Abbotsford Station: The Voyage of Rediscovery
Abbotsford Station:
The Voyage of Rediscovery
The Letter
Yes, I was blind for an entire week, for an entire week of my life I saw blackness. And my memory began to fail. You couldn’t have asked me the colour of yellow, what it looked like, because I wouldn’t have remembered during that week.
Or things like how to describe the poppies which grow in the park. (Actually, I don’t think that they’re poppies, but you probably know the ones I’m talking about.) But do you want to know something funny? What colour was plain for me to see?
I remember that black magpie which used to sit behind the trailer at the entrance to the park. Remember that bird? …it was huge. Remember how it used to scare me when we walked by late at night? Well, the colour of that magpie is what I remember the most. I hid inside of that ugly black bird for almost a week...
My Life as a Camera
I had found a bag of popcorn
and had salvaged a can of Mountain Dew
all from an earlier time
from a life when my family
was a part of love
After church
my dad with his grey polaroid
would take our picture in the driveway
load the lawnmower {a yellow gas-guzzling beast}
into the Buick
and then pasting the photograph to the windshield
he would drive us {our heads flapping in the wind}
to a picture album of a cottage
Photograph Darkroom
I am a farmer
harvesting yesterday’s crops
or rather a pitchman
bringing coals to Newcastle
I try to count the years
as time in the photos pass-
A lovely woman whose
children by now
see themselves
in their own children’s eyes
Smell of remembrance
stains the hands
moves to the heart
These people were not old
they were not whores, or horses
or heroes
they are my ship in the bottle now