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.