Signs of Life
Feb 26 2015


Birds swarm the feeder
like schooling fish,
swoop, dart, flick

but never touch.

How uncanny, this synchronous dance,

choreographed
by some 6th sense,
gaudy scales flashing
blacksilverblack.

But the birds are dark, the snow marred
by discarded seeds.
And not the soundless precision of fish
but a scolding cacophony
of squawks and tweets.
And then, some alarm sensed
off, in all directions
in a flutter of wings.

Disciplined fish

held by water's weight
electric salt.
While in the lightness of air
birds come apart.

Would they have over-wintered
in this bitter cold

all alone,

no one stoking the feeder
for signs of life?
For swirling flight, when all is still,
furious chirping
bantam-weight will?

We come together, in collective effort
then disperse;
we, to feather beds, in the balm of night,

and birds, to their furtive shelter
in deathly quiet.

Until first light,
when all as one
they once again take flight.

Except on a bare branch
in some dormant tree

a darkening.

Wild things

perish quietly

in the merciful cold,

unheard, unseen.

A frozen bird

undisturbed 'til spring.

My neighbours have a giant feeder in their yard, and the birds literally swarm it. They fly in tight formation, for a few seconds swooping in shimmering sheets like schools of fish, only to disintegrate into squabbling squawking chaos. The dog gives chase -- not that she'll ever catch one, or know what to do if she does! -- and their formation breaks as they flee.

She'll also catch sight of a squirrel, who occasionally emerge from their semi-hibernation to scavenge fallen seeds. He levitates across the top of the snow; she porpoises through it: doggedly determined, but destined to fail. Then he scoots up a tree, leaving her confused as to where he vanished. This poem was going to be another dog poem, and begin with the fleetness of a squirrel across the snow. But I kept seeing the birds. And aside from that, I'm always grateful not to write another self-indulgent celebration of dogs.

The argument against bird feeders is that it makes them dependent. You have a moral obligation to continue, once you start. There is also an argument that you might be disrupting natural migration patterns. Or that you might be confounding evolution, helping the weak links survive and thus diluting the gene pool. But birds in winter are an ornament: welcome signs of life, with their movement and song. Anyway, as little as I know about birds (which is very little indeed!) I think these are mostly hardy little chickadees, which would over-winter with or without our help.

I've written before about animals dying in the wild. There is something about the stoicism of their end I greatly admire: an injured animal, dragging itself off deeper into the bush and quietly licking its wounds. There is the fatalism, the toughness, the persisting instinct for self-preservation; then the stoic surrender to death. We rarely see the dead bodies of wild animals: they're either quickly scavenged, or discreetly decompose.

I like the misdirection of the title: a poem called Signs of Life that ends in the exact opposite.

I like the elegant solution of blacksilverblack. I tried it the other way around (silverblacksilver), as well as with hyphens and slashes and separately. But the italics and compression capture the speed, while at the same time conforming best to the line's natural rhythm.

I like the rhyming of the last stanza: from merciful, through bird, unheard, to undisturbed. It works, but I hope without the reader seeing the gears moving, and without sounding overly stylized or shoe-horned-in.

There is a push-pull between the collective and the individual running through the poem: how the birds are like a school of fish that then disintegrates into each-for-himself; how we work together to keep them fed, then disperse after dark. We favour them as signs of life. But inevitably, some won't survive the winter night, when they're on their own.

These small birds live on the margins of survival. In their profusion, we never notice the ones who don't make it. I imagine a frozen bird, untouched until spring.

Hawk

Feb 21 2015

A bird of prey

occupies the high ground

in a blighted pine,

its dry orange needles

almost luminous

in winter light.

He sits, regally still,

wings closed, talons clenched

precise feathers full;

the big bird, even bigger

in his stiff plumage

thick undercoat.

Black eyes, with their hard shine

scan the ground,

immaculate vision

pricked by the least flicker or flinch,

of a mouse poking up

a distant puff of snow.

He oversees his sovereign domain

with preternatural patience,

the hunter

ancient as his prey.

The wind

passes over him

like an invisible hand,

small waves, ruffling down his back.

With every shift,

lifts

the tip of his tail,

silky feathers

spreading slightly.

He is hair-trigger

honed to flight.

When he shrugs effortlessly into the air

with sure placid purpose,

and in a single powerful stroke

is off,

an ominous shadow

racing across

the white undulations of snow.

Flies

as if those unblinking eyes

were tethered to a tractor beam

of invisible light,

zeroing-in

on a quick clean kill.

I talk about my occasional politically-tinged rants as indulgences. A purely descriptive poem like this -- usually to do with nature, and utterly impersonal -- is also an indulgence. Because I'm not sure how much it will engage my hypothetical reader. But I sometimes feel driven to write like this, and that's good enough.

(I say "hypothetical" because I always write with a reader in mind. What can change is exactly who that reader is: someone just like me? ...or someone who's less attentive, or needs her hand held, or who can't quite be trusted to do her share of the work?)

I've recently been watching a series on The Nature of Things called The Human Odyssey. It's a terrific study of anthropology, the human journey -- through population bottlenecks, barriers of geography, and climate change -- to occupy every corner of earth; how our adaptable brains and social organization made us dominant. It's also beautiful to look at. In the most recent episode, there was this repeated high-definition close-up of a snowy owl: sitting, in flight, hunting. What a gorgeous bird. Then today, I read the obituary of the much admired Canadian poet Elise Partridge, and they talked with effusive admiration about her close observation, eye for detail, hawk-like vision. Not only did this embolden me to indulge my own preference for microcosm, there was that image of a bird of prey -- again. And suddenly I wanted to write my own poem about a hawk, and to luxuriate in as much fine detail as I cared.

To Build A Fire

Feb 20 2015

Building a fire
you must be meticulous.
Punk, kindling, twigs,
small logs, cut and split,
and only then
the big stuff.
You must feed the fire judiciously,
or risk
suffocation.

Down to your final match
in freezing hands
it takes gargantuan patience,
on your knees, blowing hard
to the dizzy black
of fainting.

But in a conflagration
oxygen, the stuff of life
is poison gas;
the virtuous circle
of heat-combustion-heat
turns to vice
uncontained.

What you create, it destroys,
building a fire
only to find
nothing's been built at all.
The heat
in its chemical bonds,
the greed
that eggs us on,
the tragic end, the fatal flaw
in one's essential nature.

So go step-by-step
nursing the flame.
Or go big, and inundate
with gas, kerosene, rocket fuel,

watch as it

insatiably consumes.

The stack of wood.

Your last stick

of furniture.

The bonfire

holds us hypnotized,

hair singed, faces flushed.
Feed the fire, feed the fire
it urges us,
so we build and build
and burn us up.


The poem begins by channelling Jack London and his famous short story. But then it becomes a parable of environmentalism, warning that there can be no such thing as endless growth; that all we have built contains the seeds of its own destruction. And the exothermic reaction of wood burning in a fire -- heat-combustion-heat -- becomes a perfect analogy to the positive feedback effects that accelerate climate change: things like deforestation, like loss of albido from ice melt. Virtuous cycles become vicious ones.

Writing poems like this is a kind of relief, a form of ventilation. But having written, I'm ambivalent. Because this is exactly what I said, back when I began this blog, that I didn't like: political stuff, advocacy, agit-prop. I prefer lyric poems: small, personal, observational; not polemics and diatribes. The trick is to avoid stridency, while keeping it fresh and surprising and whimsical, giving it some kind of narrative force, and salting it with small verbal and sensory rewards; so even the indifferent and somewhat apathetic reader finds the poem worthwhile. I hope I've managed a bit of that here.

I mean those little surprises I hope will sneak up on the reader. Things like abruptly turning oxygen into a poison gas (which it is, if you're an anaerobe; and which it was, back when all life on earth was anaerobic and this toxic gas first began to appear -- thanks, photosynthesis!) And things like your last stick/ of furniture: the compulsion to feed the fire so powerful, you'll grab anything and throw it in; future be damned.

I actually began this as a playful exercise in language: the expression "build a fire". The use of "build", with its connotation of permanence and substance, struck me as odd in this context: all that meticulous effort, immediately up in flames; nothing ..."built" at all. And then, if he isn't careful, the builder, destroyed by his own creation. And like the tragic hero of literature, the fatal flaw in its very nature.

But, of course, could the relentlessness of a fire, its consumptive growth, and the heat and carbon that are the products of combustion have led me anywhere else but climate change? So I suppose that here, too, the fatal flaw was there from the start!

I really like the way the last line seems a little off. I find I intuitively want to read this as burnS: the bonfire (singular) seems the natural subject of that verb. But, of course, the subject is the we from build and build: the sentence is actually we .../ ...burn us up. Burn ourselves. Exactly.

And who says I stink at dialogue? Feed the fire, feed the fire: positively Shakespearean!

Rocking Chair
Feb 18 2015


The rocking chair tick-tocks
like a pendulum clock's
slow lead weight,
back and forth
on the wooden floor
on gently curved runners.
The pine boards are worn
to dark dull honey,
the chair's varnished gloss

long gone.
Wood-on-wood, in a low rustling squeak
as she drifts
on the cusp of dreaming.

Not keeping time
but letting it go;
no deadlines, late fines,
no endless list of chores.

The baby's boneless body
curves into hers,
head, lolling on her breast,
her arms

enclosing him.

The room is dark
except for a small warm pool,
the glow
of weak incandescence
through a yellow parchment shade.

The shadow is soft-edged

bodies merged together.

It rocks in tandem
with mother and child,
longer …shorter
like a perfect counter-weight.

A perpetual motion machine,
if you hadn't noticed her toe
cheating time,
to and fro
against the floor
like a living metronome,
in sync with her heart.


Something I read made me picture a rocking chair. I immediately flashed back to an image that persists in my memory: looking in the window at woman I know well, going slowly back and forth in a worn rocking chair in a darkened house in a pool of light. She used to nurse her babies on that old chair. The old floor was well-worn, almost warped; the light weak and warm. A rocking chair is a lovely thing to write about. You immediately ease into its comforting rhythm, feel its hypnotic tick-tock rocking you to sleep.

I've also been encountering a lot of themes about motherhood. So who better to occupy that chair?

I hope the poem isn't too clichéd and sentimental. Especially the last line. (On the other hand, there's always Hallmark. At least they pay by the word!)

The theme of time (and time-keeping devices) is also prominent here. This is a frequently recurring trope with me. Such an awareness of time -- and by implication, of death -- might seem unhealthy, almost desperate. I see it differently. Death is sad and cruel. But it sharpens our gratitude and gives our lives trajectory. Living forever, we would lose ourselves to drift. Contemplating death is not morbid. Because acknowledging mortality -- our limited time -- helps us relish life.

I think I have a poem somewhere called Keeping Time. I used the phrase again because I like its ambiguity: on the one hand, keeping track; on the other, keeping possession. You can do the former; but only to watch it go, not to count it up like some storehouse of hoarded wealth. "Saving time" is similar: as if you were deluding yourself you could put it aside, then get it back at the end. (If only!)

Line Breaks

Feb 16 2015

You didn’t know they were last words

the day you left.

There was always tomorrow

and the next, the next.

Which is what you’ve said

most of your life,

drifting from year to year

waiting to start.

Like the line break

over which poets obsess

last words matter.

They linger

in that silent pause

with the weight of sound,

like a heavy bell

that resonates after it’s struck.

But it’s absence

that truly counts.

The stuff of regret

is like the blank page

at which you stared, and stared,

what you wished you’d written

was left unsaid.

So profess your love

confess you dark desire;

leave correctness

to the politicians

do not bite your tongue.

Because what you’ll have left undone

will burden you more

than all of your failures

and disappointments.

Even you are unsure

why you never returned

that day.

But those anodyne words

still hurt,

the squandered chance

feels like torture.

So in the dark despair

of 4 am

the cold still air is shattered

by your animal shout.

You send it out into the world

where it lurks, hovering

hungry to be heard.

And somewhere, someone starts,

dreams disturbed

breath caught.

Then turns, exhales deeply,

sinking back

to fitful sleep.

I was reading a book review (by someone named Emma Healey) in today's Globe and Mail: a collection of the love letters by Canadian poets. Even as one (although hardly collected!) the conflation of love letters and anything Canadian sounds as oxymoronic to me as it probably does to you!

Anyway, it wasn't a great review. But it included this phrase, which stuck with me: " ...nobody does details like people who obsess over line breaks for a living." It reminded me of something I wrote in a comment that followed one of my recent poems (my so-called "blurbs"): about end emphasis, the power conferred on a word simply by giving it the privileged place at the end of a line. And it reminded me of something Billy Collins (I think it was him) once said: that the only difference between prose and poetry is that in poetry the lines don't go to the end of the page. In other words, almost everything depends on line breaks. And it's true: the sound, the rhythm, and the meaning (end emphasis), as well as clever misdirection,  all reside in where you choose to stop a line.

So that was the beginning of this poem. Which turned into the idea of "last words": not just the literal end of a line, of course, but also the allusion to separation and to death. (Like the guy who dies in a car accident on his way to work, whose last thoughts are of that last ho-hum morning when, in a sour mood, he pecked his wife on the cheek, kicked the dog, and yelled at the kids. Do we ever know when it's last words?)

And then the corollary of last words: the words that were never said. (I think in the poem, recrimination and regret at a romantic break-up that ended badly.)

Which also works with actions. That is, you regret more what you didn't do in life than what you did. (Which comes in these lines: Because what you'll have left undone/ will burden you more/ than all of your failures/ and disappointments. And also comes in the opening stanza, the reference to drift. Which is especially personal, since I've been guilty of endlessly deferring, of living like I'd live forever, and so very much missing out.) I think this comes about because we naturally idealize the outcome of all the paths not taken, the forks in the road where we demurred; while the outcome of what we did choose is never perfect, never quite as envisioned. And also because you can only do so much, while the possible things not done are infinite. The lesson, of course, is to take risks, err on the side of doing. (He earnestly said, like some hypocritical guru of positivity and self-actualization!)

The final stanza dramatizes this regret over things unsaid: his (her?) agonized shout in the dead of night; too little too late. Like the tree that falls in the forest, do words that go unheard even exist? His lasts words finally given voice, but still effectively unsaid.

This is also a bit of an "inside baseball" poem about writing poetry. Which, as something that occupies a big part of my life, is naturally something I'm inclined to write about. Unfortunately, no one wants to read about the writer's angst, or his craft. So I'm very pleased that this one was able to say something about the writing life that isn't all self-referential and obscure: about end emphasis and line breaks; about being blocked (the blank page/ at which you stared, and stared); and about my own frustration of sending words out into the world that I fear will never be read or heard.

I have to admit, I was incredibly self-conscious (more than usual, that is) about my line breaks here. Obsess indeed! Hope they work.

Pianoforte

Feb 15 2015

You can't play a wrong note on the piano.

Even though its ivory keys

are streaked yellow-brown.
Like an old man, whose teeth show their age
but smiles, anyway.

And even though its minor keys

are no longer glossy.
Still black
but dull as weathered wood.

A few have lost their lift;
they lie flat,
a finger thuds, and catches.

But the carved frame
is gorgeous as ever;
burnished wood, and baroque ornamentation
showing sings of wear
from years of playing.

A crew of sweaty men, grunting, swearing
struggled to move it.
A blind man
head lowered, ear cocked
kept it lovingly tuned.

In those days
aspiring parents
paid a neighbourhood lady
to teach.
I day-dreamed
hands lazy, eyes glazed
while she rolled hers,
a sullen inanimate object
who never learned.
Dutiful parents

ungrateful kid.

But even I
can play a perfect note
on the piano.
It forgives
its delinquent pupils
like no other instrument,
the squeaky violin, painfully wincing,
honking sax
red-faced horn.

It sits
in the same abandoned corner
like a long-lived animal,
hulking, patient, slow.
Waiting
to be wakened
by human touch.

Can still make beautiful music
that starts with a single note;
sustained, over-toned
hard or soft,
even I
can coax out of it.
My index finger strikes
eyes closed, ear cocked.

So little effort
such easy power.

I recently read a piece about an accomplished pianist discussing his art. He said just this: you can't play a wrong note on the piano.How true! Try that on the violin or flute.

What a remarkable instrument: containing an entire symphony, capable of such power and restraint. One that requires such mastery and dexterity and virtuosity to play well, yet forgives the most inept beginner, who can play a perfect note without ever practicing, can compose a simple melody just by sitting down at the keyboard and plunking something out.

Pianos seem to inhabit a room forever. They sit with an air of gravity, permanence, strength. I can imagine that piano from my childhood still there: mute, immoveable, preternaturally patient; just waiting to be brought back to life.

Re-reading, I realize there is a delightful but wholly unintentional inversion here: me, an inanimate object, while the piano is a long-lived animal. And it's also personified in other ways: in the smiling old man, in conferring forgiveness. And even the violin, wincing; the horn, red-faced.

If that piano does show wear from years of playing, it certainly had nothing to do with me. Credit my older brother, who was both obedient, and mildly talented. I assiduously shirked practice. Learned absolutely nothing. And am horribly unmusical to this day.

The disproportion between action and effect may be unique to this instrument (electronic ones don't count!) It amplifies us, makes us bigger. We can reach in with our finger tips and rouse it; ride its power with a simple touch.

Blue Marble Earth

Feb 13 2015

                                                                                     

We should have been humbled
by that illuminated planet
in the vastness of space.

Mother earth,
a small blue marble
against the black.

But it's been decades
since we were far enough away
to see the earth whole.
So much so
you'd think we were alone
in the universe,
all those satellites

beaming TV, weather, GPS,

so close

the shadow of earth

looms over them,

the massive planet

wheeling just beneath.
Like nosing up to the screen
hoping to see more clearly,

but the brightness blinds

pixels dissolve

into incoherence.

We went to the moon
took one look back
and then returned.
Home, to life as before,
wanting more
and fighting our wars
and mining the planet,

'til only scorched earth

will be left to posterity.
To forgetting how long it's been
since the entire screen

wasn't filled with us.
So that half a century on

we haven't gotten as far

as the moon-shot;

white-men with slide rules,

America

astride the world.

One picture, one sharp revelation
could have changed us for good.
But we stayed too close,
straining our eyes
as if mesmerized
by the candy colours

and flickering light.

Satellites
in low earth orbit
criss-crossing the sky,
barely grazing the air
that keeps us alive.
The atmosphere, egg-shell thin
in which all of us swim,
billions of self-important souls
breathing in

each other.

More rant than poem, but something I have to indulge once in awhile.

This one came after reading this, an article about a new satellite launch, in The Atlantic On-Line.


... when then vice president Al Gore bolted out of bed with a vision of providing ‘a clearer view of our world.’” Gore was inspired by imagery from the Apollo missions, and, it seems specifically, The Blue Marble, the first photo of the entire sunlit Earth at once.

Gore loved The Blue Marble. He hung a picture of it in his office. But then, as today, getting new versions of the Blue Marble—pictures of what the entire sunlit planet looked like today—wasn’t easy. We don’t have astronauts going back and forth to the moon anymore.

Instead, we make Photoshopped versions. Modern-day Blue Marble-like photos have to be stitched together from composite images. (The default iPhone background is one of these composites.) True whole-Earth photographs are rare.


Most of us can immediately picture that famous "Blue Marble Earth". But we forget that it dates from Apollo: as far back as the 60s, when they navigated by slide rule and took pictures on actual film. And we forget how briefly we sojourned even that limited distance from earth: only long enough to see how small we were, give pause, and then return to business as usual. The power of the picture remains. If anything deserves that terribly over-used designation "iconic", it does. But now, our view has gone back in time, from before blue marble earth: too granular and close up to appreciate where we live. We've become distracted. We've moved closer to the screen -- as the central metaphor of the poem suggests -- only to realize that this makes things less clear, not more.

We flatter ourselves that we are space-farers, exploring far from earth. But we're really just stuck in low earth orbit, barely grazing the atmosphere. And mostly looking in on ourselves.

You can read this poem several ways. There are allusions to environmentalism and interdependence, to humility and gratitude, to solipsism and self-importance. To me, it's an environmental poem, its entire message contained in the smallness and fragility of blue marble earth.

I think the key line is to see the earth whole. I really wanted whole to jump out, and toyed with giving the word its own line: even more than the privileged place at the end of a line it already possesses (what I call "end emphasis", an expression I think I heard somewhere back in the mists of time, too long ago to remember or attribute).But that seemed to lack subtlety, as well as artfulness: I think an attentive reader would feel offended at being so spoon-fed. Home works in a similar way, in the 3rd stanza. The word seems superfluous. But it's not only an emotional potent word, it reminds us that there is only one place in the universe where we can survive (until we know better), and that sensible creatures do not despoil where they live.

The original version had, in the penultimate stanza, could have changed us indelibly. I tried pretty much everything to get this right: irrevocably, permanently, irreversibly, diametrically, utterly ... . So I was thrilled when the delightful double entendre of the oh-so-simple for good struck me.

The final stanza reinforces this basic theme of earth's fragility; and, by implication ours. Especially the "egg-shell thin atmosphere", followed by the allusion to both our dependence and interdependence: swimming in its soup; the recycled air on which every living thing depends.

After finishing this, I was almost certain I'd written it before. Because I often return to the same things, recycle the same tropes and images, plagiarize some favourite phrases I've already used; so this isn't unusual. And I'm always curious to see what's changed in my approach: am I getting better, worse, holding my own? So I typed some key words into the search function to see what came up. Apparently, I hadn't written this poem before. But some parts of it have appeared before. You might enjoy checking out Geography Lessons, Low Earth Orbit, and Signals From Space. I also came across Too Small to Notice, which has nothing to do with this, but I found I quite like (still!) (You have to understand that once I've posted a poem and moved on, I pretty much forget all the "old" ones. So even after several months, it's as if I'm reading them for the first time. And it's great to have that distance:  I actually get to experience them as a new reader would; to hear them without knowing what's coming next, without having "rehearsed" the reading.) 

Inescapable

Feb 10 2015

Even in the baffled room
with its thick absorbent walls, hermetic door
silence is incomplete.
The rush of blood
each involuntary swallow.

In a padded cell
you will not self-harm,
but also can't escape yourself.

As in closing your eyes
you hallucinate,
the default state
of vision.
Or sit reading a poem,
and something he says
makes you uncomfortably aware
of the force of the chair
against your bottom.

Or her scent
attaching itself,
clings
to your skin, and hair, and clothes,
trapped
in your lush nasal mucosa.
As receptive to her pheromones
as ultra-sound,
inaudible, but felt
in the rumble of bone
its rich dark marrow.

Or the metallic, flat, funk on your tongue
you cannot help but taste,
of drugs, or blood
the unction of lust
brushing doesn't get.

You cannot revert
to blank, empty, cleansed.
As much as you try
to transcend the body
its heaviness pulls you back,
animalness
holding you fast.

People find sound-proofed rooms
uncanny,
disturbed
by the deadness of air

the lagging of sound.

So you pound
on the padded walls,
beginning to doubt

your self.

My last poem was about touch. So when I sat down to write again, I thought I might try noodling around with the other senses. (I've done thematic series like this before (although this "series" will probably end up being a grand total of 2!) when I did several consecutive poems under one-word titles of various colours.)

Vision, of course, is everywhere in my poems. And I've very consciously tried to incorporate smell -- perhaps the most powerful, if most neglected sense -- into many of them. Taste is tough; and mostly smell, anyway. And since I've already done touch, that leaves hearing; which is where this poem starts and ends.

And which has, for me, been the most problematic sense: I'm inhumanly sensitive to everything; but I think sound has tormented me most. You can shield your eyes, you can keep to yourself, you can breathe shallowly or through your mouth. But sound penetrates, and follows you. Sound is out of your control. And we live in a culture permeated by sound and loudness, by the drum-beat of music and public noise: as if sound was the only thing counteracting gravity; as if silent contemplation was dangerous.

Although we think of ourselves as primarily visual creatures, and although smell is the most primordial and most viscerally powerful sense, hearing is probably the pre-eminent one. It's fastest. Our reflexive reaction to sound is more hair-trigger. It operates through 360 degrees, as well as in our sleep. Sound keeps us safe.

I think the poem must have been influenced by a fabulous article I just finished reading: The Trip Treatment, by Michael Pollan, in the Feb 16, 2015 New Yorker (http://nyr.kr/1uFnB64). It's about new research into psychedelics (LSD, psylocibin) and end-of-life; into the drug-mediated experience of escaping consciousness, ego, the body. (Which coincidentally recalls my previous poem, the one about touch, where I used the phrase dissolve boundaries.) But this theme makes sense here, since from the very start this poem is about inescapabilty -- first from sound, and then the body: short of death, we're stuck with ourselves!

Apparently, the experience of a sound-proof room is just that -- uncanny. I understand it has to do how most of the energy is absorbed and how what comes back is oddly delayed. So your visual perception is at war with what you hear: the room "sounds" too small for what your eyes are telling you; sound seems uncannily slow. But I also think being in a sound proof room is having to be intensely alone with yourself: something that might be OK for introverts, but not for the rest; and something at odds with the highly extroverted culture in which we live.

I hope the ending isn't obscure. It's simply a reference to the tree that falls in the forest: does it fall if it isn't heard? In other words, in a state of absolute sensory deprivation, what becomes of reality, of your sense of self? Who or what are you if you are not embodied? This is the experience of transcendence, whether by means of LSD, meditation, or religious ecstasy: the permanent and radical spiritual change when you transcend your physical self -- even if you only experience it once. The ending was originally beginning to doubt/ your own reality. I went with your self for two reasons: I like the emphasis on self that comes from splitting the expected yourself into its constituent words; and I wanted it it be directed more inward -- at the body, at self-awareness -- than out at external reality. Other than that, I prefer the short sharp ending: too many syllables in your own reality.

I quite like opening the poem with baffled room instead of "sound-proof". It's the duality of "baffles" that makes this work -- the combination of confusion and uncertainty with actual things that divide and muffle. And shortly after, there's the misdirection of padded cell, which contains a lot more psych ward than sound-proof room.

I like involuntary swallow: as much a nervous gulp as an autonomic reflex. I get the impression of a dry swallow, something stuck in the throat.

I give thanks to the god of English for funk and unction, the sound I was looking for throwing up the perfect words: funk implying foulness and dread and a kind of essentialness (like a funky scent that's hard to wash out); and unction implying vaguely unpleasant bodily secretions. (Of course, the best example of a powerfully persistent taste -- and one I find highly unpleasant! -- is garlic. But not only doesn't it rhyme, it's hardly as evocative as sex!)

It's two other words, though, I think really work best in this poem: animalness and uncanny. Animalness is a very unusual, but attention-getting, construction. I like how it does everything without needing any elaboration. And I don't think I've ever used uncanny. It's also uncommon. Where I've heard it used is in the expression uncanny valley, which describes the gut feeling of something amiss when 3D computer graphics or robots simulate real human faces and movement. And again, the god of English has granted me the perfect meaning allied with the perfect sound. Whenever that happens, a poet gets this intoxicating rush of endorphins, and poetry feels like a drug.

And finally, my obligatory apology for once again breaking the cardinal rule of suddenly (3rd stanza). But try leaving it out, and something essential seems lost. ...Except now I have left it out. And tried uncomfortably in its place. Because I think the reader will experience the sudden awareness, and doesn't have to read about it. It's the uncomfortableness that surprises, not any suddenness: how could something that feels like it could actually cause injury have been so utterly suppressed? (In neurology, this is called "accommodation", and as you can imagine is extremely useful. Especially for a writer who spends far too much time on his ass!)

Intact

Feb 9 2015

Deprived of touch

in the cold dormitory

in the bleak orphanage

in The People’s Democratic Republic

the children grew up dull, and stunted,

unable to reach out

from the dark hermetic cell

of self.

You’d think the absence of touch

would dissolve boundaries,

as if you could surreptitiously slip

out of your skin

undetected.

Or that the deficit

would strengthen the senses,

like a bat, migrating night,

or the gift of sight

in infra-red

ultra-violet.

But no, you must live with pain,

because oblivion

is certain death.

You must be stroked

soft and hard

warm and cold

dry and wet.

Feel

with fingertip, and tongue,

the intricacy of skin

the taste of another.

Exposed nerves

bristling, hair-trigger,

ticklish, and tactile, and rough.

You must be held

and mothered

and loved.

Or you will wither away,

a baby bird

left in the nest

gaunt, and featherless.

Born blind, or deaf

is a minor setback,

but deprived of touch

is sentenced to death.

You will feel no pain

even as the flame

envelopes you,

the inferno

consumes your final breath.

The recently published Touch:  The Science of Hand, Heart, and Mind, by David J Linden, inspired this poem.

He argues that the neglected sense of touch may be the most important. The opening of the poem refers to those infamous Romanian orphans who were so deeply damaged by the privations of their upbringing:  never held, touched, stimulated. To be born blind or deaf is a terrible hardship; but you will almost certainly grow up to lead a full and normal life. While these stunted children, deprived of touch at an early age, can never be fully human.

Coincidentally, at about the same time I heard Linden interviewed, I became aware of a rare condition called “mirror-touch synaesthesia”, in which people not only feel their own sense of touch, but that of anyone whom they witness. It’s like a super-charged power of empathy that, just through sight, can trigger sympathetic sensation in the brain that’s as powerful and real as actual sensation signalled by one’s own nerves: an over-abundance of touch that can be as debilitating as the absence of touch experienced by those Romanians orphans. Apparently, watching someone get injured is bad; but eating with people is horrible! But nowhere in the discussion (on the NPR program Invisibilia) did anyone ask about sex:  would sex be overwhelming, impossible, or spectacular? I wonder!!

The title digs down to the root of “intact”, linking the idea of tactility with that of surviving whole. Which --  along with expressions like “losing touch” and “being tactless” – shows just how language continues to recognize (even if we don’t!) the importance of touch to social life, as well as life itself.

Snow Angel

Feb 7 2015

To make a snow angel
you lie on your back
in virgin snow
and fan your out-stretched arms.

I haven't seen one in years.
Was the snow deeper

when we were small?

Are kids growing up too fast,
too distracted

blasé?

And who doesn't scoff
at superstition, in this secular age?

At that chubby cherub

precious as a baby-doll,

six-winged seraph

eye-to-eye with God?

Anyway, engineers calculate
that for human flight
our wingspan would be impractical.
That snow angels

would descend from heaven

white as captive doves,
feathering down
all around us
like wounded birds.

The simple pleasures
of childhood
making the best of snow.
Before God's messengers
were grounded.
Before the angel of death
was stuck somewhere
in an unploughed schoolyard,
desperately flexing
his useless wings.
And just when the devil
who detests the cold
has made himself scarce.

I miss seeing
those hopeful impressions
in freshly fallen snow,
the hollowed-out shape
of a very small child.
A tiny mitten
hand-knit, bright red
left
in the empty space.



Last night I watched a movie called Snow Angels. Or, more accurately, re-watched: I'd first seen it several years ago, but it was so good (and my memory so alarmingly vague!), I indulged myself.

A child dies. (As well as a grieving mother, who wasn't happy in the first place; and must have loathed herself for her impatient outbursts, her one fatal lapse in attention. And a young father, whose earnest well-meaning and essential neediness were tragically matched by his inadequacy and inner demons.)

When I sat down to think of something to write, the poignant innocence of that title came to me. I thought how anachronistic snow angels are. How I turned up my nose, as a child, thinking how girly they were. And how politically incorrect they now would seem, if not downright silly. But I think that dead child was in my subconscious. Especially the image of the snow angel as an empty negative, with its implication of absence. And, reinforcing this, its transience: tramped over, snowed-in, or lost to melt.

Which may explain why a poem that starts off in nostalgia and detached amusement takes the turn it does. Although that's only if you read it with this in mind. Because the poem can easily be read just the opposite: death on vacation, the devil at bay; and the beautiful snow angel, a pure expression of a child's innocent fun. So the orphaned mitten is either a poignant symbol of loss, or a smiling reminder of carefree childhood.

The poem turns on the idea that the traditional depiction of angels contradicts the physics of flight. Of course, only a scientist would quibble! What a perfect illustration of how diametrically opposed are the two world views: religion, with its faith and allegory; vs. science, with its skepticism and measurement. But it's true. I recall hearing that engineers had done exactly this: calculate if the surface area of an angel's wings, as a Renaissance painting would have them, could sustain flight. Apparently not: the wings needed would be far too big and heavy for any human-sized creature to hold up, let alone put into motion. ...So who knows, maybe snow angels really are the grounded remains of their celestial creators!

Old Snow

Feb 5 2015

2 weeks

and the burden of snow has settled.

A winter desert,

badly in need 

of fresh white camouflage.

Old snow,

too cold to melt

too warm

to feel like winter.

Like an old general

still fighting the last war.

Like the lost battalion

stalled in no-man’s land.

Parched wind, and cycling sun

have left a hardened crust,

strong enough 

to walk upon

with wide deliberate steps.

Its surface is dull, and brittle

scattered with debris,

as tired and effete

as the ancien régime

ripe for collapse.

And in the distance

I hear insurgent whispers

gaining strength.

So we wait

for the next big blizzard

to overthrow the world,

over everything, equally;

a utopian dream

of the level field. 

Slowly raise 

its modest flag

of white-on-white,

proclaim 

the soft democracy of snow.

As usual, I started off trying to write something short, sharp, sweet: almost a Haiku about old snow, when it hasn't snowed in weeks. And, as usual, my prolixity got the better of me!

I think the animal analogies work well together. But they set a tone of mild amusement, and the poem fails to follow through: the reflections on old age are more bittersweet and rueful.

Although the ultimate message is a positive one: that surface deceives. Yes, a beautiful dusting of snow may conceal the true ugliness underneath. But the appearance of age is also deceptive: as the 4th last stanza implies, not all old people are "old", and an old face also contains all of its younger versions. In both cases, quick judgements are fraught.

Nevertheless, while winter may be rejuvenated easily enough, you can’t reverse old age with a simple make-over.

Clickety-Clack

Feb 4 2015

Riding the train
taking the long way home
is like listening to jazz
with your eyes closed.
Black vinyl
held by the edges
with fingers extended, hands opposed.
The turntable
hypnotically circling,
needle inserted
in its pre-determined track.

The train’s rocking
is like white noise
converted to motion.
As imperfect, reassuring
as a recording you’ve loved,
lightly scratched
a little warped.
Your head lolls, shoulders shudder
body gently jolts,
the clickety-clack
is a soothing mantra
repeating itself.

Like an analog recording
you follow the grooves
from start to finish
in real time.
Surrender yourself
in this enclosed space
at a steady pace
in the glorious haze
of the saxophone solo,
the grounding thump of the bass.

Or you could enter a plane, ducking under the doorway,
and next thing you know
find yourself home.
As if you'd blinked
and outside the window
the scenery got changed.
A digital device, that gets you there,
all-or-nothing

yes-or-no.

But on the train, you gratefully slump
in the seat of your choosing,
let yourself sink
into aimless daydreams, innocent slumber.
Like a bag of sandy soil,
dug
last summer
from the garden you still can smell,
you take the shape of your container
release your weight.
The train’s

gentle agitation

shaking you up
so your contents settle-out,
awkward lumps, down to the bottom
fine particles
migrating up.

Your placid surface

smooth as jazz.
A tropical beach
before bare feet
have wandered across it,
sun-warmed sand
squeezing-in
between your toes.

I just read this piece in The Atlantic On-Line. It's an excerpt from an 1862 edition of the magazine, written by Oliver Wendell Jones Sr., the father of the (then) future Supreme Court justice. Here it is -- after which I'll explain what it has to do with this poem:

Many times, when I have got upon the cars, expecting to be magnetized into an hour or two of blissful reverie, my thoughts shaken up by the vibrations into all sorts of new and pleasing patterns, arranging themselves in curves and nodal points, like the grains of sand in Chladni's famous experiment,—fresh ideas coming up to the surface, as the kernels do when a measure of corn is jolted in a farmer's wagon,—all this without volition, the mechanical impulse alone keeping the thoughts in motion, as the mere act of carrying certain watches in the pocket keeps them wound up,—many times, I say, just as my brain was beginning to creep and hum with this delicious locomotive intoxication, some dear detestable friend, cordial, intelligent, social, radiant, has come up and sat down by me and opened a conversation which has broken my day-dream, unharnessed the flying horses that were whirling along my fancies and hitched on the old weary omnibus-team of every-day associations, fatigued my hearing and attention, exhausted my voice, and milked the breasts of my thought dry during the hour when they should have been filling themselves full of fresh juices.

You don't read sentences like this anymore. Our culture is too fast-paced and impatient. We aren't inclined to stick out a self-indulgent metaphor, and aren't supple enough to surrender ourselves to a pile-up of unrelated ones. (Not mixed metaphors, which were always inelegant; just a lovely indirect trip, like the free association of daydreams.) The metaphor I admire most (or, to be accurate, analogy) is the kernels of corn: I can feel the weight of the bag, the strained seams of its container, the small act of settling with every little jolt.

Immediately on reading this piece, I felt impelled to write another train poem (on top of the few I've already written, even though trains are not nearly as big a recurring trope with me as, for example, trees.) Not a super-fast high-tech bullet train on its perfectly levelled track in Europe or Japan, but an old-fashioned train on steel rails -- the kind that still travels coast-to-coast in this unhurried and somewhat complacent country of ours.

I can hardly claim originality, since his bag of corn becomes my bag of sandy soil. But the other analogy -- a jazz record -- does better. Jazz came to me as I thought about the perfect accompaniment to a long journey by train. And then, it seemed wrong to be on anything but vinyl. I think the analog/digital comparison works really well: going from start to finish, conducting the journey in real time. I used to make audio tapes of favourite radio shows -- a very fussy business. I'd use a timer, and an hour long show would take an hour to transfer to cassette. Now, listening to podcasts, the show jumps almost instantaneously from my computer to my iPod; I can "tape" whenever I want; and listening back, I can skip the boring parts as if obliterating time. Getting on a plane is utilitarian, and digital. Travelling by diesel train is slow, and analog: you see everything you pass; and you see it at eye level, in real time. I also like the care you take with a vinyl record (held by the edges/ with fingers extended, hands opposed): a singular object you can touch and cherish, as opposed to digital blips reproducing themselves somewhere in cyber-space.

Like the subject of this desultory sentence -- train travel itself -- we don't have time. This is a great theme for me, since I admire the flaneur, the boulevardier, idling away his time observing the crowd, nursing a coffee in the outdoor café. And I'm all about creating free unstructured time: which I need; both as an introvert, who needs to decompress and recharge, and as a creative person, who needs open-endedness. Our culture approves of people brag-lamenting how busy they are. While I'm happy to admit I'm not at all busy; and what's more, don't feel the least bit guilty about it!