Imagination
transforms cracks to stems,
makes steel circles bloom.
Rain-softened by time,
lock opens to soulful green
guests it once denied.
Imagination
transforms cracks to stems,
makes steel circles bloom.
Rain-softened by time,
lock opens to soulful green
guests it once denied.
Friendship knits us close,
but bedside attentions hasten me closer,
find me fishing for fabric
below the blades of your shoulders
to snap the gown together back to front,
then fasten bracelets to rock-n-roll wrists
and fold a blanket over your feet.
***
Fully tucked from chest to toes,
you hold up hands as teachers
who tell a story of siege:
fingertips furrowed by siphoned fluids,
nails shrunken by a fungus that profits
from sapped immune system,
vasculitis scattering its scarlet marks,
and the sober port implanted in your left arm.
***
When the dinner tray arrives, you check it out,
delighting in rosy chunks of melon,
calling them sexy and inviting me to share.
This prompts glad rummage in a dresser on wheels
for a fork nestled in cache of butter pots
and sweetener sachets, pink and white.
***
As I boost mattress-firmness from 5 to 7,
you describe the Olympian efforts needed
to centre your body in bed,
the triumph of standing for 15 seconds,
pain searing hips and legs, shooting like lightning,
your broken back screaming No.
***
Though suffering torments untold,
you nevertheless look outwards,
still notice a new haircut,
praise my purple glasses, and accuse me of flirting
with the Robo Coffee Bot in the lobby.
I love you for not giving End-stage Liver Disease
the right to devour your delicious banter
or eclipse the firestorm of your charm.
This to me is valour, this to me is grace.
***
Yes is the answer to your request
to read the poem where your father
lifts you into the pony’s saddle at the local fair.
At the sound of this verse, confinement
and paralysis dissolve, inciting tears to fall
as you say, I can feel my father here. He’s here.
***
Held by this truth, grief and love saturate me
throat to chest, sensing how family and time return
to encircle you with solace from age six to sixty,
never divided, never abandoned, never lost.
Memories of my own father’s smile melt composure,
and I dash to the pantry to fill paper cups with half ice,
half water, hoping the coolness will last after I leave.
***
On my return to Bed 2, you ask if I smell bowel movement
and buzz the front desk to state, I need a change.
At the sight of nurses with fresh bed pads,
I step into the hall while they clean your ass, crotch, and thighs,
careful of rashes, mindful of pain.
***
I sit with you a little longer,
and soon dark brown eyes begin to close
and re-open at shorter and shorter intervals,
sleep stealing the ends of sentences.
Unsettled at first, I come to respect
the eloquence of drowsiness
that tells me time to go and let you rest.
***
Another visit is planned,
but I never see you again
nor hear you harmonize
with Free Falling on the radio,
lyrical instincts unbroken,
deep voice dancing into curtained corners,
soulcraft that shatters
silent windows with its flight.
Right cheek warmed by friendly planks,
I sprawl beneath a chosen window
that spills its sunshine on my lips,
ladles honey heat over tilted nape.
I roll from side to side, waking combs of beeswax
and provoke the floor to creak an invitation:
“You can ask me anything.”
***
Unsure, I glance to the mirror for answers,
but it speaks only shame, does not listen.
I fling away my glasses, and the judge dissolves to Wisdom:
examining my body is only one way to experience it.
***
Rising yesward on bolder knees,
I study the high ceiling,
ten tall windows with fans whirring on their sills,
the fire exit platform threaded with vines –
and this choir of generous portals shouts
“Get Your Freedom Here!”
and bids me stand.
***
Now on my feet, I allow shoulders and wrists and thighs
to shake off dutiful belittlements —
the should’s, the sorry’s, the shrinking silences —
and let them be shed and shredded on the dance floor
somewhere south of broken.
***
For once, my hips don’t apologize for their curves
and they dare me leap from mountain bridge
to thunder-soaked river, where I wrestle
with dangerous currents I’ve shunned out of fear.
Surrender to the river tugs me wild open, cracking my thick shell,
pushing, pulling, having me rolling like a beast
who slaps mud on her chest and stamps her hooves
and doesn’t care who thinks she needs a cage.
***
Being here in this dancing river
feels like returning to the fire-girl I was,
burning up caution, sadness, and grief in a healing fever,
reveling in electrical storms that crackle along my bones,
flourishing a purple cape, tasting the salt of delectable effort,
spine loose, palms grateful, instinct hushing intellect,
feet singing over noise of the brain.
Here in this movement, I inhabit my body, my rightful home.
I am a ruined barn, empty but smelling of ancient hay. I sit in a lost valley, no longer a shelter nor part of a living farm. I used to be warmer, to glow orange from lanterns on February mornings, to retain animal heat. Now my shadows fill in their outlines, brief flashes from the highway my only relief.
I am tired of being a relic, a rural ghost who attracts photographers from the city. Their insulting attention reminds me that I am just a skeleton of economies past, a symbol of romantic decay.
All my sounds are whispers and echoes now, where once I heard grunts, shouts, whinnies, cries of pain and hunger. It’s so quiet now. Ruin is quiet. My unsteady walls feel dry, brittle, so straw-like that one warm hand on my door would set me ablaze. I welcome this fire, this sweet extinction into ashes.
When it rains, I feel the blessed water soaking my beams, splashing through broken panes, swelling the hayloft floor so that I forget my ladder is broken and my stalls now shells that once held a family’s wealth and sustenance. I miss being whole. I miss being real. I miss the animals I used to protect.
One fall day,
a logical gully
guides me down the slope to Highland Creek.
My steps disturb a creature
who escapes under the cover of leaves,
defining a ribbon of movement
that lifts the rustling shelter as it flees.
With anonymous grace,
the animal testifies to life unseen but more real than this poem,
fusing threads of instinct without pause.
One summer day,
I cycle home from the college on Ashtonbee Road,
thoughts distracted from the simple path
that curves by the banks of Taylor Massey Creek.
I pass a tall gathering of yellow grasses
that erupts with red winged blackbirds.
They fly straight up from the reeds,
rising in a startled mass of flapping.
Like verses that nest unknown within us,
it takes a sudden whoosh of wheels or wings
to show life at its roots, a wild relentless freshness
that we cage with fear.
One spring morning,
dark green shoots
grow from my breasts, pushing up, pushing out.
Cautiously, I tug a shoot from my left aureole
and a curly leaf unfurls in my hand.
I tug more leaves and yet more leaves,
shocked by the secret depth of my roots.
Raw soil spills over my fingers,
and one last strong yank
yields a golden onion.
My vegetable offering
hints at the body’s food, the push of streams,
breath of reeds, and the resilient moss veiled by fallen leaves.
I believe in succulent roots
that answer winter prayers of the famished
who trace patterns of desire on the waiting Earth.
Your anguish is a force, a separate soul that cries out for solace and remedy. A thousand words of comfort rise from the ache in my throat, but they cannot restore the beloved person who abandoned you. Into this void, my voice may drop like a stone.
It hurts to see you cry, face in your hands, unable to sleep, eat, or even feel real. Dizzy from the shock of sudden desertion, each second refuses to pass, remains incomplete. Your injured heart has lost its rhythm and your movements seem leaden, as if masses of melted tar are dragging your arms down every time you lift a glass.
While your body slows to glacial time, the brain accelerates as it struggles to comprehend this alien reality that cannot be happening but is happening anyway. Like a never-ending game of tether ball, your thoughts spin faster and faster into smaller and tighter circles, shackled by panic to the iron fact of loss.
If I had the power to heal you, I would gather the softest banana leaves in creation and soak them thoroughly in shea butter. Then I’d wrap them round your head to cool and cradle your brain, drawing out the poison of self-punishing thoughts, soothing the pain, and smoothing the wrinkled loops of endless tormenting questions.
For your heart-wounds, I offer a poultice composed of clay, feathers, and ferns to press against your chest as if in prayer. The heart-poultice cannot mend the cracks, but it honors them with love. When the minerals and soft coverings touch your skin, they ease the hurt, giving you precious minutes of relief.
And for your whole body, a pool has been sunk into the cursèd room that most haunts you with memories. The pool is not very wide — the width of three ordinary bathtubs — but it is fathoms deep. The sides and bottom of the pool are made of peat-black marble, turning the water so dark that it gathers you into oblivion. When you sink into this personal well, the only things you experience are the present sensations of cool healing water, your steady breath, and the kind red beating of your heart.
(Thank you Sean McDermott for making the recording! For a physical or digital copy of Visualizations for Heartbreak, please contact Catherine Raine at cafrinie@yahoo.ca).
Once the reality of betrayal shatters the numbness, your rage awakens molten creativity and revives the blacksmiths and glassblowers of old. Your curses blast the forge and explode in the fire, where they transform into a glowing orb with fierce swirls of crimson, orange, and yellow.
The fiery globe is too hot for human hands to touch, and curious viewers must back away from its dangerous fragility. But when the orb cools, when it settles into itself, thousands will flock to this glass masterpiece, magnetized by its primal beauty.
The rage orb electrifies viewers and powerfully connects them to the anger of our hurting world, for this beautiful object has been forged and burned and spun from the rawest materials on earth: the fury of the wronged and the anguish of the betrayed.
When the orb is tilted at different angles, flashes of violence appear, open wounds that seethe beneath the fragments of a shattered heart. Critics may find your art disturbing or claim it contains glints and flints of revenge, but I say, “No, not traditional revenge or actual violence. Only the satisfaction that comes from refusing to bury pain inside. It takes courage to harness anger’s explosive energy and hurl it into a new form, sowing seeds of fire into grief’s deep furrows.”
Although the orb’s creation has not exorcised anger for good, it has given you some peace. Its presence is a testament to the value of authentic feelings, no matter how uncomfortable, sharp, or bitter. As you navigate this strange land of loss, you bring rage with you, for it is a righteous guide that divines underground springs of truth.
(Thank you Sean McDermott for making the recording! For a physical or digital copy of Visualizations for Heartbreak, please contact Catherine Raine at cafrinie@yahoo.ca).
After the storm, spindles of ice turn a length of driftwood into a sparkly comb, and a forsaken branch nearby bears ice down to the stone.
Anchored in a resolute stance between jutting shards of rubble, repeated lashings of water and freezing spells have burdened the wooden frame. However, a thousand gale-driven waves have not been able to shake it from its moorings.
A sculpture carved in adversity at the edge of the lake, it resembles a silent harp resting on its side. With strings ever more shellacked as winter deepens, the harp seems both haunted and haunting, a formerly melodic rib cage benumbed by cycles of fear and grief. And as the storms intensify, layers of icy bulk cling more fiercely to the body: a freeze frame of memory rendered visible.
Come the melts of spring, the icy coat dissolves and bare driftwood testifies to the hardship it has endured — rough exterior sanded, an extremity sheared from its host.
Cracked and forgotten, the harp-shaped branch may be flotsam, but it is not an useless instrument. With her strings missing, she is all the more open to the beyond. She still stands and bathes in sparkles. She still sings.
At the freezing point,
wild west wind and lake spray
mantle the trunk, marzipan on a rich cake.
Thickened ice highlights the outer layer
then darkens to charcoal-purple,
legacy of the long drift from forest
to midnight bonfires on the beach.
As it salves driftwood burns,
ice defines the border of a helmet
whose irregular edges soften the dark wedge,
trace translucent deltas that flow,
river to ocean evolution
from eye of shark’s prow
to fearful mammal below.
As I nestle between lakeside boulders, drifted ice drapes me in a veil. Successive layers of frozen water etch a daguerreotype portrait of arrested lava, once-fluid anger trapped by a season so heavy and cold.
Behind my nape, the thickness of the ice is greater, and swirls of gray-blue shadows entwine in smoky tendrils with hints of ash. From my chin, crystal shards have grown into a beard that flows from the seam where my edges meet the lake’s beach below.
The ghostly poncho that almost completely glazes me has left only an egg-shaped tonsure melted by the sun. In a few weeks, spring’s solar ascent will fully dissolve my obscuring cloak, but for now I am content with the small oval that lies exposed to the elements.
One day soon, an exhausted bird will warm its feet on my crown. Resting after miles of migration, my guest will sit for a spell all hunkered down into its feathers. As it turns its beak towards the water, it will flex its wings to the humming thwack of high winds that scour my quiet skin into forgiving sand.
Unexplained on the wide sidewalk, the door stands upright with the aid of two wooden stands that grip its bottom rail a few scrapes above the absent threshold.
Though the door no longer opens or shuts, the stout pin of one hinge remains, partly encircled by a barrel of the same rusty vintage. Cracked layers of thick white paint on the panels accent the unhinged condition.
Without a hinge to hitch portal to solid frame, access to an interior is lost. For a hinge is the servant to movement. It facilitates welcomes and good-byes. It swings the dancers, defines transitions, provides an exit.
This displaced door reveals the crucial role of hinges, for entrance to beloved places relies on a connecting part so humble that its anatomy is rarely learned: leaf, knuckle, pin, sleeve. Visitors take the obedient swivel of doors for granted, assuming they can handle endless openings, hesitations, closings, and slams.
No longer a barrier between public street and private property, the door’s new context gives passersby the chance to pause and notice its value as an object divorced from human passage. Free from the press of admission and the drama of expulsion, it serves in a different way now.
With its superfluous locks and bolts on display, the unhinged door invites visions of access without traditional keys. For how might humanity evolve if restrictive concepts of ownership become unfastened from their jambs? How might we open ourselves without fear?
At nine o’clock in the morning, serrated leaves by the fence receive the signature of dark steel lines. Dominant chains have eclipsed the delicate veins, and the diamond shapes seem to define the screen of the leaf-surface, imposing rigid patterns on what needs to grow free.
But the fence’s shadow, looping and stamping itself at nine, will be gone by noon, leaving the victorious leaf unchained. After all, it never asked to be cast in a shadow play. Nor did the plant sign a lease with the barricade that straddles its roots. It only desires to rise from the soil in peace.
The tattoo of links is impermanent, for a seemingly solid fence in the morning becomes a shadow of itself as the day wanes. By psychological extension, shifting solar movements can suggest a hopeful metaphor: harmful habits that create barriers to happiness can dissolve like so many shadow-chains. For example, the bruising self-criticism that overshadows confidence and disturbs inner peace may not be the iron-grey shackle of truth we assume.
If distorted thoughts are building a cage one steel rod of fear at a time, consider the power of one question, “Are these thoughts true?” Then take a deep breath and call out chimeras from their hiding places — behind benches of judgment, beneath shaming silences, under tongues that tsk-tsk on the regular — and watch them melt into phantoms with the passage of the sun. Challenge the cruelty that crushes self-love and reject the quelling projections of others. Above all, hold fast to what illuminates, such as visions of leaves that turn fences to trellises, limitless shelters that dapple and shine.
Not long before Pat died, he sent a card thanking me for a Christmas gift. The medication that he was taking caused his hands to shake, and it touched me that he had written by hand despite the difficulty. When composing Cousin Pat’s Letter, it seemed right for the piece to include an example of his handwriting, symbol of both his uniqueness and his suffering.
Pat used to collect antique glass bottles, so for his collage I fashioned a bottle shape from some handmade paper to provide a stem for a flower. Fragments of the thank-you letter became the petals.
In addition to glass-collecting, Pat enjoyed writing haiku. From 2002 to 2003, he composed almost two hundred three-line poems about cars, artists, coins, baseball, rock bands, and the antics of animals he observed from his window.
In the months after his death, I read all of the poems, and a number of words and phrases struck me as characteristic of Pat. Eventually, the gleaned words suggested themselves as a new poem, and I hope Pat would approve of how I arranged his lines to make this collaborative text. Like the memorial collage pictured above, Born in Missouri is devoted to remembering my cousin’s interests, creativity, and sense of humor. He died much too soon.
Aging milkweed pods
suggestive of arching spines
crack open their seams,
give Fall those mad fluffy seeds
that hope no longer constrains.
Hovering at the height of the telephone wires,
the man in a cherry bucket sheers a section of tall maple,
an aerial chef dispatching vertical stalks for the chipper.
The chunk of trunk falls to the sidewalk,
splintering the moment into a thousand perceived realities.
The sky-worker, one section down,
four more cuts to go before the break.
His co-worker below who feels the thud of dead wood
buzzing through his boots and grey hiking socks
all the way to his toes, soles, heels.
The startled squirrel that leaps with instinctive flair
from a truck to the trunk of an intact tree.
The papa two doors down from the amputated maple,
his baby fascinated by the moving shape
silhouetted against the morning sun
that makes the roaring beast chew the air.
A frail witness across the street
pausing in the task of sweeping her walk
to remember playing in the neighbour’s tree house
that once rested on today’s fallen branches fifty years ago.
And in the house newly bereft of a steady shelter
a solitary woman stands sentinel,
long flowy curtains to one side,
nothing to hold back the rush of memories.
Like the day her father nailed the last plank
against the trunk, the ladder’s base
low enough for her, the youngest, to reach.
The crinkle of waxed paper that preserved sandwiches
packed for the children living out entire summer days
way up high in the branches with their comics, jacks, and fairy tales.
They would descend when the fathers returned from the munitions plant
and the mothers called them to gather for dinner.
She turns away from the window,
wanting a reprieve from the present,
switches the kettle on, and cradles her favorite mug
against the inner curve of her shoulder.
The cabinet opens, shortbread biscuits inside.
The curtains fall back and summer subsides.
This serious night that knows only waiting
wearies the line of us bound for Fort Wayne.
It slumps the postures,
turns luggage to chairs,
and makes a bed of the floor,
where a man dressed in scrubs
has stretched against a wall,
head on a hard-ribbed suitcase.
When headlights flash the gate open,
we jolt alert, tense as night lynxes.
Our backs arch then straighten,
the smallest of muscles poised to hunt for a seat.
Within seconds of boarding,
we survey our chances,
debate odds of rejection,
and pounce on the first empty chair we see.
Claims staked and bags settled,
sixty-four strangers commit their souls
to sail the expanse of Midwestern lands,
the vast curved platter that once cupped an ancient sea
now gathering and holding us in uncertain intimacy.
Soon the last of the dark folds itself into our dreaming minds
as we slumber in our seats past town after town,
and the sweet cadence of a Spanish lullaby
cradles caffeinated hip-hop beats
that leak from pulsing headphones near the back.
Discrete snores rasp out here and there,
like the first popcorn kernels to punch the bag bigger.
And far ahead in the first row,
a small rectangle burns in the gloom,
action film inflaming an insomniac screen.
Drifting in and out of wakefulness,
we nod to the rows of towering lamps
that follow loose curving lines of the highway,
hypnotizing us as we hurtle past.
The lamps unfurl, curl, whip left, sway right,
making patterns like feathers being shuffled,
the tremble of tall grasses before the prairie storm,
bluestems tossed and sown by spinning wheels of chance.
Come seven o’clock, a deep veer shakes us awake,
signals an exit that breaks the spell of endless highway.
And soon the chiming incantations of waking phones
ring out like singing bowls that circle an Indiana dawn.
Dad, I’m giving your military sleeping bag to the Anglican Church of Canada. The last time you unrolled this large pocket for sleepy cadets and folded your tall frame into it, Eisenhower was president and your younger brother was still in high school.You were serving in the US Navy, whose officers were training you to become an air traffic controller. From Midway Island, you witnessed atomic testing in the Pacific, received a gooseberry pie in a package, and wrote long letters to your sweetheart.
After returning to civilian life, you kept this olive-green souvenir of your time at Midway’s Naval Air Facility, and following your death in 1995 the bedroll that once padded your barrack’s bunk remained unclaimed. It was stored away in perpetual coil in my Missouri childhood home.
Not long after the 20th century spiraled into the 21st, the sleeping bag was unearthed from the mudroom and given to me. Following its passage from Missouri to Ontario, it continued its dormant, unfurled existence. Out of active service for 61 years, it seemed unlikely to be recruited for a second mission, and if the pandemic had not struck, it might have lain in limbo for another decade or two.
But today your Navy sleeping gear is needed again, recommissioned by the Community Director of a downtown Toronto church. He has requested emergency donations of sleeping bags, water, and shampoo for people who have pitched their tents against the sheltering bricks of the Church of the Holy Trinity.
So, I plucked your bedroll from its dusty cupboard and ran it through the washer and dryer. Then I carefully spun it around itself — a ritual winding before resurrection into relevance — and bundled it into a shopping bag for transport.
On the designated donation day, I arrived fifteen minutes before the doors of Trinity opened. To pass the time, I paced the nearby labyrinth with a loaded dolly that trailed behind like an unsteady pilgrim who carted your sleeping sack, a case of bottled water, hand sanitizer, and a blanket.
Guided by the twists and turns of an ancient pattern, I meditated on the evolving, looping journey of the sleeping bag — from Midway Island to landlocked Midwest, United States to Canada, Cold War to global pandemic, Navy to non-military encampment, father to daughter, car trunk to dolly, labyrinth to arched door.
In the gentle maze of my mind’s center, images related to the transfer of Dad’s military property appear: my father is in the sleeping bag, 21 years old and having just seen the ocean for the first time, and now it is 2020 and a new person is snuggling into the bedding, someone who needs it.
Dad, I see your spirit in the sleeping-bag gift. I remember how you volunteered as a job counselor for a local shelter and as a cancer-hotline listener. I still see you in acts of service and care, the unrolling of a temporary bed, its careful placement in a tent, a shelter during a time of pain. If you could send a message to your brother or sister in sleep, I believe it might go like this:
Take this donation with my blessing and heartfelt prayers for your well-being. May it provide a protective layer between you and the hard ground below as well as the cold air above.
Like you, I have known struggle. I fought a cold war, lived with epilepsy, and battled for my very life, surviving two bouts of cancer before the third one got me. I was vulnerable. I was scared. I often felt alone. But suffering passes. You keep smiling. You keep making jokes.
May this old but sturdy bedroll of mine help you sleep through the night, giving you strength to face the morning. May it contain some of my optimism, fight, and love to match yours. May it not let you down.
Sleep well, dear comrade, and may sanctuary enfold you always.
Be warm. Be well. Be safe.
Be at peace.
Putting bath-bomb enjoyment on hold for six months does not rate highly as an example of noteworthy sacrifice during a pandemic. However, from March to August of this year, it made me sad every time I saw the lovely non-violent bombs (a Christmas present from my sister-in-law) languishing in the bathroom cabinet.
Without access to a spacious lounging bath at home, I usually count on hotel rooms with tubs to provide ideal conditions for foamy immersion in swirls of moisturizing colour. During this unreliable year of ordinary expectations dashed, travel restrictions grounded my bath bombs on the shelf, turning them into symbols of the luxurious freedoms that I had previously indulged in without a thought.
On July 31st, Ontario entered Stage 3 of re-opening from lockdown, and I celebrated by planning a trip within the province, vowing, “I must not take this privilege for granted ever again!” The chosen destination was Bancroft, and I booked a motel for five days near the end of August.
When the day of the road trip arrived, I carefully packed the four bath bombs that had remained inactive for so long. Upon settling into the motel, excursions to Silent Lake Provincial Park, Papineau Lake, Egan Chutes, and downtown Bancroft took place in the days that followed, and evenings were devoted to long soaking sessions in playful combinations of fizzing blues, purples, yellows, and pinks.
On the last day of the holiday, bittersweet satisfaction accompanied the ceremonial dropping of the fourth unexploded bathing-device in the tub (indigo with gold stars) before fully packing up for departure. Never had I appreciated with such fervour the deferred pleasure of travel, motel life, and a return to decadent bathing.
Neither smooth nor automatic,
the mechanics of forgiveness
clank fist-first into the soil
broken by a rusty plow
that moves so slowly
it strains to finish the first row.
Forgiveness is not a miracle.
It is work to be done
and redone as the seasons cycle.
It requires the engagement of gears,
calls for the mallet, the shovel, the hoe
to shoogle resistant brick
and stony clods of dirt
that have hoarded energy locked
into coils of resentment.
Muscular labour turns the wheel,
pulls up the choking nettles,
and digs a clearing for rain,
for seedlings,
for tenderness to grow.
Say yes to this employment.
Grab the tools from the shed.
Go.