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i feel like a stranger

When you’re drunk it’s so much fun—

Your stories don’t make sense.

An early fall has strung

The elms with yellow flags.

—Anna Akhmatova

*

“i feel like a stranger” says

the woman across the table

whose glass of wine is always

the first of the evening.

The second evaporates

in the mind before the swallow

of her “disappearing disease.”

*

The sun sets tonight

without navigational direction.

Our farmhouse turned

the wrong way round.

*

A frame of blue jays

*peck *peck *peck

– a beak of grain beyond

winter

a world away.

*

This year. The repetition compulsion. A question, How is X?” Or, “What time are you leaving?” This year. The repetition compulsion. A question, “How is X?” Or, “What time are you leaving?” This year. The repetition compulsion. A question, “How is X?” Or, “What time are you leaving?” This year. The repetition compulsion. A question, “How is X?” Or, “What time are you leaving?” This year. The repetition compulsion. A question, “How is X?” Or, “What time are you leaving?” This year. The repetition compulsion. A question, “How is X?” Or, “What time are you leaving?” This year. The repetition compulsion. A question, “How is X?” Or, “What time are you leaving?” This year. The repetition compulsion. A question, “How is X?” Or, “What time are you leaving?” This year. The repetition compulsion. A question, “How is X?” Or, “What time are you leaving?” This year. The repetition compulsion. A question, “How is X?” Or, “What time are you leaving?” This year. The repetition compulsion. A question, “How is X?” Or, “What time are you leaving?” (ostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenie

the world made new again

ostranenie (estrangement or defamiliarization) or strangification (the ugly translation)

a term gleaned from the beauty of the Russian ostranenie ostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenieostranenie to describe the poems I love

this woman

X

not a poem

but a plea

i feel like a stranger

a poetic turn of phrase

to myself

a question

this moment a simile for “slip”

unseasonable thaw

ice suspense

betweenfallingdown&catchingyourself

your ampersand hand, bluer

bruised w*enched

arm, broken

open, shoulder

(a verb that would dislocate

if anything were

still

in that place

you remember

the hip bone

connected

to the brain

*

44.4228° N, 78.3541° W 22/9/2018

*

(from my mother’s brain, an Alzheimer’s journal)

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A few thoughts on sleeping with the elephant after US midterms

While my beloved housemate joked about my intense interest ( “obsession” ) in the Trump midterm election, the thought of the US continuing with the unbroken authority of Trump was too much to bear. And I made myself ill sitting glued to the ups and downs of the midterms.

I followed the election as though it were an elephant. At the Washington Press Club on March 24, 1969, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau mused about living next to the United States: “It is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly or even tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, we can feel every twitch and grunt” of the giant pachyderm to the south.

Sometimes Canadians are sensitive to the elephant’s movements because elephantine GOP handlers advise our CONS on policy.

Sometimes our borders open to refugees fleeing the elephant’s Muslim Ban.

Sometimes our dreams fill with elephant wars that our government already shares in.

Sometimes our nuclear nightmares bloom in the elephant’s broken treaties and increased isolationism.

Sometimes the elephant generates an uptick in hate bigotry so misogynist and white supremacist outbursts and terrorism increase here too.

We are not without fault or error. As continental bedmates, we share the memory foam of history that spells out our collective historical wrongs as settler colonies and nation states forged in theft, exclusions and hierarchies.

But now we sleep with a neighbour turned fascist.

The US judicial system may be permanently twisted into the hateful scowl of the ultra right Xian misogynist Kavanaugh. But I am glad that this morning, the brute to the south has some enemies within who are empowered to change the course of government and hopefully bring him to account.

For all our sakes.

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Freedom of the City Admission Papers

1742

An ancient relative (10th great grandfather, if you believe the research) was a Lancaster stone mason. Remarkable title of this archive “Freedom of the City Admission Papers” – what capitalism and the price of real estate accomplishes in Vancouver and Toronto and other urban spaces.

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Obsessing

“Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.” Gertrude Stein (1923)

At the moment my life opens into a new set of possibilities, my new interest in geneology becomes a guilty pleasure. The long look back entices with the possibility of learning about, imagining, interrogating, and rewriting the history of my ancestors.

The unsettlement of a settler history refocuses the moment and on what is left out or forgotten, an erasure of convenience. The present comes into a different focal range as a consequence.

And the future – a catastrophic phantasm of climate change and extinction – disappear into the fog on a rear view mirror.