I got delayed in Ottawa for one more day, so my new leaving time is friday at 7am. Which is sort of good because by 2:30 this morning I hadn't finished packing yet and I was discussing poetry upstairs in adam and socks apartment. Anyways, I am taking advantage of this last day in Ottawa to go eat waffles at cora's this morning and maybe take some photos. We'll see I guess.

And who would have thought it? After complaining all night at tree about not being able to write anything, I came home and wrote what you see below this post. Thank goodness something came out, I thought I was going to go insane!

So I was reading this anthology I got in september called Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets, and there is this great poem in there by this woman named Anne Simpson, the poem is from a series called Seven Paintings by Brueghel

Landscape with the parable Of the Sower

A sales receipt, a shoe. The silvery rain
has many hands. A stream - Fresh Kills - elides
with river. Thick and slow. A landfill plain:
a ghost in biohazard gear. Gulls ride
the thermals, circling high as barges come,
a linking chain. Blue metropolis, far-
off glints of light. The cranes all lift and hum,
making hills of metal, bone. Crushed cars.
So garbage rises: this stench is monument.
Yet Brueghel's farmer takes the seeds, flings wide
his arm. A miracle: small event. We meant
to go, but every boat was laden. Tides
pulled home, pulled here, then left us for the birds.
We take the shape of soil, abandon words.

Another one I liked in this was by Anne Carson

Short Talk On
The Youth At Night

The youth at night would have himself
driven around the scream. It lay in the
middle of the city gazing back at him
with its heat and rosepools of flesh.
Terrific lava shone on his soul. He
would ride and stare.

last but not least I will end with a John Newlove poem I like a lot and seems especially pertinent to tomorrows trip home:

It was all there

I am now a servant only
of what in my innocence
I had wished to make myself.

Successful, I am unsuccessful; complete,
I am more empty than ever.

These compulsive trips
into the mountains
that frighten me, these runnings away -

what reputation do I have to make?

It was all there, all
the time, I could
sit back quietly now and nothing would change.

I have been too careful for that.
The stuttering boy
is known as the glib

obnoxious insulter, but alone
he still hems, picks up things left-handedly,
and cannot make an order.