BETA: January 2012

22 January 2012

18 January 2012

Newtown, winter.

For the first green river in the snow
turn left;
find it there--
back alleys
of fur-greasy
rats lying
dead outside the
finest restaurant in town.

The dishwasher is there too,
be-aproned and grimy, short sleeves in
mid-winter and
smoking a
cigarette.

Habs are playing tonight, he says.

Big game. Big game.
I think
we're gonna win.

Wikipedia Blackout!!!

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Wikipedia is ██████████████ for 24 hours, in response to the ██████████████
making their way through the U.S. ██████████████. ██████████████, in the name of restricting Internet piracy, will actually ██████████████ our ability to access (and share) free information.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Learn_more

13 January 2012

Saturated Landscape

My vantage point for some time now has been Montreal, third floor apartment, on the edge of a street where all the buildings are connected. My building is set on the top of a steep incline that descends into old Montreal, the Fleuve, and is adjacent to Park Lafontaine. There are rats sometimes below my pinnacle at night and squirrels during the day. The sky is always visible from my balcony.

On Remembrance Day, 2011, it was 7 degrees and partly cloudy. I was looking out the window from my third floor apartment. I saw the dark clouds hanging low overhead, and the grey sky blended in with the cold grey concrete. A saturated landscape that left a background where only melancholia and house chores seemed to fit in. The trees whipped around in a wintry wind, and although they still wore their gold leaves, without the sun they seemed menacing and dark, reminding me of the imminent cold that would soon envelop the city.

Only a few days earlier that week it had been 15 degrees. The sun had given off a delightful warmth in the afternoon even though it traveled across the sky in a low arc, visibly closer to the horizon than it had been all year. It shone through the yellow and red leaves of the maples giving Park Lafontaine a warm ethereal glow. I had basked in the sun that day, lying flat across the green grass letting its rays penetrate me with what felt like pure heavenly greatness.

Later, four days before Christmas, that day was but a distant memory. It was still balmy but the snow was competing with an icy rain. Orion was out in the sky in its full glory, coming higher and higher in the sky each night around nine o'clock when I'd sit on my back balcony and smoke.

Orion is a marker of the cold weather to come. Crisp clear winter nights are complete with its presence, like an old reliable friend. The stars in the constellation, although light years away, form a symmetrical arc seeming to be Orion's sinewy limbs outstretched, leaping through the sky. The Hunter fighting Taurus the Bull.

Then, later on in mid January, the snow fell and then fell some more, obscuring all visions of the cosmos. The trees are now sleeping, and I am trying to keep my feet warm, outside on my balcony. Sitting here with the peace of knowing that each season will return again and again with time.

12 January 2012

Loretta-Townes Van Zandt

11 January 2012

this morning

you are a bright pink blur
as you move accross the soft white snow
trudging to school
and I sit at the window and watch you
with the cat
waiting to pounce
at any moment

a poem by Frank O'Hara ("Mayakovsky", from Meditations in an Emergency)

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.