This place is a zoo! I swear, finally I am rewarded a few hours of solitude, had just settled onto my daybed, fired up Word, opened a new document to start writing when I hear tires on the gravel and the dogs going nuts. Fortunately, the visitor came and went pretty quickly but it happened again a few hours later. I always call first, why can’t other people do the same? I was reassured though to write a new poem today, it’s been so long, I wondered if I still had it in me.

Why are there two elections happening? I think it’s a plot by Steve Harper, a sleight of hand of sorts. The spectacle that is the U.S. election will keep our eyes off his shenanigans, as he merrily cuts arts funding and ignores environmental concerns, making us look bad to the rest of the world in the process. “Ordinary people don’t care about the arts.” What a dolt. A cynic. “A cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. “Gawd, I hope he doesn’t get re-elected.

Life is sweet and bizarre all at the same time. WTF? is going on? Markets melting, loved ones dying, wars proliferating. Am I lucky, smart or ruthless to be in the position of looking out my window, my window in the sense that I finally own one, having just bought this house before this economic crisis?

I was visiting my friend Tina Schliessler’s place in Deep Cove other day, marveling at the huge freighter sitting in front of their house. I tend to perceive the cove like a lake; the shores are so close together. I had to wonder about life aboard that vessel, why they are biding time there, how that works. I see freighters out my window all the time, crossing Burrard Inlet but it was astonishing, shocking to my cortex to see one looming so large on that water.

Speaking of Tina, I’ve been working on the art book we are collaborating on. She has given me fantastic images of trees she shot around Vancouver, the North Shore and Bowen Island, arbutus mostly, and I am to write verse to accompany or complement the photographs. She frames them in such a way as to suggest human characteristics. I know it sounds awfully corny but I enjoy imagining a dialogue with the trees, which I recall doing as a child as I wandered the forests in the Kootenays. I always felt a presence, perhaps it was only the life force all around me, or God if I was a good Catholic, but with as much awe as I felt, I invariably got spooked. Does everyone feel haunted in the woods? In any case, the trees speak to me now, through these poems, they were not silent at all. I heard because I was listening.

Serendipity? I was sorting out my To File pile the other day, came across the notes the midwife made during Junior’s delivery (his 14th birthday coming up in about ten days) and didn’t know what to do with them. I had pulled them out of my 1994 file for some reason. What was the reason? Surely it wasn’t simply sentiment. I think I referred to them because of his ASD and the upcoming possible therapy with a new interventionist. I was inspired to write about birthing when I gazed at one of Tina’s trees. I pulled out the midwife’s Labour Flow Sheet Progress Notes in search of words to use in the poem. I didn’t use “mec in pool” but I found more than one gem. Man, it brought back that time so vividly. I guess that’s why I like to hold onto some things.

Ah, it’s like I live in a Disney movie! I looked out my kitchen window to see a deer grazing on the property, jays, sparrows and towhees flitting about, but, I am mixing a martini, the doe is now raiding the bird feeder and I suspect the flock is dive bombing, trying to intimidate her away from their chow.