Clawfoot Tub

March 28 2017

A white porcelain tub.

Standing free

in a high-ceiling room

filled with natural light.

Its hard enamel gloss

and soft ivory finish.

Its smooth curves

as if something organic, living.

How it cradles a body

in all its prickly edgy distress;

hard bone, under thin skin,

sharp elbows

knotted neck.

On old-fashioned tub

on ornamental feet

in which it's long enough to stretch

all the way out,

deep enough to sink

down to its depths,

eyes closed

body at rest.

Not quite sure

where water begins

one's boundaries end.

A hot soaking tub

suitable for naked creatures

with smooth impervious skin.

Who began life fully immersed,

and can trace our long line of descent

back to the sea;

our forbears, pelagic

our blood still salt.

Ending the day

by scented candle, a capella chants

in a tub big enough for two;

slippery skin, leg-on-leg

weightlessly spooning.

           ~~~~~~~~~~~

Or a tepid shower, in a narrow stall

under needle-sharp spray.

Slick tile, surgical white

reflects bright fluorescent light.

The white noise of water

echoing-off,

a grinding fan, bearings shot

drowning out his voice.

I was reading the usual personal essay on the back page of the Globe, and it ended with a woman taking her customary end-of-day soak in a hot relaxing tub. It brought to mind what a foreign experience this is for me: I never take baths; and probably haven't since I was a small child, when showers were for grown-ups.

At the risk of stereotyping, I suspect this is a gendered thing: that men by and large prefer showers, while women bathe. A “hot soaking tub” sounds immediately appealing. But then I think of sitting in my own dirty tepid water feeling bored, and it quickly loses its allure.

Nevertheless, the tempting ambience of her hot soaking tub inspired me to write. But it felt dishonest to write in the first person, presumably about me. So the poem became more descriptive than narrative, more detached than intimate. It takes until the sudden turn in the final stanza to really introduce emotion and a sense of story into the thing. I resisted the urge to over-write – the needle-sharp spray could have been flaying his naked skin; his voice could instead have been sobs – in order to leave it to let the reader make the story her own.

Monochrome

March 26 2017

On the cusp of spring

the world is monochrome.

Unbroken cloud

the same dull white

as the sodden snow.

A vague horizon

where land and sky merge.

And in the narrow in-between

dripping eves

iced, and over-flowing.

Naked trees

with thinly branching limbs

as if arthritic from cold.

Islands of brown

where the ground is exposed,

bare, but frozen.

The chill damp

of the saturated air

cuts to the bone.

There is no brightening, looking up;

only milky light

from everywhere at once,

a middling sun

through constant cloud

as if through frosted glass.

So there is no telling time

only season.

Waiting

for the earth to tip

into colour, heat.

Before the sky blues, grass greens, buds open;

before the drip-drip-drip of spring

becomes a torrent.

Before a late winter storm

blows in from somewhere north;

fresh snow, once more

whiting-out the world.

Blank Slate

March 24 2017

The tide re-arranged the rocks

as I slept.

The view

if I stood just so

was gone.

The power of water.

Found art

and beauty's transience.

But I love the wash of surf

as it retreats.

Wave after wave

lapping, draining,

leaving smooth sand, sloping down

glistening wet.

Small trails of froth

deffervescing,

stranded objects

discarded, or dead

scattered about.

The waves arrive

not quite clockwork.

A pause, as if trifling with me,

then a volley

of two or three.

And some are strong, some weak,

like the fitful breathing

of a pent-up sea.

Just as the heart

is never quite regular,

water

the same salt as blood.

The tide ebbs, the beach lengthens.

And the sand is re-arranged,

stirred-up from beneath

or washing out to sea

or shifting

to the lee of the hook.

So in a thousand years

it will migrate down the shore,

leaving a granite shelf

coarse gravel.

But still, for now

the same hard-pan surface,

the familiar beach

that seems eternal.

My footsteps

heading down to the rocks

do not last long,

water

seeping up from beneath

sides slumping inward.

Impressions

the rising tide will smooth away.

Each day

a blank slate

beginning as it ends.

A meditation on time: cycles within cycles; recurrence vs progress; transience, illusions of permanence, beginnings and ends.

It's also a poem of close observation and microcosm, and plays with magnitude and scale. I like the telling detail that close observation and microcosm invite. But a poem isn't a novel, and the pleasure in the writing is cultivating an ear for getting just the right balance between too little and too much.

The New Yorker this week (March 27 2017) had an article (by staff writer Joshua Rothman) about Daniel Dennett, a philosopher – and an absolutely fascinating character -- who studies consciousness (a favourite topic of mine!) But the poem has nothing to do with that subject. Rather, it simply began with a phrase from the final paragraph that caught my attention, and made me want to riff. Here it is:

Before the morning slipped away, Dennett decided to go out for a walk, down to where the lawn ended and a rocky beach began. He’d long delighted in a particular rock formation, where a few stones were piled just so, creating a peephole. He was disappointed to find that the tides had rearranged the stones, and that the hole had disappeared. The dock was pulled ashore for the winter, its parts stacked next to his sailboat. He walked down the steps anyway, occasionally leaning on his walking stick. For a few minutes, he stood at the bottom, savouring the frigid air, the lapping water, the dazzling sun. ♦

Arctic Air

March 22 2017

In the dry cold

of a high pressure system

each star is sharply etched,

sky black

as absolute zero.

Where the planets wander

among the stars

just as the ancients saw them;

Mars, tinged with red

the silver-blue of Venus.

Where shooting stars streak

then silently extinguish.

A cosmic mote of dust

turned super-heated fireball

in the planet's outer atmosphere,

some primordial rock

after billions of years.

Our eggshell-thin layer of air;

its molecules, so lightly held

diffusing-out into space.

Where the slender slip

of a crescent moon

dangles like a sky-hook.

In its curve

a silhouette of earth,

the planet-sized shadow

of our only home.

And its ghostly rim

you can only discern

if you look and look;

its oceans of dust, blasted calderas

subsumed in gradations of grey.

I briefly glanced up

before the porch light triggered

and the universe instantly shrunk.

Just me

in my murky penumbra of light

brought quickly back to earth.

I'm playing around with perspective here, widening and narrowing the aperture; and in so doing, incidentally exposing the fragility of life on earth. This is a familiar trope in my poetry: insignificant man, in all his self-importance, in a cold indifferent universe. I'm not thrilled to be so predictable and tiresome. But in my defence, I rarely start out wanting to say this; I just can't seem to help coming back to it!

The sky has been quite spectacular lately: cold dry arctic air has settled in, and it acts like a clarifying lens. Except I'm aware that most people never look up. Or if they do, light pollution lets them see little. I have the privilege of living with relatively unobstructed skies. I thought of this again when I was recently talking with my brother, who lives in the greater Toronto area: I mentioned the waxing of a fabulous full moon; he was oblivious. Which gave me the closing paragraph, and which – I modestly submit ;-) – makes the poem.

The title is a bit of misdirection. But I think legitimately and effectively sets the scene. 

4 - Eyes

March 20, 2017

The girl in the short story

placed her glasses on the bedside table

lenses down.

Which is when my grade 9 English teacher asked

“Anyone?”

So, was this about wilful blindness?

Or that what you see with your own eyes

can be unreliable?

Or something to do

with the careless insouciance

of invincible youth?

(Mrs McGregor

would not have spoon-fed us,

nodding toward the big well-thumbed Webster's.)

They would have called her “4-eyes”.

Or taunted her

about the lazy one

that sometimes wandered.

Sitting out

dodge-ball, and double-dutch.

They would have been bright pink

cat's-eyed

post-war plastic frames,

the kind with spangles

and bottle-bottom glass

that left her looking googly-eyed.

But none of this was explained.

She simply placed them there,

and we imagined the scrape

of glass on wood.

The telling detail

that said she didn't like what she saw,

that it didn't matter

looking out at the world

through a scratched or broken lens.

Glasses off, when she slept.

Technicolor dreams

in which she was invisible,

eyes at rest

in the blessed dark.

I remember this, from Mrs McGregor's grade 8 or 9 English. And I'm pretty sure it was J.D. Salinger; either Nine Stories, or Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.

And I still return to this, when I find I'm not giving the reader enough credit; when I find I'm saying, instead of showing.

It's surprising how a tiny incident can burn itself into your brain so that it persists intact for almost half a century. I think this is because in that moment I felt so excited by his mastery, by the power of the telling detail, by the deft use of simple language. And maybe, in my pride, embarrassed I'd missed noticing it myself.

Could this even have been when the writing bug first grabbed me? When I thought I might aspire to the same deft mastery as Salinger? (And if I've failed to come close in that, at least I have in reclusiveness!)

(Knowing what I know about memory – how we conflate memories, now we recreate a memory anew every time it's opened -- I probably don't really remember this. But if I'm missing the literal truth, I think I've retained the essential truth. Which may just be better, anyway. ...Mrs. McGregor, though, is absolutely real, and I'm glad I managed to get her into the poem: a nice way to honour a good teacher, and by implication all the good teachers who were so influential in our young lives.) 

Attachment
March 14 2017


I have yet to fall in love.

Never surrendered
to its gravity,
oblivious to the rock-bottom stop
coming back to earth.

Never drifted
in free-fall's blissful calm.
When all the forces balance out,
attraction, attachment
friction
lift.

Never let temptation win, inertia slip,
the ill winds
of neglect, envy, sex.

Never considered
being eased into death
in her words, her arms;
or embracing her
as she departs.

Perhaps levitation
is closer to the truth.

So much to love, in life.
The small gratitudes
of everyday.
The forgiveness
we give even ourselves.
The holding
and the being held. 

The Natural Order of Things
March 11 2017


The way water seeks its level,
falling, if it could
to the lowest point on earth.
Where it rests,
a warm stagnant pool
that concentrates, in the darkness and depth,
thick as brine
depleted of air. 

Or follow a tree, as it radiates out.
Dividing 
from trunk, to branch, to twig;
a green crown
trembling in the wind, 
a vast network of roots
spreading, thinning. 

The river
to its delta, swamp, bog.
The carotid, branching off
smaller and smaller,
until its only blood
is a solitary cell.
A single red corpuscle,
bled of oxygen
in its pale dimpled skin,
lodged 
at the clotted end
of a tiny terminal vessel.

In a city of millions
in a nondescript block 
in a modest apartment
all talking at once,
a dining room table
containing all the people you love.
Faces flushed,
in the warm glow 
of artificial light.

As if you were the growing point
at the tip of the highest branch.
As if all of your ancestors
stood at your back,
fanning out 
like terracotta soldiers
raised from the dead.

How many divisions
until we come to rest?
In a universe, too vast to comprehend,
the small, and the settled
that let us make sense.



Nature repeats. When you step back, or zoom in closer,  the same pattern reveals itself: a river dividing, a tree branching, the pattern of vessels on a leaf. The circulatory system, as well. 

Just as we are constituent parts of something larger, in our society and communities:  each stop of the aperture, narrowing down, until the camera focuses in  on our small quotidian lives; until all the bustle and noise and chaos of the world is distilled down to a warm intimate space. We can happiliy exist in this universe, bertween these 4 familiar walls, oblivious to the whole. 

The poem is unsure what this means. Is it a growing point? Is it slow death by suffocation? 

I was watching HBO's High Maintenance, which is a series of short stories linked by an itinerant pot dealer (who actually ends up being quite peripheral in each of these self-contained narratives). The tone of each piece is to begin in the chaos of New York City -- claustrophobic quick-cut views and sounds of the variety and bigness of this vast metropolis -- then narrow in on a very small space containing that story's circumscribed lives. Who, for that half hour, become the whole world for us; and so reduce this incomprehensible and intimidating place to a human and livable scale. Which is how we perceive our own lives:  the centre of the universe; except when we briefly surface and realize we are insignificant characters, spun off into some marginal and minor extremity.  

(Of course, every story does this:  zeroing in on someone. But I think the power of High Maintenance is how the main character is introduced. Because at first you're not at all sure who the story is going to follow, and it's only when things are well along that one of many walk-ons and extras steps up, and the central character actually emerges.)

Incursion
March 7 2017


A child deprived of touch
will fail to thrive.
He wastes away from the inside,
growing brittle-boned
hollowed-out.

The voice in my head
that howls and pleads
cries, berates.
Like the obedient child,
seen 
but never heard.

My personal space
moves with me
as I make my way through the world.
Like a big pneumatic bubble
it has inflated with age,
its invisible rim
more and more impervious.
Poke in here, it pushes out there,
a thin elastic skin
that always reverts
to a perfect squeaky sphere.
Because in this vast country of winter
there is plenty of space
and we keep our distance,
eyes averted, elbows out;
all of us
bouncing off, like bumper cars
as we jostle along.

Until the static, building up-and-up
is all at once on fire. 
The electric touch
of opposite charge,
the flux of base desire.



The poem began with my awareness of what a large personal space I surround myself with. I have an acute sense of boundary, infringement, threat. Apart form individual differences, this notion of personal space is very culturally specific:  so much bigger in 1st world countries of the West than crowded 3rd world ones. 

It also began with something more personal, and that I think is causally related:  my feeling that I suffered through much of my life from lack of touch:  my family was/is not very demonstrative or openly affectionate; I don't think my personality as a child was particularly inviting of touch; and I've been solitary most of my adult life. If not for my dogs, I'd be terminally damaged! 

An older poem newly revised. Unfortunately, a formatting problem prevented me replacing it in its original chronological place. Instead, it's being posted fresh.


A Rare Atmospheric Anomaly
Sept 28 2008

You’d think the smell
would have overwhelmed you,
gagging
that many fish, all at once.
Quicksilver forms
turning dull in the heat of the sun.

But it’s sound you remember most,
all those small stiff bodies
flipping and flopping 
on cold hard ground.
Until they lay
gasping on their sides;
gulls circling, squawking
sniffing dogs.

You always liked categories  —
the permanence of names
everything in its place.
So life feels safe
predictable. 
But when fish fall from the clear blue sky
you know anything is possible  —
that the flat grey lake
could rise-up, and take you in;
or the land
you took for granted
swallow you whole.

And you,
walking, by yourself, by the shore
might find you’re not alone
after all. 
Free fish
like manna from heaven.
And someone special, unexpected
who will walk hand-in-hand;
gather you up, and believe
all your fabulous tales.

An older poem newly revised. Unfortunately, a formatting problem prevented me replacing it in its original chronological place. Instead, it's being posted fresh.



Double Negative
June 8 2010

He kept on saying “irregardless”.

The word was a sulky child

sweeping the checkerboard clear

before all was lost.

It was a bulldozer,

leveling every argument I could muster

valid or not.

But he was oblivious,

stubbornly persisting

with double negatives,

never mind that awful concoction of a word.

His preference is clearly for emphasis

illogic be damned.

In fact, he loved double negatives,

couldn’t get enough.

I didn’t do nothing

he protested,

unaware how accurate he was.

I tactfully pointed out his mistakes,

which only made him more enraged

scathingly itemizing mine.

Whatever, I finally said

seeking refuge in Zen indifference,

not to mention the moral high ground

of letting go.

So, does passive-aggressive

cancel out as well?

But it’s these internal contradictions

that make us human,

how love and hate

pleasure, pain

can co-exist

And irregardless

of cutting words, objects hurled,

that unforgettable

post-fight sex.

This old poem was recently revised. Unfortunately, I'm unable to replace the original version, due to some formatting problems. So I'm leaving that one in place, in its chronological spot, and posting the updated version here.

Body Heat

July 21 2009

No relief

from this sultry heat

with the sun at its height.

It seems to hover there,

as if time were arrested

our fugitive shadows effaced.

Even the bugs have hunkered down,

their hard black bodies

cinder-dry.

We move slowly.

Sit motionless.

Revel

in the wisps of breeze

that stroke our shoulders, stir our sun-bleached hair.

Our only shelter

a puff of cotton-batting cloud.

We are naked,

eyes shut

heads tilted upward.

Our bodies are engines of heat,

pulse tripping

skin flushed with blood.

Barely contained desire

radiates out.

I picture you underwater

smooth as polished rock,

nipples stiff, body slick,

tautly muscled arms.

Your golden hair floats free

in a halo about your head.

And I can see the bubbles of air

that cling to your skin

the closer I get.

I follow your legs,

ascending the curve of your ass

the small of your back

your finely-boned scapulae,

like delicate wings

gliding beneath

an even tan.

We will make love

in this tropical water,

weightless

frictionless

out of breath,

erupting-out into air

in a burst of spray.

And in mere seconds

will feel the salty astringence

of sun-dried skin.

Except the wetness, where I entered you

running down your leg.

And the sweat, intermingling

where we hold each other tight,

bodies touching

skin still hotly flushed.