A Hot Dry Climate
Oct 15 2016


In the arid sands
of the Holy Land.
In the southwest desert, or sub-Saharan sahel
live dark-skinned people
hardened by sun.
Their small rectangular homes
are jumbled like children’s blocks
on the lay of the land.
Sand-coloured walls
choke narrow roads,
a patina of dust
that seems centuries old.
Cowed dogs, all skin-and-bone
slink in the shadows.

In a hot dry climate
the roofs are flat.
Where people seek relief, after dark,
grateful, in the stifling heat
for any hint of breeze.
Where they lie on their backs
and look up at the stars
feeling small.

Exposed, in communal sleep.
While we huddle against the cold
beneath sloping roofs, overhanging eaves,
a muffle of snow
to keep the world out.

As if climate were destiny
and we could be nothing but
reserved, taciturn, closed.
Never looking up
at the night sky,
feeling awe-struck
and wonder.

Even high summer, we swelter inside.
As constellations rise, and sink;
the heavens circle
indifferently.

We are products of our environment. So while our northern temperament is private, quiet, and guarded, southerners are more communal:  they live outdoors, in shared spaces; public and private overlap. 

I picture a village of small dun-coloured buildings scattered over an arid landscape. They are all flat-roofed boxes made of clay and crumbling brick. In the heat, people sleep on the roof-tops, gazing up at the stars. So many of us have never seen the night sky. Our lights blind us. We never look up. 

This poem began as I listened to Terry Gross (of NPR’s Fresh Air) interviewing  the author Jonathan Safran Foer about his new novel Here I Am.  He talks about a father and son who, after visiting an observatory in  Marfa, Texas, sit out on the roof looking up at the night sky. Foer quotes (from memory, so it may be a little different in  the actual book) one of them saying:  Why do you think it is people whisper when they look at stars? The question contains truth:  we do speak in hushed reverential tones when we feel wonder and awe. And I like that he apparently ends it there, leaving it more as a rhetorical statement than a  question that needs to be answered, making both the fictional listener and the actual reader complicit in the thought.  The best writers understand the power of this kind of restraint, leaving the reader to elaborate on her own. Anyway, the poem had its start when I heard this and it became somehow conflated with an image I’d seen of this kind of village. 

Not only don’t we have dry heat and flat roofs and an inclination toward communal living; we also don’t have much opportunity in modern life to experience wonder and awe. The key word in the poem is small.  A feeling of smallness and insignificance: this is the common denominator of all experiences that overwhelm us, that shock us out of the boundaries of ego -- from religious transcendence, to the search for meaning through psychedelic drugs.

Keeping House

Oct 11 2016

The spare room

in the rented villa

where we once kept house.

A rough wooden table, salvaged chairs.

Your paintings

against white plaster walls

the nude above the headboard.

And at its glorious centre

all brass and feathers

an unmade bed.

Where we nested at night

and explored each other

in the heat of day.

It was all spare;

an open space

with no clutter or waste

and nothing to possess us.

Which is how we all remember love;

an island of two

in a simple house

absolved from time,

sharing sun-warmed olives

cheap red wine.

Getting by

with a few awkward words

in the local tongue.

Because the young

can afford to be ascetic

and are hedonists at heart.

It’s the old who accumulate,

bent under the weight

of all they’ve done

and didn’t.

Their desire, cooling like dusk.

Which comes surprisingly quick

in this southern latitude

its unfamiliar stars.

David Remnick has a piece about Leonard Cohen in the latest New Yorker. I was reading about his early years living in a simple villa on the Greek island of Hydra with his beloved Marianne. 

I admire Cohen’s ability to combine a rich inner life with a Zen-like asceticism. 

I admire how a ladies’ man and a lover of women can also be so modest and kind.

But he’s in his 80s now, and Marianne is dead, and his body is inexorably betraying him. 

This poem is a mood piece. It was inspired by this article, but is neither biography, nor autobiographical. It really started in language, which is where a lot of my poems start:  a word or sound or phrase that pricks up my ears. Here, you can see this in the opening stanza. First, it was the double meaning of spare room that stuck with me:  how the expression sounds like an afterthought, but also conjures up the ascetic beauty of spareness.  And second, it was that dated expression keeping house (or, in this case, kept house). I thought of two young adults giddily playing at being grown-up in a little doll-house starter home. But I also thought of “kept woman”. And thought, as well, of  the intense domesticity of infatuation, where the world recedes, leaving only eyes for this illuminated other.

The poem is also looking back. So while it’s presumably about the passion of young  love, it ends in a wistful reflection about  baggage, regret, and navigating the unfamiliar terrain of growing old.

 ...In the process of working on this poem, the announcement came of Dylan winning the Nobel in literature. I was shocked by this, and thought of him as unworthy. And I still think that, because I don't believe his lyrics stand up on the page unaccompanied by voice or music. Even knowing that poetry is primarily an aural, not a written, art form, I find that lyrics make bad poetry. But if a singer-songwriter had to be awarded the Nobel, I would have without hesitation chosen Cohen over Dylan. For this line, if nothing else: Ring the bells that still can ring. ...There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.

Miscalculation
Oct 8 2016


The act
is smooth, tactical, fierce.
In the soundless distance
violence turns to art
and death is stone cold blood.

The eagle
with the silver-sided fish
is labouring up,
water streaming
compact muscles flailing
in the blinding dry.
Wings pump,
powerfully, methodically
gaining  height.

The impression of  prey
beneath a flat grey lake.
But its grasp is fixed,
great curved talons 
locked-in,
and a monster fish
can pull it down.

The white belly 
of a bloated fish
an eagle drowned.
Back and forth
where waves lap the shore;
sodden feathers, captive legs,
eyes' dull stare.

I think this poem is about challenging assumptions. 

Because we reflexively identify with the predator:  we don’t think of ourselves as victims; we feel an affinity for the warm-blooded charismatic creature. But hunters fail often. And hunting can be as risky for predator as it is for prey. 

And because the  fish doesn’t just complete the scene --  a mere ornament in our view of the majestic eagle --  it’s also a living thing in its own right, worthy  of empathy.  In this sense, blinding dry -- despite being  only 2 words -- is important:   it tries to inhabit  the fish’s experience of an utterly incomprehensible event. Perhaps how we would feel, snatched-up by aliens into an unimagined world. I’m challenging the reader to flip her point of view from the  cold blooded scene playing out in the picturesque distance into something immediate and real.

The poem is also about contingency:  how in  a momentary miscalculation this beautiful, powerful, iconic bird  quickly meets its death. Every time we drive, we perform judgements that can be just as fateful and final.

The poem is  nature in tooth and claw:  the zero-sum contest where there is no life without death;  the grim end we all ultimately share.