poem: "the dreams that you dare to dream"

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“the dreams that you dare to dream”

goes the song
about somewhere

far enough away
to be uncompromised,

yet for a few minutes a day
plays in this room

when the sun and cut glass conspire
to drop a rainbow

on old cement
where the feet and guano

of chickens once fell
when it was a pecking house

of life, an egg factory,
before someone opened

a way in for more light
at the peak facing east,

a leaded glass window
that breaks the sun-yolk

onto the floor
into something dreamy

here and now,
something I haven’t

yet understood the truth of,
how and what happens

when life falls out
of the breaking and orderly
mechanisms of this world

February 2012

These shelves were the chicken roosts.

  photos from my atelier in warmer days;

once a chicken coop, which Don and Peter

transformed into
another kind of living and working space;

my Grandma Olive's easel from art school,

with Lesley's sunflower picture

from her art school days;

my paint brushes, cairn, jump rope

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On becoming a doe

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What is it you feel on a walk in the woods when you know that suddenly you must stop, because the energy within you and surrounding you has become one? The white pines you love, from the tops of their sky-touching branches to the needled floor coppery and aching to be slept on, are full of deer-ness, though there is not one in sight. And, as though magically transposed into a doe yourself, at last you commence your walk, changed. Yet, as a deer, though you might have assumed before now that you would be fearful as one, you are not afraid; rather, you are attentive, listening, stepping foremost with your nose, black and moist, your ears and hide the color of the pine needles, together ruffling in the breeze.

And from where did it come, this deer-ness, and what does it matter, when next day on the next walk you remember that you are now a doe and instantly you hear a rustle by the pond, not thirty feet away. There, six does eat leaves of the poplar saplings and stop for you. O the moments when this transpires, the eternal moments when everything is one. They recognize you now. They have met you here for breakfast. They felt you within and without, walking in the air, eager to join them by the frozen pond table. They know that you are no longer separate. Yet it is their nature to bound off at last and leave you, alone, aware that you were the one who had this to learn.

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Tesselating

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Our days run on in mundane, ordinary echoes of each other.
But think of honey from the tessellations of a honeycomb.
Consider the patient migration of a turtle in his symmetrical coat of arms.
What warm energy pushes within facsimiles and repetitions?
And what do their tiled borderings make possible,
like the scales of a snake’s skin that enable him
to undulate like an S of smoke sideways across the grass?

Eaglehawk Neck in Tasmania

one of the rare natural tesselations on the earth's surface;

see what natural movement formed it here.

Photo wiki commons

Drawings of symmetry by M.C. Escher; more here.