No, this is not "a video." This is yet another attempt. I videotaped for nearly an hour today and will throw it all out. Posting a tiny clip just because.

I'm working at it; I'm not getting very far. There's another unsuccessful attempt that's better than this one that I may upload tomorrow, don't know yet.

I am learning that creating 'videopoems' is very hard to do!

I'd like to run the text as a line in the top third and have spent a good half hour looking to see how to do that without success!

Learn by doing - that's what this is!

Please forgive. (And the song, too. I'm not sure how to remove it, or if I can. It's from "Yumeji's Theme" on My Blueberry Nights.)

When I arose this morning, it was dark. As I drew open the bedroom curtains, the world outside was still.

Not one flake swirling, perhaps it passed us by.

In the tiny kitchen, I put on the kettle, and while that came to a boil, measured freshly ground coffee into the Bodum, and put away dishes that were dry in the rack.

Then I went into the livingroom and opened the curtains of five windows.

Between opening the curtains on the one side of the apartment and the other, not five minutes apart, the kettle still coming to a boil, the sky was swirling with blinding snow.

The storm moves with a sharp line across the horizon.


Walking my dog, snow pants, coat collar covering cheeks, only my eyes exposed, the lashing snow stings my eyelids.

In the park, the dog and I chasing each other, there is a lone man in a large navy blue parka and khaki pants.

His arms swirl slowly, one after the other, like warm Pacific ocean waves rolling. His body sways.

In the squalling storm he is gently performing tai chi.

When I pass and smile and say he looks beautiful, those oceanic movements, he says, "A storm is a great time to practice. In Halifax, a whole group of us did tai chi during snow storms."



The store where I bought that nylon coat is gone and it's extremely hard to find 4-paw, underbelly-covered coats for mid- to large-sized dogs and so this one is patched with copious amounts of duct tape inside which holds it together! If she doesn't wear it when there's packing snow hundreds of little balls of snow stick to her fur and cause her to shiver and then I have to bath her carefully at home to melt them off.


Keesha looks a bit like a red rocket chewing on a stick, but you can see the tai chi gentleman in the distance.

Certain books change your life. While I can't say I fully understand the novel, Pedro Páramo, by the Mexican author, Juan Rulfo, having now finished it, yes, I am different. Literature has possibilities I didn't know of before reading this book. Published in 1955, it began a tradition of writing. Rulfo is called the father of the literature of magic realism in South America. In the novel, those who are living and those who have died interweave in haunting ways. Time moves backwards or forwards, you can hardly tell. Characters appear and disappear like wind; memories are everywhere in the air. Everyone's death is foretold again, and again. Put it on your list. A must read.

For days I've been trying to get a little free time to film a videopoem in the late afternoon sun, but kids are afoot. I've hung fabrics over the bookcases that line the livingroom, am working on composing this piece. No idea, of course, where it's going or how it will turn out. Everything hinges on the performance, and that can't be pre-determined.

It's a tiny apartment, and you can see that I need to tidy shelves from the "teleprompt' (homemade with a black magic marker and newsprint from the art store! It works. Though I have discovered I can turn a computer into a teleprompt - for free - and so can do that with the netbook or my daughter's laptop. Whew.)



Looking at these images, I wonder if I should hang the painting you see by 'teleprompt' over the white sheets to the right of the chair? I'll try it tomorrow when I videotape. I thought to leave it white so I could project some other images on it, like Botticelli's Venus, or perhaps magnolia trees. If I videotape in the two dresses I thought of, and now with and without the painting, it's going to take awhile! And since I really don't know how to edit in Final Cut Express, ooh la!

In answer to that question, I work best alone, yes.

This made me laugh, something I'm not doing much of these days. I didn't exactly lie, who isn't "involved"? Though in actual fact I'm not involved with anyone and live the life of a monk (or monk-ess).

Omar wrote on your Wall:

"in network am find u and feelling u like me am egyptian man if u want make relationship with me tell me"

Brenda wrote on Omar's Wall:

"that's beautiful, Omar, thank you, but I am already involved"

Omar wrote on your Wall:

"really am very mad about that am egyptian man and if u want make relation with me send ur answer"

They float, clamour, collide, reach over each other, fold or open, radiate toward light.

A variegated mass of embodied thought. That greening poinsettia from last Solstice, Hanukkah, Christmas on the wooden overhand of the large old oak desk that came from a used furniture store on the other side of the country. Yes, this helps.

Feel what I'm feeling. Though sometimes I don't like what I feel about something and so block it until it drops like a dead leaf.

Or it's stronger than my not liking and I must integrate it into the mass reaching for the light.

perhaps the landscape isn't what we rest in, perhaps the landscape is a consequence of who we are

Imagine a love that cannot be tarnished,
not even by us.

We messed the beauty we had,
with our switchbacks.

I demonize you; you decry me as a crazed woman.
We wouldn't speak to each other; my fury unabated
fierce.

You were a sleazy cheat; I was self-righteous, indignant.

What is this love that continues despite our resistance?

Surely not modern love, with its questionings, choices.

But some ancient love, as old as the gold sun itself,
primal, spiritual, enfolding its mystery.

What is a love that cannot fail itself?

And how can we trust it?

It is strange not to be fighting you
like a bad obsession, like an addiction to street drugs.

To accept your irrefutable, irrevocable
presence in my life.

The forever clause,
it's caught us
darling.

one of those 'perched days,' like the birds on branches outside, it's fine, feels on the brink of something important, an expectant day

It's strange coming to the end of a story that's insistently told itself every day for a month.

I'd like to go on, but it's finished. Oh, perhaps another night of writing, at most.

It's not sad to come to the end, though having evenings to do nothing will seem strange, almost indolent, excessively free, you know what I mean.

I may even start going to bed at a reasonable hour again, instead of 2 or 3am, and do away with the weekend sleepfests.

What can I say about it? I've had a writer's block for about a year and a half in that nothing has flowed easily in that long. Yes, I do feel writing's been released in me again and that feels good and wonderful. Writing is flowing, the block's released, and I don't care what caused it or didn't.

The story is strange in that it is not autobiographical at all and doesn't have huge depth or any of the writerly slants I like to give things I compose.

The first day I sat down and wrote, without any prior notion of what to write.

Each day was like this. In fact, the less pre-determined, the more spontaneous, the better. I cleared my mind as in meditation and wrote from a fresh place. Often what occured surprised me, yet seemed logical in terms of the story that was telling itself.

The story, now that's another aspect of this process. The story reminds me of those long, boring dreams we have, ones that take lots of dreamtime, and if we remember them, relating them goes on and on and really we see very little point to them. They are not 'major' dreams. They are ordinary, every day dreams. Our little adventures, the ones submerged in our minds beneath the big transformational dreams, beneath the big thoughts and important occurences of our lives. What I discovered from writing this book is that an awful lot of things go on just below the conscious threshold. We are infinitely rich beings on whom the world makes a huge impact.

Yeah, there 's a fair bit of Eros in it. But not nearly enough. And towards the end it dies out altogether, but then the main character got married and has a family and etcetera.

But it was juicy in the telling up to the settling down.

I'm going to race through it cleaning up glaring inconsistencies, grammar, excesses, and if you convince me you'd be interested, and were willing to share your thoughts on the composition, by email, then I may add you to a version for readers and/or collaborators (for the purpose of editing typos only) who've expressed an interest in the manuscript.