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

Wicihitowin

The thing that amazes people about the pair of geese that have made a home in the fountain in front of City Hall is not that they are there, but that they should not be. The geese seem unperturbed by the distinction. They waddle/strut with goosely dignity and unconcern across 102A Ave between the fountain and Churchill Square, pose occasionally for phone cameras. Let people share the space with them.

Usually, Canada Geese, especially in large migrant flocks, are symbols of the wild and of the north. Their coming and going marks the seasonal shifts—just as Wade Hemsworth, who wrote an iconic song about geese on the north shore of the Lake Superior, letting the worker know the end of the season of whatever he had been doing in the north was coming to an end, and that he would soon be going home to spend his money and earn the necessity to come back to the north woods.(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4Z13wmZlsU)

Canada Geese typically are not symbols of city centre, not habitués of concrete and high-rise. So when they set up housekeeping in front of City Hall, the civic living room, they challenge our own sense of the qualities of the places we have created for ourselves. They adapt, and let us know we have to, as well. They accept.

What is a goose in front of city hall a metaphor for? Validation of our choice of place? Parody of our self-important claim to ownership and belonging?

What if the geese had never stopped to smell the flowerless park and swim in the treated water? Would our civic square be any the lesser for it? No. Or at least we would not have that standard of measure against which to judge ourselves and our spaces. But now that they are here, what would it say if the left? That we have created a park unsuitable for geese? That we have revealed ourselves to be unfit neighbours, unamiable hosts? Not worth sharing the space with?

But they do stay--in summers, anyway. And in so doing, maybe the geese are showing us that we need to designate that Square? They might be part of a movement to rename it not for a dead English Prime Minister who never passed through here that  have heard, but for something much closer to home. For our home itself, in a way.  

The name being promoted, my friend Anna Marie Sewell (a former Poet Laureate for the city) tells me, "would be Wicihitowin Square - after the Cree concept for 'working and sharing together.' Wicihitowin Circle of Shared Responsibility is a long-standing advisory body of reps from Aboriginal community liaising with the City." 

Honk on that, City Council...

Rainbows

As sometimes happens when we are walking our dog on the University of Alberta South Campus, a photo op comes along. And as I sometimes do, I snapped it with my phone camera, then sent the picture to my much-published poet friend, Anna Marie Sewell. And as Anna sometimes does, she returned a poem based on the photo. She focused on the geese.

And as I sometimes do, I pulled a few of my favorite lines from that poem (italicized to give credit where it is due), and worked them into one of my own. I focused on the rainbow:

Eyes follow the refraction:

a call to attention,

a suggestion that all

songs slide down from above….or

another on-ramp to the sky? 

a reminder that song also rises, 

reaches from the singer’s depths

to enrich the chorus all around, to feed soul-

hungry voyagers from their own resources, turn

their emptiness, their appetite,

into sustenance, the chance to feed

on their own need, to answer the question:

“Shall we be fertile?”

 What, then will

we bring to the table, chanters in the

choir that never ceases?

Then another friend, Shayne, came back with a poem on the Portuguese concept of "saudade, for which there is no complete translation in English, a poem that connected through both geese and rainbow as essential to the landscape, so  went back to work with lines from both Anna Marie and Shayne to push things along:

a constant

vague desire for something

lingering at the bright

union of rainbow reaching

down to the grass and the geese,

backs turned to the spilling

violent color behind;

or hiding just beyond

the ragged edges refracting

into the clouds that half-

helped create this call to attention:

the sense that we have not

exactly seen this all before

in all its rolling untamed

familiarity