In partnership with David O’Meara, English-language Poet Laureate for the City of Ottawa, 10 artists from my studio met and collaborated with local poets for a Special Event during our Open Studio. I was honoured to work with Sandra Ridley who is the author of three chapbooks and five books of poetry, the most recent of which is Vixen (Book*hug Press), winner of the 2024 Pat Lowther Award, Ottawa Book Award, and Archibald Lampman Award. She wrote about my work Pine in a poem entitled Fire-bidden.
Fire-bidden
At times, it’s hard. It should be easy, but it’s hard sometimes.
As fragile strands shiver through their weave.
There are degrees & kinds.
Begin again.
*
black fire beetles & longhorns
deer mice & mosses
lichens & fireweed
*
Unfurl a scroll, a tree before a forest.
A sky becomes a firmament.
A season, a lifespan, a throughline, held in a lichen scrim.
At times, it’s hard to listen
to the nighthawks
stirring
before they quieten.
Sometimes it’s hard to breathe.
*
horsetails &
trembling aspen
jack pine & dogwood
& the smallest footsteps
sprouts & seedlings
*
Pine & breathe & therefore be.
A blaze.
Before a trace & its intervening shapes, changing light.
Seen & unseen.
A resin seal softens to release small seeds.
Opens on its own time.
Grows a future.
An ancestry.
A forest from a single tree.
*
paper birch
willow & rose
black-backed woodpeckers
nighthawks & white-throated sparrows
goldenrod
& boreal asters
*
A seed remembers itself, forgets itself.
After the fire, the first to open is first to return.
A heartbeat there.
Herewith & here under.
A seed unfolds its old transformation
& finds its way.
*
wild raspberry & lady ferns
& shield ferns
voles & shrews
mourning warblers &
alder flycatchers
*
Slowly.
Slowly. Life comes back.
It should be easy, but it’s hard sometimes.
A tree. A trace.
From the fire, foreseeable & not, known & not.
From nothing-at-all to all-of it.
We had to run our hands over it to make sure it was really there.
*
moose & deer
black spruce & bear
feather mosses
& reindeer lichen
*
Healed over.
Night waited & in those hours
we thought the pine was breathing &
it was.
*
us
Pine, 2026, laser photocopy transfer from a photograph of my painting Blaze, acrylic medium, book binding scrim