Freeze-up

So there we were out in the bush. As usual. I was taking photographs of everything. Trying to fit everything in. The wasp nests. The frost. H was watching mayfly nymphs being swept from under the ice and into the culvert. It's a long way to May, I heard him say. At least I think that's what he said. Just at that moment the creek moaned. The lake moaned. It went on and on and on. Everything stood still. Black spruce. Willow. Alder. Heads bowed. Everything flushed.

He sees his breath, says his breath

I reached (for) McNiven.  I found frost and a streetscape of leaves and parked cars, including my own, which I had parked first in front of the piano teacher's house, then further along, on the north side, in the sun.  None of that needed finding, nor did the geese, the university students walking through, the blue sky pale.  But I looked anyway, past the care home where McNiven school used to be; past the empty field to the northeast end of it, looking for signs of goalposts; past the fronts of houses to the rears.

The hydrant at Darke and McNiven
says 1958.

Itching to get on with things

It's hard to trust a morning this bright. Even the birds are glancing around, no doubt wondering what's up. And something is up. You can tell by the way the semis on the main drag are gearing down. As if the brightness is slippery.

I've seen such days come and go over the years. If you stare into the brightness long enough, you'll see someone coming down the street. Hood up. Small white dog on the end of a leash. It sniffs a rock, raises a leg. Everything golden. And it's then you realize it's time. Time to bury your head in your work.

Should we

There was much debate before the City closed 25th avenue at Bell street.  "All the traffic will come screaming down Bell," said people to the south.  "Much safer for our children," said people to the north.  "As far as we're concerned," said the City after a while, "25th street at Bell is now closed.  It no longer exists."

Now people cut through--students heading to/from U of R, dog-walkers, shoppers heading to/from the Safeway a block west, kids with spray paint cans alive in the easements that lead to this space.  I've harvested rhubarb that grows outside the fences in three or four locations here.  All kinds of plants grow beyond all kinds of fences.

Every decade or so, I'm guessing, someone builds a new stretch of fence along the former-25th.  "I suppose it's time," they say.  "Should we keep the sign?"

Leaves take a seat

The show can begin. A matinée. I play the lead. I can play anyone. Just ask a poem. And I do.

ACT I

SCENE 1

Enter I. Carrying a camera. Stops to look down at a dead junco on the deck beneath the kitchen window. Black and white, head covered in leaves, its feet curled around the inevitable.

I: Take its picture.

I: Forget it.

[Exeunt.]

Yesterday ends up today

I had to get dressed to answer the door. It was just the neighbour kid ringing doorbells as her mother led her down the hall. A day so ordinary, full of this and that, ends up taking up a good half page of someone's notebook, usually my own. Bought a thera-band, tied my left leg to a table and pulled toward the wall. Went to see my daughter's play and found myself in the spotlight next to her during one of her entries when she, playing Alice, chats with an audience member. ("I'll remember that for a long time," she told me later. I said I would too.) Watched the beginning of the one film Charles Laughton directed, which begins with pastoral New England autumn images (in black and white) zooming slowly to a dead body found inside a shed. Found a stump in the easement behind Monroe. That's where to find things, I guess: behind, inside, at the edge of, pulling someone's leg (usually my own).

Yesterday my friends bought a house

It ended up in my dreams. I was sitting on the floor beneath the window, lost in the icing of a Nanaimo bar from the Tall Grass Prairie Bakery, when the knock came. We all looked at each other. No one moved. The door swung open on its own accord. There stood a letter carrier basked in light, holding a large envelope. Is there a Brenda Schmidt here, he asked. I stopped chewing. We all looked at each other again. Of course there is, he said, answering the silence. She makes everything about her.