To make Comments write directly to Jim at jimt@quixotic.ca
15
Sep
2020
At the end of Elvis Presley’s concerts, the venue’s management typically announced, “Elvis has left the building.” The phrase seemed appropriate in a different context.
one bag of garbage one load of laundry one plate on the table one side of bed unrumpled one datebook to compare one has lost its other one of us has left this place
Categories: Poetry
Tags: loneliness, death survival
26
Aug
It has been a long time since I felt like indulging in poetry – over six months. During that time, my wife Joan has died, and I have gone through some of many stages of grieving..
“How are you doing these days?” people ask.
“Just fine,” I reply. And usually I mean it. But sometimes I’m lying.
Daisies lupines and long green grass wave and waive and weave the meadows bright brush strokes splashed against
the sky. Savory sage bristles higher on the drier slopes. Roots reach down into the depths of dark. A sunless river runs through it, silent water seeping through millennia of limestone....
Tags: anger, undercurrent, explosions
18
Feb
My wife Joan has been handling the gradual decline of her life with astonishing composure. But occasionally, the veneer cracks, and I realize how fragile she is, physically and emotionally. I try to imagine myself into her experience, and can’t – inevitably, I drift off into my story, not hers.
So as once before, I’ve chosen the ruthless structure of classical haiku – three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables – to enforce some discipline on my monkey mind.
Walking on water
ice fractures under my feet
fall into nothing
Tags: dying, death, unknown
Jan
Here in the Okanagan we had nothing like the storms that have hit Newfoundland, or the American Midwest. But temperatures down to -20C, and snow that has fallen every day for more than a week, propelled my creative juices a little.
This is what musicians call “variations on the theme by…” Chopin or Mozart or…. In this case, the familiar Christmas carol by Christina Rossetti.
In the bleak midwinter
grey snow shrouds the ground
bare branches claw the sky while
overcast clouds crush spirits
Frosty wind made moan
arctic vortex strikes
a coiled serpent sinks
icy fangs into bare flesh....
Tags: Snow, winter, Christina Rossetti
4
n these months, as 12 years of Joan’s chronic leukemia move towards their inevitable conclusion, I have found it – as you may imagine – difficult to write poetry of any kind. And yet I feel that it is somehow important for me to try.
Something about the sheer sparseness of the haiku formula appealed to me: three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. The format leaves no room for maudlin meandering. I wrote about a dozen of them; after consulting with a pair of friends, four remain.
tides suck life away
anemones scrunch in pain
rocks rise wet with tears
Tags: