according to the whims of the fleeting sky.

The winds blow the mist at velocities I can only imagine. What appears like steam billows past the window at race neck speeds.

Despite the rippling shoulders and back of the lake, the harbours in the islands are still. Like moments of meditation.

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?