Thursday, January 20, 2005

The sky is sitting on the town

...this morning, pushing the wood smoke back down the chimneys. Earlier the sky, clad in worn grey flannel, brushed my peripheral vision as I biked and soon I began to see two ghosts - one poking me straight in the eye, the other bouncing off the left lense of my glasses.

Perhaps I wouldn't have noticed them if I hadn't been reading the first installment of the 2004 Caroline Heath Memorial Lecture, "Anne Szumigalski and Eli Mandel: Two Visions of Blake" by George Elliott Clarke, which appears in the January/February 2005 issue of Freelance. After I heard Clarke deliver the lecture back in October, I looked forward to reading it, wanting to linger on whatever it was that moved me as I listened to him speak about these two great Saskatchewan poets. Sure enough, as I read it I felt again that strange stirring, a stirring I cannot describe much less explain. The sky, still in its old pajamas, seems to be waiting for me to figure it out.

2 comments:

Anita Daher said...

Just beautiful images, Brenda! I love imagining the sky in old pyjamas :-)

Brenda Schmidt said...

:-)
I dare say, Anita, your pyjamas look better than my pajamas. I stared at that word this morning, thinking hey buddy, you don't look right. I've long been a pjs person and it shows.