Sunday, November 17, 2013


"Life is a long walk forward through the crowded cars 
of a passenger train, the bright world racing past beyond 
the windows, people on either side of the aisle, strangers 
whose stories we never learn, dear friends whose names 
we long remember and passing acquaintances whose
names and faces we take in like a breath and soon
breathe away."

from Local Wonders
Ted Kooser



When I decided to use the Kooser quote above I had intended
to end with another quote from one of his poems. However while
flipping through the The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English
Verse Chosen by Philip Larkin I found The Ice by Gibson and loved 
the  poem so much I decided to use it instead. Kooser's strength is 
always metaphor and the image of life as a walk through the cars of a 
moving train really spoke to me. I could not resist complimenting it
with Gibson's poems dealing with the stages of life where the elderly
women has attained the wisdom to ignore the jeers of others and 
experience the pure joy of childhood. I love the ability of literature to
allow us to share the experience of others or view the world from a 
different perspective. We all use a variety of sources and mechanisms
to guide our lives and make sense of the world whether it is personal 
experience,  family, community, religion, political ideology, science or 
art etc. I really enjoy using science, nature, literature and paintings 
to inform my world view and colour my experience. And of course
pets and science fiction.


In winter we tend to hibernate here we are going for it.



Saturday I had hoped to go to an Ivan Eyre show but the 
weather took a real turn for the worse so I took some photos
of the usual suspects enjoying the heated bird bath. Today
we started with -20 celsius and have warmed up to -11 so
I am watching the CFL playoffs and thinking about vacuuming. 






"HER day out from the workhouse-ward, she stands,
A grey-haired woman, decent and precise,
With prim black bonnet and neat paisley shawl,
Among the other children by the stall;
And with grave relish eats a penny ice.
To wizened toothless gums, with quaking hands
She holds it, shuddering with deliscious cold;
Nor heeds the jeering laughter of young men --
The happiest, in her innocense, of all:
For, while their insolent youth must soon grow old,
She, who's been old, is now a child again."

The Ice
Wilfred Gibson





Sunday, November 3, 2013

You are here, alive in this place,
touching with sight
things that are smoke tomorrow

from Alive in the World
John Haines



I could not capture the motion but all day the vent on 
the neighbors garage has spun round beneath its little
cap of snow.

Two days of snow and the feeders and heated  bird bath
have been the centre of attention in a cold and windy world.
And for me this is always a welcome site seeing that they
are here and things are, in this moment as they should be.








So the song is becoming as the world
becomes, and it can never leave us;
 because we are the notice in its passages,

from Song of the Ocean of the World Becoming
Pattiann Rogers