Learning to Navigate in 2013 and Calgary.

In this place, one new and yet not, I am a rather clumsy sailor. Or perhaps an unkempt boat, led by a spectacular moon. No sun yet, but I suppose those gifts are only given to the most resilient of sailors, or the sons of kings. Like Odysseus, who took a decade to go home, (I always wondered how Penelope never wavered) my hair is also filled with sand and old phrases you all once uttered. And a net full of fish, each of them a life, each of them a history of its own species.  In this place, lilies have a fragrance of something else. Not a flower, but a waxy smell, of childhood? An imprint of some stoney version of who I may have been? Or is this just another betrayal of my own tendency to fit all things into a bigger truth. Must all things come with a meaning, fleeting but still just loud enough to be caught by those who sit and wait and listen. Coy and fickle, only showing itself to those fools who gaze lovingly at lilies and curtains and pillars waiting for some brazen young thing of beauty to emerge from a hidden conclusion. Must an epiphany always burst forth if one stares long enough into a starstruck sky above a prairie field.  I don't think it can be helped though. The map in my pocket – the one I drew myself (of the sky and the land), it always tells me to do just that. It's folds are deep and browning, with the whispers of those dead old men who thought themselves such great thinkers. They were. They are? But how useful will those century old secrets do me? A woman.

Dead men, surprisingly though, only grow more senile and vulgar. Even if their words remain inactive. Their souls clamber on, a heavy and ridiculous air of old gods and old knowledge. Resisting the truths offered by Chthonic heroes, and shifting slowly, slowly to an Olympian philosophy. And there they are, in their obsession with the sky and hatred of the ground, breathing down my neck, telling me how I should read my own map. "Look up, don't look down. Keep looking skyward. There is nothing of value in dirt and roots. Only an atlas of stars can help you" It can all be very patronizing. And yet, it is precious to me. This is precious to me. Words are all I have. Mine and theirs and yours.