Christy > Recent Status Updates

With each circle and with each
divide I will too be there,
you will look over your shoulder;
and this too, we both know
will ache in the column
most clear and light.

spice scent of after-shave
Father wore. this room contracts.
a dime size, poem
I wrote for him, folded paper,
placed to his breast at
cremation.

Now, to write again
a new poem, freshly
singed, this smell
in air.

McCaul Street

no on.
street’s air, chill.

roadside piles of dried leaves
blown, scatter noisily
over pavement:

single leaf
carried up in wind; up

I enter,

thinking,
‘… died, white
in her.’

the moon is clear in this sky,
in my small heart.

you come into the pines.

in the North,
you are coming into
the pines, now.

you are north
of North Bay, now
jack, red, to white pines,
it’s fun picking them out.

snow, granular
like sugar;
night receding across the lines
light, daylight and now
and you are coming into
the brittle snap

cold -

a descent

mouth open
the altitude and
rock face,
to the dark water,
mirror of stars.

'life is a short patter before
the mongolling of death,' a curious traffic of words across
accident-tending city streets, long breaths of literate
exhaltation

reducing of being
from tangled thought's
strands feeling, breath
and line a
memory of touch
stone cancel
'd breath
to

everything falls away
to the edge
nothing is repeated.

each moment,
/ a woman, finely-dressed,
work perhaps,
walks by

/ a pigeon floats past a blue
parked car

breathless, a centre

where words gather,
every clever perception
falls away:
the centre is breathless

like brilliant light
crescent moon
fills the pool,

heart, pure and clear
is a paradise land.

She is past and onward walking down her future, holding envelope and leather bag under arm, holding hesitations which linger in a storage of air.

He wasn’t singing for you, or about you.
He had some other source of joy,
nothing to do with you at all -
he was an unknown man, singing in his own room, alone.
Why did you feel so hurt then, and so curious,
and also happy,
and also set free?

There is so much silence between the words

Here is our bond, in ordered by bone.
Perhaps love is how it feels
To breathe the same air.
All we have is time, is now.
Time takes us on.
How we are moved says everything
About what we are to each other
& what are we to each other
If not everything.

It will not shrink in size,
But lighten in load.
It lets us breathe.
The densest despair takes
Us to no ordinary joy.
Sometimes diving
Into the deep inside us
Is the only way
We rise above it.

Change is made of choices,
& choices are made of character.
Cling to whatever brings us to begin,
Even if it is formless as foam.
We keep hoping
For no reason at all.
For every reason we share.

I am wishing you rivers and quiet wherever you are.

He just holds me tight, smelling like home.

I remain at a distance looking at her.

we hadn't realised that the holiday we went on when we were seven still meant so much to us....; we'd not properly grasped how frightened we are of being abandoned by a particular friend (in the dream it didn't occur to them that we couldn't ski and they raced off down the mountain without us).

you can be loved apart from your achievements and merits, you can be precious to another person just because you exist. And this opens the strangest possibilities: your own capacity to be generously tender to another, even when they don't much deserve it. You may often feel quite far from love but, as you remember the warmest moments of childhood, you realize again how much you want and need it.

We can - right now- shut our eyes and travel into, and linger amongst, the very best and most consoling bits of our past.