the chunks of snow that fly off needles, like bits of coconut meat flying from whitened fir trees in a northern oasis

-
A River
of Stones

scooped white dragon fruit, grated and tossed, swirling the night wind, and the black seeds, invisible, smacking my face, coat, hands

_
A River
of Stones

                                          

Keesha, a Springer Spaniel (field dog type, bred to run all day, a high energy dog), and Tigger, who is Tiggy, or sometimes Tiggles, a black cat with some white markings (a thin and long cat with a tail long enough for him to catch).

Keesha was born August 25, 1999. Tiggy was born March 4, 1997. Some dates are too important to forget.

Keesha's bed blanket is many layers thick. Because it's snowy outside, it's even more layered than usual - beginning with a waterproof crib blanket, maybe 4 layers of fleece, a down baby comforter, a halofil comforter, and 2 or 3 towels. Don't ask. She likes it soft. An aging dog.

Tiggy *never* sits near Keesha, and *never* has anything to do with her. Yet he came, and slept like this, on Keesha's dog bed (that's on the bed, yes, yes, I know) for a long time.

Snap, snap with the iPhone.


                                          

Secrets, 20.5cm x 25.5cm, 8"x10", India inks, archival pen inks, graphite, coffee spill, uploaded January 11, 2011 - a doodle, though I did make a stop and start voice recording as I was writing the words (you can hear the pen scratching on paper in some of it). I'll see about hosting the recording somewhere, and transcribing it I guess. I don't think this piece is finished yet, though maybe it is.

If you click on the drawing, it'll open to a larger size in a new window. It's later, and I've made an .mp3. You can listen. The words are in the drawing, all of them and I'm reading them to you via a 'voice memo' on my iPhone as I'm writing them.

Raw drawing; raw recording. No performance or finesse here. I had to try this once, and once is enough truly.



Not sure how listenable... recorded while composing the writing in the drawing, and you can hear the pen scratching, me flipping pages to look for written images, and the slowness. Voice following the fingers. Reading what's being written, rather than composing out loud. Unable to post as is, the flat voice, so I had to. Bamboo Music, a background.

Brenda Clews, words, voice, mix; background music, Bamboo Music's 'Last Flute,' a free mp3 download on http://music.download.com.

                                          

the green wing of an angel, olive lines cross-hatching into branches, the slush of salted sidewalks

_



[the image came first]

A River
of Stones

                                          

                                          

Last night, in -17C wind chill, I walked some of my dog's favourite routes - a fairly large off-leash park with small hills, a school that's deserted late on winter nights, and took photos with my iPhone.

When I came home, I played in Photoshop. What new aspects to the shot can appear with various filters and colour manipulation intrigues me, and often triggers poetic response.

I offer more-or-less 'before' (with a little license since the originals were dark and grainy) with 'after.' All images evoke their own stories. Click on each for larger versions.

Of the two above, the one on the left looks like an empty, closed building late at night. The same image manipulated makes it seems alive, perhaps the location of a party event, or at least some kind of prophetic vision happening in the night.

The two images of the tree by the road, its boughs lined with snow, a tiny waning crescent of a moon in the sky, surprised me. Firstly, how the snow looks like a river flowing by the tree with the shadow of the trunk appearing as if a reflection in flowing icy water, and then the green and blue image which fit strangely to my image for River of Stones yesterday. What amazed me, working in the midnight air at my computer, was that the tree, though bare in winter nakedness, with different colour manipulations suddenly bloomed as if in richer seasons of leaf.

...it was a dawn of phosphorescent algae, coming in from the ocean, drifting overland,


a green sun
hung in icicles.





A River
of Stones

like white fruit drifting from the sky, like a swirl of cold blossoms that hide patches of hardened blackberry ice

_
[some of the crystals of snow falling were huge, clumped together, like chunks of coconut, reminding me of falling white fruit, and the second image of a swirl of cold blossoms should have come first, blossoms before fruit, but that's not how the image composed itself and I had no energy to resist with insistence on some modicum of poetic logic - but I had already fallen in love with the image 'blackberry snow' -no idea where it came from- how freshly falling billowy snow tastes to my synaesthetic seeing... later in the day I was able to re-assert some poetic order to the image and called it properly 'blackberry ice' referring to the black ice on which we can slip, skid, fall, tumble...

the image sounds like a fancy fruity cocktail? I wish...]

A River
of Stones

                                          

A bath lit by flame. Candles whisper at the edges of the water. And a singer whose song arises from the caves of the earth rising up through the steam.

_
[A host of candles. Tealights placed around the edge of the bath. Lisa Gerrard's The Silver Tree (scroll down to find it).]

A River
of Stones