Memory is a coordinating system. When you start losing your memory, you lose the coordinates of your mapping system, the one inside your mind that helps you negotiate all the terrains from the past to the present to the expectancies of the future. A coordinating system that is multi-dimensional, composed of inner and outer landscapes. Whose latitudes and longtidues are strands of narratives composed of interpretations of memories. Memory: what repeats itself. If a coordinate is touched, awakens, it opens out that area of the map and all the strands of narratives connected to it. Until it falls apart, senility, dementia, Alzeimer's, stroke, aneurysm, until the memories slip off the narratives like beads tumbling off a broken necklace.

She's lost the narrative of the streets. She can't remember where she lives, or the directions home. She thinks buildings long gone are still there. She can't remember what she said five minutes ago. What was a finely woven grid of electro-chemical impulses is sagging in places, torn, drifting, unable to complete its circuitry. Memory is unravelling and so is identity. But in a fog of forgetfulness that releases her.

_______________
At some point I stopped writing inspirational posts and let the deeper images emerge. My writing continues to deepen, at least I feel as if I'm diving into my undercurrents as I explore difficult terrain without covering it over with glossy patinas. Or perhaps I still do. Who knows? I let the images emerge whole and just polish them a bit in the grammar and in the ways that the metaphors are constructed. This piece is about my mother. It's a very difficult situation.

Should I stay, or move on?

This question central in many facets of my life presently. Yet even the new vistas we explore become continuations of the old issues from which we cannot escape. The larger ones, that are like the song we continually sing of our lives. I am always ready to move on; staying becomes a challenge that really is the musical score I dance. Leaving is easy, staying is hard, and knowing this doesn't make it any easier. There is nowhere to go anyhow. All new scenarios become reflections of all the old scenarios until you understand that you cannot escape yourself. If you cannot escape from yourself you might as well relinquish resistance to whatever it is in the present circumstance that you want to leave. Life certainly has its own logic but it is most irrational in its insistence on keeping you on your path of challenges no matter whether you stay or move on!

Touch

In the steam, you disappear. Monsieur, I feel your presence only by knowing. You sit before me until you vanish; hot clouds dissolve us into vapour. Your strong sensuality, like Zeus, yet you become a phantom. Until I am alone. When the hot breath of air presses in on me your hands rest on mine, our knees touch. Two figures of naked skin streaming as the steam subsides. It was in the room you built, this womb of steam from which we emerge wet and hot into the cold air of the welcoming night.

Rapture

How deeply
the unfolding
through the water
of the blessings of
our bodies of rapture.

We are clothed in the streaming truth of
the night sky, its melting snow.

An offering
to fire and transparency.

In the hot springs as the clouds uncover
the full moon of the New Year
you plunge into me
while I dance in the water,
surging, volcanic.

Waves of heat
absorb us

Into an immensity that has no name.

In the creative presence of sensuality
our union effaces the conditions of union.

The essence of passionate love
is mystical union.

We become
a writing of love.

Transfigured.

Rupture

Do we imagine the depths of each other
differently?

Were we Shiva and Shakti dancing?
Our own Lucía Y El Sexo
under the moon in the water?
You kiss my breasts as I float
before you, I massage your floating
rapture,
and how many times do we
undulate?
How continuously
do we hum ecstasy
in the silence of the Winter's night?
Your final surge
rising, fertile, flowing
light, filling the lucid
darkness,
honey of
delirium.

We offer each other such
pleasure.

Afterwards, the next day,
driving me home, you said
you wanted to be clear,
that you love me
but weren't in love
the magic of transformation
absent.

You want your life to change,
that's what love does.

Your New Age
speaking
cliches
clashed
with your
strong loving
and a year later
I received a letter
from your other lover
about your nights with her
filling the hours
around ours, as well as
the others you had
slipped into bed with.

It was never
a question of love.

Portal of Breath

There are words I must speak, though surely never will. You call me across the expanse. I kiss your closed eyelids. I lie over you softly, breathing with you. With each wave of breath, like sea foam, I cover you with a silent resounding mantra, I love you. Even while you call me to you, you do not hear the rippling of my heart. It is when you are asleep and I lie with you that I hear the fullness of the silence between your breaths. You are the full intoxicating sea-garden in repose and I am calmly delirious in the scent of the night. In the morning you have forgotten everything; even the savouring. How do we "translate the silence of the real encounter between the two of us?"¹

Relation of

Monsieur, you can't be possessed.

One can only come into a relation of openess with you.

You leave, and yet always return. What you dismiss, you affirm.
Yesterday was no; today is yes. The horizon floods like continuous
Kabbalistic light.

______
¹Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life, trans. by Elizabeth Lowe and Earl Fitz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p.43.
_____
for Kaj Devai, from the manuscript, EnTrapped WOR|l|DS, 2006, in which he is listed as a reader of this book in my Google Docs, and in 2007 he accessed and printed on his printer and read apparently a few times, and then had me read this poem to him over the phone in 2008, and agreed that in this writing I should tell the truth.

After dancing for hours to the beat of 30 or 40 ecstatic drummers on African drums, walking home past groups of revellers and noisy happy nightclubs, near dawn, I took this to celebrate the New Year with you...

During this festive time of the birth of the light, of the New Year, wishing you pure magic and joy, prosperity and success.

That the dance of impermanence flows with agility, grace, openess, love.

Touch

In the steam, you disappear. I feel your presence only by knowing. You sit before me until you vanish; hot clouds dissolve us into vapour. Your strong sensuality, like a sensate Zeus, yet you become a phantom. Until I am alone. When the hot breathe of air presses in on me your hands rest on mine, our knees touch. Two figures of naked skin streaming as the steam subsides. It was in the room you built, this womb of steam from which we emerge wet and hot into the cold air of the welcoming night.

Rapture

We are clothed in the streaming truth of
the night sky, its melting snow.

Do I have anything to say? I wander around feeling a relief from the pressure of writing, a pressure which was so intense for awhile. I don't have to continually create what I'm living in writing; I don't have to reach for metaphors that inadequately embody my experience, imaginary or otherwise.

Only I do.

This I cannot escape from. Every moment is writing.

The world I interact with is composed of lights and planes and shadows, of sounds and textures, of feelings and thoughts, of people and events. Every moment is intimate.

The life that I live demands that I read it continually. That I be agile, open, dancing. That I maintain a strong sense of self while being loving, caring, gentle, giving. That I find where the light froths and bubbles with incandescence. That I fill my days with laughter inbetween the tears and furies.

Last night, amidst the usual family crises that occur over the holiday season, with many thoughts about the way we compose ourselves for ourselves and for each other, I thought, seriously, at least half of us are quite mad, barely rational, while the other half are caretakers, angels who hold us together.

But, then, I don't want to be like that, thinking those thoughts, and so I swept all such considerations away, leaving my mind a great expansive ocean. Meditation keeps me balanced. Always the vast emptiness. The silent bliss. Surely we are each everything, dark irrationalities and the stuff of radiance. All six billion of us. So toasting this mad, crazy ravage of love that we are on the earth!

While I don't think I'm still 'in' the writing that cohered around themes and that collected itself into a 'parcel,' my writing's changed. Who can stay the same?

My first husband accused me of changing every year. Ah, mid-70s?

Do we transform into different versions of ourselves as we age through the years?

It's the brain cells that are most magnificent, the way they are born, live, die and somehow pass on their information, their memories, to the new crop, and they do this continually throughout our lives.

All the cells in the body maintain the structure of the whole of us by keeping their processes going.

But transmitting memory,
and who knows how, is a feat, a miracle.

Is this why the brain is perhaps structured like a grammar? With syntax and a lexography? So that it can write itself into the future?

When you've finished a first draft... the months that it's taken, when things were rolling, or not, but moving, and then it's over. There's a lull. A let-down. An emptiness. I'm not sure what it is, perhaps like a mini-grieving? One should be happy that the end has come and the rewriting can begin, and yet, the high is gone. I don't know what that is.

It's like there is sand or something in my eye. So I'm typing with my eyes shut. Blindly groping in the darkness behind my lids, talking to you, my readers, whoever you are...

There are changes in my life, and more coming. I really can't explain what they are. Movement, but also settling in. Establishing directions for the near and far future. Odd, obverse things that we intuit but find it hard to speak of.

An image of myself spinning slowly while my life unwinds through time...

I'm here, touching the keys, staying connected.

But I feel as if I'm floating on the other side of the star system.

Yesterday I took my dog on a very long walk to Mountain Co-op and there is a small blister in the very centre of my foot, in front of the arch. And when I stand and press down I can feel the little dome and it's like a homing signal reminding me to touch down, to feel the ground.

My life operates on trust.

Sometimes I'm winging it somewhere across the galaxies though.

Why not float in space for a bit?

I was watching, The Lover, the movie of Marguerite Duras' novel, and while it's beautifully rendered somehow it lacks the poetry of her writing even though there is a voice-over (in an English accent, which doesn't work for me, but ah well). She wrote that book, it's autobiographial, when she was 70!

There was a lot of lovemaking and my daughter came in and so I turned it off. Now that she's in her room writing in her journal and drawing (oh, we are so alike!) I wonder if it's worth watching to the end? It's like, okay, look at the scenery, feel the heat, and there was no more to add. The book is beautiful. Her writing is stunning, as it always is. No-one like Duras.

But I am babbling!

I knew my posts were going to change, but I didn't know how to come back to them.

xo

Still one more piece to write that will complete my little prose poetry book, my rhizomatic text, which I may or may not post. It's a Monsieur piece and you might just have to buy the book in 50 years when it's published to see how it ends. Sighs, and laughs.

Monsieur is an amalgam of the men I've loved/love... you know that!

But even amalgamated Monsieurs like secrecy.


For the last month I've been working at a very busy central switchboard at the executive level in a corporate bank, only a 7 hour day, but exhaustion! The board rooms, the expensively appointed dining rooms, the clients, meetings, parties. In a fish bowl. Asked always to wear a suit, be polished. Come home late, 8pm after walking my doggy, too tired to think, let alone talk or be with my daughter or help her with difficult homework assignments. Not to complain, it's money for gifts, and hopefully to move to a larger apartment (I pay rent and storage each month so can afford a better place just need the last month's rent, which this job should provide).

I was writing a book, though, when I accepted the assignment. Let me tell you, with will power, anything's possible. Almost all of the book, with the exception of the first bit, was written during coffee breaks or on lunch: work like crazy with calls piling up on the phones and then work like crazy on breaks writing in Second Cup, or one of the exquisitely appointed rooms high in that bank tower overlooking the lake. Enter whatever I wrote that evening when I was too tired to think or do much more than move my fingers over the keyboard.

Yesterday I took sick. Hot flushes and cold spells, perhaps pushing myself too hard. I came home early, went to bed. Today I've stayed in my jammies, resting, sleeping, warding off a sore throat, the flu. I just finished a 2.5 hour meditation that I did mostly on my back and feel greatly cleared. Bliss is restoring itself in me.

In a day or so when I recoup, I hope editing opens up. I just found out that I'm at the job until the end of the year, which is very good news.

It's blessings all round.