Poem to a bachelor

I will wait under the hornbeam tree
in the field none can see from the road
and you will know to find me here
though this place is unknown to you.

By the field a forest grows
white with birch and dark with pine.
I will wait by the hornbeam tree
like any maid of old.

You will know this tree;
you named it for me.
It is gnarled and hard,
hard as any heart old with grief.

You will walk the unknown field,
dark with grass, light with sun.
My father will guide you
to the hornbeam tree, known as ironwood.

. I waited through my autumn days;
. my wait was vain.

. I can wait no more, love,

for winter came to the hornbeam tree
and I have cut her limbs to burn.

© 2005 lividviv

*the dots represent tab stops. Blogger wouldn't let me tab.

Chewing cud

I've collected up a few observations I've made over the half year that I've been living in the country and stuck them below. Don't get the wrong idea, I truly appreciate cities, but at the moment I am defining how I really appreciate the country because it's not the city -- so if you're a real urbanite you may be sorry to see the lack of positive commentary on cities below.

! Frequently, I have the pleasure of total fatigue, brought about by hard work. Last Wednesday I had it because I learned how to use a chainsaw and dragged or wheelbarrow-ed plenty of wood as well. By contrast, I used to return home from the embassy completely exhausted on a daily basis. But I never felt suicidal from a day of carrying wood. There is a difference between these two feelings of tiredness. I feel very clean after I've worked hard physically, and also feel just as clean and wonderful after I have worked hard on art. But in the government exhaustion was an unpleasant thing, as if snakes were eating my brain or something. I was liable to break things. I certainly wanted to hurt myself.

! It is very rare, living in the country, that I try to avoid seeing things. In the city, there are always many moments over the course of the day during which I wish that I hadn't seen something. By this I don't refer only to the types of social problems that most of us wish we didn't see and that we have a responsibility to keep seeing; I also simply mean things like gum ground into the sidewalk. More seriously, I include incidents like the following: as I was driving into downtown Toronto, a convertible cut me off quite sharply, so I had a ringside seat when its passenger deliberately flicked a still burning cigarette at the back of a shirtless man sitting on a newspaper stand.

! I am regaining my ability to tell the time by the position of the luminaries, the sun and moon.

! I am learning the names of trees, and of birds such as hawks, buzzards, ravens and cranes.

! When the moon is in the east and at least half full and when it has rained but isn't raining anymore, our pond looks mystical. Mists rise from its surface and the surrounding rushes. The apple orchard, maple tree line, distant fields and farther forest all appear as blocks or shapes of silver. And every shape, whether it is the massive forest or the oblong of the field is a slightly different silver. You know what it reminds me off? It's as if my eyes could see what film negatives must look like from very close. Tiny tiny tiny droplets of silver of varying intensities.

! I'm slowly beginning to see Toronto for what it is. I love that city but I am now very aware of how neurotic it is. The majority of the people on the street are constantly preening, adjusting clothing, arranging hair in subway windows. Most of the things that people wear are completely ridiculous and it is as if most of us go around on the street mainly worrying about keeping our clothes clean or unwrinkled. People often say they like fashion because it's fun but I think it's more important than fun. Most people seem defensive, wearing what I call a game face. It feels as if the streets are a tableau of a horrible bloodthirsty sport that is completely irrelevant. People in Toronto give off the smell of unsatisfiable desire that I don't feel from people or inside myself here. Living here I never have to participate in this race nor do I have any real fear of human predators as I do whenever I go outside in the city. Even when I feel perfectly at ease in the city I always have this awareness that someone might drive onto the sidewalk by accident and kill me or might deliberately pull a knife on me to get my money. Thus, there's a freedom to be alone here, without anyone being able to locate you, even to sleep or get completely lost in a daydream outside. When's the last time, if you are a woman, that you went into a park and no one knew you were there? I guess they call it a rat race for a reason but it's only now that I've left living in a city that I'm really able to see what I had to do in order to survive: the stamina that I had to have, the strategic thinking, the contingency planning all based on a desire for unimportant things and fear of sudden violence.

! I enjoy a sense of living close to the bone. Obviously I haven't gotten to the point where I'm struggling and I don't really want to struggle, but I already feel as if important things such as food and gas money are at the top of my list where I once used to want very badly a new pair of Kenneth Cole knee high boots. I despise retail therapy, and I think it's a very common solution for the gnawing ache that most professional people seem to suffer. I don't know a single person who shops as a sport who is happy with her life. I think that here I have had opportunities for priorities, both personal ones and priorities that I have as a citizen, to become clear. If life in the country had not been structured in such a way that I could figure out what mattered to me and to people, I would never have figured out what my life purpose and its foundation and goals are.

! People do struggle to survive around here more than they do in the city because the country version of poverty is poorer than the city one. The median income here is 20,000 Canadian dollars, well below the poverty line. Perhaps this explains why there is a slightly higher degree of cooperation around here, though still not enough for my liking. One woman told me that she can think of at least six or eight homes that she could walk into, no keys in the door and no one home, and help herself to anything in the fridge. She told me that she knew several people who would lend her their car at a moment's notice. A couple weeks ago I handed my keys to somebody who wanted to go to the beer store simply because I didn't feel like ending a conversation so that I could be the person to drive my own car.

! I really enjoy and have sought for some time this opportunity to simply deal with the people who are "here." Coping with and adapting to and challenging what is... instead of flitting from place to place and group to group, basing all decisions on "what I want" and what I "have in common" with whoever.

So I guess in general what I'm trying to say is that I feel that the country, at least around here, is more relaxed, safer, contemplative, and poorer financially and richer socially. Yeeesss and so original, Viv!!

I have been living here now since a week before the end of march. That's five months. Because I have moved several times I have developed a mental chart of the cycles that I go through when I move. When I worked for the foreign service they taught us that there were two kinds of people: there were the people who had a honeymoon period when they moved somewhere followed by a depression followed by normalcy -- and then there were the people who started out with a depression and then got to normal [I always felt sorry that those people missed the good part]. I'm a honeymoon person. When I got here in march I was very happy and then a couple months went by and I became very unhappy. So I guess now I'm in the normal phase. This is the happiest normal phase that I have had anywhere I have ever moved.

We'll see what happens over time. I'm banking on a few rough patches.

Anyway, time to go. It's smoke by the pond time.

The Hardest Tree

Within the line of maple and apple trees that exists to gather the stuff of nature into the recognizable cartography known as our farmland, and standing above a thorny mess of wild raspberries and chokecherries, stands a tree called ironwood.

It's branches remind me of the rays of the sun on icons of the sun god. From up close, they are gnarled and confused. They twist in every direction, bearing leaves only at their ends, and it seems to me that they labour long for their reward. (But then, these leaves are like the ideal of leaves; and well worth waiting for.

They are shaped like my childhood idea of a leaf, like an almond. And they are that so-green green, and pointedly-edged. They flicker in the wind between their green-green tops and lighter undersides, so that I can't tell if I am looking at green or grey.)

But from afar, the local vagaries of the branches' turning paths fade. Instead, it is clear from afar that their courses actually bear unerringly outwards and upwards. I see that for whatever tangents taken, this tree's intuition of its needed destinations in the sky feast that is photosynthesis is as breathtakingly beautiful, as pure and secure as any other feat of mathematical calculus.

The ironwood tree faces the west, its shadow falling across our backfield, which this same tree and the line of trees to which it belongs prevents people from seeing. For the same reason, onlookers are unable to see the forest beyond the field and, since the forest is in a shallow valley of the field's making, they are equally unable to see the sun setting above it the way one can while sitting below the ironwood tree.

I find myself staring at these three things: the tree, the field, the forest, in the same way humans of my ilk have always stared. On one hand, much as in the preceding paragraphs, I am trying to find the corollary to my life's permutations. The branches of the tree, fallibility, choice. On the other hand, more deeply, I am trying to understand something else. I have no idea what it is.

I am told that the ironwood tree is so named because the wood grows to such hardness that it's barely worth burning, is so hard that it can be used as the base to split softer, weaker wood. It's fitting that in nature it is the hardest tree that plots the truest course and with such meandering whimsy.

Suck my perrier

This is just a wee little post about a wee little wonderful thing I saw this evening.

My soccer buddy invited me over for a fresh grilled swordfish meal. While I shouldn't pass over the meal so quickly, because it was scrumptious (SCRUMPTIOUS!!), I really want to talk about lamb formula.

So soccer buddy keeps sheep, among which is a tiny little lamb. My friend mixed up something that looked like condensed milk and water and, with a sheepish (hee) laugh, pulled out a perrier bottle. "My lambs only drink from a perrier bottle." He funnelled the stuff into the bottle, squeezed a plastic nipple on it, and we went out to the pasture.

"Yell hello," he says to me. So I yell. And sheep perk up their heads, as my voice echoes across the valley.

But I don't have that familiar, that-human-who-feeds-me voice. My friend calls again, "Hallo!!" The baaa-ing begins.

We squeeze through the gate into the dewy pasture, and a little lamb, about a foot tall, runs gawkily up to us.

You know what? He let me feed her. This bold little white sheep with a brown patch.

She literally sucked that bottle dry in a minute flat. Frankly, he did most of the work because my perrier-formula-bottle-holding technique is a bit novice. He even got her to bend down onto her knees a bit while she drank.

Have you ever see a scampy little lamb in action? I wish I'd got out the camera, but it lives on my car seat.

Man. This is the kind of great stuff I get to experience now, post-city. I also had a long conversation with a guy today about place. Neither of us spent our childhoods in one place only, and consequently we don't have much of a sense of roots anywhere. But it is very interesting, albeit slightly false, to actively choose to put roots down. It's so conscious an experience.

I'm betting there'll be lots more on this theme.

The conveyor belt stops for no man

Tonight, on the way to Soccer Round Two, my soccer buddy and I got to talking about relationships. We're both single, both very emotional people who love relationships of all types, and we're both lucky people in many ways, but unlucky in Love. He's had a bunch of unhappy ones, I've had a few unhappy ones. Hell, the best relationship I ever had was a fling with a guy who barbequed us food while I lounged around in a hammock. When he wasn't giving me the facts of life from the perspective of someone 20 years older than I, it was great. Lots of sex and food, hammocks and scotch.

Years later, I'm 29 going on 30 this winter, and it's been over 3 years since I loved anyone.

How I feel? 0bviously, lonely. When my newborn soul was passing along the conveyor belt of gifts and curses, somebody stamped "unrequited" over my heart. I've been hearing sad old songs in the back of my head all my life. A kind of "doom, doom, doom" beat clomping along behind the harmonica.

But I can't feel too bad for myself. Over the course of three decades, I've met all kinds of people, been paid (or not) to do many different things... I've traveled, made music, written stories, danced, gardened, thought... played soccer... How many things should one person get to do and feel? If I died tomorrow, my life would have been full.

l used to do this exercise that I got out of a self-help book. After drawing a large box on a page, I divided into 9 squares. Each bore a label: family, relationship, work, vocation, health, spirit, friendship, community, hobbies. The object of the exercise was to make sure each square was full, or at least not empty. I did this exercise repeatedly over the years, and sorry, but the whole box never quite got full up.

Because, you know, I'm never going to have that totally well-rounded life! Yet, my life feels wonderful. Today, I hauled deadfall wood out of our forest (my hands performed superbly, yay!) so that I can cut them (after I learn to use my neighbour's non-vibrating chainsaw) and burn them in the stove to keep me warm at night over the winter. Then, I played soccer. Then, I ate pretzels, which I dipped in organic butter churned 100 feet away.

So. Since I am so lucky, and even though I would love to have a family, how can I say that this existence isn't enough?

Hence, the conveyor belt theory. I've come to believe that wanting more than the talents, brains, and good fortune I've been dealt would be like stepping over a pot of gold to go haring after the dragon's hoard. How will I ever be serene if I keep fighting the dragon? I got some stuff, and I didn't get some other stuff. That's okay, right? Because I don't want the "lonely, unwanted" nastiness to be the truth. I don't want wistfulness to be the soundtrack of my life.

I told soccer buddy my theory. He liked it. It soothed his solitary heart, too.

So, here's to all of us, lucky here, unlucky there! What a glorious, messy pageant we play in! Maybe next year I'll be poor, maybe last year I was unhappy, maybe my hands will recover completely, maybe the watermelon will stay in its crater. Today, in my loneliness, the fifth thing I will do (after logs, soccer, butter and blog) will be to smoke a cigarette by the pond under the stars.

Heading the ball

I left the house at 5:30 Sunday night, fortified with cappuccino, clad in rumpled, paint-splattered blue jogging pants and a t-shirt, and warmed by my folks' encouragement. I drove out to Flesherton, gingerly pressing the gas pedal through my mom's soccer cleats. At 5:50, I drove into my friend's driveway and stretched out my legs and back. By 6:30, twenty people, men, women and children, were filling up with water and grinning at each other onthe soccer pitch behind our organic dairy farming hosts' house.

A half dozen kids were under twelve, one was seven, and our oldest adult was at least in his sixties... Do you remember that feeling when you were a kid of coming up against adults ? I don't remember it at all. The kids amazed me. The only one we coddled (and that was rare) was the youngest. They just held their own. Man.

We played soccer for over two hours. I took it upon myself to manage the backfield, or whatever the area in front of the goalkeeper is called. Nevertheless I got a lot of play. I even headed the ball a few times, once in the right direction. There's no greater satisfaction than doing something you're scared of, is there?

Soccer is completely new to me. Perhaps it was on my high school phys. ed. curriculum, but that was decades ago and I don't remember. Because of the fact that I had no childhood friends, I never played sports on the street. I don't have a t. v., so I've probably watched, oh, a half dozen games.

I'm playing soccer because I can't play any team sports that involve my hands. And I need to develop a social life here so that I don't freak out and pick up my watermelon again.

So I wanted to like it. Instead, I fucking loved the game. What a charge! If the crowd were different, my tune would change. But what a vibe. I'm told that sometimes, when mostly men come out, that they get their game on more, even come close to blows. But last night it was perfect: people fighting hard to win, laughing at their own defeats. No ugliness, but still intense. Everyone was totally happily in the Zone.

I've been tagged!

Sassinak tagged Othercat who tagged me.

Ten songs I am listening to right now. Difficult to do since I am a radio junkie these days.

1. Late in the evening, Paul Simon
2. Track 6 on Sheva's live album
3. Lively up yourself, Bob Marley
4. I don't know why I love you like I do (I don't know why I just do), King Cole Trio
5. Night moves, Bob Seger
6. Locked in the trunk of a car, Tragically Hip
7. Highway to Hell, AC/DC
8. That song about Birds flying at the speed of sound, Coldplay
9. Turn out the light, Nelly Furtado
10. Sarah McLaughlin's latest single, maybe called Fallen, not sure.