Eastend: New Moon

 
Woke at 4:55 a.m.
Starting reading a mystery on my phone
Until 6 a.m.
Decided life is too short
For gruesome occult thrillers
Even well-written ones and sent it back
To the library from whence it came
Partly-read but as with coffee, tea and wine
True love, bread, cheese and books
Loyal friends, kind strangers and ice-cream
Life is too short for pale artificial imitations
Of the real deal
Accept no substitutions
Forge on for quality, inside and out

Up high the New Moon means
It’s dark, yes, but also the time to start
New projects, indoor tomatoes, a poem

Eastend: These Trees That Dance

 
My neighbour’s beautiful many-branched birch
-a European weeping birch I do believe-
A most graceful, tall and swaying tree
A contrast to the massive spruce near by
festooned with cones, a bumper crop
beloved by Bohemian waxwings and robins too
who perch at the very top

These two tall trees stand in two backyards
Companions, coniferous, deciduous
Friends despite needles, or not
the birch holds its leaves in a tight grasp
against today’s relentless snow
Black spots, there are a few, broken branches too
They matter not, the trees stand and sway
Buffer and shade and offer shelter

Some of us humans could take lessons
observing these trees

 

Eastend: Dry Ground At Last

three boys walk down the alley
the sun glints off the baseball bat
their gloves and surely someone
has the softball for this first game
of Five Hundred or just a casual hit and catch

women friends walk their dogs and confide
while their hounds revert to wolves
sniffing for any trace of intruders
left on dried grass and tree trunks

thinking then about the first dry patch of dirt
outside Transpine School in the Peace
how we’d etch out hopscotch squares
decide our categories- mostly breeds of cattle
horses chickens even pigs
the names repeated twice before each hop
a stone on every square after all had hopped safely
one-legged wonders celebrating Spring

today I wore my running shoes for the first time
my own light-footed celebration of dry ground

Eastend: Spring Run-Off

The water is trickling every which way

Finding old paths, pouring down hills


Blasting through snowbanks heaped at the base


Spooling through culverts below the farm driveways


Seeping past tree roots still frozen but thawing


Steeping the waters like good strong tea

Down in the valley the river is rushing

Released from the wintery grip of the freeze-up

Now it is shoving the bergs and the blocks

And the still-massive shelves of thick river ice

Pushing the chunks like a child plays with sailboats

The bathtub his ocean where boats go to sea 

Eastend: Writing Like a Spring Unsprung

Looking ahead I am realistic
Five more good years
Maybe ten or even fifteen
Or two.

It does not help to speculate
It does not help to bargain
The question would always be
Who with?

If ever there is a time to live
In the moment, carpe diem
It is here and it is now
I’m on it!

Eastend: The Deer Are Limping

Three deer are limping today

On the village streets

One walks on just three legs

The casualties of vehicles no doubt

Some trucks do like to roar

Down these quiet yet never quite empty streets

A lone birdwatcher with binoculars

Hopes for a new bird, a migrant

But finds only raucous starlings today

And one small deer down beside an old house

The deer is dead, and very recently

Its eyes glazing over

In front of this small empty house on Main Street

She makes a note to call the village office

Best to move it soon, before warm weather

Eastend: From the Cemetery POV

 From up here in the long steep hills to the west
The village is tucked out of sight, mostly
A few tall roofs and some trees are all
The eye can see and elsewhere it’s more hills
Cypress Hills, the start or the end of them
Depending on your point of view

There’s just me and the gophers here today
They gave squeaky airy hoots
To warn their buddies of my arrival
They’ve certainly taken over the place
The gophers in the graveyard
The deer in the village but it’s all nature’s way

We lived, we gave birth, we loved, we suffered
We are beloved or at peace or silent on the matter
Some of us remain a mystery, reticent with details
We are a name with a date of birth, another for death
One, I was pleased to see, laughed often & loved much
And one other, a rancher is far-seeing...

 

 

Eastend: About The Deer

 
 

 

You can’t help but see them all
The deer who are here
Promenading down the alley
Drinking from the small seasonal lake
Beside the grain elevator
In two’s or three’s or herds of a dozen
Prancing down the avenues
Browsing the lilac hedges
Around small empty houses
Tracks crossing the Frenchman River
Where the ice still holds fast

We live here only on sufferance
In the unceded territory of The Deer

 

 

 

 

Eastend: Out-Of-Towner

It could be the red beret
Sensible wool but pretty bright
It complements my Stewart tartan scarf
Guys driving mud-encrusted pick-ups
Do the classic double-take
It could be because I’m the only adult
Walking, not driving this wide main street
Or maybe it’s just obvious
A stranger in a village of five hundred souls

The friendly woman in the grocery store
Asks me outright: Are you the new Stegner lady?
I allow that I am
She beams at me and asks me what I’m working on
I reel off book review short story maybe finish a novel

She’s not artistic she says
When I ask if she’s a member of the Arts Council
But her co-worker defends her
Reminds her she decorated the whole store for Christmas
We all smile and the young man behind the till says
He used to eat crayons so they called him artistic too
We all laugh and I head out with my groceries
Ponder how lifting the spirits with colours with words
Spreads joy however we do it
With the tools we have at our disposal
Or spend a lifetime refining

Eastend Saskatchewan: Take One

 April is Poetry Month, among other good causes, and although I'm late in contributing, I am finally settled in at the Wallace Stegner House in Eastend, Saskatchewan and have set myself the happy task of writing a poem a day. It's a very good way to 'shake the language loose' and to push myself, when stuck on long-term large writing projects, to write something new every single day. It's what makes the wonderful opportunity to do a month-long residency here so valuable to writers and artists, the chance to shake up our routines, push ourselves out of our comfort zones and tackle new projects in this upstairs study with a west-facing view at the edge of town. The amazing arts council (Eastend has a population of about 500 souls) maintains and administrates the Stegner House, after buying it in 1988 and restoring the interior and exterior to the original plans. Residencies have been offered since 1990.  

Eastend Saskatchewan: Take One

Today I walked three short blocks
Mostly on sidewalks
Hopping over the abundance of deer poop
Avoiding thick crusted ice packs
The murky puddles and snowbanks
Good thing I wore hiking boots
My down jacket and plaid wool scarf
Sunglasses and my red beret

It was -17 yesterday morning
A blizzard the day I arrived
So I stayed inside this 1916 wood frame house
With a view of prairie sunsets glowing
Like incandescent nectarine juice flowing
Over the snowy Cypress Hills
A westward view I’d call sublime
From the windows of this upstairs study
I cranked up the heat a few degrees
Added more layers of down and wool
Read and wrote and thought and cooked and slept

But today I walked to the school
Gave my Fear & Imagination talk
Complete with mohair tarantula computer mouse and rubber snake
To my K-3 audience who were learning
The difference between a comment
And a question and mercifully the librarian
Had twenty-five years of experience
As a wrangler of unfiltered off-topic
Needy delightful and/or distracting behaviours
 

I read my two picture books and showed the rest
They all sang Twinkle Twinkle Little Star so sweetly with me
Fielded comments about holidays and brothers and ticks
Did my best to answer good questions
About how to make books with hardcover bindings
And about how long it took to write books (True answer: my whole life)
Then the inevitable question forever in the arsenal
Of my K-3 fan base
“How old are you?”