Wish You Were Here

Coming home on the night ferry from Victoria I saw so many things.
I was bundled and standing at the bow, the stars were legion, the big dipper closer than I’ve ever seen it. In the dark of Active Pass the ferry illuminated the islands, giving the forests a gently supernatural glow in the moonless night, and glinting off the whitecaps lurching from its wake. As we came out of the pass there was an arc of cloud formation crossing the sky, Tsawwassen twinkling beneath it on the horizon. The arc seemed to hang over the city, but as we got closer the perspective shifted and I realized the arc was low and close, out over the ocean, forming a sort of gateway we would pass under. The clouds looked like a parade of woodland creatures, each running at full speed, and at that moment in their strides where none of their feet were touching the ground. Fox, hare, stoat, vole, possum, badger... and all the little ferries criss crossing the water underneath, tiny jewel cities set adrift on the night sea. 
All this celestial and corporeal phenomena, the stars, the clouds, the boats, the trees, the twinkle, the glow, I could witness it all at once, my face in the wind, wide open with awe and joy.

Swimming Versus Falling

The fever scratches at my door

I yell from the kitchen that now is not a good time

The scratching pauses

In the silence I sink back into myself, like wading into a cool swimming hole, the leaves of the surrounding trees fluttering like nervous birds, but my naked body is calm and neither in the future or the past, just here in the lapping water

The fever scratches again, more insistently, and my body is pulled from the water, a tumult of words churn the treetops and the leaves are no longer anxious birds, but angry dogs, hungry ones, and the barking along with the scratching

I yell again IT IS NOT A GOOD TIME and there is no pause and the scratching has become banging and the door breaks down and I can feel the fever heat spread towards me across the floor and up my body and I am burning and shaking and I can not discern one noise from another from words or meaning 

All there is now is please please stop make it stop 

I promise to stop wanting what I want

I promise to let go

Please let me breathe

Please give me silence and return my nervous birds to me 

But the trees shake themselves out of the ground and come crashing into the kitchen and through the floor and through the foundation and their weight forcing a hole in the earth and me and the kitchen and the trees crash right through magma and out the other side and into a landscape that might as well be the moon 

And all the silence of being lost and alone should be terrifying but instead I find myself breathing and still

The landscape unfamiliar

 But the scratching stopped

I look around for somewhere to swim

The Present Breath

Biking home from beach and very satisfying ocean swim, at magic hour, I stopped near my house, on a rise where you can still see sky and all the way to the mountains, and where there is a little park, with whorls of long grasses. That light, just the moment after the last bit of the sun has sunk behind the horizon, and everything glows, and your vision starts to play tricks on you. That light embraced the whorls of grasses, and the particular gold of them, dry and almost in sheafs, hints of green in the tenacity of other plantings - that deep gold, those traces of green, colours that take the path that goes from my eyeballs to my heart, and further, into my soul and everything that made me who I am. The peace, solace, the little wind that rises to rustle the grass, the description of ages on top of ages carried on that breeze. The giddy, lustful time right before all becomes sere, and fuel for fire. I could live in that moment, the sweetness of the smell, the warm wind on my bare arms, all time before and forever stilled and captured on this in-breath.

Reasons I Find It Hard To Wake Up

You should see the Chinatown I dreamed last night.
Rooftop dumpling and noodle cafe, looking over a courtyard bustling with humans and leafy shade trees, surrounded by crumbling brick buildings, held together by ancient layers of multicoloured, peeling paint in graphic shapes. Windows filmy with time and steam, tall windows framed by brick arches and packed with hanging plants, drummers practicing inside.  At street level grocery stores with avocados and yams as big as your head and tea counters full of all the artists, talking, crying, laughing, their exquisite shoes in various states of disrepair, and having to ask them to move to get to the precarious stacks of giant produce, everyone laughing boisterously when a pile rolled onto the creaky old wood floor.  Friends’ apartments in odd shapes at the peaks of buildings, with window seats and skinny steep stairs down from sitting rooms to kitchens to bedrooms.  Soft pinks and lacy curtains.  And kissing old friends met on cobblestone, music in their eyes and mouths, as we laughed about how hard it was to come down from trips to Calgary.  I wondered in my dream how I hadn’t known this Chinatown existed, after all my years of living here, and how I could live in one of those falling down places, draped in silk, home with my tribe.

What I Would Have Said To You If You Had Ever Been Born

I saw a man and a baby, the man was jogging, pushing the baby in a stroller. The man looked like it hurt so much, to be jogging. I thought, that man is going to drop dead of a heart attack on the seawall, leaving that baby alone. Then a few minutes later the man did drop dead, and I saw him fall, and I was there. I called 911 and took that baby out of the stroller and held her on my knee while I talked to the 911 operator. Someone asked to the general crowd where the baby from the stroller was and I said I have her, and everyone could see she was happy there. 

"It's going to be okay, little baby," I said, "don't worry, don't worry."  We both looked at the mountains a while. Then I sighed, and said, "No, it's never going to be okay." That baby listened. She held eye contact and furrowed her brow and pursed her lips. 

"It will be with you all through your life, informing your choices and identity. You will search a long time, baby, for that missing piece of your heart. But this is your story, and it will make you interesting, and complex, and you will have to decide how to be all those things, use them. Let it happen, baby."

Then the fire department came and then the police, and finally an ambulance. Not very reassuring if you're waiting to be saved, but that man wasn't waiting, he was dead. There was activity and questions and then someone took that baby out of my arms and she started wailing. Some time her mother arrived, too, and started wailing, too, and they nearly harmonized. I noticed the resonance specifically.