A LETTER TO ARNOLD SCHALKS / Di Brandt

Winnipeg 24.6.95

dear Arnold, it's too hot to write in my study so i borrowed Wayne's laptop computer & set it up, just so, comfortably, on my bed, with the lamp over my left shoulder & the window fan blowing cool air into the room, & then i couldn't figure out how to turn it on, so now after all i'm writing this by hand, sitting crosslegged on my bed, on blue lined school paper, the way i used to do, the way we all did, before computers, before typewriters.

you will read this after i've copied it onto the computer, & so you will not see the black smudges & crossed out words i'm accumulating on the white page along with the words, but i like to think of them as present, in the shadows, behind the words, dancing & shimmering as shadows do, sometimes big, sometimes small, moving in & out of the light.

it's your careful, care-full, description of how you're constructing the installation that made me think about the elaborate preparations i, too, make, when sitting down to put together words, building images, collages, interventions as you say - what a lovely word, somehow associated with the "divine" in my mind. & why not, there are miracles all around us, why not one here, among these lingering monks' ghosts on the edge of the wide eyed prairie.

the elm tree you have found that reaches up to the sky like an outstretched hand touches me in ways you could not have known. the family farm i was thinking about in the poem when i said, "on father ground, our father's land" was called Elm Ridge Farm. it has just this year been dismantled & sold to strangers. most of the farm did not consist of either elms or ridges, it was mostly straight bare fields sown with wheat & barley & flax & sugar beets - we watched our father break the prairie into farmland & then later after he died we had such a battle over whose land it was - & here i am, freshly in mourning over the loss of it, that place i was so deeply rooted in & thought was there for us, in us, forever, & this outstretched hand, reaching for open sky, seems such a perfect metaphor for home, as i feel it inside me now, the double row of ash & sugar maple & elm trees that surrounded our farmyard, with their graceful, flowing branches, like fountains, i often thought, or dancers' arms, & how it has all transformed over time into sheer memory, thin & permeable, though strong enough to hold us up, animate us, like air.

& you here, building literal images, of wood & steel, with your hands, out of my airy words, does seem like a miracle, my old Dutch ancestry of shipbuilders & carpenters rising up in me, triumphant, proclaiming the realness of poems, yes, they are something, they do exist in time & space, see, see how you can suspend them from a tree on the edge of the wide eyed prairie. how we take the words out of the physical world & return them to it, the space they take up on the page, in our eyes, ears, minds, & here, transubstantiating miraculously into an ark, made of wood, & hemp & steel, suspended in air, open to weather, offering the impossible to us, the meeting in the poem that can never happen, made suddenly real, possible again, in the flesh, a love poem after all, with its reaching beyond, toward -

such a fitting requiem, & lullaby, & love song, all at once, in real time, in brother sister mothertongue, such a lovely leaving, taking on the prairie

with love, Di