It was a startling thing to see in downtown Toronto, this unadorned and pitiless majesty.

Had the bird taken it’s victim in mid-flight, plucking it from unsuspecting air?
Had it tracked it’s prey at great velocity, and then it’s sharp, sudden talons piercing the animal, and then the wood upon which the creature had been scurrying?

My eyesight is not great, and the bird receded back into the camouflage of the tree. I stared up at that tree– that tree which could have been two centuries old– for a long time, hoping to see that world flicker back into mine, but it did not, and this vivid life of blood and bone would remain known but unseen. A reminder on a cold, November day of this other world, of how quickly, astonishingly and with unsentimental finality, it will one day make it’s presence known to each of us.

******************************************

On a winter day while hiking through the woods, Rachelle’s father Terry came across the imprint of an owl’s wings and body in the snow. From the tracks, he could see that it had been following a mouse of some sort, and then swooped down, picking the creature up from the surface and carrying him up and off to death. He took a photograph of the imprint, and it’s amazing to see such a moment crystallized, to see just the shadow of this small and brutal divinity.

It has always reminded me of this poem by Mary Oliver:
White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field
by Mary Oliver
Coming down out of the freezing sky
with its depths of light,
like an angel, or a Buddha with wings,
it was beautiful, and accurate,
striking the snow and whatever was there
with a force that left the imprint
of the tips of its wings — five feet apart —
and the grabbing thrust of its feet,
and the indentation of what had been running
through the white valleys of the snow —
and then it rose, gracefully,
and flew back to the frozen marshes
to lurk there, like a little lighthouse,
in the blue shadows —
so I thought:
maybe death isn’t darkness, after all,
but so much light wrapping itself around us —
as soft as feathers —
that we are instantly weary of looking, and looking,
and shut our eyes, not without amazement,
and let ourselves be carried,
as through the translucence of mica,
to the river that is without the least dapple or shadow,
that is nothing but light — scalding, aortal light —
in which we are washed and washed
out of our bones.

Heather:

When I was initially diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease I characterized it as an act of terror.  By doing that I abnegated any responsibility for my circumstance. I did nothing wrong—there was nothing I could do to have prevented the disease, it was like getting on a bus that just happened to have a bomb on it.  I did not feel weak.  I did not feel that I was to blame.  It was a random, utterly arbitrary occurrence that just happened to have victimized me.  It would not come back.

When it did come back, my sense of disease as terrorism intensified.  It became a manifestation of fear.  Cancer was the terrorist bomb that could explode within my body at any moment.  I became jittery and tentative—vigilant to anything out of the ordinary.  I lived in fear, and I lived quietly, unwilling to make commitments to people or things, I locked myself indoors for worry of the terrorist threat within my body.

I am trying to stop that.

As always,

Anderson

Here are three:

Dear Mike,

I have just read a novel in which an Englishman sees Spokane, Washington for the first time from a window of an airplane. It reminds him of Northwest Pakistan. Do you ever look at a place or a thing and it reminds you of something on the other side of the world? The first time I saw Athens from the air it reminded me of a coral reef deep in an ocean where I had never been.

Dear Mike,

Do you think you would ever be able to remember everyone who ever asked you the time? The only instance I remember very clearly was when I was 18 and sitting in the airport in Milan. An Italian man in a suit said something to me and pointed to his watch. I was terrified and shrugged and waved my watchless wrist at him. It became a habitual gesture. People ask me the time and I point to my wrist, whether I am wearing a watch or not.

Dear Mike,

The first time I saw the Milky Way I was seven years old. We were driving home to Chicago from my grandparents’ house in Lorain, Ohio in the middle of the night and my dad pulled the car over in a place where there were no streetlights and showed it to me. I remember the feeling of crouching as I looked at the sky.

Under the awning girls in tube tops giggle while their boyfriends watch them, imagining lifting their twisting and smiling and screaming bodies up, and carrying them out into the cooling streams of rain– the moment and everybody in it, becoming slick, beautiful and imperishable.

Madeline:

Somebody far in the distance is strumming a guitar. Just beneath the hum of the fan, I can hear it drifting in through the open window. It enters so softly, as if a daydream of romance that’s now free of its moorings and lost in the streets.

I look across the street into the illuminated parking garage and as if summoned, there’s a young and attractive couple in Rock n’ Roll clothes holding hands. I have to look through the dark into captured light, and the way the garage is lit makes it look like a theater and the couple is on stage, and they are so very happy they might actually be skipping. When they come upon the striped parking garage gate arm, they delighted even further, and bending back they both did the limbo beneath it, still holding hands, laughing and smiling at one another, unaware that anybody was watching.

Love,

Carter

Amanda is a haunting. On every street I feel her presence, our shared past inhabiting the city like weather. I was sitting at the bar and I imagined that at any moment she might come striding in, the door swinging open and a fresh smile cutting across her face, and this expectation of the sudden, visual manifestation of my sorrow is the ghost I live with.

Beside me at this bar sat a woman with blonde hair. We were talking about whether it is a good thing or a bad thing to have a large family and there was a look in her eyes that I hope is not present in my own. She looked like she wanted to talk to someone, like she desperately needed to talk to someone. We chatted for nearly an hour, and when she got up to leave there was a pause. She was opening up a space where love might rush in, and strangers, we could have kissed forever in that field, but instead I said good-bye and turned away from, and she walked out the door, now just a little more brittle than when she had walked in.

Everything is punished when love falls away.

Colin

The girl in front of me in the line-up was squarely built and dressed like a farmer. She had the red hair of an outsider and looked quiet, like she was still trying to decide who she was to become. On her right wrist there was a tattoo, a vividly green box with the word LIFE beneath it– a rebellion of optimism. You could see how the liberty of a new city and the excitement of an unwritten life, just now, finally developing, was animating her eyes, her eyes, which were so alert and watching everything,  just waiting for what was to happen next.

Cuba, I guess, was a bitter pill. Our frail efforts at visiting the “Real Cuba” as opposed to the “Tourist Cuba” only served to prove that we don’t like the real Cuba, and neither, of course, do most Cubans. We stayed in three different cities, two of which (Havana and Varaderos) are tourist centres, so the crippled, interior poverty of the country was  absent from our experience but only hinted at as we took a cab from city to city, passing by thatched roof homes with working donkeys living on the front porch. Our time there was one guided by hustlers, zombies and dead-eyed bureaucrats. Of course they would hate us, seeing in us only a mythic, superhuman capacity– one that was randomly dealt– to change their circumstances without damaging our own in the least. There’s an obscenity to wanting to have a fine lobster dinner in such a context, a very obvious one, and that tension was everywhere, invisible yet humming. We were billboards from the west– white, covered in corporate logos and sufficiently arrogant as to not know a word of Spanish. You know, I wanted to feel some sense of gratitude for my “charity” but what I felt was resentment and entitlement, which is probably the way that it should be. But in each small moment when we encountered what we hoped was the milk of human kindness or just a native curiosity about another human, it quickly revealed itself to be a prosaic, economic transaction.

The world is unfair in many, many ways.

******************

I figured this out, too little, too late, but I figured it out. And so we stopped communicating, and it was in those spaces that I imagined her, and then she just appeared, as if conjured. Her grandmother’s ring on her left hand, the powder blue jacket that was bunched in the middle, her hair not quite the way she meant it to be for a Saturday night. She saw me sitting there in the corner of the bar and she did not know what to do. A current ran through her body and she panicked, I think. I called out her name and she looked at me like I was a ghost. I was a ghost. She wanted movement, she wanted to be running through a field or diving off a cliff, she wanted the plane to be landing in a new city, and the guy she was with, gesturing to the open table just a few over from where I was seated, he had no idea who I was or what my presence might mean for his unfolding evening.