2008•05•30 ~ the touch
Last night I was at a poetry reading (at which a stunning number of bastard ghazals were read…who knew?!?!). I sat on the stairs at the ARTery, a great new venue for all things literary in Edmonton, and I was listening to the introductions when I felt something touch me on my right shoulder blade – turned around to see nothing. There was nobody on the stairs above me. It didn't feel sinister, nor did it feel joyous. It just was. It wasn’t a twitch, or a twinge, or a prickly reaction to the heat in that room. It was a touch. Isn’t that odd?
Eating a mango in mountain light
There are mornings when bird song serpentines
through traffic and arrives in this café – siskins, chickadees
sparrows – and if the light is right, and the air the right combination
of promised warmth and remaindered cool, I can drift in that bird sound –
to a place high-up in granite, a sun rise memory, sitting on stones
on the bank of a Mozart-string-quartet stream. A ceiling of fingered
pine filtering everything into a soft pale green.
There we were in YoHo, with four fine days behind us, in that cool morning,
eating a mango with a sharp knife. Cutting this dripping orange flesh
from the bone. This mango which made the trip with us, across
three mountain passes, wrapped in a sweater, as we moved ourselves
through snow and granite and sun, staggered under the weight of our packs
but happy. That mango, on that last morning, was sweeter, more delicious
than we could imagine.
1 Comment
1. Adam Snider had this to say: May 30, 2008 ~ 12:47 ~ #
Ghosts, man, ghosts.