Twilight Liturgy

Twilight Liturgy

The roar of a distant highway
intrudes like a timid visitor,
peeks between mullioned fields,
then asserts with the cough of a semi.

Elsewhere, a freight train,
as if only just alive,
shoots a warning complaint
of weary, forseen disagreement.

The crickets stall on a false start,
the promise of coming chirrups
that sputtered and choked;
it is yet too cold for their throttling hymn.

The night begins its liturgy
in low, muttered phrases of song.

Thunder's Ghost

Thunder’s Ghost

By peace and obscuring walls,
by field and forest halls,
by silence of a sacred type;
your voice, lost in the muskeg,
calms the building squall.

Your breath, in the morning,
leaves me low beneath the weight of oceans.
Your heart, a heavy Albertan sky,
that hides me under stone and loam and silent water.

Yesterday, in the rain, we were
the low sky and the earth,
eager for the touch of current.
Today, the storm, unbroken, passed
and we, by token, formed of stone,
deny the thunder’s ghost.

Estuary Hymns

Estuary Hymns

When summer drops, out of the green Spring folds

and scatters in a flight of waking bees.

When owls rise in warm twilights

to add their baritone praise to the chorus of growing pains

just behind the dark of every tree –

In this spot, at this time, on this night

(no heron mars your sight) you know

what lovers know when their temples flush,

or crickets when their ankles rub,

or the night when it sees,

or the sea when the tide – swells potent to the moon.

Bottling

Listening to Jackson C. Frank - Blues Runs the Game

   On our journey through the American Southwest, on the eve of the wedding day, I sat with two friends on our motel-room balcony. We smoked our pipes and talked about life; one of us strummed on his guitar and at one point I shared a poem I had written; a bottle of homemade mead was passed around; and the crickets chirruped in the warm Phoenix air. I will not easily forget that.
   Last night we bottled the Stout and the IPA. There were just three of us in the kitchen, listening to music, sipping wine, and doing the good work of bottling. It is good to be with people. It is good to have friends to sit with. I am thankful for the good grace of friendship in my life.
  
Listening to Lightning Dust - NPR Tiny Desk Concert

   This morning at St. Herman of Alaska Orthodox Church, I became a catechumen. If you would like to know why, please ask me. I will do my best to put it into words. When the brief ceremony was over, the priest said, "welcome home" to me. Maybe that explains it better than anything else I could say.
   A year ago, I would not have understood myself. Five years ago I would hardly have recognized myself. Ten years ago, I would have greeted myself as a stranger.
   This morning at St. Herman's, a kid ran up to me and headbutted my leg. I was confused until he proclaimed, "I'm a Pachycephalosaurus", at which point I understood him perfectly. I understood because I am the same person now that I was when I was five years old and I loved dinosaurs so much that I wanted to become a paleontologist. You might not recognize me shrouded in a beard and smelling like I just walked out of an incense shop, but if you were to sit and talk to me over a glass of homemade wine, in five minutes you would find yourself talking to the person that you had always known. I still think Pachycephalosaurus is flipping sweet.

Will

Juggernaut

Listening to Frank Black - Ole Mulholland

My literate consumption behaves somewhat like a large, concrete, hexagonal block. It seems to be tremendously difficult to get rolling. In fact, I frequently need extensive help to get it to do so, particularly after I have exhausted myself at the task for some time. Once rolling, of course, assuming that the block is on a flat or downward sloping plane, it will continue to roll, juggernauting anything that stands in its way. The block will continue in this way until it reaches the necessary upward slope. At which point, the block slows and stops, refusing to move for some time, until another kind soul helps me to get it rolling again. Actually, that sounds more like my car, Marlin, stuck in Red Deer this past summer. Ah well, such is life.

Navigations

Listening to The Breeders - Night of Joy + We're Gonna Rise

We have come to the point in the conversation where a resolution seems imminent. I see how these tangled problems and hypotheses could have a conclusion, but then I see that they all end in the same place. All these interactions and relationships of joy and necessity can find a common point of termination as this year fades into the coming year. I told my boss that I was moving on in January, I told my roommate that I was moving at the end of the month, I am currently finishing the final papers of my degree, I am tenuously considering moving closer to the Orthodox Church. How much of your life is wrapped up in those four things; how many of your relationships depend on them? There are a lot of things that carry through; I am moving in with some of my friends from Trinity and I still have the same family, but the fundamental character of much of my life is currently in flux. What are my navigations for the coming year?

Listening to Patrick Watson - Big Bird in a Small Cage + Where the Wild Things Are

Now I'm sitting in my friends' kitchen, in the middle of the night, eating chocolate, contemplating Pascal, and trying to think of ways to win someone. Trying desperately to remember what love is. Trying to remember if I feel love for anyone. Because sometimes, the way my heart beats, I forget. It sounds melancholic, but right now I'm writing up a playlist entitled "Melancholy" so it might be honesty. While I'm being honest, I'll reiterate (as I so often do) that I have a tremendous hope. While it would seem that I am tossed, with random uncertainty, on the ocean of life; in truth, I rest certainly in the hands of God, wherein lies all possibility; it is the world that tosses like a tempest around me. What a contradiction am I! And how can we ignore the soul when such inner contradiction is present?

Listening to Peter Bjorn & John - Up Against the Wall

So these creatures that we have become, that toss and turn in desperate uncertainty, can find no home (no rest).

 Wild Roots

Our wild yearning and our hands
feeling in the dust for supple earth
our shoulders borne with weights
our feet seem raw or wrecked with callous
from beating down to the South and West 

The wild horns that push from our skulls
the scales and fur that tear our clothes
the burning tears we try our
level best to ignore

If we could feel the sun
as it glares upon each violent turn 
if we could hear our hearts
hammering like nails into our chest
if we could feel our scales fall
 from eyes and see what really bides

Our features would deepen in
each appropriate line
our burdens would weigh no longer
on our straightening back
our feet would mend in gentle skin
and strong roots would form
grow down towards the water
we would be still then
above the flowing water

The Hollow Sky; The Hollow Sky

   I started on a new writing book, earlier in this semester. I got maybe six pages in, with some revelatory poems and ideas, and then I lost it. I lost it while I was traveling to the airport to go to Barrie ON. and when I returned to the West coast I had lost the impetus to write. I tried a couple of poems on the new typewriter and then I just stopped, consumed by the busyness of school, work, life. That isn't a great way to live, not writing. So I've been dancing on the edges of writing poetry again. I've been sketching and creating; I've been writing down my thoughts. I feel as though I am pregnant with words, but they have not come to term yet.
   The Undercurrent is entering a new phase of it's existence. It is growing beyond a singular vision, which is frightening and beautiful. We are making a blog called Undercurrent B-Sides, which is something I never thought we were going to do. We have been swirling in the maelstrom of controversy surrounding Trinity's impending CLAC unionization. At some point, when you begin to actualize ideas, they interact with the "other" and come back to you changed. You may not recognize what is coming back to you; you may be confused and angry; you may try to keep what you have made contained, keep the vision singular. But that is death. We tie up our own identity in the things we make, and when that changes, we feel that identity threatened. But since when is our identity self-contained; we negotiate it with the other. So we allow our identity to be pliable. Eventually this project will eclipse us and move beyond us, but until that point, we allow a part of ourselves to be negotiated with the "other". And that is life.