This whole apartment thing is a nightmare. Every place that I can afford comes with a roommate who is a freak. I mean, look at this, "Wanted: female roommate, non-smoker, non-ugly." Just, there's nothing. This city is full. -- Rachel Greene, Friends, "The One With Ross's Denial"
For those of you who don't know, I'm supposed to be moving across the country in about 5 weeks. I still haven't found an apartment. My hunt hasn't been quite as sitcom-y, but substitute dumpy places for freaky roommates and you have a pretty good summary of my last good chunk of time. I am beginning to feel like I'm on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Apartment hunting is consuming every free moment of my thoughts, and even some moments that aren't supposed to be free. It's hard to focus on anything else. I thought I hated moving - the packing and unpacking has never been something I've enjoyed - but I've discovered I hate apartment hunting even more. This whole apartment thing is a nightmare indeed.
Skin Divers
Anne Michaels
Under the big-top
of stars, cows drift
from enclosures, bellies brushing
the high grass, ready for their heavy
festivities. Lowland gleams like mica
in the rain. Starlight
soaks our shoes.
The seaweed field begs, the same
burlap field that in winter cracks with frost,
is splashed by the black brush
of crows. Frozen sparklers of Queen Anne's lace.
Because the moon feels loved, she lets our eyes
follow her across the field, stepping
from her clothes, strewn silk
glinting in furrows. Feeling loved, the moon loves
to be looked at, swimming
all night across the river.
She calls through screens,
she fingers a white slip in the night hallway,
reaches across the table for a glass.
She holds the dream fort.
Like the moon, I want to touch places
just by looking. To tell
new things at three in the morning, when we're
awake with rain or any sadness, or slendering through
reeds of sleep, surfacing to skin. In this room
where so much has happened, where love
is the clink of buttons as your shirt slides
to the floor, the rolling sound of loose change;
a book half open, clothes
half open. Again we feel
how transparent the envelope
of the body, pushed through the door
of the world. To read what's inside
we hold each other
up to the light. We hold
the ones we love or long
to be free of, carry them
into every night field, sit with them
while cows slow as ships
barely move in the distance.
Rain dripping from the awning of stars.
Waterworn, the body remembers
like a floodplain, sentiment-laden,
reclaims itself with every tide.
Memory terraces, soft as green deltas.
Or reefs and cordilleras -
gathering the world to bone.
The moon touches everything
into meaning, under her blind fingers,
then returns us to cerulean
aluminum dawns. Night,
a road pointing east.
her sister, memory, browses the closet
for clothes carrying someone's shape.
She wipes her hands on an apron
stained with childhood, familiar smells
in her hair; rattles pots and pans
in the circadian kitchen.
While in the bedroom of a night field,
the moon undresses; her abandoned peignoir
floats forever down.
Memory drags possessions out on the lawn,
moves slowly through wet grass, weighed down
by moments caught in her night net, in the glistening
ether of her skirt. The air alive,
memory lifts her head and I nearly
disappear. You lift your head, a look I feel
everywhere, a tongue of a glance,
and love's this dark field, our shadow web
of voices, the carbon-papter purple
rainy dark. Memory's heavy with the jewellery
of rain, her skirt heavy with beads of mercury
congealing to ice on embroidered branches -
as she walks we hear the clacking surf
of those beautiful bones. Already love
so far beyond the body, reached only
by way of the body. Time is the alembic
that turns what we know
into mystery. Into air,
into the purple stain of sweetness.
Laburnum, wild iris, birch forest so thick
it glows at night, smells that reach us
everywhere; the alchemy that keeps us
happy on the ground, even if our arms embrace
nothing, nothing: the withdrawing
trochee of birds. We'll never achieve escape
velocity, might as well sink into wet
firmament, learn to stay under,
breathing through our skin.
In silver lamella, in rivers
the colour of rain. Under water, under sky;
with transparent ancient wings.
Tonight the moon traipses in bare feet,
silk stockings left behind
like pieces of river.
Our legs and arms, summer-steeped
slapped damp
with mud and weeds.
We roll over the edge into the deep field,
rise from under rain,
from our shapes in wet grass.
Night swimmers, skin divers.
I know it's a long poem (kudos to you if you read the whole thing), but I am struck deeply by the intimate connection she makes between rain and memory and love. It is so beautiful, and holds so much of how I feel about rain. It is supposed to be rather rainy for the next week or so, and I am hoping that despite the insanity of my life I will have some time to simply luxuriate in that nostalgic, beautiful, loving sensation.
I've written here before about how much I adore the song Moon River. I don't think anyone will ever top the scene in Breakfast at Tiffany's where Audrey Hepburn sings the song. However, I recently discovered The Honey Trees' cover of Moon River and am rather smitten. So much so that I felt the need to dedicate a blog post to it. That, my friends, is very telling. It's just so adorable and sweet. Click the link and take an aural gander. It will put a smile on your face.
Ps. How cool is the mic they are using?
Insomnia
Billy Collins
Even though the house is deeply silent
and the room, with no moon,
is perfectly dark,
even though the body is a sack of exhaustion
inert on the bed,
someone inside me will not
get off his tricycle,
will not stop tracing the same tight circle
on the same green threadbare carpet.
It makes no difference whether I lie staring at the ceiling
or pace the living-room floor,
he keeps on making his furious rounds,
little pedaler in his frenzy,
my own worst enemy, my oldest friend.
What is there to do but close my eyes
and watch him circling the night,
schoolboy in an ill-fitting jacket,
leaning forward, his cap on backwards,
wringing the handlebars,
maintaining a certain speed?
Does anything exist at this hour
in this nest of dark rooms
but the spectacle of him
and the hope that before dawn
I can lift out some curious detail
that will carry me off to sleep -
the watch that encircles his pale wrist,
the expandable band,
the tiny hands that keep pointing this way and that.
The seemingly ever-increasing stress of moving means that I am getting ever-shrinking amounts of sleep. It's a really lovely example of an inverse relationship. Someone should make a math word problem out of it. Billy Collin's image is so delightfully odd and yet so apt. It is a perfect way to capture the insane spinning in circles that my brain does when it ought to be sleeping. Instead of sleeping though it thinks things like, "Call that guy about furniture delivery," and "You need to buy pillows, and sheets...and a mattress," and "How am I going to fit everything into my week?" And I eventually fall asleep thinking these things. I know I fall asleep because my alarm wakes me up, but it doesn't feel like I sleep. Instead it feels like one continuous thought, as if I could fall asleep in the middle of a mental sentence and wake up finishing it.
I think this picture is a kind of bridge between the poem and my mental state for me. Or, perhaps more accurately, it is a photographic representation of how my brain feels while the poem is a literary one and I feel as if the two are connected. These are the wheels of some farm equipment on display at Fort Edmonton. The brightly coloured nature reminded me of the slightly-juvinile characterization of insomnia's persona in Collins' poem. And the simple fact that they are a whole bunch of wheels connects pretty nicely with my always-on brain. Oh sleep, I miss you.
Someone is watching from behind a tree. I stare from my hiding place without moving, until my eyeballs harden, until I'm not longer sure he's seen me. What's he waiting for? In the last possible moment before I have to run, light coming fast, I discover I've been held prisoner half the night by a tree, its dead, dense bole carved by moonlight.
(from Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels)
Here's today's confession: I am bad at waiting. I am incredibly impatient. I can't function when I'm waiting for something. For me, waiting is akin to the sensation of holding your breath for an extended period of time. I can't accomplish anything substantial because my focus keeps drifting to whatever it is I'm waiting for. It's like part of me is frozen, just standing there, completely useless. And then the other half of me is frantically scrambling around. That's why this quote from Fugitive Pieces came to mind. That complete stillness accompanied by frantic mental scrambling is exactly what I feel like when I'm waiting. Right now I'm waiting for something big and it's like I'm afraid that if I move it will evaporate into thin air. And so here I am, frozen in this, the most unpleasant state of being.
Happy (Belated) Canada Day!
I had a lovely day with my parents and two of my best friends, Gabby and Sally. Breakfast, a picnic lunch, an afternoon at the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village, barbecued steak dinner and fireworks...what more could you ask for? I had good friends, good food, sunshine, photo opportunities galore (I came back from the afternoon with almost 100 images), and fireworks (which, as a lover of light, I adore). Yup. Pretty great Canada Day. I hope you also had a great day.
