Daylight Shifting

I woke, and found the hour returned for revision. End of daylight savings, an hour that repeats itself: from 2am to 3am, and then back to 2am again.

That re-lived hour changed everything.

Take both forks in the road. Try alternatives, side by side. I lived the first hour trapped, obsessed; then went a different way when the hour started again. In the dark hours, a resolution to the dilemma, and I became free in a new way.

Or explore it multiply round-the-clock & superimpose the hours until time is like Comet Holmes expanding.

All day I re-live each of the hours when I pass clocks, the large blue-rimmed one that ticks loudly on the kitchen wall, the yellow-lit numbers on the stove, the travel clock on the bathroom shelf amidst coloured stones strewn around a conch shell, my electric bedside clock with its red LCD numbers, and my tiny silver watch, some are changed, and some aren't, absurdly I like it like that, playing with time, repeating each hour.

I envision changing my watch on the subway platform in the morning, stale underground air, crowded, turning the dial and watching the hands unweave the forever spiralling forward of time.

Today, the 25 hour day, when time repeats itself in the shift towards the light.

Models and Muses

Probably I will take this down and integrate it into a prosepoem, but I am intrigued by this insight, or perhaps it is only a reflection.

I hadn't realized before, anytime through all the years of exploration that began, perhaps, during my Jungian phase and obsession with the animus, the divine masculine.

When I am obsessed with a man, I write for him. Or is this too simple? Over 30 years of writing, I'm not talking about very many men. Those I've fallen in love with. Those few jewels sparkling in the light.

What I clearly understood today is that a woman writer has models, the man on whom the poem is dressed, but that the model is not the muse. The muse is the man to whom the poem is addressed.

The one, the figure; the other, the inspiration. The one, the man one might have become involved with because it worked for one's art, and was rather fun; the other, a man one rarely was involved with because he's, oh, how to describe, brilliant, knowledgeable, talented, huge in his capacities and achievements, and thus fearful. One is vulnerable before one's muse.

Yet one feels understood by the muse, for whom one pushes oneself to produce the best one is capable of; the model barely understands what one's working on, and only sees it in terms of themselves. The muse is hidden, the glory underneath, and for whom everything is propelled, created, while the model perhaps gathers an arrogance from the attention. It's an odd thing, this model/muse.

Perhaps the one is like Helios, who drives the sun across the sky each day; the other like magnificent Apollo, the ancient Greek God of Light. Rarely have the model and the muse been the same man. Though sometimes I mix up images of both: hopefully, it's cleverly done and goes undetected. I write about one as a model for the other's imagination, and pleasure.

I would never consider a serious relationship with a man who's a model, though I might with a muse. But I stay away from my muses. It's easier.

Or so I surmise: I haven't landed anywhere in the last 10 years, since my marriage ended. But there've been some wonderful men who've inspired me greatly; and I've had perhaps one or two wild rides with fascinating models.

Exploding Comet Holmes

"This is a composite image of exploding Comet 17P/Holmes. German astrophotographer Sebastian Voltmer combined various exposures taken through his 4.1-inch refracting telescope and processed the composite to highlight the comet's bright golden core (with jets and streamers), its gossamer green halo and an emerging faint blue tail. It's one of the strangest and most beautiful photos of a comet ... ever."
Spaceweather
(click on image for larger version, and take a look at these from photographers around the world -magnifique!)

Writing in the Air

for Jocelyn

Ancient and barbaric tongues, a music, mystical, meltings, crossings, of decay into other forms.

Are our metaphors metaphors of the metaphor? Composting into earth; or the ocean sweeping under.

A warmly cool wind blew over me after a hot humid night. Later, my feet caressed by sand, I walk to a nearly deserted beach. The pale-sapphire lake, remnants of mist like writing rising into the blue sky, infinity brought close.

Signs. A blond-haired young woman ambling the beach who stepped into the water to catch a tiny flap of orange and who freed the Monarch butterfly in the shrubbery. Or the man with wiry white hair who dozed on the wood brown-shellacked picnic bench, his dark tan, like a toasted chestnut, kayak a pod beside him.

Emergence, tumescence. Unendingly, cycling, one following the other, appearing and disappearing, jarring, the punctuations of this rhythm.

Lying on a blue striped beach towel, brushing the sand with my flat palm, my fingers touched a stone, small, perfectly round and flat, slate black. I knew it was hers, a philosopher's stone, and I would place it with my Australian dream-time stone on the alter of abundantly flowing memories and mementos composed of everyone's love for her.

With the upcoming memorial dance, I took a taxi to the subway, arrived home, showered, blended bananas, nectarines, peaches, strawberries in milk with soy powder and honey, put on a black dance leotard, some sports capris, filled a bottle with spring water, and hurried out.

The day blossomed into a flower, rich and hot and curling at the edges, crumpling. Its redolence like ripeness bruising to a deeper hue. I had barely known her. In the room where we gathered there were many tears. It was her blue Pilate's ball that submerged me as I clung to it. We cannot navigate through grief; it is grief that navigates us.

A room full of dancing for her. Already she is an apocryphal story. Auspicious. A little dizzy, sitting, eating pizza with her partner on the porch, happy, content, she died suddenly and unexpectedly. Without resistance, she went. A heart murmur, perhaps. It wasn't an aneurysm, no direct cause clearly discerned. Writhing, crying, leaping, sliding, we danced for her, her absent presence.

It was massive, the dancing of grief and joy. Our bodies moving through the hours like love writing in the air.

Afterwards in the circle we held the black twine passed around, coming in tighter, all connected, and we each took a blue glass bead, and when the scissors came round, we cut, cut the thread holding us, separated our life lines, and strung the bead and tied it around our wrists or necks or ankles.

In the evening at home, I ate a mixture of seeds and nuts, fed a neighbour's cat, warmed a little beef bourguignon, watched The Sea Inside by Amenabar, tears, copious, finally finishing the evening with sweet dried pears, hazlenut and currant dark chocolate, cheese and red wine. The night, still soft, Summery, by morning a cold front moving in, with clouds and rain.



___________________
With many thanks to Taeji, our 5Rhythms facilitator, for holding the memorial dance on September 8th; and to Rhodda for creating the black twine and blue glass beads ritual at the end.

Rising Water

My table is set up in a dining area in a small carpeted room adjacent to an enclosed porch overlooking the lake. I take it away from the hands working on it and move it into the windowed area with the sun and waves close.

Alone, I continue preparing my table, perhaps for dinner for my family, although underneath are art supplies, brushes, tubes of paint, a disposable palette, primed canvas; it's on wheels.

The building disappears and I find myself on a spit of land in the room whose windows have now dissolved so that the air pours in.

The area around where I am setting up is becoming wetter and soon will be impossible to reach. The room has disappeared and I am standing on a low-lying bank beside rising water. The ground is muddy and grassy, soggy. I continue setting the table until I realize my family won't be able to get here.

When I look out towards the water, I understand how vulnerable my set-up is. One storm, one lash of water, and everything's gone.

I am considering how to move inland but slowly come to wakefulness in my warm bed in the pre-dawn darkness.

O Halloween!

Overheard on the streets on Halloween party night, "Every vampire is a f----ing Goth." Goth is the Undead. Rah!

Making my way through the crypt-white skin and deathly black lips, hair, eyes, nails and clothes of vamps combing the streets looking for treats, I look up and see clouds looking like bruised blood in the sky, with a faint purple tinge over by sunset.

Black silhouetted trees are torn of their leaves by ravaging winds,
shadowy fat leaves fly like bats over the streets.

The clouds broil and the rain comes in,
a fierce spitting snake sliding across the sky.

Ghouls unite! It's time for Gothic Romance
or Zombie Undead Heaven!

Later I walk somnambulantly through the night after my howling dog, and see a bank of dense black cloud moving under the whitest of moons, which sheds light on the upper ridge of the clouds so it's like a stripe rolling along a great skunk.

It's eerie to see the world projecting itself in animal forms.

It must be the influence of those ancient Celts and their (listen for the wail) Halloween.

___________
Really, dear Readers, every word is true! Whooo.

Enjoying Strategies...

Tirades you sit through. It's like mumbling on the outside. Those who criticize others and defend their own positions. Placing clumbsy values that lack complexity on a person in a way that ignores one's own faults. A talent, like any other: fault-finding. Building an air-tight case. Or bitching: what enables the continuance to continue. Faults are places where there is potential rupture, perhaps it's best to keep the lid on the boiling pot slightly lifted so the steam can escape.

Or those who are paranoid about the judgements of others. Who carry self-pity around like a Lockness monster risen from the deep. But it is a form of narcissism, this continual focus on the self and on how ungreen one's grass is. And manipulative, most certainly. Who will tend to our wounds?

We should guard against excessive negativity towards others or ourselves, even if indulging feels good sometimes. Keep the teeter-totter even. Not a game of excesses but of balances.

It's the professional ones who are remarkable. No hidden motives; no judgements; fair play all round. Let's just get on with it.

The latter my preferred, but stable and perhaps not as interesting as the slightly unhinged who see the days as varying degrees of battle.