The Equator

A line from Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World: "...how many times in the course of a lifetime would the equator be a significant factor?" (4). Probably seldom--but then again, probably every day. The very fact it is there, by convention if not by physical fact--more a line on a map or globe than a physical fact on the ground or surface of the seas--cannot be ignored. It is one way of marking the line between us here in the farther northern hemisphere (another convention) and Brazil, where all those wing-beating butterflies are or are not causing all kinds of fluctuations in our weather. But we have so many imaginary lines fencing us in and out at the same time...

When a metaphor stretches

the idea of a line across

creases in the land, undulates its way straight, purposeful

through folds, dips, furrows, gullies, hills and hollows,

across rills and rivers going nowhere

creating borders of everywhere always in

between along the way, the connecting separation

made concrete, inked in by wood and wire and glass-topped

bricks and stones linking points planted along the way,

inventing prolonged unification, purpose as well as place,

trajectory into the out there,

try not to straddle,

centre yourself on your own ambivalence, find, locate yourself

on both sides of where the line guides,

disappears in both

directions

Le p'ti' liv'

Le p’ti’ liv’   (Pour Adele)

What riches in a little book?

The epiphanies of years, small but

mighty crafted moments of clarity,

playful transformations

and adjusted conformations,

multiplying ‘til the pages cannot hold

the outpourings of such a large heart;

le p’tit liv’ becomes a fountain overflowing

transfusing the lifeblood,

the painter’s vision, passion, love

for life out beyond its margins and

into the eyes of the grateful world.

Don Perkins 28 March 2015

I bought this little painting at a memorial display for Normand Fontaine last year. It was the first page of a book of crafty little studies he did over the years, playing with perspectives and unusual twists of relationship. It was, in effect, his manifesto for the book as a whole. His wife, Adele, asked me what I thought the blood pooling out of the booklet in the picture meant, so I wrote her this poem to explain what I saw in it.

Musing at Eze

Eze perspectives          

Does she mean to be my Muse?

that sculpted earth goddess

wondering over my shoulder:

“Why is he turning his back

on the glory behind—the glory

that includes me turning my back

on the same glory to wonder

why he is turning his back on us both?”

Is that inspiration in the glance? 

Or condemnation? Or bemused

participation? And what is in

her hand dipping into that

suggestion of a pocket?
A hint? A hope?

Or a hard projectile 
about to be bounced, 
a wake-up call, 

off my cranium? 
We seem to be off to a
rocky start.

 Eze, July 2015