All I did was dump coffee in the sink
And he appeared. He must have wanted to go on a trip, a journey or a jaunt, I doubt he wanted to be washed down the drain.
Which wasn’t the plan anyway. Not when there is so much to see everywhere, day or night, here or there.
And kindred spirits to discover.
With golden suns disguised as room-temperature metal beginning the process of your transformation. No matter how you begin.
Was it a mistake to throw out the old drafting table during my decluttering blitzkreig with its thousands of hours of receptivity to mark making, creating & colouring upon a flat screen opening to the unknown through seasons of catastrophe, celebration, and hope
Only to discover new ones at the same price, half the size, rickety, like stacking plastic toy soldiers until they fall to the floor beside the laundry and a coupon expired
Standing half as tall – is this how people live today – cramped / like ceilings pressing at odd angles, like too much irony or TV news or variety shows with varieties of one crop farming
In the city I discarded what I could squeeze into a hole, after it made itself known, who could fail to notice this hole, brazenly tapping at the doorway like trance drumming & insisting on action
As loud as a hole can be without attracting the attention of other shapes competing for psychic food although that might be a personification best for allegory or proverb
& Even vibrations (especially vibrations!) passing into wood or metal created in the right spirit, I’m sure it was the right spirit, know they are the right size for the hole, the circle, the absence, the sun
Though saying goodbye to memories vanishing into & beyond the hole might be a mistake, if there are mistakes in the ecology of memory and in the shadow of labour – no I am sure there cannot be, and a goodbye is never a forever, yes it often is
In this new world, either squatting, or hiding from the enemy, or working within form shrinking from moisture or heat or time, one realizes a newer price will have to be paid for a full size, it’s no longer one size fits all, it’s no longer all at all
One might reclaim discarded memories in the hole though they float away forever, but the idea of agreeing, I think, is to create another hole, a flourishing courier system arriving in the future at the other doorway, or now, and how can any mistake be made while awaiting couriered delivery
Of it all & with a great sadness, goodbye
‘I am large, I contain multitudes.’
‘I am large, I contain multitudes.’
An idea for a novel came upon / me.
Whoosh.
Two words.
The next night I dreamed the title.
Five words.
I didn’t see any connection
between the title
and the idea.
I wrote on paper with 3 holes / long-hand / daily, and typed those pages.
No matter the words – I simply transcribed.
If I heard it in my head I wrote it.
No argument.
72 days later I had a first draft. And editorial notes for each segment.
I stapled each batch and stacked them on top of a cold radiator.
The typed pages are in the computer.
I emailed them to myself daily.
I didn’t edit the material
or refashion it.
I treated it like poetry
with a germination period,
alone in the dark.
Just allow it / to arrive
from surprise destinations.
It’s in the dark now.
Whoosh.
Out of nowhere / it never failed
to arrive.
Like arriving from darkness.
A novelist told me the first draft
is the most difficult part
of the process.
This didn’t feel difficult.
Perhaps laborious.
I hope this is a good sign.
A sign in the dark.
Follow darkness
until the sign
arrives.
Whoosh.
After I broke (shattered!) my ankle I began drawing for long periods in bed.
I used a Sharpie marker on lined paper and numbered the drawings.
Sometimes I titled the drawings and indicated how I might use them, a linocut or a painting.
Drawing 14 broke free of its mooring and reappeared after traveling through several rooms.
I recreated Drawing 14 using digital tools.
1 + 4 = 5. Some people say 5 is a dynamic number of change. An indicator of flux, of positive movement,
& some things never reappear & you realize there might be something else, down in the roots, you need to want more.
And you experience both mystery and loss
while wearing wings and antlers.
Wherever those came from.
Glass continues the journey of light –
flooding the walls & flooding the floors
with colour as light as air.
I am an apprentice.
Today my wedding day.
My master creates a window for the Magi.
I invite my master to the festivities.
After bidding my guests ado
I take my bride to the wedding bed.
The Magi (flooding light) flood my master’s studio.
The light is warm. The light is water.
Tonight I am the flood.
Might I ask of you –
Might you remember –
this apprentice,
on his wedding day
and say,
The light is warm.
The light is water.
Medieval marriage by Giovannino De’ Grassi
St-Gatien’s Cathedral, Indre-et-Loire, France (1300)
He fell in love with a visionary
who cared for a tree.
Her visions became commonplace,
although beautiful,
as she cared for the tree.
The knight sometimes
aimed
his telescope
at a leaf dangling in the wind,
or a branch bent low, or bark,
or beds of moss
on the edges,
warming.
Invincible
sunlight
streaming.
Basement bright with skin
shows dark, rapt faces.
They hold him
in their hearts and brains.
Someone whispered the world
is not worth becoming evil for –
On the ceiling, which is the maiden mother’s floor,
they pound, and pause, and pound again.
Blood pulsing in their fists,
the pierce of loathing under their ribs.
In a shadowed mezzanine
below the conscious mind,
they gnaw on river fish,
direct you to the wrong people,
put glitter in their eyes,
control the atmosphere,
arrange stillborn thoughts in old places.
Later they will say you brought down
the old, dull, rusted sword
with your own hands – and you did –
on the samovar that hid her hand
and the bed where she bared herself.
Motionless,
bird reposed in flight,
love for whose sake everything, murderous
and merciful, is done –
It’s so quiet now,
vouchsafed to a world of sullen depravity,
a few crumbs of dust for the broom.
The true operation of your mind – follow it –
Ned Baeck lives in Vancouver.
His poems have recently appeared in untethered, The Continuist and Sewer Lid.
His first full-length collection of poems is forthcoming from Guernica.
My mother told me theatre is like a rooster
but film is like a hen.
She said would you rather wake up
or have an egg?
Ingmar Bergman, The Seventh Seal
Cathy, I’m lost, I said though I knew she was sleeping
And I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why
(Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, JFK)
lyrics Paul Simon, America
