Season’s Greetings
Dec 20 2010


A Christmas thaw,
the streets awash
in gritty slush,
salt-encrusted fenders.
A van with a red velvet bow
on its bumper,
and a rusty truck
sporting a festive wreath.
A standard sedan
has a green button in front,
an adorable nose
of plastic mistletoe
to kiss someone under.

Even the lifeguards at the pool
wore cute little Santa hats.

The seasonal spirit
is contagious,
an epidemic of decoration
overtaking the world.
A white Christmas
with teeth-clenching carols
to afflict us,
from tinny speakers
hidden in storefronts, and parking lots.

The streets will freeze
into minefields of congealed slush.

My next door neighbours
are off to the Bahamas
for the next two weeks,
where they will celebrate beside the pool.
Their house is dark,
except for an elegant tree
trimmed with tiny white lights
framed in the window.
I appreciate
this modest display
their tasteful restraint.

I think of the tree
in that over-heated house
dropping more needles each day,
until its lush green branches
are scrawny twigs.
A skeleton tree
festooned with lights.
Like a wizened old lady
with too much make-up
who can’t disguise her age.

But from a distance
a perfect scene —
the angelic tree, pure and simple,
through a picture window
touched by frost.


All true. The Bahamas, the 2 weeks, the elegant tree. Even the cutely decorated cars and lifeguards. I’ve never noticed people decorating their cars before. So it’s either something new this season; or I just haven’t been very observant! Anyway, it’s this almost unseemly proliferation that gave rise to the rather bleak metaphor of contagion and affliction.(The "teeth-clinching" carol is -- what else! -- "Little Drummer Boy".)

I think we all feel torn by the season: a religious celebration appropriated by a secular world; the clash of the spiritual and material; the blatant excess in a time when nature is all about scarcity and hunkering down. Which is how the poem works, whipsawing the reader between beauty and tastelessness, between cynicism and hope. So the incongruity, interruptions, and modest misdirection are all very intentional.

I end on an uplifting note. So there: I'm not as negative and cynical as you'd think!

Birds Who Mate for Life
Dec 17 2010


Birds who mate for life,
who return
to the same tract of trackless forest
same tree, same branch,
in another spring
a thousand miles after,
still sing
to each other.

His song of seduction
is not intended
for the young receptive hens.
But instead, to cement their attachment.
Just as they mud the nest,
having survived
to mate again.

Like an elderly couple
married forever,
who squabble and peck
ruffle their feathers
then quickly forget.
Who complete each other’s sentences,
are snugly content
in silence, together.

The trouble is
they have studied the DNA,
and birds who mate for life
apparently stray.
Frequently.

I see the elderly couple
on the park bench,
tossing stale bread
to a scuffle of gulls.
I wonder if one, or both, ever cheated,
if they’ll take the secret
to the grave.
Or did the guilty party confide,
and still, the marriage survives?

And does he sing to her
at night?
Or doing the dishes
his turn to dry?
An old song
off key,
with words he’s not quite sure of.

And, deaf in one ear
she joins in the chorus,
with a clear pure voice.


I've been listening to "Between the Covers", on CBC radio. This is a podcast, where they present audio versions of contemporary books. The latest is Elizabeth Haye's "Late Nights on Air", which won the Giller Prize a few years ago, and which I'm quite enjoying. Anyway, there was a single simple sentence I heard on one instalment, and it stuck in my head. It seemed a good first line for a poem So I wrote it down on my usual blank white sheet, and let my mind wander. This is how it turned out.

A nice combination, I think, of the cynical and sweet; the romantic, and the ornithological!

At The Confluence of Rivers
Dec 17 2010


Ft. Charlotte wasn’t really a disappointment.
No, there were no palisades, no log cabins,
no re-enactments, like Disneyland.
But I could tell men had left their mark
on-and off
for hundreds of years
in this New World wilderness.

At the confluence of rivers
at the end of a long portage,
this was once the outer limit
of exploration,
connected by a tenuous thread
of blood and sweat
and manual labour
to the civilized centre
of life.

At the confluence of rivers
near a Great Lake port,
this could have been a great city
like Minneapolis
New York, New York.
It was a gentleman’s chivalry
to call it “Charlotte,”
after some virgin princess
a patron, perhaps.
And a grand ambition
to call it “Fort.”
Because the frontier would quickly move on
leaving Ft. Charlotte deserted,
stillborn
in its virgin forest.
Where there was nothing as rich as gold
to hold them,
the fabulous Orient
luring them on.

Standing here, I feel as if I had stepped back in time
in my own small city
at the confluence of rivers
where a forest once stood.
Where by chance, or larceny
settlement took.
How it , too, would look
if you lopped-off
the girdered buildings,
the bungalows
on cul-de-sacs, and circles.
Stripped away
the concrete surface
and grid-locked streets.
Plucked out
ornamental trees, and well-kept gardens,
roughed up
manicured lawns.
And underneath
pulled cables, tubes, and conduits,
replaced
the blasted rocks.

Leaving wilderness, like Ft. Charlotte,
as hard a journey as it ever was.
A walk back in time,
when all our cities
were modest clearings
in a vast unbroken forest.
When an entire continent
felt impenetrable, closed.

Which you’d think would make me feel claustrophobic,
over-towered by trees
underbrush, entangling my feet.
Except that suddenly
I was in an alternate future
in the middle of a 6-lane street,
gleaming black walls
50 stories high
crowding the sidewalk,
angry horns
bearing down on me.
The Ft. Charlotte, that might have been.

Where, like every city, I cannot breathe,
sprawling beyond the horizon
traffic crawling by.
Desperately seeking an edge
I can step out over,
and hear myself think.



There is a long hike, at Grand Portage, near the Minnesota/Ontario border. The highlight is a spectacular waterfall, the Cascades. But for some reason, the trail is very poorly marked, and the more obvious path leads to another site, grandiosely called “Ft. Charlotte”. Not much to see; but I’ve missed the cut-off a few times, and found myself there. And each time, the germ of this poem was always lurking somewhere in my subconscious, but never managed to get written.

How, back in the day, this place called Ft. Charlotte was as civilized as it got. Minneapolis or Thunder Bay or Duluth either didn’t exist, or were just as rudimentary. So what alchemy chose them to become the cities we know, and left the ambitious “Fort” to be nothing but a plaque in a modest clearing?

And how would it feel for someone 400 years ago to be standing on the original site of one of these modern cities, and then suddenly transported into the future? How utterly gobsmacked would he feel? How could someone from 400 years ago even assimilate a tiny bit of the modern world?

And conversely, standing on the site of Ft Charlotte made me feel as if my whole city had been whisked into oblivion, and its original virgin state somehow recaptured. An impossibility, of course; but a tantalizing mental simulation.

Anyway, the poem became a bit of an epic. It kind of reminds me of Gordon Lightfoot’s famous Canadian Railway Trilogy. If it’s anywhere near as good, I’ll be thoroughly pleased.

Swim Class
Dec 15 2010


In swim class
back when I was a Tadpole,
hoping for a bright red badge
to sew
on my swimsuit.

We were earnest listeners, learning to swim.
They showed us how to crawl, tread, kick;
the daunting fly
was for older kids.
How to throw a big orange life preserver
past the drowning man,
then pull it back
shouting reassurance.

I always pictured him splashing madly,
like blood-in-the-water
a froth of sharks.
But sometimes
it’s just a look in the eye
of quiet desperation.
Parting the water like a sharpened knife,
slipping silently under
the undisturbed surface.
Maybe twice
before he vanishes.

And sometimes, a frugal wave,
like a benevolent Queen
to her adoring subjects.
The final gesture
of a dying man,
I acknowledged with a nod of my head
an open hand,
politely waving back.

Exposure
Dec 14 2010


The shortest day of the year.
When a month of winter
is enough, already.
I console myself
that soon, the darkness will begin lifting.
Imperceptibly, at first,
until the shadows shorten
and I feel myself emerge
into light.

But the season is indifferent
to sun,
and I can count on 3 more months
of blizzards
arctic fronts.

The lake is locked in ice,
an immaculate field of white.
A tabula rasa
waiting to receive my footprints.
Where a machine would make a perfect path
mine seem to stagger across its surface.
Bundled up, so just my eyes appear
I walk erratically;
drunk on life, perhaps,
or simply lost
in thought.

Shadows are sharp enough to cut.
The sky, a high blue bowl
inverted.
There are rabbit tracks
a lone wolf’s massive paws.
But I haven’t seen a deer since fall.
When the bucks were in rut,
flanks steaming, nostrils flared
tossing their noble heads.
When they’d emerge on the back-country roads
hungry for salt.
Now, for months, they make themselves scarce,
hunkered down, burning fat
easy prey.

A wolf, without its pack
might starve, as well.
Because we are all the same
when exposed skin freezes in seconds.
A solitary man
walking into the wind,
squinting in blinding brightness.

Their Houses Set on Fire
Dec 12 2010


The science of fire
is simple —
oxygen, fuel, ignition.

It’s the art of fire
I’ve been missing.
How to catch lightning
before it strikes the earth.
How to pull away
from hypnotic flame.
How to feed
its inexhaustible appetite,
without consigning myself to the blaze.
Because it’s either incinerate
or burn slowly,
decomposing
in warm fertile soil.

Not every circle of Hell
is white hot, molten.
There is the Hell we make
right here.
Scorched earth,
diabolical air.
The acid sea,
that will strip you of your outer shell
reduce bone
to nothing.

The fields of the vanquished
were sown with salt,
their women taken as slaves.
And their houses set on fire,
the men who remained
left inside.
So for years
the smell of burning flesh
clung to the place.
Teeth, and fragments of bone,
sifted from cooling ash
disgorged from fertile ground.

Grass, succeeded
by saplings, and trees,
a dark dank forest.
Until lightning strikes.
Or a match
accidentally tossed
into tinder.


An environmental poem about the perfidy of man; the creative destruction of fire; and the regenerative cycles of nature.

There is lots going on here, and probably lots I don’t know about. It was a kind of stream of consciousness thing, on a freezing day when I made a roaring fire: a day when my mood was darkened by the black dogs of futility and despair. Which probably explains a lot!

Dying Tongue
Dec 9 2010


The last one left
alive.
Old friends, buried,
brothers and sisters, passed away.

How the last speaker
of a dead language
must feel,
who has no one in the world to talk with
to criticize his grammar
or recall, for him
a forgotten word.

You begin to wonder
which memories are true
did the past really happen
when only you
remember.
Even your childhood no longer exists
when there’s no one left
who witnessed it.
And the man, impossibly young, in the pictures
could be anyone, at all.

The old man
stooped and grizzled
was always thus,
according to passers-by.
Who see him on the park bench
tossing bread at pigeons
drowsing in afternoon sun,
almost biting his tongue
when some reminiscence
startles him.

You always felt
you were an old soul
in a young body.
So perhaps it’s only just
you’ve finally caught up.
And now, the final custodian
of a long ago world
you’ll take to the grave.

All you have left is the past tense
the future imperfect
the passive voice.
Talking loudly
to yourself.
So that mothers with little children
warn them sternly
about strangers,
herd them quickly on by.



This poem is about how, without memory, we are nothing, we cease to exist, we lose meaning. And how memory has to be shared to be authentic. And how it’s only once we are forgotten, once there is no one to remember us, that we truly die.

It’s also about the loneliness of old age: how the world can move on, how you can feel like the last one left, how you can even question what's the point of going on. I’m really pleased with the analogy that is at the heart of the poem: how being the final custodian of shared memory is like being the last speaker of a dead language. So there is no one with whom to speak; and when you die, the language – and the world view that is inextricably part of it – might as well never have existed.

And finally, it’s about how we see old people as if they were born that way, were always thus. A silly conceit, of course, that ignores your own procession through life. And ignores how in the fullness of time, we are all contemporaries, all occupy the same continuum. And ignores how the child, the adolescent, the young adult remain alive in us, however old we become.

The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company
Dec 8 2010


At A&P, it was Eight O’Clock coffee,
a no-nonsense name
for the well-regulated life.

Strong java in the morning.
Back when the percolator
burped frantically on the stove,
burning the bitter liquid
but infusing the house
with glorious aroma.

As a boy, I loved that big red machine
in the aisle chock-a-block with coffee.
The powerful grinding noise.
The silky sluice
of finely ground beans,
that stopped
just short of overflowing.
The intoxicating smell.
So that I yearned to try
the grown-up drink.

The first cup
is like a rite of passage.
Up there with the first kiss,
accidentally clinking incisors.
With learning to drive,
your dad on the passenger side
clenching tightly.
A delicious aroma
but the taste was bitter.
Until, that is
I was initiated into the ritual
of milk and sugar,
transforming it
into a rich brown elixir.
Because a child’s palate
is so much more sensitive,
not yet jaded by life.

Eventually, I learned to take it black.
A well-roasted blend
filtered through acid-free paper.
As I learned to drive
with the roof down, the tunes cranked up
a girl nestled beside me.
And learned to kiss,
not just lips, but tongue
all over her body.

My first cup of coffee,
a gateway drug
to all the pleasures of life.

Snow Take Its Time
Dec 5 2010


Snow takes its time
getting to earth.
I can see the flurry in the distance,
snow in the shape of wind
swirling, hovering
even rising up,
suspended
on cold dense air.

Or perhaps, in winter
the law of gravity is inconsistent.
No different than everything else, it seems
this time of year.
When I walk on water,
awaken, in darkness,
constantly crave
sugar, fat, and starch.

Rain simply falls,
in sprinkles and showers
and cats and dogs.
In summer
a drenching sun.
And night, descending
at a sensible hour
all at once.

But the snow won’t come down
without tempting us
with mischief.
Watching it dance on the wind,
form bottomless drifts,
festoon the trees
with glitter.
Invite us to burrow in
to its unexpected warmth.

The man in the 3-piece suit
puts down his briefcase
scoops up a handful of snow,
and when no one’s looking
aims for a passing bus.
Perfect packing snow,
before the plough
carves an ice-hard snow bank,
before the salt and sand.

A small perfect window
when there are no rules.
When even gravity has gone out to play;
back, in a minute or two.

Longing
Dec 1 2010


The flightless bird
looks ridiculous.
A fat body
on stick-like legs,
waddling bobble-head.
Prehistoric feet
awkwardly grasping at earth.
It adjusts its useless wings,
iridescent, elegantly feathered
longingly feeling for air.
Gracefully stretching, then tucking them in
against a well-muscled breast.
That has yet
to atrophy.

A fish out of water
flops spasmodically,
one unblinking eye
aiming directly up.
Into heaven, perhaps,
a bright and endless sky.
Scales glisten, drying quickly
fins gritty with sand.
Its delicate gills flare,
drowning
in the thin sharp air.

A man, in the darkness
of an arctic winter
desperately longs for the sun.
Not so much heat
as light, and shadow,
the going down, the rising up.
He remembers how tired he was
sleepless, all summer,
when sun penetrated everything
boring relentlessly in.
Now, just a glimpse
would reassure him,
the world might recover
from ceaseless night.

He sleeps, constantly.
Like a land-locked bird
unsuited to earth.
Like a beached fish
turning putrid.
Still trying to find
his element.

The Longest Night
Nov 30 2010


The longest night
of winter.
The moon, extinguished,
the feeble light of stars
at the end of a million years.

Out here, I can see the porch-light for miles
welcoming me home.
It looks like a snow-globe
gently shaken.
The ground glows,
its soft white cover
reminding me of innocence,
never touched.
And forgiveness,
excusing the sins of fall
of things not done,
in a year
when winter came so suddenly.

A flash freeze,
a messy thaw, like false spring.
Now snow
relentlessly falling.

My footsteps are sharply etched
in the soft wet surface
here, in the 40W light.
But follow them back
and they fill-in, gradually
— a precise map,
conflating time
and distance.
Until the last footstep disappears
in a field of perfect white,
all evidence of my passing
erased,
and who would ever miss me?

Like starlight
I decay in time and space;
not quite so far
as the galaxy’s outer reaches,
but ending here, as well.
Where the light of a single bulb
is strong enough to overwhelm
a thousand suns.