Brenda Laurel's Blog http://tauzero.com/Brenda_Laurel/blog Poetics Thu, 29 Mar 2012 06:38:32 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.2 Granville Island http://tauzero.com/Brenda_Laurel/blog/?p=42 http://tauzero.com/Brenda_Laurel/blog/?p=42#comments Wed, 28 Mar 2012 22:01:53 +0000 Brenda http://tauzero.com/Brenda_Laurel/blog/?p=42 Continue reading →]]> There’s an impressionistic wash of rain on Granville Island. I’m strolling around the place, getting my bearings, sniffing the air. In the foreground, houseboats form undulating row-houses in bright pastels. Beyond dull metal arches of bridge, almost-postmodern buildings of glass and metal whoosh and bend toward dark water.

I’ll be giving a talk at Emily Carr tonight. I turn the corner and there is the college – post-industrial like CCA, but more cramped and vivid. Someone has applied the word “SILLY” to a high window in what might be a studio building. The students are familiar – rainbow-haired, clothed in celebratory mismatch, smoking cigarettes, ignoring the rain, utterly absorbed in their scene. A boy’s voice says, “I love you” into a mobile phone.

I think, I’ve been in scenes like this for fourteen years – it seems like such a long time and such a far cry from the corporate lives I led. I am suddenly aware in every cell that I live here; I love it here. Likely no one notices the older lady in the black coat as I smile mildly past the kids on the wet sidewalk. But I belong.

 

]]> http://tauzero.com/Brenda_Laurel/blog/?feed=rss2&p=42 0 Halloween http://tauzero.com/Brenda_Laurel/blog/?p=15 http://tauzero.com/Brenda_Laurel/blog/?p=15#comments Fri, 28 Oct 2011 01:10:50 +0000 Brenda http://tauzero.com/Brenda_Laurel/blog/?p=15 Continue reading →]]> This afternoon,
setting puckered-apple witches out,
stiff gauze ghost and felt pumpkins,
I honor work of little hands now grown.

Spiders in black satin: I remember little girls.
this afternoon,

I paint pumpkins on the porch,
streaking colors with wet fingers,
laughing like a skeleton,
just the orange wind and me.
and I know this:
the world still turns to fall,
to smoky gold long-shadowed dusk
and then to stars and dark
and all around, the Mystery.

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