Photo: Sarabande at Toronto Music Garden, yesterday afternoon."This movement is based on an ancient Spanish dance form. Its contemplative quality is interpreted here as an inward-arcing circle that is enclosed by tall needle-leaf evergreen trees. Envisioned as a poet's corner, the garden's centerpiece is a huge stone that acts as a stage for readings, and holds a small pool with water that reflects the sky."
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Yesterday
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djjo took me to Toronto's
Harbourfront and we walked around looking at the Empire Sally (Canada's largest sailing vessel), the Toronto Music Garden and the crafts building. The atmosphere was strange. It was an incredibly beautiful day for the first of November. Flowers still bloomed in the garden: rugosa roses,
Buddleia, leadwort, even yellow foxgloves. Bees hovered in the chrysanthemums. The stillness of the park held at bay sounds of traffic on the Gardiner Expressway; I could hear them, but they did not penetrate. The harbour was still and reflective. Autumnal clouds grazed graciously across a sapphire sky.
And yet the whole scene had a peculiar bleak, forsaken feeling that visits city waterfronts in winter. It was the kind of emptiness you see in certain movies, you know the ones I mean, where one or two characters wander through a motionless amusement park. Maybe it's in Atlantic City, I don't remember. It always evokes a sense of loneliness or vague, creeping horror.
Even though I was profoundly happy in that peaceful afternoon, I couldn't help thinking of those scenes. I breathed in the rarefied light and the simple pleasure of being alone with my gentle lover.
Toronto Music Garden was inspired by the Bach Cello Suites, conceived by cellist Yo-Yo Ma with landscape designer Julie Moir Messervy. It was originally intended for Boston, but the plans fell through, so Toronto got lucky.
I visited this park once before. It must have been a cold day in December 2000 with Tracey. We went on a long walk that day, all the way from his apartment in the Jamestown Project to Harbourfront. I hardly remember the Music Garden. In fact I couldn't find the one memory I have of metal clanging in bitter wind, snow drifting across the sidewalk and among golden grasses. That clangorous sound was absent yesterday. The garden was still. The lines of walkways and stones interpretted Bach's music in three dimensions of space.
I was most impressed, appropriately, with Sarabande, a reflective space for poets with a reading rock. A plaque stood there bearing verses of joy at the arousal of organic sound and artistry from the bones of urban death. Light fell on golden leaves in the tiny pool on the poet's rock. I would like to take one of my own verses there and sigh it onto the wind, an offering of joy, my own life added to the spirits who gather there celebrating.
We bought pizza and sat listening to pre-election coverage on the news. Then Danny bought me a Cointreau truffle. Later, walking into This Ain't The Rosedale Library on busy Church Street, I found a lucky smudge of bittersweet chocolate still clinging to my palm.
( The poem in Sarabande )( 2 more photos of the Music Garden )![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
