my father would have hated that, this pipe in my uncle’s
mouth, see, my beloved uncle, was always a problem, only
animals carry with their mouths, my beloved father said,
leave the ashes, the scraps, the slash, the bones, we’re
made to go forward, he said, that’s why we haven’t got
eyes in the backs of our heads or toes behind our heels,
here’s my beloved aunt holding a pistol, my sickly cousin
with a book, some close-ups, hand with rosary, steering
wheel, telephone, cheese grater, matches, food dish,
beloved shoe, my father said never carry junk, remember
people only if you can describe their hands, them
touching you, some of them, hands want to reach for
what’s clean, what’s young, he said, what’s past is
past, or maybe passed is passed, now, he said, is for
packing up, here he’s shutting the trunk of the car
FIRST MEMORY
White-ceilinged space fills my face, which is the size of the room and includes everything in sight.
Recalling this, I know I’m on my back on a grey rug in the old farmhouse living room, but at the time I’m not aware of the rug, the room or my body as separate things.
An unstable presentation of light and shadow, warmth and coolness, surrounds me and shares my awareness. It materializes from a distance, swelling and full of purpose, then it falters, veers and fades. And then it grows again, at times feebly, partially, at times with sudden vehemence and force.
I take this activity of light and shadow to be a creature endowed with emotion and intent, a potent being like my mother or father but lacking human form. And although I witness its behaviour as unpredictable and independent of me, I also encompass it. It inhabits me. Its changes work my emotions and shape my physical presence.
The actions of this creature of coolness and warmth, doubt and resolve, its expressions, are never the same. It follows no pattern. It hesitates, it hovers between being here and somewhere else, it surges up, fully decided, glorious, powerful, bursting with plans for things to do, then its attention drifts away, no appetite, no confidence, leaving a queasy aimlessness, a vacancy which is also a kind of pleasure, like watching something fall out of reach, getting smaller and smaller, the shrinking aftermath of a sneeze, a spasm, goodbye saying hello, a wrinkled chill.
There goes its coming again and here comes its going away. And as it goes and comes I feel it slowly, very slowly lengthening out and sliding over me from right to left.
And then I realize what it is: sunlight broken by running clouds is passing through a tall south-facing window and casting a pattern of panes and sashes over me. (It was likely early spring.) I recognize the rug, my body, the window and that something in the sky is making the light strong and weak.
The flighty light-shadow creature has suddenly stiffened and gone into hiding in the window frame, in the floor, in my body, which now all seem set to stand their ground, mute, discrete and secretive, for as long as I live.
AFTER THE WAR, OUT IN THE COUNTRY
At the cutting board across from the wood stove
my mother unfolds the paper wrapper holding
a white-layered bacon slab and shears off
thongs of translucent rind she dangles for the cat
waiting beside me. The bacon pops and spits
in the black pan. The cat gnashes the rinds
with sharp gasps, jerking his head. My father
will go to work, my sister to school. I will
burrow back under the racket of newspapers
on the daybed or watch my grandmother root
through her rag bag choosing the next patch
for the quilt-a field of deep blue with silver
clouds, a field of brown furrows, a field
under cool green water. Or in my slow
coat and boots I’ll follow the cat’s black
whittled legs through the snowbanks’ glare.
EVERYTHING’S ON THE MOVE
warm cool warm night-wind crazy with jailbreak,
laced with thawed swamp. spring peepers’ shrill riot
oceaning over the porch, lifting my shirt. a halfmoon
staining the haze.
I brought these things up to bed—
and the three wild turkeys stilting halting over the lawn
at dusk, swivelling their blue Jurassic heads high
between bending pecks—
awake in the dark now, an ache in my scarred skull.
let all the unfrozen throats rant their blocked pang! pang! pang!
wind puffs the curtain from the sill and gasps it back—
sighs and clamour gathered from all down the continent,
calls across canyons, final farewells—here’s all
my memories, all I ever wanted, all I loved and tried
to hold
DRACO
the comet Draco sweeps the earth with its phosphorous
confetti tail—trickledown animism—detours, loops,
shortcuts—I drift through bedroom dark into the hayloft—
its prickly air—how close it always was!—dust-rich
light streaming through cracks and knotholes—heat
from the sun-stressed wall, the roof’s creaking tin—I
lie with my ear to the tine-scarred floor, smell of old
pine—chaff—grist rubbed in the grain—waiting—wood
charged with the sun’s hum-I hear you now climbing
the smoothed rungs-into the raftered heat, the sweetness
of dry grass—a loose plank rocks under your step—you
rustle, you kneel and lie beside me, don’t you?—young
as before we were married—putting your mouth to mine
IN THE ONE-ROOM SCHOOL
In winter, while we bent
over our workbooks in the rows of joined
desks, Miss Duncan would watch us
silently from the front of the room,
stationed
on the round iron grate where the cellar
coal furnace heat rose,
and her dress would swell like a silk
bell over her warmth-stroked
skin
and her gaze would surround me, mixed
with the murmuring dark algebra
of her perfume.
FULL MOON
Ross Denby’s words had brought me to the dark
dining room’s window. January full moon.
The house cold, soundless. His words had wakened
me, drew me slowly past my parents’ half-open
door and down the long invisible stairs.
The week before, while he and my father
jigged their lines through the opened ice,
he said, “You know this lake here’s bottomless.
Bert Roddick took a team and wagon out to
about here to cut ice—broke through and was
never found.” A mauve jackrabbit
darted in the twilight near us. Ross Denby
said, “Them hares dance under the winter
full moon.” He looked at me. “You’ll see them
dance, if you watch for them.”
Beyond the glass, the prowlers’ world stands
moonstruck, drained of dark. The swing
hangs from its pine bough, bone white. Its seat
I carved my name on casts a puzzle-piece-shaped
shadow sharp as ink.
My parents and sister are far away in a small
newspaper house.
In the moonyard, the knuckled black net spread
under the apple tree flutters. Blurs into moving
bodies. Red-spark eyes. A wisp of rabbits crouch
low flailing at mute drums. They burst apart, then
huddle, hunting for a lost ring.
They make a hopping carousel. They jig on hind
legs, wavering tall. They vault each other up
and up, white arch on arch to glitter-haze.
Behind my eyes a sun-filled plain. Open road.
Beyond the glass, under a frozen dome, ghosts
clamour toward the one bright hole—climbing
shadow rungs in the gaze of the great white owl.
MY FATHER TAUGHT HIMSELF ARC WELDING
Alone in the cellar he wired the welder directly
into the fuse panel’s main feed, and every
evening billows of burnt-metal smoke pulsing
with green-blue light boiled from the open cellar
door next to the kitchen. Zot-Zot-Zot! He
was down there in gauntlets and dark-lensed
helmet, bent over the sparking rod while the lamps
and ceiling bulbs in the rest of the house wilted
to migraine brown, and I Love Lucy shrank
to a white dot on the TV screen. We
sat in the dark. The room, wracked by electric
fits, filled with vaporized steel. We could only
wait. He was under a spell, determined to master
the incendiary stitch that fused metal to metal,
and to waken him would have unleashed something
worse.
PASSAGE
Little snow has made it down through the boughs
of the white pine and now the slope at its base catches
the winter sun. The fallen dry needles make a pocket
of hot rosin smells in the February air—a moment
you can occupy and pass through. When you were nine
you slept in this smell on warm pine needles behind
the school. An island washed in waves of glare.
Beyond the frozen marsh, the sun is sometimes engaged
in cloud, a breeze wanders here, handles the soft
surrounding boughs then strolls away ruffling a stand
of cedars. How little breeze it takes to make this pine’s
high branches sing. Their faraway thin-brushed
whistle—braiding three minor keys—hungers—memories
of storms—fades—drops to an ear-touching whisper.
DISTURBANCE FROM AN EMPTY ROOM
My sister moved out at fifteen and the fighting
stopped and for months I heard my parents’ footsteps
in separate parts of the house and the silence
of her room rang in my ears, I was ten, I spent days
alone in the barn’s loft building a hay fort, a thick-walled
cave in the high cavernous space with its blades of dusty
light, in the stillness above the stall where her horse
had snorted and paced, where one fall Saturday afternoon
in my dark burrow, talking out loud to imagined people,
I pushed my hand out through a seam in the bale wall
to feel fresh air or imagined rain, and a hand
seized my hand, a dry cool flat-palmed barky strong
hand gripped my outthrust palm where I couldn’t
see it and pulled it silently for a long time, I was
silent too, my shoulder and cheek drawn tight to the
stubble wall, and then the hand let go and I crawled
to the fort’s low door and looked out not knowing
who or what I’d find, it was honour and the need to claim
sensible business that drew me out, and there was Barry
Knox, a boy a year ahead of me in school who had
never visited me before, I said, “Oh, hi,” as though he’d
knocked and I’d opened the front door, and he seemed
to have just awakened from sleepwalking with no
better idea than I had of what he was doing there.
THAT WAS NOTHING
The elms have gone on their pilgrimage
in the grey wind, leaving no clue
to the routes they travel.
They might return with a passion
for awnings and deckchairs, but now,
the heat off, pipes drained, their rooms
stand open to snow and stars.
No, I never whispered any such thing
or cared
or had those thoughts you’re thinking of.
UNCONSOLED
I’m back in Newfoundland at a celebration of Al’s
life and poetry. So many old friends. Smokey looks
as young as when I first met him. I’m so glad to see
him alive, I say, “Let me press you to my breast,”
playful and honest. I quote Ron Hynes: “It’s all gone,
it won’t come back no more,” and realize I’ve come
unprepared, invisible, without really picturing the event
or its importance to me or the value my show of love
has for my friends. I should have brought a book
and planned to read a poem in Al’s honour. I should
have written a poem. Al would have done that.
Celebrations and displays of love made the landscape
he lived in, whereas for me they often feel like
an accepted loss, consent rigged by those in control.
And yet what other presence do I have? I’ll have to
ask someone to drive me to their house in the hope
a group of gleefully furtive women are smoking hashish.
They beckon me in. I inhale from a small hot pipe wet
from their mouths, telling myself I’m crazy, I’ll lose
track of time and never come up with a book, I’m farther
and farther from what I intend, I’m in The Unconsoled.
AUNT AGNES
I see in old photos that my Aunt Agnes
was beautiful when she was young—clear-faced,
endowed with an open future—the person whose dress
I thought was a kind of upholstery, who moved
like a pulpit on casters, whose hair was a layer of black
macaroni, whose small face was a pouch of old
accusations, who worked her mouth like she would
spit something when you weren’t watching.
At the dining table we were nearly silent.
Uncle Walter breathed thickly through his nose. He could fix
radios although his fingers were stumpy.
“Would you like more cake?” my mother asked.
“No,” he exhaled, “I’m full as a bull.”
Aunt Agnes’ eyes sagged at him, her throat swelled and coughed up
quietly, “Ach, Walter.”
I blame you, Ontario, for her ruin and my squeamish ignorance.
She was still young when her twelve-year-old son was shot
and people went back to their jobs and dim parlours.
Simcoe’s and Osgoode’s and Russell’s long-running charade.
If you haven’t made a puppet to enter in your name, stay home.
And make sure that home is very small and no one else can get
in.
The man from Timiskaming or Nipissing asleep on the snow
near the equestrian statue of Edward VII in Queen’s Park.
He had fallen off a bench. I paused to see if he was still
breathing and walked on.
What could I do?
SICK AND WRONG ABOUT MANY THINGS FOR A LONG TIME
Last night I wandered onto a small borderland road
and met my friend David Freeman who was witty and serene
about being dead, and today, after spending the morning
with Bly’s Vallejo translations, groping through the Spanish
to see how his poems go, I eat lunch reading a review
of a book that mentions Edward Thomas hiking the countryside
to escape depression, so I go to see if I’ve got some Edward
Thomas on my shelves and find his Selected Poems with
an inscription in David Freeman’s hand wishing me happy
birthday and adding in different ballpoint, “ ‘As the Team’s
Head-Brass’ is one of the very best poems to have emerged
from WW1 (on p. 256).” Poor Edward Thomas who found
himself on the borders of sleep and gave in to the popular
logic that he could only prove his love for Britain’s earth
by getting turned to worm shit in France. Which reminds me
why Lawrence was so great, refusing to sleepwalk into
death with his countrymen. And Vallejo, who knew
our dreams are not confined by sleep.
SAD ONTARIO
Ontario is sadder than landlocked Bolivia.
It has its Great Lakes, but they’re cut down
the middle and, with American smokestacks along
the water’s horizon venting brown fog, their shores
aren’t thresholds to eternity. There are too many
fences and borders. If you can’t walk through
a forest without thinking of fuel and intruders,
you’re still indoors. And Hudson Bay, real
saltwater, is not in real Ontario, fortunately
for Hudson Bay. It lies north of the mirage line
where roads and travellers get refracted back
to Toronto or ripple and reappear up to their brows
in muskeg, covered in deerflies. Hudson Bay exists
in textbooks in the south and otherwise in its own un-