Even after a lifetime of watching hockey, even after years and years of being the daughter and sister of hockey-mad men, the mother of a hockey-mad boy, I’m shaky on all the finer points of the game. Mostly I just like watching people fly down the ice, propelled by glutes and quads and hellbent focus. I can enjoy nearly any sport, provided I can admire the body’s role in it. Car-racing is stupid to me because it just seems like sitting there. Sitting there going fast, granted, but still just sitting there.

And maybe I’m just a geezer—okay, who’m I kidding, I totally am a geezer—but I definitely give preference to the hockeying of yesteryear. Not just the pro hockeying, altho’ little can compare with watching Guy Lafleur tear down the ice with his unfettered locks streaming behind him, but the nonpro stuff especially. It’s all so organised now, with little kids competing in highly structured games, leagues, tourneys … too much pressure, I sometimes think, all that, too much pointless pressure. Maybe it would be better just to let the hockey happen more, the way it did when my brothers and I were kids. To get up and head off to the rink for a jillion hours of unorganised and superfun shinny … I’m a fan of that, but of course I would be, given that I’m really not so keen on heavily schedulised regimentation for little kids. It’s cool to have a thing you like to do and to just go do it, without parental involvement, without somebody telling you when or how to do it. The fly-and-be-free approach. I like it. I like it as much as I liked The Flower’s glorious flowstream of hair.

Still and all, I do take pleasure in watching the Habs go toe-to-toe with all those other high-paid hockey men and am happy, even for my own sake, to have them all back to bring an opportunity to cheer and yell, to yell and curse,  here in the cold old winter.

(And if you don’t watch any of the other video I’ve posted, watch this first one. The Sweater, written and narrated by the most glorious Roch Carrier.)

Put your foot on the round rock and be reminded
that the world spins on its axis
unconcerned with your wherefores and what for?s

Do the doing things:
do not leave them undone.
Allow the adverb upsurge to take flight
Speak the things that do not make sense
Find the order in disorder
and the poemical in the polemical

(Current linguistic attitude: I will fuck with you with love in my heart, language, baby. Now and forever.)

2012 hasn’t been an easy year — christ almighty, just the opposite — and I’ve undergone some significant changes. Some of those have been internal changes — metaphysical ones, I mean, altho’, as it happens, physical ones too — and some have been changes to external parts of my life. They’ve all been big and the various transitions have challenged me considerably. The year’s been catalysing, that’s for sure, with travel, ill health, changed family circumstances, and a new job in an industry heretofore entirely foreign to me, driving me to make reconsidered choices about how I live my life — the life inside my head and the life outside it too. (Interestingly, creatively, 2012′s been mostly great. There’s been sadness about a juicy collaborative project that seemed to have stalled permanently but maybe hasn’t, after all, but fulfillment with another collaboration, happily completed, and something pretty close to joy over a long-haul solo undertaking that is both difficult and delicious, just the way I like.)

Twelve months ago, I couldn’t have foreseen any of the events of 2012, with the exception of the child leaving home for university. I thought I mostly knew the course my life would take but everything got topsy-turvied and I was smashed and crashed around and I decided to acquiesce, to relax into the buffeting maelstrom and enjoy the ride as much as possible, and oh my darlings, the goodness you can find when you let the unfoldings unfold as they must.

That’s just how things go in this crazy world called life.

My version of sailing was intense and powerful brainmagic — intense and powerful bodymagic too. Moving across the world’s surface in that way was the freest I’d ever felt, maybe the freest I’ll ever feel. It made the world big and small at the same time, endless, but with exciting possibilities of manageability, navigability. It made my body thrum and zing, not with sturm und drang, but with the aliveness of being. It made me feel of a piece with the world to ride up like that, of a piece with the water and the wind and the sky. It was a chance for trance (or something very near it) and a chance for letting go. Epiphany and catharsis, my old chums.

As a kid, I had a few boat-lit obsessions, too, with Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki Expedition topping the list. I loved that book into dust and had to acquire another copy, so ardently did I read and reread it. I was also hung up on Jerome K. Jerome’s comic novel Three Men in a Boat, written and published in Victorian England, a somewhat oddball fascination for a pubescent girl in 1970s Montreal to have, but it’s such a funny bit of writing and such an excellent counterpoint to the Heyerdahl. I mean, the Heyerdahl is this great roistering saga of crossing the Pacific on a raft and the Jerome is a delightful bit of drollery about a boating holiday on the Thames. Contrapuntal punting. I like. You too?

And no character in children’s literature was more compelling or more resonant for me than C.S. Lewis’s Reepicheep, the gallant mouse who paddles away to the end of the world in his little currach in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Oh my god, the number of times I salted the pages of that book while reading about those venturings into the unknown. Tears! Goosebumps! He’s still my hero, Reepicheep, and one of the reasons I like to travel in the manner I like to travel — largely unplanned, the antithesis of package- or resort-holidaying, because the joy and terror of not knowing what’s around the next corner is so delicious and skin-prickling, and Reepicheep showed me that, for true.

Later in life I became pretty consumed by Trawler, Redmond O’Hanlon’s account of  joining the crew of a real-life fishing boat working the notoriously rough North Atlantic. I think I’ve read that book 10 times now and I plan to read it 10 more before I die — hell, maybe 20 — because O’Hanlon is both hilarious and insightful and also I do love to read about people pushing themselves physically and mentally, about how they cope with stress, suffering, privation — how they cope  and manage and find in those moments exhilaration and hilarity and — who knows? — maybe epiphany and catharsis too. There’s plenty of all that stuff in O’Hanlon’s book because it’s about, you know, men on a motherfucking fishing boat in a cruel, brutal, beautiful sea.

A boat, you say?

Yes, love, a boat. I am a dame who does love a boat.

Not many more exhilarating poems to write with your body than the boatpoem of flying across water on the surface of the world. Not many at all.

The most potent creation metaphor for me is that exact Dylan Thomas line above because it presumes the impulse towards creation to be involuntary. I very much like how the word “artistic” can be divided up to read “art is tic” because on a certain level that is exactly how I see it. Not that art-making is effortless or doesn’t require all sorts of thought and hard work and plenty of slogging it out in the trenches, because I know full well it doesn’t just happen, know full well it requires blood, sweat, toil, and tears in all too liberal quantities, but I love the notion that the need to make is so strong in some people that they have no choice but to heed it.

* * *

I am very breathless right now, surrounded by all the endings. More than one goodbye caught in my throat, so many words that can’t be spoken. They’re like ships, those words, ships run aground, except that’s not right because ships run aground are ships that have launched and moved along, gone somewhere, made progress, muscled forward by sailors and weather until keel has met silted sea bottom that forces stall. My goodbyes have moved past nothing, have not moved at all.

Of course, the case could be made that at least one of these endings is more like the flowing of one line of poetry into another, or a new rung being gained on the good old ladder of life. I mean, yeah, the leaving home of a university-bound child is a moving forward, not an ending, really. Right? It is the child taking the next step, not the child bricking up the doorway. It is exactly the flower being driven through the green fuse; in my brainplace, I know this. I’m filled with gratitude to have had her here with me for eighteen years but I’m not ready for her to go, even while understanding that my readiness is neither the point nor the necessity. The fern will push up from the forest floor, just as it’s meant to do. Will push, does push, is pushing.

I am trying to decipher the language of insects
they are the tongues of the future
their vocabularies describe buildings as food
they can instruct of dark water and the veins of trees
they can convey what they do not know
and what is known at a distance
and what nobody knows
they have terms for making music with the legs
they can recount changing in a sleep like death
they can sing with wings
the speakers are their own meaning in a grammar without horizons
they are wholly articulate
they are never important they are everything

But now the frogs are gone from me — the little lake that supported the amphibian madhouse that was the Bay of Frogs, and the marsh where the bittern flew up, and the Northwest Passage (so densely packed with grasses and other aquatic plant life that it was never fully traversed by me and my paddling ally, my son, but oh the sweated muscled joy we had trying), all of it unavailable now, all of it gone from our lives.

The new place we lit upon is lovely really, but it has no bay thick with waterlilies and a constant roil of frogs. I’m no minimalist in the matter of frogs; for me it’s always the more the frogs, the lighter my heart. Now it’s a different joy I have to make or find and I’ll do my best. But there will never be a day that I don’t miss the little lake and the little bay paved thick with frogs.

On the little lake, 13 August 2010. (Excuse my atrocious, er, cinematography.):

Regeneration:

“It’s Not Easy Being Green”:

1 – I believe in inclusion, not exclusion;
2 – more people expressing more love can never be a bad thing; and
3 – one of the greatest things my country has done so far this century is legalize same-sex marriage (which we did seven years ago. Can I get an “Aw yeah, Canada!”?).

Be happy and be together. Love whoever you love and damn the torpedoes. Now scooch over closer and gimme a smooch.

when you sit outside in a day that’s almost night and the fireflies arrive

all the other places you never know in daylight open out to you

there in the glow

I keep careless careful track of all the weird dreamy image and language stuff that pops into my head. I have ten jillion notes on my iPhone and two hundred jillion on tiny rippy bits of paper scattered throughout about a hundred paper journals that I obsessively start but never finish and also generally sown around my bedroom, especially thick-laid on the headboard of my bed. If I close the door to my bedroom too quickly, a blizzard of snippety paper slips whooshes up and down and all around in a whirlygig assault of disconnected thought bits. Which is essentially a three-dimensional rendering of how it is in my brain, come to think of it.

Anyway, I’ve been doing all this fucking crazy writing lately, just opening myself up to making a noise, and this river of poetry has rushed out of me. I kind of feel like I’ve been fighting it for a long time, the river of poetry, knowing it was there but trying to ignore it because it felt too scary to let it exist. I’ve really kind of muzzled myself, in my life, for all sorts of reasons, and this thyroid thing has actually been incredibly useful, for true, in terms of deciding not to obstruct myself any more. The ailment became the prescription. Crazy, innit?

I’ve got adventures to go on, you know. And I’m going. Now and forever.