Perigean Moon

During the height of a lunar and solar tide I fell into the watery moon. The time of the decreasing declination of the lunar gravitational pull. My inertia held me.

You are angry at me and I don't know who you are, or why. No, I'm not waiting for an answer.

Somebody knifed people a few blocks up, stabbing two women's faces, a man in the back, someone's hands, at downtown street corners, or boarding a streetcar, randomly; no-one knew him.

Answers are meaningless during these flood currents when the bays and estuaries are swollen.

Sometimes the water rushes in a few kilometers an hour. Then you must run, the roaring. Do beware of the perigean tides, when emotion floods us.

You wouldn't know from the cool, clear, serene day with that clarity in the sunlight.

The current full moon, located on the nearside of the ellipse, the biggest and brightest this year.

I don't know if language hovers between my nerve endings and the world, or if language is my skin itself.

Sheath of feeling. Words groping to touch air.

ARM Conference: Maternal Health and Well-Being

This weekend is ARM's Maternal Health and Well-Being conference, which is being held in a hotel in downtown Toronto. I went last night for the launch of Andrea O'Reilly's massive 846 page tome, Maternal Theory: Essential Readings, and the equally wide-ranging book Rishma Dunlop has edited, White Ink: Poems on Mothers and Motherhood. Most impressive. I love this group of women.

I'm presenting Saturday, a chapter I wrote for my thesis on the maternal body that I didn't complete. The chapter was the 'grounding in the body' and is about the process of conception. It took months to write, if I recall, between medical accuracy and writing it as a love poem of what happens deep within our bodies when we create new life. After finishing it, I intended to continue on with the 9 months of pregnancy, but it seemed such a daunting project I didn't get started. And a more difficult task - for me to humanize pregnancy by bringing the poetry back into the medical view would mean writing it from my vantage and my pregnancies were, of course, different to the experiences of any other woman's and I foresaw problems with issues of essentialism were I to embark on writing it.

Iconography in Marble

Like lavender, or dark plum mixed with titanium white by a wet brush on the palette because of the faint grey tinge in the tone. On a ceiling many stories high.

A cream coloured maze over the pale purple, reminiscent of ancient Greek motifs, that's upraised, embossed.

My attention on the groups of five squares in the upper configuration, one on each side. Their borders are fine gold lines. The interior is vibrant turquoise, what I lust after in jewelry of the semi-precious stone, or the colour of the Caribbean ocean, where I always want to be. The turquoise in contrast to the staid cream marble of the rest of the foyer.

In the centre of the turquoise squares, gold suns. The ten stars radiate out from central gleaming circles like crystal balls in twelve rays tapering to points. Fairy tales can come true under such a ceiling of shining stars.

Did the interior decorators go wild way above? Who looks up, gazes?

Before me letters are carved into the marble, large and elegant with serifs, inlaid with gold, they are perfect, curved, crisp. Once I thought that language was a symbolic representation of objects and actions. But look at that wall. Language carves and shapes reality, creating the world as we know it. It collects our memories and forges our future, shaping us as it shines through us.

Under the light-echoes from the stars I see you. An empire builder. There's substance behind it; resources to enable sustenance in abundance.

The muted dark veins of the cream marble race over the huge walls like maps of territories.

Governor General's Literary Award finalists

My ex has been nominated for Canada's largest and most prestigious literary prize for his latest book of poetry, Nerve Language, and I'm proud of him and hope he wins. It's his best book so far. That he's up against people like Margaret Atwood and Dennis Lee... they've already won the prize in past incarnations.

This is the recognition he has wanted all his life, the one he dreamed of when we were together so long ago. It's really great news.

Governor General's Literary Awards finalists

Poetry

Margaret Atwood, Toronto, for The Door: Poems (McClelland & Stewart)

Don Domanski, Halifax, for All Our Wonder Unavenged (Brick Books)

**Brian Henderson, Kitchener, for Nerve Language (Pedlar Press)**

Dennis Lee, Toronto, for Yesno: Poems (House of Anansi Press)

Rob Winger, Ottawa, for Muybridge's Horse: A Poem in Three Phases (Nightwood Editions)

Magi-Gold Lushness of the Early Hours

encrypted first draft of a poem

Coronal Holes

encrypted first draft of a poem