epistolary

Dear Twenty-Ten,

First: thank you.

Thank you for allowing me to wake up to the most frost-laden trees I've ever seen. Thanks for giving me the chance to walk by myself down the road in the country to drink coffee and eat breakfast in the mornings with people who love me.  Thank you for showing me what it's like to live beyond civilization in the wintertime -- and for making sure that there was always someone to help push my car out when it got stuck and shovel my deck when it got too much.  I loved the silence of those early winter evenings when I'd light a candle in my window to feel warmer and safer.  Out on the deck, if I was quiet, I could hear the gentle movement of horses in their pens down the road, and I liked that very much.

Thank you for finding me a cute little house in Garneau with two people with whom I have long been friends.  Thank you for the white trim on the fireplace and the books on the shelf.  Mostly, I am grateful for the location of this house and for the walks springtime rain with a lime green umbrella.  And for the trees, which bend to touch each other over the road in the summertime, a canopy of green and so many birds.  I have delighted in backyard campfires and drinking beers on patios with sunglasses pushed up into my hair.  I have loved walking to meet friends at pubs and coffeeshops and bookstores.  I will never forget you, two-thousand-and-ten, for giving me this first place in the city.

Thanks so much for providing me with the opportunity to let even more love into my heart (and out of my heart; it's a two-way valve) and for bringing me closer still to a man who is becoming exactly who he'd hoped he would be.  He is ever stronger, ever more brave, and ever more compassionate.  Thank for for the house we bought together, for the walls we'll dress with things that are ours, for the life together that we're continuing to build on.  Twenty-ten, you have seen the two of us take enormous steps --- leaps and bounds --- and we'll just keep on going.

I wanted to thank you particularly for the new friends I've made.  You have shown me, twenty-ten, much more than your predecessors, how to connect with other human beings, how to reach across the void of being just a person and start to form communities.  Thank you for the community I am now a part of, and thank for teaching me how important it is to be with other people, no matter what.  To love more fiercely those around me.

I know it hasn't all been good, twenty-ten, but I know that my melancholy nature, professional shortcomings and self-destructive behaviour isn't your fault; it's mine.  But I am aware now what I lack, and I will try to do better when I meet twenty-eleven.  I will try not to get so caught up in the dramatic depressive tendencies of being a poet.  I will be more grounded.  I will be more organized.  I will accept the things about me that I don't like, and I won't allow those things to affect other people.  I won't allow those things to interfere with my relationships, and I'll love even more than I did with you, twenty-ten.

Oh, twenty-ten, you were a teaching year --- you taught me so much, even when I didn't realize it.  I appreciate you.  I am grateful for the many delights you provided, and I am ready to say goodbye.  I trust that twenty-eleven will still show me frosty trees, colourful umbrellas, and all of the love I can possibly stand.  I hope it will.  If these things are not apparent, I will go looking for them, which might prove to be better in the long run.

Take care, twenty-ten.  I'll miss you.

Love,

Deanna

things i live for

i live for that, you know.  for reaching out to touch you,
for the kisses you drop on the tip of my nose, for your confidence.
i live for holding hands in the car, or smiling at you across rooms
at parties, or walking behind in your footsteps in deep snow in the yard.

now it's not just those moments, although i've banked them all,
stored them carefully away to revisit and feel warmed by;
it's a wide open future of lying in bed all day in squares of sunlight
from our south-facing bedroom window, fingers clasped under sheets.

we will get a couch to sit on while we watch documentaries
and plant root vegetables in the yard to bring us into winter.
i can see you through the window in the back, coming home,
and i am happy to see you --- i'll always miss you when you're gone.

there are so many things that i'll live for when i get the chance;
so many things to delight in and long for and make plans for.
i will reach out to you always, put my hand over your heart while we watch tv,
and i'll grow around you as you grow old, getting better and better all the time.

this is not a poem

There are one hundred-and-one posts in this blog.  Every one of them is a poem.  Many poems I've never looked twice at.  Some I've hastily edited.  Some I chose for a more careful inspection, and some of those I put into a chapbook I recently made.  This has been an interesting experiment, and I am glad to have done it---it has served me as a writer.

For eight months I haven't had anything more to say.  I am operating a distillery of words.  I used to write the longest, most complicated sentences, and then I'd string them all together one after another.  Maybe it was to prove that I could---that I had the skill to use semi-colons properly, or something?---but this year I haven't wanted string out words like I used to.

This has been my entire life this year.  I have been drawing inward.  It has been a hibernation of self.  I want fewer things.  And by "things," I mean physical objects; I want less stuff.  I want to decrease my territory.  Places I used to drive to without thinking seem a strain, like the strings that tie me to my house are ever-tightening.  Less stuff, less distance, fewer friends.  I am growing insular.  My friends can surely see it, this ever-decreasing world of mine.  I am lucky to have them; I know that.  I will be lucky if they continue to come to me, if their spheres don't shrink too much as well.  I love the friends I have with all of my heart, and it hurts me to see how my insular world is affecting my relationships with them.

And I have fewer words.  Smaller ideas.  Epics are now vignettes, vignettes are tiny thoughts like "these are our things." That one sentence is really all I had to say.

This is me trying harder.  It's not that I will try harder to have more things---that's an aspect of my self-hibernation which I will embrace.  But I will try harder not to draw away from relationships, to continue to build my community, to be a better friend and sister and daughter and wife, when the day comes.  And I will try to write more than a ten-line poem.  I will try to stretch beyond single images, isolated thoughts.

This is me trying harder.  This is not a poem.  This is me trying.

our things

moving into the new house
our meagre possessions
won't fill it     not even close

it's not so much a matter
of amalgamating objects
as it is a matter

of filling empty space
by stretching everything
my coffee table     your desk

hand-me-downs     all of them
mine and yours were     theirs
before their houses got too full

to contain them
but we'll sweep them up
and put a name on them

a name that sounds less
like mine
less like yours

just ours     i suppose
we can look
at our mostly empty house

and say "these are our things"