My notebook becomes shredded strips of text,
torn from copious notes written as I stand and stare,
dark lines of dry ink smudged across flawed xerox copies,
uneven edges, folds of crumpled paper like compressed layers of earth,
look over the mountains.  
Can paper contain a memory? 
Can it contain a memory of a place, of experience, of poetry,
history, of a process of getting to know,
and understand a place within a place?
My arms are in a trough of water
Floating cotton, like bits of cloud
on the rippled surfaces of water
We are in the Open Field
Harvest colours
Paper flapping, like prayer flags
against jagged rock
My notes contain the ideas that flow in and out as thought.
The crude ones that await refinement.
Lists of “to do”..a way of ordering within an unknown world.

The notes become texture, lines and folds and crevices of the earth,
and over this, tracings from photographs taken out of my hotel window
Moon peak, that sits in snow peaked splendour.
They are then overlayed, collaged onto the strips that are hastily glued with stick glue.
These lines demarcate boundaries; traces lines on flat representations.
Maps unmade, drawn and drawn with a kind of detail that defies logic,
except that of territorial control.

The immolations in Tibet have been relentless since we arrived. 
I stare at them; those small printouts pasted on walls, of charred distorted bodies,
as though Pompei had spewed more volcanic ash.
Caught in agonizing gestures. Frozen angst.
Trophies for unrequited politics. Or freedom. 

Tomoyo ‘s painting’s burn into the pores of handmade paper,incense sticks to smoulder fibers that weave together many into a whole.

They are counted with each day, numbers compounded, added to long lists of those already fallen .
As crowds gather every evening to light those floating candles,
waiting for the wax to flow down the hillslope
as tears flow to smudge the ink that stain paper that blots

Each day new names are uttered over the radio or written like syllables in the sand…
into the 70’s (today was 76)
She tells me she needs to cry from within
I must throw that splash of cool blue-cerulean and turquoise, over the page, as though to cool those burning bodies, as though to feel the blue sky caress the hot red of burning timber.
Tying with string one book and another,
like a running stitch from the nimble fingers of my grandmother’s soft hands,
Bright colours in rusted boxes for painting
Recipe’s for Comfort has warm soups and pot cha.