GABRYEL HARRISON

in Memoriam

2007-08-30T12:03:00.000-07:00

There is a mango, plump and soft, filled with the juicy gift of its sweetness bleeding into a white ceramic bowl its over-ripeness. I cannot eat this food, this lingering fragrance of your kindness left on my doorstep the week you died. You have left this world for another state of grace and I, who am alive, listen to the mind’s pains of hunger for an answer to why I did not cut the sunflowers from my garden and bring them to you that evening they held the light of day burnished and gold as the glowing corona of Christ in all the Byzantine Icons. Sometimes, when the heart’s eye is opened to the round bloom of love, the body closes in its old cloak of fear, blind fingers tugging at the worn habit of protection, leaving emptiness in her beggar’s bowl.
Now, this bruised ovoid fruit, skin shinning its subdued russet flame speaks to me in the whispered shame of my heart calling forth its own forgiveness.

August Eclipse 2007

2007-08-28T11:16:00.000-07:00

“They should put out the eyes of painters as they do those of bullfinches,
to make them sing better.” Picasso

Drenched in moonlight
the midnight water is moving
the river to the sea
past the open mouths of
coyotes howling at the full round song of the moon
calling back to herself
all the waters spread beneath her
all the waters inside us
all our inner tides complicit
rising to her round measure of time
appearing and disappearing in her cool silver sphere
this lunar wax and wane true as the shadowed penumbra of our imaginings
wandering our own warm sea like a blind prophet
singing out in this vast emptiness
for us to hear the words of invisible power.
Listen to what calls from the deep well of darkness.
Incorruptible celestial guide lighting our skins
shining bright as coins
closing the eyes of the dead.

I have just left the red

2007-07-13T20:07:00.000-07:00

I have just left the red
center of a rose, paint buttery
smooth as a petal’s velvet cave,
studio full of the scent
of damar, turpentine and oil.
On the black table, Bing cherries in a white bowl.

Outside, I water the double begonia,
scarlet petals limp,
summer’s torch burning everything.
For three days, a hot wind
licking the brittle edges of leaves.
Grass burnished gold,
inextinguishable light
on this parched earth.

I am thinking of the wide blue wheel
and all that air,
that sliver of eternity
between me and the taut membrane of the trampoline
catapulting me bright as a child into the morning
I slipped free of gravity
bodiless, light as the swallows
flight all round me, all the shadows of clouds
white as the wings of angels
and I seeing them in the jade ribbon,
the river far below me.

The day is a handful of jewels.
Even the shock of carmine trucks,
chrome yellow hoses uncoiling from
fire engines exciting the day,
polished metal skins
and chrome shrill as a warning.

Think of it.
Eyes on heaven, arms flung wide
floating me upward into Brueghel’s blue,
fire rising beneath me.
As I leapt higher and higher
flames climbed from their cradle
of dry timber, tongues hungry
for the same mouthful of air.
Death always ready to burst forth,
and I oblivious
rising to the heart's spark
this sudden flickering
raising me up blind
but alive,! So alive.

Ancient cedars

2007-05-28T15:57:00.000-07:00

The air, sweet with pine and soft hush after the chainsaw’s whine is stilled. Carl is guide to the lively, sharp-toothed blade slicing green wood that will be my winter’s comfort. Once split, one season of sun and the keen screams of wind raw from the river, strips the living water from these felled trees. I am looking at the decadent center of each round when I hear Ben talking about the beached grey whale lying dead at Tsawassen’s tide line. He is telling us that sometimes if bulldozers or backhoes cannot drag the 50 tons of carcass close enough for the sea to slip her waves beneath the gravid weight, men thrust dynamite inside each orifice and cut open still more wounds to bear their explosives. Blubber, bone and blood blown sky-high, shattering this lover of water, this song-ful leviathan of the deep. Warm, red stain of a mammal like you and I, now scattered across the sand like the pieces of Osiris by his brother. I am shocked into stillness. I can see the bones shining, suddenly exposed to air.
I seek refuge in the rings of this tree. I ground myself in round circles telling me of its history, the dark strands woven with the light, the transforming of wind and earth and rain, the turning of day and night into something of grace and green. Some say whales carry the memories of all the world inside them. In what dark cavity can they find a place for this?
Clay breaks silence in a whisper. I hear his reverence. Words set adrift in the air like an offering. Sentences compressed like the incense of trees. Ancient Canadian trees.Cedars twisted in limb and gnarled with age like bonsais. Some, he said, seeded themselves in tiny crevices of rock before the first Crusade. Long before Columbus touched the continent those cedars were sipping air from their tenacious holds in cracks scarring rock ledges of the Niagara Escarpment.

Wiry roots wound tight in grains of soil fallen from the talons of eagles. I wonder why I have never heard of these trees? They possess the inner secret of how to thrive in the earth's cracked seam. The way they live 2000 years on air and emptiness. Tempests raging all around them.There must be something in the heartwood itself. Something they must take inside them like the rock takes in the light. It makes me think of those wise women and men who sit still and let everything flow through them. Peacefully abiding. Meditating in the mouths of darkness with the eye of the heart wide open. Opening the way for vast emptiness. Opening the way for the infinite moment. Round and whole and perfect, turning eternity's golden wheel. Opening the way for the light.

Chrysanthemums

2007-05-25T19:55:00.000-07:00

I sat watching the river early this morning. A great blue heron and I shared the slanting arrows of rain. They entered silent and quick as slivers, breaking the skin of the slough. The bird was concentrating all its stillness on what lay beneath the silted tide.
Myself, I was transfixed with fire. Cacophony of chrysanthemums, long stems bearing their spiked crowns aloft, shining chrome yellow, crimson, and traffic cone bright. A corolla of flames rising between slate sky and water bleak as zinc. Somebody had left a bouquet in a plastic Schweppes tonic bottle carefully cut and tied with a strand of twined wool, white and blue fastened to a bench overlooking the Fraser. Rain dark as a beaten shield falling around this golden shrine, alight, luminous as fireworks bursting in the gray cataract of the morning.
Sometimes, I think I'll go blind from the looking. The eye longs to draw its dark curtain across the unthinkable. We strain toward the invisible, hungering for some shape of beauty, the flash of light to feed us, the one thread binding us to the center of things. We lose sight of eternity when all the time it burns bright as an ember inside us. See here, the dark cerement of earth and sky alive, this offfering of fiery petals more brilliant than any pyre.
I wanted to return with a splash of gin, to dissolve my witness into the pure tonic collected in memory of the dead. To honour the way one tender gesture can for a moment return them alive to us. But I lingered, and oh the glory to see the heron unfold its wings. Silent angel rising. The river flowing serene. Blades of marsh grass were swaying, gently bending in memory of her passing.

San Francisco, Mexico. On the trail to Casa Kali.

2007-05-24T17:01:00.000-07:00

photograph by Isabella Scandolari

The heart has built its nest
in an ecstasy of thorns.
Coracle of protection suspended
in branches woven
like a tattooed crown.
It was always the dangerous
you loved the best.
The bright hook. The torn flesh.
But now, when i look on
that cage of twisted limbs,
the suffering,
I see only the bright blue
blessing. All that openness beckoning.
Each black barb
enfolded
in the light's invitation.

hello world

2007-05-23T21:44:00.002-07:00

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