Saturday 5:40 a.m.

If I had to love Toronto

I’d pick this hour when a misty light starts to glow in the east

beyond the cityscape.

I cycle south

past a solitary streetcar,

past a streetcleaning tractor,

the road sloping gently downhill, I glide into the urban gloam

towards the glorious moment.

I cross the Lakeshore and eagerly turn east

into the salmon and oyster clouds

the brightening.

At Cherry St, I stop on the bridge

to face the industrial dawn --

the blues tinged with mauve and yellow fill the eastern sky

the empty expressway races north

hydro towers, smokestacks, and this canal prepare the stage for the star's arrival.

Behind me, the CN tower and bank buildings give a standing ovation –

and on the waterfront, factories and silos

the island and ferry terminal in the distance

pink-tinged sag of smog

purple striations of cirrus.

The ducks swim into the canal

a truck rattles past

while gradually and absolutely

the sky turns white.

A fish – or an otter – applauds with a splash,

and, like an old person rising from a chair,

the sun pulls herself above the horizon

between the houseboats and the smokestacks.

It’s 6:10 a.m. and

I own the morning:

this sunrise -

mine.

Transformation and Timing

My eyes strain

in constant pain

the light too bright to bare,

I step out to find fresh air.

It is always sweeter at this hour,

I fill my nostrils with the chill of autumn,

the scents of decay and dew,

my eyes rest in the comfort of a sky its deepest blue.

The exchange we rarely witness

of night to day, occurs with swift quickness.

As my eyes reopen

to my moment being stolen...

The switch had been made, the barrier crossed,

the sun sprinkled pink to the clouds, purple to the sky,

quickly tonight has become last night...

my last night.

My eyes close

and there I go,

slumping like a slinky down the front stairs,

with peace I release, my last breathe of the freshest air.

  I lay my headphones down,
  the trickling sound all that 
  unsettles the air. 

  Muting the music as to set still
  the dawn, the utterances of birdsong
  gently pierce the outbreak of silence.

  The dark of the night doesn't fight
  as the light sun appears. They are 
  one and the same. Eternally interdependent.

  The more I observe, the less I’m an observer.
  Everything I see is everything I am and 
  in that moment I am free from thought.
  
  I am no longer separate. I no longer
  see through the past and comparison.
  Language cease to enslave me.

  But before long reflection returns. I yearn
  for the connection I glimpsed, to feel
  truly in the present. As the present.

  But the harder I grasp for this fulfillment
  the more my clasp loosens. This freedom comes
  from the abandonment of self.

I like this image:

into the salmon and oyster clouds

It reminds me of the first time I visited my grandfather in the Philippines and walked around the university where he worked, early in the morning. I remember how the air felt different than where I was from and all the tropical details that revealed themselves: the type of stone and mortar that made up the old sidewalks and the dull green of the moss that grew in the uneven surfaces, the shapes of leaves I'd never seen before and the glow of the sun coming through the clouds, made more vivid, my grandfather said, because the ash from the recent eruption of Mt. Pinatubo still hung heavily over the country. And then the birds began to sing.

Birdsong changes with longitude and latitude and I grew up where mornings sound like crows and mourning doves. Other birds sing, but those are the ones that invade the consciousness. What I notice when I wake up far from the house I grew up in, I usually notice the birdsong and the smells of a place and then the sounds of people. At my parent's house, the most one hears of people are the passing chatter of dog walkers, the even scrape of running shoes and the diminishing hush of passing cars and in the summer, sometimes a lawnmower or two, rumbling to life and then droning over the lawns.

When I lived in Vietnam, I wouldn't hear any birds, unless it was that nervous flock that ate the hard, green fruit that fell in the garden, the ones that no one ever seemed to eat. I'd also hear the fishing boats, with their improvised engines coughing back into the harbor, and the people on small-engine motorcycles riding around, playing the same, canned message, asking people to exchange their broken electronics for small sums of cash. Then there were the women, who would ride by on bicycles, selling noodles or bread, sometimes ice-cream, each with their own distinctive cries. When I had my pig, I'd heard him snuffling around and then eventually squealing at me to wake up and give him his breakfast of watery rice and rice bran. Behind it all, there was the sound of the ocean.

This past week, I was in Boston. I wasn't doing anything much, other than visiting friends and remembering what it was like to live there. After I left the house on Tuesday, I ended up walking a long way, through BU and into Kenmore square. I'd just sent a message to a guy I've known for 26 years, a guy who is my brother in every way except genetically. He was supposed to take a look at a tooth that's bothering me, since he's training to be a dentist, it seemed like a win-win. Moments later he called. He sounded exhausted. Just hours before, his wife had gone into labor and he was now the proud father of a baby boy. I congratulated him and we chatted a bit before I let him go. It struck me that it wasn't so long ago that we would wake up together, either at his house or mine and we'd eat breakfast, where he'd invariably ask either my mom or his mom to strain his orange juice and how when we'd play it was always me looking out for him because he was so clumsy and frail. An image came to mind of footage he and I once saw in health class. It was a closeup of a woman crowning and the blood and amniotic fluids were spilling out and somewhere overhead we could hear the woman struggling and then the baby appeared. It reminded me of stories where a witch or a shaman would read the future in an animal's entrails and I wondered then, if babies cry because they read their own futures in the shreds of what once was their home.

I ended up using that in a poem (of course) which you can read on my site, if you like.