Quiet and Night

Just after bath time while your brushing your teeth and pulling on your pajamas Quiet starts getting ready too. Quiet is a shadow of the loud sounds of the day. His job is to fill the whole house, every room, hallway, basement, attic, little boy, little girl, mommy and daddy up, so that with the help of night, which is the day’s shadow everyone can sleep. Night comes just before quiet does. Night flies in gently without a sound to perch on a tree just out side. He is black and once he’s settled you can’t see him unless you catch his eye. He watches you like blackbirds sometimes do, but he, watches longer and more intently as he waits for Quiet to fill your room and fill you up. Then when your asleep Night folds his head under his wing an goes to sleep himself. Once Night falls asleep, Quiet’s work is done, and the house starts to dream and all the rooms in it, mommy and daddy, and you too.

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Fertile Ground

In a parking lot next to the highway caught between a merging lane and a retaining wall, topped with a fence, covered by a caged pedestrian overpass, he grips the throttle and clamps the body of the bike between his knees. He idles stubbornly and waits for the police to decide to move on.

The season and place are nothing particular around here, It feels like every other night and place here in the city, mean and bored, senseless and restless. Something has to be done, the people need to keep in motion, even in all directions at once. This soil though, is very fertile. While the subdivision sleeps the parking lot teems, around in back or clumped under the dead lights. The neighbours can't breathe, their hearts are wild, their faces pallid. Their hot houses send them out into the night air.

2010

Sleep

Look at me with gentle eyes and speak to me softly,

night's, sweet, child, sleep.

Comfortable Under The Covers, And A Bonfire Warming Your Frontside (The Land Of Night)

These tiny points of light pass straight through me, they seem to cool the air. The horizon is a mist that drops away as near as I can shout. The whole landscape pulls up close around me, and night holds the faint light close. This tepid light does not set the night to ease, the blackness is a border to the stars.

Shadow Games

To shed our shadow cast before us, we need only step over it.

Melodic Chance

The nascent future, the receding past, the passing of time through the eternal present.

Field of Light

These tiny points of light pass straight through me, they seem to cool the air.

The Diary Of A Writer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, P.3

“Still worse off is he who, of his own accord, seeks to study and to understand things. Even harder is the lot of him who candidly divulges such an intention. But if he ventures to declare that he has succeeded a bit in grasping something, and that he intends to express his thoughts, he is promptly deserted by everybody. Nothing is left to him but to find some one suitable fellow, or even hire him, in order to converse with him alone; perhaps to publish the magazine for him alone. It is a despicable situation, since it is as if one were speaking to oneself and publishing a periodical for one’s own amusement.”

portrait

Special Qualities of Books

Libraries become a mind after a while, by mere contact the books on the shelves begin to grow together, become linked, start to dream and later to think. Also, it is said that you can get lost in a book, as when you are alone, when it is very quiet, or sometimes not quiet at all. Sometimes reading — can be a waking dream.

Inspiring Thouhts from Fiona Tan's (Island, 2008) at The Vancouver Art Gallery

"Lazing on the pleasant side of boredom"

"...now the air feels cooler and she thinks this place may be becoming her home..."

"When she leaves, she will fold up this place, and put it in her pocket for safe keeping."

"...long long days of endless dusk..."

"Gaining distance is sometimes the only way to get close to what really matters."

Midnight Lunch and a Spring Derivé

A fragment from a story without a working title.

He was swung into The Land of Night by his toes, gently he was flipped right-side-up with his blanket still covering him. It was as dark outside the blanket as his room. The air was cool and pressed close to the ground. The little boy pulled his blanket from him and found that he was standing in the stars. The grass at his feet was cool, and the ground was warm, and the dew soaked his socks. The sky above the stars was black as pitch. Slowly the star lit ground came into focus in the misty light…

The Vertical Man

The vertical man / The vertical man

is a sky scraping syllogism, / is a deep well of light,

bloated with books / dense with understanding

who screams like an animal / who speaks with transcendent artfulness

into a bottomless chasm. / to the fog of time itself.

two cats (not my own though)

From Watt, By Samuel Beckett

Some see the flesh before the bones, and some see the bones before the flesh, and some never see the bones at all, and some never see the flesh at all, never never see the flesh at all.

From The Fourth Notebook, Franz Kafka

"The generations die as do the moments of your life... It's the old joke. We hold the world fast and complain that it is holding us. In a certain sense you deny the existence of this world. You explain life as a state of rest, a state of rest in motion."

A Fragment from Aurora

I can't stand at the threshold any longer. I slump from the weight of my hat. I wait for a word, a word that's late. The stars are beginning to come out so I sit down into the wall next to the door and wait. The house I sit against is my father's, who's in a great excitement right now, he thinks he's dying. Father is not feigning his illness, although his nerves aren't good, but Mother whips into such a frenzy, so infectious that even a fit of coughing warrants the surgeon, who doesn't come so quick anymore. So, thats why I'm here, hands double-fisted crouching against the the wall of my Father's house waiting for a man to come, proscribe a placebo and permit me some peace.

It's dusk and the room above me has hushed with the surgeon's entrance. A festival seems to hang in the quiet still air, the moment feels ripe. I slip round the corner down the street towards the square. A shore of warm light greets me that bathes the stone there, and I move with the tide of night rising from the sleeping houses onto the piazza. No one is here so I set down and wait, a friend is bound to pass by, tonight. There isn't a breeze, and any movement would seem slow, every step would seem as if in a dream, if a friend were to emerge from the night in the streets.

_______________________________

I stroll down the most touristic promenade in one of those rare golden August moments when not a soul is in sight. I turn down a lane to look for compatriots at window sills. At the first corner, Chiara has her chin flat on her window's ledge staring out dead eyed bored, beyond. It takes only a breath, a sigh in the stillness to lift her away from from ennui. She disappears from the sill out onto the street into arm and arm with me, and without so much as a word, we set off. She isn't cold like the approaching night, she holds those last rays of twilight close to me. We are walking to the river and for the elegant parks on the hills.