Happy Halloween (recommended reading)

"Yet more disturbing than our view of the asylum was the idiotic gaze that it seemed to cast back at us. Throughout the years, some persons actually claimed to have seen mad-eyed and immobile figures staring out from the asylum’s windows on nights when the moon shone with unusual brightness and the sky appeared to contain more than its usual share of stars." 

"And next to that room would be another room that was unfurnished and seemed never to have been occupied. But leaning against one wall of this other room, directly below the sliding panel, would be some long wooden sticks; and mounted at the ends of these sticks would be horrible little puppets."

"To make things worse, the setting sun would each day slip out of sight behind the asylum, thus committing our town to a premature darkness in the long shadow of that massive edifice."

from Dr. Locrian's Asylum

by Ligotti, Thomas

Sept. Snow

"Fast drives the snow, and no man comes this way;
The hills grow wintry white, and bleak winds moan
About the naked uplands. I alone
Am neither sad, nor shelterless, nor gray,
Wrapped round with thought, content to watch and dream."

from In November

by Archibald Lampman (One of my favourite poets)

Coot

"To hear at eve the bleating of far flocks,
The mud-hen's whistle from the marsh at morn;
To skirt with deafened ears and brain o'erborne
Some foam-filled rapid charging down its rocks
With iron roar of waters; far away
Across wide-reeded meres, pensive with noon,
 To hear the querulous outcry of the loon;
To lie among deep rocks, and watch all day
On liquid heights the snowy clouds melt by;
Or hear from wood-capped mountain-brows the jay
 Pierce the bright morning with his jibing cry.?"

from Comfort of the Fields

Archibald Lampman

"Back there at the beginning, as I see it now, my life was all time and almost no memory. Though I knew early of death, it still seemed to be something that happened only to other people, and I stood in an unending river of time that would go on making the same changes and the same returns forever.

     And now, nearing the end, I see that my life is almost entirely memory and very little time." 

from Jayber Crow

by Wendell Berry

Fall Reflections

"This land like a mirror turns you inward

And you become a forest in a furtive lake;

The dark pines of your mind reach downward,

You dream in the green of your time,

Your memory is a row of sinking pines."

from Dark Pines Under Water

by Gwendolyn MacEwen

Big Walk 2

"Live with me on Earth among red berries and the bluebirds

And leafy young twigs whispering

Within such little spaces, between such floors of green, such

figures in the clouds

That two of us could fill our lives with delicate wanting:"

from Live with Me on Earth Under the Invisible Daylight Moon

By Milton Acorn

The Big Walk

Labour Day weekend we went for a walk intending to visit an area next to the cabin where we can hear frogs in a wet spring. We found it, a dried slough but got turned around in the trees and the half hour walk became 2 1/2 hours as we walked past sloughs, neighbours' fields, the nearby lake, Helen's brothers place and the family farm. But we saw some lovely things and the rain held off until we got to the cabin.

"But rather as children of one common birth,

Discerning in each natural fruit of earth

Kinship and bond with this diviner clay.

Let us be with her wholly at all hours,

With the fond lover's zest, who is content

If his ear hears, and if his eye but sees;

So shall we grow like her in mould and bent,

Our bodies stately as her blessèd trees,

Our thoughts as sweet and sumptuous as her flowers."

from On the Companionship with Nature

by Archibald Lampman