Brickwork

June 29 2015

The brick is hot to the touch.

In the cool of dusk,

as cool air hugs the ground

and shadows fall,

I bathe in its latent heat,

radiating freely

out into space.

Like a warm body

its closeness comforts me.

I am a contented cat

stretching-out in a patch of sun,

eyes, drifting shut

hypnotically flushed

with heat.

I love the warmth of brick; 

basic red

with a brush of rose, a touch of pink.

Common brick, made of local mud

dug up

from vestigial rivers

exhausted lakes.

The particularity of clay,

as easily traced

as a fingerprint.

I built a hearth from salvaged brick.

An earthy red,

softened by weather

showing its age.

Each, a roughly different shade,

so taken together

the colour is warm, and rich

and restful.

It's a substantial structure,

anchoring the room

with its settled weight.

But the lines are far from straight.

My corners, hardly plumb,

the mortar

a little crumbly.

Because brickwork

is not factory-made;

it reveals the hand of its maker,

the pedigree

of clay.

My red brick fireplace,

warming the house

all night long.

Like the exterior walls

it heats and cools

expands, contracts,

as if slowly breathing

in and out.

Yet steady as rock;

the heaviness of brick

that grounds the house

and anchors the hearth.

And the permanence

of native earth.

The common clay

from which man was made,

formed, and fired

and cemented in place.

As with all things, I didn’t build it myself. But around a woodstove in my basement den, I had it built:  an imposing hearth, made of red recycled brick.

In the poem, I wanted to convey the warmth, the permanence, and the earthiness of brick. There are the obvious references to home and hearth. But there is also this idea of “terroir”. Because brick is too heavy to haul long distances; it’s only practical to use local stuff. So brick is grounding in so many ways:  the feeling of comfort; the steadying weight; its essential connection to the ground itself.

One way I get at this quality is personification:  it’s a warm body, it has fingerprints, it seems to breathe. And in the end, there is the Biblical conflation of man and clay.

And aside from psychological and aesthetic warmth, there is the physical heat of brick. Which is where the poem begins:  standing by a warm wall in the chill of quickly falling dusk.

Seasons of Shade

June 22 2015

The big maples

are as high as the house.

Saplings, when they were planted

on a fresh expanse of lawn,

leaves sparse

stems like spindly wands.

When I was so much younger

and they were thin, but strong;

the supple resilience

with which all of us start.

Now, their canopies touch,

a cool shelter

enclosing the house.

Three trees, forming a gentle arc

of dappled leaves

filtered sun.

Thick roots

knuckle-up near the base of their trunks.

Nicked by lawnmowers, calloused by weather

they wear their scars like hardened men;

tough bark,

armoured against

the known world.

While underneath, there is a mirror tree

which has never seen the light;

roots radiating out

that divide

divide again.

Tenaciously clinging

feeling their way.

In fall, so many leaves to rake.

The give and take of nature;

summer shade

autumn chores.

And all winter, standing naked

in frozen dormancy.

Reduced to bare wood

they are skeletons, disinterred.

But unlike bleached old bones

undergo rebirth;

trees, that will surely outlive me

counting up the years.

Bigger and bigger,

through seasons of shade

seasons of work.

One small change near the end of the poem seemed to pull it all together for me: when counting down the years became counting up, the usual diminishment of age was turned just enough off-centre to call back to the vitality of the trees -- their bigness, their persistent growth, their longevity. It's as if what you plant -- or create -- in your brief lifetime confers a kind of posterity. Or at least the consolation that life goes on. In the poem, I think the personification of the trees helps with this identification: the roots become knuckles, the trees are hardened men, and the bare branches are skeletons; they feel and cling and are reborn. Even in the opening stanza, this personification is subtly present: in the conflation of the young narrator with the even younger trees.

I like the sense of alternation, regularity, predictable cycles; which is exactly how nature operates. While in human affairs, we tend to think of progress, of history as an upward sloping line. I'm reminded of the Biblical verse, made famous by the song (the Byrds, 1965): " ...to everything there is a season; turn, turn, turn ... ". From this point of view, the give and take of nature becomes a key line; and the ending is a perfect coda. And it's the weight of that same verse which gave the poem its title, easily pushing out all contenders.

The mirror image, the depiction of the whole tree, can be taken any way you like. Because when we imagine trees, see trees, draw trees, we invariably ignore an entire half. It's as if what we don't see doesn't exist. It reflects our conceit that we know how the world works. Or perhaps you can take this as referring to dark underbellies, or doppelgängers, or the essential and persistent mysteries we will never unearth.

I'm as sure as can be that a search of my archive will turn up a very similar poem -- or poems. Because as I wrote, I felt I'd written this before. But, as usual, I hope that time and practice have honed my craft. And that if I do turn it up, this one comes out best.

(Just a short note on a technicality, a choice I made that may or may not work. In the first stanza, I think it would have been clearer -- and perhaps more grammatically correct -- to have said but WITH the supple resilience/ with which all of us start. On the other hand, the 2 with(s) become such a mouthful, I thank anyone would trip over their tongue trying to say these lines out loud -- and all poetry should be written to be recited. Bad enough having to use which: a picky word that often involves the kind of plodding explication that's more prose-like than poetic. Trouble is, if I dispense with which the line becomes we all started out WITH; and I hate ending a line -- let alone a stanza -- on as weak a part of speech as a preposition.)

All-Day Rain

June 20 2015

Degrees of rain.

Starting with a grey pall

shrouding the surface.

Mist, too fine to fall,

as if damp cloud

had descended to earth.

And still air

expectant as held breath,

Tension, you know will break

but when?

The succession of weather,
from gentle drop, to steady fizz

to heavy pour.

Then volleys and gales

like hammered nails

lashing down,

torrents of rain

rivers in flood.

Saturated soil,

laking-up

and overflows.

When the wind

that came charging-in like wild horses

exits like a milk-run mare

stabled and fed.

It has settled in

to an all-day rain,

low cloud, unbroken sky.

The comforting sound

of slow static, dribbling down.

And in the end

the drip-drip-drip

of leaky gutters,

rubber boots

squelching home.

Bug Hat

June 17 2015

In black-fly season

I am an astronaut,

clamped

into a stiff pneumatic suit

hermetically sealed.

Breathing stale air

and where a tiny tear

is instant death.

I look out at the world

behind the veil’s fine mesh

as if through plexiglass,

a mosquito net

crawling with bugs.

Feel constrained, somehow, not quite there;

an anthropologist, in his blind

taking notes.

Its supple folds

shimmer in the breeze,

catch the sun

blinding me.

I feel claustrophobic

as if depleting my air,

acutely aware

and taking meticulous care

of its gossamer mesh.

As if I had ventured out

into an alien world,

too warm-blooded, soft-skinned

to survive.

But they, too, will die,

mostly fruitless lives

that end without a bite.

And by the end of July

the hot dry air will be still,

the buzz-saw of bugs

quieted.

I duck into the house, relieved;

as if an air-lock had hissed

and I was free to breathe.

Unmasked;

as if in the muzzled light

of drawn blinds, and tinted glass

I could clearly see.

I never quite get used to this bug hat. It seems to come between me and the world: I don't see clearly; it's as if I can't breathe. And it's a lot of fuss going in and out. So it's such a relief when the season ends.

But more to the point, this is another poem that casts man as an intruder: a creature who doesn't quite belong, and isn't welcome, in the natural world. It's not just the idea of an alien, or of an astronaut on life support. It's the sense that there is always something intermediating between us and the world. We never quite see clearly, even though we think we do: whether it's the anthropologist in his blind; or whether it's peering out from behind tinted glass or through a fine mesh mask. Who would have thought that the crux of the poem might turn on the rather unpoetic as if -- read with a slightly ironic sneer – repeated in the final stanza.

I rather like muzzled (which, in the first iteration of the poem, was "filtered"). It plays nicely off buzz and bug and duck. But more interestingly, it's a word from the realm of sound applied to vision. In so doing, it acts a kind of bridge between the buzz-saw of the preceding stanza and the subdued interior of the last: the exterior world full of life; the interior one sterile.

(Naturally, I've taken the usual poetic license here. Only the black-flies are gone by July. There are still plenty of mosquitoes and deer flies and other nasties. Not to mention that there is often another hatch of black-flies sometime in September.)

Winter Kill

June 13 2015

A bald patch

on greening lawn.

Dead grass

the colour of straw

in dry compacted soil.

Black earth

rich, and loamy

and crumbly wet.

Firmly compressed,

squeezing out

between sturdy fingers

weathered skin.

And seed, light as wind;

inert little spindles,

containing the germ

of growth.

Mixed, and watered, and left.

To sun, and air

and life's basic imperative;

roots burrowing

into darkened depths

blades shooting up.

Its sense of direction

infallible.

The miracle of seed.

Life,

as profane

as it is holy.

For beauty's sake?

Or for its own?

I filled in a few of the worst bald spots on my lawn.

I was reminded of the everyday miracle of seed. Of the power of information: the same 4 letters of DNA, containing the all diversity and complexity of life on earth.

And we, gifted with consciousness, intelligence, and self-awareness, cannot help but ask its meaning -- the meaning of life, its purpose. We want to impose order and direction, an idea of progress. We want there to be an ineffable God, making sense.

But I'm an atheist, and a nihilist. So my answer is both materialist and reductionist. Believers might call it evasive. Which is to say that survival and reproduction is all there is. Everything grows for the sake of growth: both a beautiful lawn, and an all-consuming malignancy. You can call it beauty, or call it cancer; but either way, it's for its own sake. And just as beauty is an imposed notion, so is purpose: determined by us, and for us. ...And anyway, according to the law of thermodynamics, will all end in the dark, no matter what.

Sorry, I couldn't help myself: allowing the last 2 lines to turn a simple poem into a question on the meaning of life. And worse, to then answer by saying there is none!

(Actually, this idea isn't just there in the last 2 lines. I think a close reading reveals a consistent ambivalence about all-consuming growth :  starting with germ, then running through imperative and profane, there is an implicit questioning of growth for its own sake. And just as nature consumes and competes to fill all available space and exhaust all available resources, so do we. No point. That’s just what the life forms that survived – human, and otherwise -- were successful doing.)

Although I doubt anyone (but me) would have read the poem that way before having read this blurb. (And most still probably don't see how the last line asks such a profound question, or implies such a nihilistic answer.) I suspect it would much more likely have been seen as a commentary on the cultural construct of beauty: the arbitrary standard of good and bad; of worthwhile and worthless. Lawns are coming to be seen this way: a standard of domestic beauty that only exists in the suburban culture of the last half century or so. But even though a different title -- something like "Growth" -- might have helped aim the reader a little closer to my direction, there are three reasons I stuck with Winter Kill: I think it's a great title to draw the reader in; I like its misdirection, since the poem begins with death but doesn't dwell there; and I'm not particularly enthusiastic about being so black in outlook, and so don't mind in the least if the reader doesn't accompany me there.

All-Day Breakfast

June 8 2015

All-day breakfast

comes with a bottomless cup

and a waitress in comfortable shoes.

No wobbly heels

or low-cut dress.

No neutral "server"

drained of sex.

Because breakfast is never

served by men.

But by mothers,

who drag themselves up

when nothing stirs

and morning is murky as dusk.

When the kitchen light

is a yellowish blur,

and the house is at peace

and the time is hers.

When her housecoat was frumpy

and she was bored by the drudgery

but still took care,

no matter how thankless

or undeserved.

A woman's work,

that never seems to be done

or earn what it's worth.

The waitress cracks wise

and the grill men curse,

while the bacon fries

and the toast is burnt.

And the smell of coffee

like she used to perk

perfumes the steamy air.

I hate getting up before noon.

So all-day breakfast

is comfort food,

warming the soul

in a greasy spoon,

feeling like home

in an old-fashioned diner

where the waitress calls me “dear”.

Breakfast served

in the dregs of the night

every day of the year.

I was quickly glancing over a publisher's ad in the book section. One title caught my eye: All-Day Breakfast. Three words that evoke instant comfort! So I ran with it. But as soon as I found myself writing "waitress", I realized that this is no longer the politically correct term. Yet I can't picture an old-fashioned diner or a greasy spoon serving all-day breakfast without also picturing the traditional waitress: maternal, capable, and able to put everyone at ease. And so the poem found its direction. And also allowed me to redeem my political incorrectness, in these 3 lines: A woman's work,/ that never seems to be done/ or earn what it's worth. Phew!!

I suppose this might have gone easier with a rhyming dictionary. But once I got started having fun with "serve", it didn't matter: I suspect I exhausted just about every conceivable rhyme! The art, of course, isn't demonstrating one's ear for language; it's in making the word-choice seem the most natural thing in the world. The last thing you want -- unless you're being ironic, or self-consciously playful -- is to have a word sound shoe-horned in, a sentence contorted for the sake of rhyme. (Although I’m pretty sure I went a little overboard here, and it does sound like showing-off!)

Picture Window

June 3 2015

A motionless body

beside the house.

Looking out

the floor-to-ceiling window

on a grounded bird.

Its inert form

seems perfectly intact;

balsa-wood bones, fluttering heart,

the still iridescent

meticulous feathers

works of art.

But something vital

has shattered inside;

its pea-sized brain

gossamer skull.

The angle of sun

reflection of glass.

A dull thud,

and another stunned bird

feathering down.

To see a creature of movement

so oddly inanimate

seems deeply unnatural.

The stillness

of a dead bird.

But in only seconds

the finality of death

takes on weight,

the gravitas

that is its due.

Yet how light it feels,

as if too insubstantial

even for life.

And what chance

has a tiny bird 

when instinct's inadequate,

when glass occurs

conjured out of air?

From improbable birth

to interruption, mid-flight

it leads so contingent a life.

But when a picture window kills

it seems intrinsically wrong;

an unsuspecting bird

culled,

the forest

stripped of song.

I like the mischievous bit of misdirection that starts this poem. Is this a murder mystery?!!

I like the words that capture the violence of immoveable glass: words like , stunned, interruption mid-flight, unsuspecting, culled, and stripped.

I think my favourite stanza is this: To see a creature of movement/ so oddly inanimate/ seems deeply unnatural./ The stillness/ of a dead bird./ But in only seconds/ the finality of death/ takes on weight,/ the gravitas/ that is its due. This is how it feels, stumbling on a dead bird: I do a quick double-take -- a grounded bird, a bird not in motion, seems oddly unnatural; and then how quickly it sinks in, and this feather-lite thing takes on the gravity of death. What makes this work even better is the beginning of the next stanza: the physical lightness, placed against that heaviness.

And I like the very last word: the abrupt introduction of sound, when everything before was visual (if you don't count dull thud!); the way sound so poignantly recalls the uninhabited forest as it once existed.