torthúil explores

Writing about Poetry:

Poetry (outlining my motivations for revisiting the reading and writing of poetry)

Other things I have previously written connected to poetry:

Monday, 16 February 2026

Meditation for the Mountain

We drove into the mountains at dinnertime

When the sun was beginning her descent

Between the peaks. In the restaurant,

I chose the seat facing high windows

With the view of Mount Kidd, and I set myself

To learn his features. Cliffs piled upon cliffs, sedimentary layers

Dusted with snow. A mountain with a biography of storms.

In spring he will flood the river at his feet, and downstream

It will meet the river that flows through my city.

Now the waiter brings us glasses of water

And a cloud partly hides the summit.

When I sip my wine

The slanting rays of the sun

Break the craggy face into shadows.

Main course

Sees the light fading to purpled blue

Silent forests and snow-loaded cliffs

Gathering the darkness to themselves.

I remember day trips

As a child, how this was the time we left the mountains

Ski trails dimming behind us, car headlights cutting a path

Toward the highway that funneled us

Inevitably toward the lights of the city.

Now, in the soft, fortified luxury of the hotel

I feel almost savage

To stay after dusk, with the audacity

To sleep under the gaze of the mountain.

ii.

At breakfast,

I regain my vigil at the window.

Flurries twist outside

Sun lighting the facets of snowflakes

Like flecks of gold leaf.

Later, we walk the grounds among them

The gusts catching and swinging my skirt.

As the fitful sun comes and goes

I loose a scarf,

Or pull on my mittens,

Tuck a hat into my backpack

or tug it over my ears.

I dance with the elements

Daring the sun to warm me, dazzle

My eyes where she strikes the snow

But always the clouds shift overhead

The air thickens with snowflakes

And we move in a flattened world,

Bereft of the depth of light and shadow.

iii.

At dinner again,

We are back at the window.

Do we feel slightly claustrophobic by this time?

Your mountain is gone,

My husband tells me. It is true.

Where Mount Kidd should loom, layer upon layer of white

Makes a white darkness.

Near the window,

The white shivers into thousands of snowflakes

Water glass, menu, wine glass

We fall into the rhythm of our weekend

Our conversation the melody, while I watch the sky.

Main course,

The clouds never stop moving.

They are the stories we tell,

I say, and the stories we hear.

Always changing

Tricks of perception

Now a stand of forest visible

Now a single tree.

Somewhere out of sight

In the frigid airs of the distant sky

A wind squall opens a portal

Of purest blue.

Now I see a glimpse of the mountain

Wearing a cloud like a woolly scarf

Now the scarf is tossed away.

A cap of white

Rests upon the summit

Tendrils of flurries hang like a veil.

Dessert.

Look, the mountain is back,

I say with satisfaction

I claim this as my personal insight

The mountain was always there.

iv.

We have grown restless, watching the weather.

It seems in sympathy,

Our final day dawns silver and gold and azure

You could throw a stone upward

Into the sky,

And watch it sink forever

Into the achingly blue depths.

We say goodbye to my mountain

At least the side that we were watching,

And drive deep into the valley.

Now mountains leap at us

On every side of the highway

The motion of the car animating the landscape.

The mountains could be austere and cold

Wearing few ornaments of human habitation

But they are alive with memory and anticipation too.

Yesterday's snow dazzles in the forests

And we plunge in like divers

Snowshoes crunching on the veiled earth.

Against the landscape,

We have become story

Movement, a brief improvised dance

For an hour or two.

We are foreground to the mountains' mystery

The woods absorb our conversation

As they have taken in the warmth trails

Of those before us.

When we emerge from the trees

Released again to the highway

The image of the mountain lingers in my mind

Even as the white peaks fade behind me.

Have I left them something in return?

Links:

Original Writing:

Writing about Poetry:

Poetry (outlining my motivations for revisiting the reading and writing of poetry)

Other things I have previously written connected to poetry:

Saturday, 20 December 2025

A Christmas Palimpsest

This memory is older than

The kitchen table just level with my forehead.

I can trace the pattern

on the plastic backs of the chairs:

Brown with drawn-on quilt patches.

This memory is bigger than

The stage where I'd just seen Swan Lake performed:

Which led to me twirling about

on the kitchen floor, announcing:

I'm going to be a ballerina.

This is before the grammar of ballet

entered my body.

There is no stage, it is our living room

With the lights off.

Candles are lit.

A folk song plays on the turntable.

I hold hands with my parents, and my brothers

And we dance.

The song is lost

The language is lost

The steps are lost

(If I even learned any steps.)

What remains:

Candles, a circle of hands, bright music

And my wish:

Can we dance in the dark tonight?

II.

Santa Claus,

Round, red and animatronic,

Welcomes me to the grocery store.

Ho, ho, ho: Are YOU ready for Christmas?

He presides over stacks of packaged cookies

Pastries in clamshell packets

Mandarin oranges in bright boxes.

An inflatable sleigh

Flies over the processed meat counter.

Robot Santa calls it Christmas

But he is a bit of a relic

Mostly in the temples of commerce

We call it The Holidays (capitalized)

Of course many of us no longer attend.

Instead there are domestic discussions

Over Amazon purchases

Shiny coupons on our screens give silent joy.

Each offering is tabulated on a credit card balance.

Every now and then

In between Robot Santa's speeches, a choir

Is overhead singing about Christmas.

Maybe it is an artifact

Of a cult in another kingdom

Where they dance in circles by candlelight.

Wherever it is,

I don't know the way back anyway.

III.

In this memory

I have turned off the fluorescent lights

(Economical but ugly).

The path to adulthood

Is sometimes easier to walk with the lights dimmed.

This is not yet an adventure

Taken on an eastbound airplane or

A bus at midnight, or

A sheep-framed road in the Hebrides.

This journey is between the most familiar of walls.

Paced out hour upon hour.

I am not wishing I was somewhere else.

I am somewhere else.

Not all distances are measured in miles.

IV.

A story from far away and long ago:

680 AD in Streoneshalh, or Whitby Abbey.

There was a man called Caedmon,

"Well-established in worldly life"

And advanced in age.

But alas for Caedmon, he had never learned any songs.

When there was a gathering at the mead-hall

An occasion for joy, where men would take turns with a harp

He would run away.

One night he left the banquet hall

After the harp came toward him,

And went out to the animal stables

Where he was to care for the cattle that night.

Inside me

There are two wolves.

They stop by the woods on a snowy evening

Looking for two diverging roads.

One wolf takes the road to the mead-hall.

This is where I bring my children

To celebrations they can name.

They dance in circles

To songs whose words they know

Holding hands with friends

Who make the circle ever bigger.

Feast, abundance, tradition:

This is the gift I wish to give.

The other wolf takes a road

Which leads to an empty place, a fog

In which I dimly perceive

The songs, the languages, the prayers

I might have learned in childhood.

Here is a mirror

Too broken to show me my reflection

It is held by the wraiths of my ancestors

Who chose the less traveled road

Abandoning much along the way.

I did not choose this loss

It was bequeathed to me.

This road seems to lead nowhere, yet

I know I will take it again and again.

Every time the burden of compassion feels heavier.

One day, perhaps

I will have enough to present my old ghosts with gifts.

VI.

Caedmon went to sleep in the stable,

With the horses.

Then in a dream, some man stood by him.

Caedmon! Sing a song to me.

"I cannot sing," he replied.

"That is the reason I left the meadhall!"

Hwæðre þu meaht singan.

Nevertheless, you shall sing me something.

"What shall I sing?"

Sing me frumsceaft

Sing to me of creation.

When Caedmon received this answer,

He immediately began to sing

How God created the world,

In verses and words that had never been heard before.

VII

It wasn't a man that came to me

Last night in a dream.

But hlǣfdīġe, a lady.

I saw you standing at the end of a hallway.

I could barely make out your face,

But somehow I was expecting you.

The distance was suddenly too much,

And we ran toward each other

Embracing without a word.

There were no arguments to win or lose

Nothing said of reproach or regret.

Nor were there any words of wisdom

Or songs to last a thousand years.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised

For you are no angel and I am no saint.

In the dream,

We were silent.

It seemed like we could hear a distant choir.

Heaven, your roof

Middle-Earth, mankind's keeper

Praise forever

Some sources, of information and inspiration to check out:

Bede's story of Caedmon from Heorot.dk for a transcription/translation (of course, this is one of many available online)

Two Pilgrim Tales (I love this so much)

I first encountered the story of Caedmon and Hild as a child, in a storybook. After I rediscovered it in university, it has remained in the background of all my adult life.

I wrote about Caedmon and Hild many years ago here. More recently, I recalled encountering the story in university in my blog The Saints.

I will never exhaust Caedmon's story; this bit of writing is only my latest encounter!

Links:

Original Writing:

Writing about Poetry:

Poetry (outlining my motivations for revisiting the reading and writing of poetry)

Other things I have previously written connected to poetry:

Tuesday, 11 November 2025

Woods

The woods of my mind are mingled pine

and birch, with far-up sunlight broken

and reassembled, into a mosaic:

Blue sky and sparkling coin-shaped leaves.

I can walk among the trunks

In a ballerina dress

And the magical tulle never snags.

There is birdsong:

But the birds are in the distant canopy

Messengers of another sphere.

I don't know their names.

The woods in my neighbourhood

Are a ten-minute walk away.

Maybe less, when I almost run

To keep up with the girls on their bikes.

The trees are three scattered bushes.

There is a parking lot

Where the children yell into the bosom of the wind

And ride in circles.

I sit on a bench, an empty

School building at my back

A flat, mowed field at my front, green

Thanks to the frequent summer rains.

My daughter careens past, vanishes around the brick wall,

The stillness closing behind her. Then reappears, walking.

I saw a tarantula: it was right here, she says.

I watch the mounds of weeds pushing up through pavement.

Will one of them crawl toward my foot?

The best evidence of time

Are the sprinklers that erupt

Row by row for five minutes, then vanish

Amusing, ice-cold geysers.

They splash wrists and ankles

The bikes and search for tarantulas briefly abandoned.

Otherwise,

It might be another summer

A lake like an oily mirror,

A wooden dock at its edge, the small splinters working into my bare feet.

I leap off it again and again

The thunder of my own splash echoing in my inner ear.

Above me, the mirror shatters to reassemble

Into a mosaic of liquid diamonds.

Each time, I push my body deeper

How many ways are there to be underwater?

A dancer in magical tulle

Rehearsing, weightless

In an empty studio.

You don't need music in this kind of silence.

In a few weeks, people will ask me casually:

How was your summer?

I went into the woods of my mind, and I found them

Nearer than I remembered.

Links:

Original Writing:

Writing about Poetry:

Poetry (outlining my motivations for revisiting the reading and writing of poetry)

Other things I have previously written connected to poetry:

Monday, 27 October 2025

The Flow Poem

The Flow Zone,

On the glowing rectangle of my screen:

A diagonal arrow, straight

(sometimes with stylized curves)

Starting at zero in the left bottom corner,

Pointing upwards to the top right corner,

An endless vector between

The axes of Competence and Difficulty.

Locate yourself on the graph.

Leave a fingerprint on the screen.

Later, disgusted, wipe it off.

Along with all the other greasy marks.

How many left per hour?

The evening class.

Wearing my slightly itchy knitted sweater.

Real wool.

I am one point in a semi-circle of desks,

Facing the Creative Writing professor.

She is laying down the ground rules for giving feedback on writing.

Whatever you say, don’t say It flows.

Everybody says that.

But what does it even mean?

I guess she was right.

I still can’t tell you

What flow means,

Except with that old dodge:

I know it when I see it.

What about defining what flow is not?

Start with the opposite.

Go against the flow.

Go into the woods, find a wandering stream

Step in, force shins and ankles against the current, feel the undertow

The ache of the cold.

No, this is not the opposite of flow.

To push against a current is to have direction.

To go upstream is to seek a source.

To seek a source is to believe a source exists.

Besides,

How could standing in a woodland stream ever feel wrong?

But if there is truth in water,

Follow it.

How about sailing a boat, on a day of little wind?

I can hear my father’s voice,

Watch the ripples on the water, follow the shadows

They will tell you where the wind is coming from next,

Push out the boom, loosen the sheet, be ready.

But the wind is

A breath, then an angry gust

First from here, then from there,

The weather vane spins.

The sail, set ever so carefully,

Backs and snaps

Set it again.

Dead waves slap and rock the hull

Knock the bow sideways.

A storm waits somewhere, they mutter.

But you have no wind

Either to turn and face it,

Or to flee.

No, that is not a comfortable feeling.

Like the itchy knit sweater, on a cold autumn night.

Why did I even wear it?

Perhaps as defiance

Against the approaching winter.

The wind cut through it, quickening my breath,

Pushing my feet faster, over the concrete path as I walked

To class.

The heated room with yellow cinder-block walls

Felt almost welcoming in contrast.

The sweater was my mother’s.

There are photos of her wearing it,

Smiling into the camera, on top of a ski hill.

Even when I was a child,

This was a long time ago.

A time I knew only from story:

My mom and dad as newlyweds.

An apartment fire.

Everything lost.

What did they hang onto in every re-telling?

The single black and white photo of her favourite cat from childhood,

standing on his hind legs.

His first slide rule, a parting gift from a grandfather I never met

When he left Greece for Canada.

After the fire they went back once.

My mom refusing to take photos. I don’t want to remember, she said.

They saw their brand-new sauce pans on the stove, filled with ashes.

It was Christmas Eve.

The sweater.

She picked it up,

After people in the city

Filled a gymnasium with donations.

At some point, moving above the axis of time,

It was my turn to remember.

The song of the stream

The swish and slap of the lake on the hull of a boat

Too many notes to put into music,

But whether by lake or by brook, I take out my phone,

And record it.

It is memory.

My daughter goes to sailing school.

On land she wears black and her hair falls like a curtain

Over a stage where the play is yet to begin

But on water she is fierce.

She watches the wind, she leads the fleet.

Even now, walking a concrete path, she turns to me smiling.

This would be a great day for sailing.

Yes, it is, and I smile back.

Your grandpa would have said the same thing.

And look at those clouds, is there a squall coming?

Links:

Original Writing:

Writing about Poetry:

Poetry (outlining my motivations for revisiting the reading and writing of poetry)

Other things I have previously written connected to poetry: