Three hawk feathers in three weeks.
The gods are speaking to me again.
They have come down from the clouds
With these notices of flight.
Before the first, I felt bound to the earth.
After the second, I tested my wings.
With the third, I leave my body behind.
Footprints of light
They are footprints of light
Laughing forests of stone
Savannahs of blown-glass animals
Migrations of palm prints
Oceans of raw materials
Deserts of innumerable alphabets
Mountain skies with mountains
They are footprints of light
Trees of first flight
Clouds and water flowers
Vines of healing outgrowth
Silence smiling in space
Rain enacting its own performance
They are footprints of light
Crabapple Trees in the Rain
The crabapple trees love drizzling rain.
Their jewels burst open and the street
Becomes awash in five-petalled fuchsia.
It brings out the painter and lover in me.
The dampness opens all my pores,
Tasting their waves of delicate rose.
Embraced by rain they’re never more content.
Even the oldest trees with branches
Like entwined limbs of exhausted lovers
Would, in their death throes
Flower for a thousand years– if they could.
Venera Fazio (1943-2017)
Today I miss my friend, Venera. If you didn’t know her, you didn’t know the Spring. She was the Spring. If you never met Venera, you never met the best side of yourself, because that’s what she brought out of you. Today I miss my friend, Venera. If you didn’t know her, you couldn’t know charm for its own sake. If you never met Venera, half the light of love is missing from the moon. And having known her, half the light of love is missing from the moon.
Paint by Province
(Essex County)
By mixing the sunset
With green farms
And black walnut,
A white horse grazes in a field.
(Cape Breton)
By mingling lake water
With white birch
And yellow leaves,
The sail of the sun floats into view.
(PEI)
By combining lupins
With red soil and green fields
The island sleeps
In the waves of its dreams.
(Chocolate River, New Brunswick)
By amassing sediment
The sun pans for gold
Like an old prospector
Knee-deep in the river.
(Rural Ontario)
By bonding the smell of snow
With wood smoke,
November sets its essence
In your mind.
(Lake Louise, Alberta)
By joining elevation
To compression and water
Mountains wash their faces
In their own turquoise mirrors.
(Gaspe, Quebec)
By linking the St. Lawrence
To an endless watershed
Of blue iris in bloom
Beauty floods the seaway.
Window of Dreams (On my daughter’s 20th birthday)
Time, like a window, separates without dividing.
Love, like a window, sees through time.
Marsh Boardwalk
Hovering above, between, amidst,
Like a boat attached to its own moving pier,
Space swamps you along the boardwalk.
The wind walks at the pace of the reeds.
Light falls on bulrushes and water lilies
Glowing in waters of inevitable wonder.
Every time you return, nature returns tenfold,
Enlarging you, lengthening your shadow,
Seeding your own expansion back to nature.
The marsh never changes, the marsh changes,
The upkeep of the boardwalk is enormous.
No worrying about time on this footpath.
It has all been preserved by the marsh.
It has all been dispersed by the reeds.
Photo by Brigitte Ala
