My New Assistants, and the old one

Summer in the city

The first one is the view of the sky from the shop right after the storm passed. Furious nature showing it's colours.

Life and Death Cycles

Schunzel
1991-Aug 18,2009

Beautiful, feisty, smart
Loving, ferocious, curious

Wake us in the night
For love, or for attention

Come to us
Look into our eyes,

Talk with purr so loud
Remind us of our duties

Lie beside the kids when sick
Scratch them when they pass you by

Mark us with your smell and hair
Then move away to rest a while

We sit, you sit
We rest you rest
We eat you want to share

We live you live
And then you die
We live on to miss your essence
Your bushy proud tail
Those huge green clever eyes that see us as we are
The whiskers, the hair inside your dainty ears
The fine arrangement of your fur
The whole of you, and now the hole of you.

What Remains

I've just watched the film Sylvia, a touching rendition of her life and love with Ted Hughes. Made me want to read her writing again, after many years.



Poppies in July

Little poppies, little hell flames,
Do you do no harm?

You flicker. I cannot touch you.
I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.

And it exhausts me to watch you
Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.

A mouth just bloodied.
Little bloody skirts!
There are fumes that I cannot touch.
Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?

If I could bleed, or sleep! -------------
If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!

Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,
Dulling and stilling.

But colorless. Colorless.

Poetry on Lake Simcoe

I was referred to this poem by a kind customer who heard I was on lake Simcoe recently:

Poetry on Lake Simcoe
By Desi Di Nardo

We were oceans apart when I met you
On my way to a blackened hell
You swept by me
A wingless angel
And pulled me up
To keep me from sinking
I sat on an invisible alae
Stunned by your strength
You carried me to loftier dreams
While I scattered old dead skin
Like fragile snowflakes
Pale white shells
Floated down
Lighting up the sky
And drifted from memory
Like a cold winter song
Skimming dancing flitting
As broken pebbles do
We smiled and wondered
On whose toungue they would fall

Water Power

I take the phrase 'put your feet up' literally.


There's nothing like being by the water, on the water, in the water, to calm and repair what needs to be repaired inside.