Effortless
Feb 26 2014

I find my rhythm

swimming lengths.
In the repetition
of kick, stroke, breathe.
In measured distance,
muscle memory.
In the meditation
of effort, release.

It's winter outside.
But here it's humid
and a little too bright;
like a forced smile
the eyes betray,
trying too hard
to be cheerful.
An unlikely oasis,
a concrete wall away
from darkness

and ice.

How it feels to fly,
hovering submerged
looking down at the bottom.

How it feels to die

boundaries dissolving,
water in water
like in like.

Odd molecules
diffusing out,
returning to water
as a lifeless body

does to earth.
As ashes to ashes, and dust to dust,
as all we are
and ever were.

An infinite dilution
that leaves no trace.
Or would I remain
in every ocean and lake
and drop of rain?
The homeopathic cure
for losing oneself.

My mind is wandering
through time and space,
the Zen of glide
the measured pace.
Until my lungs scream
hungry for air,
and I break for the surface
gasping for breath.

Body and mind
together again.


I swim daily.

What keeps me coming back are those days when I find that rhythm, and it becomes effortless ...when muscle memory takes over, and my mind is free to wander ...when I feel I could go on forever. And when I do my first length, underwater, and look down at the bottom as if I'm flying. But buoyant, and without the least bit of exertion: the perfect density of water in water, like in like; and therefore not even having to hang from my arms, as even a soaring bird must support itself. I think this idea of effortlessness is where this poem started, and so seems the most natural choice for a title.

The rest of it --the metaphysical excursion into molecules and dust, into death and re-birth --I will simply attribute to stream of consciousness, the ineffable mystery of the creative act. In other words, don't ask me to explain!

This idea of the one great ocean and infinite dilution immediately brought homeopathy to mind. Which is really technical sounding, not the type of word I like in my poetry. So I was most pleased to have come up with "the homeopathic cure/ for losing oneself."

Shift
Feb 25 2014

I sit
on the water's edge,
the setting sun

almost liquid.
The dark horizon

splits it in a jagged arc,
wider and wider, as the mountains rise
until it's bursting big.
Where it seems to pause, shimmering,
a brilliant orange gold.
And then, will quickly thin
pinching-off,

an after image

of light.

The trick
is to shift

to distant eyes.
Where the sun
is eternally fixed,
the absolute centre.
And the mountains and oceans
in all their ponderous grace
are wheeling through space,
steady
unstoppable.

My grip, tightening,
feeling queasy, inconceivably small.
I am a spinning child, who suddenly stops
his footing unsure.
A bareback rider
on a massive earth,
as the planet beneath me
soundlessly turns.


I've written something like this before, where I tried to create this sense of the music of the spheres, of a clockwork universe of massive ponderous bodies following unstoppable trajectories. And in which man is insignificant, inconsequential. I recall something about lying on my back looking up at the night sky, and having the sensation of riding the planet, of watching the horizon overtake the stars.

As I've said before, I often get the impression I'm writing variations on the same poem over and over again. So it goes.

This version came out of an image in a movie I just saw. Before Midnight is the third in a series that includes Before Sunset and Before Sunrise: the rare sequel that is better than the original (not an easy task, since in this case the original was brilliant!) It stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, and is a real writer's movie, full of pitch-perfect dialogue, subtle truths. (Most movies these days are not "writer's" movies; they're director's movies, or special effects flicks.) The two are on vacation in Greece, sitting on a patio at the edge of the Mediterranean and watching the sun set. They're backlit, and the camera draws back and back (or maybe it doesn't, but this is how I seem to remember it). So the impression is of their smallness in a vast landscape. And when I followed their eyes to the moving sun, bisected by the jagged horizon of weathered peaks, my perception suddenly shifted, and I had the impression of this massive planet wheeling through space, carrying them on its back and leaving the sun behind. This is the image I try to recreate in the poem.

Playing With Trucks
Feb 24 2014


Dump trucks
that run with gravel, summer long
are hauling hard-packed snow.

To empty fields
on country roads,
working quarries
of sand and stone.

That are eerily still
until the soil thaws.
And bring to mind

an ominous post-apocalypse  --
heavy machinery

brown with rust, immobilized,
and broken ground,
barren, white
no sign of life.

They shuttle to and from
city streets.
Where front-end loaders
belch diesel smoke.
Where blue lights blink
and back-up beepers, urgently keen,
even louder
in cold night air.
Where they shake themselves free
with a mighty clash

of steel-on-steel,
the shriek
of big black diesels
straining hard.

Under harsh illumination,
as starkly white
as a moon colony, in airless light,
men and machines
in some bleak lunar dystopia.

How the streets  are cleaned
as the rest of us sleep,
mountains of snow
methodically cleared,
frozen pavement
scraped bare.

How unliveable
winter would be
without oil and steel.
Without men
who are willing to freeze

in early morning darkness, 

jockeying big diesel trucks
great yellow machines.

Every sleeping boy's
dream job.


I often walk the dog very late at night. Not just that we're nighthawks (me, anyway), but that the streets are quiet and she can go more safely off-leash. Except it's not always so quiet. On winter nights, we will encounter these localized hives of activity, full of loud noises and big machinery and eerie light. And running up and down the highway, at ungodly hours, we'll encounter big dump trucks shuttling to and fro; even though all the quarries have long been closed for the season.

In a winter like this, I'm running out of room to put all the snow from shovelling the driveway. And the mountains of snow the city ploughs have piled up? This is where it goes, under cover of dark.

A couple of weeks ago, there were 2 inches of snow in the southern US. (Admittedly, pretty icy snow). Whole cities and states were paralyzed, the freeways littered with abandoned and dented cars. While here, the biggest storm is seamlessly cleared by morning: we are prepared with lots of salt and sand and snowploughs and experience. So we looked on amusingly, secure in our smugness. But without fossil fuel, life here would become impossible -- overnight! The interdependence of a complex system, our dependence on the thin thread of a long supply chain, is all that separates our smug efficiency from those scenes of mayhem. Not to mention the high cost in CO2 emissions behind our standard of living, the comfort we take for granted, the luxury of being able to live in this beautiful northern landscape.

In The Beginning

Feb 23 2014

In the beginning
there is sound.
The primordial sense,
animal, powerful.

Your slippery body,
slack-boned, weightless
feeling-out its shape,
as cells replicate, cascade
strain
at your extremities,
buzzing with growth.

Her heartbeat,
like a big bass tympani
with its steady nervous beat.
Great wattles of sound
thudding through
the muffled warmth.

And her distorted voice,
distant, yet immanent
and intimately close,
that will accompany you
into thin astringent air.

Startle reflex.
Stapes, incus, malleus,
membrane tautly stretched.
Cochlea, cranial
cerebral cortex.
Pinna, outer, inner,
hard of hearing
deaf.
He said, she said
out-of-context.
Selectively remembered,
forgotten
repressed.

And in the end
when you will have stopped listening
but still can hear.
The slow drip-drip-drip.
The bleeps and blips of monitors
banalities of talk.
The intimacies, and whisperings,
confessions
shared, or not.
As they sit, curtains drawn
lost in quiet thought.

And you will remember when
in an instant
a heartbeat stopped;
whisked
into cold hard light.


I've tended to think of smell as the most powerful sense: that it exists in the most ancient part of our reptilian brain; that it is so intimately connected with memory; that it intrudes not just into consciousness, but into deep emotion, even when we're not paying the least attention.

But I think sound may be more elemental. Not only does it convey language and music, in all their refined complexity, it is also omnipresent: we are receptive in all directions; it intrudes just as powerfully as smell; and we respond with the reflexive urgency of flight or flight to its slightest pin-drop of threat. And it is not just our first sense -- overwhelming present in the womb -- it is probably the last to die. Aside from that, the unconscious brain is constantly monitoring our acoustic environment. And the acoustic nerve is -- I believe -- faster than sight or touch, and radiates through the brain more widely.

When I started the poem, I had a vague idea of word-play with stapes, incus, malleus; or, better still, hammer and anvil. The word-play survives in the 5th stanza, and I think it ended up working pretty well.

"Immanent" was a tough call. I like to avoid big words; mostly because they stop the reader, who has to shift mental gears into a more intellectual processing mode. Or worse still, because a more obscure word literally stops the reader, who has to put down the poem to look it up! And considering that even I had to look it up to confirm its meaning, the decision to keep it certainly gave me pause. On the other hand, "immanent" (not "imminent", btw, for you too-quick readers and time-pressed skimmers) works really well, and sounds even better; so I made an exception, an indulgence which -- after a lot of self-restraint over the course of numerous poems -- I think I've earned.

The final line brings the poem full circle. Because it can be read as death recapitulating birth. We're all familiar with the so-called "near death experience", the trope of death as going toward the light at the end of a long dark tunnel. Here, I think the cold hard light calls back to the emergence, earlier in the poem, from the warm dark womb into life's thin astringent air. (Or maybe not, and this is first time you're seeing it this way!) Not that I believe in reincarnation; or any kind of life after death, for that matter. I believe that death is final: oblivion, annihilation. But it's fun to play with tantalizing possibilities, no matter how unlikely or wishful.

Alberta Clipper

Feb 20 2014

The rain was unstoppable.

A mythological downpour,
water enough

for the Biblical flood.

The one about judgement, punishment

justice done.

The one Noah, that nut-case

went on-and-on about,

warning the others,

but struggling with doubt.

A puppet-master God,

His mercy strained

commanding the rain.

Whose hand, according to the literalists
is firmly on the spigot;
so there are no accidents,

no luck, good or bad

in His heavenly plan.

But in the Bible

there is also no snow, no northern winter,

no blizzard equivalent
of the Biblical flood.
Here, where doors swing inward,
or the only way out
would be a window, upstairs.
Where cars are plugged-in, wood split in advance,

larders well-stocked
with staples and cans.

The forecast calls

for heavy blowing snow
and we're still patiently waiting,
tingling
with anticipation
at Nature's wrath.
Because this northern God, this modern deity
has tempered His anger

mellowed with age.
Unlike the Old Testament version,
who drowned the world
for the sins of the few,
roiled the oceans
smote the lewd.

Who afflicts us only with snow.
Perfect
to jump and slide and throw,
for building forts, and digging burrows.
For the brilliant gift
of snow days,
work excused
cancelled schools.

An Alberta Clipper, a Texas Low
colliding
over Lake Superior.

And just for fun
little kids, all bundled-up

in brightly coloured coats,

making angels in the snow.

The forecast was for a big storm: heavy winds lots of snow. But as I sat down to write this, it had been almost 24 hours since the predicted start, and the weatherman kept moving the goal line. So the patient waiting and the tingle of anticipation are true. As are the topped-up woodpile and the hoarding of essentials.

I wanted to find an expression for this that would be as powerful as "Biblical flood", and realized there was nothing: certainly nothing Old Testament. As much as our world-view separates us from a time when, apparently, prophets and miracles were commonplace, so does our landscape: as different from the Middle East as one might imagine. We hardly expect daily miracles; but nothing in the Bible prepares us for Biblical blizzards, either.

"Biblical" is not, of course, simply an instrumental reference to the mythological flood; it also has allusions of judgement and punishment. Noah didn't just have his own doubts; he was also roundly ridiculed by his neighbours. And while a sensible reading of the holy book understands that it is allegorical and in the realm of instructive myth, the literalists take it as the transcribed word of God.

I heard an item on the news about an earlier storm on the East Coast, and the fellow was talking about being temporarily trapped in his house but the snow piled up outside his door. I smiled smugly to myself: prudently, mine opens in!

I like the contrast between more archaic words like "smote" and "affliction" and "sin", and the silliness that follows: things like throwing snowballs and digging caves. And I also like ending on "snow angels: calling back to the Biblical theme, but taking all the sting out of it.

It eventually came, 18 or so hours later. Not quite Biblical ...but there's still time. (Unfortunately, any snow angels will be quickly obliterated by wind!)

Exposure
Feb 17 2014

At the darkest time of year

the light can be unbearable.

Low winter sun
sits barely above
the near horizon,
tearing up, and blinding me.

Old snow, turned to ice

scattering light

from countless tiny facets.

And the freshly fallen stuff, air-puffed

absorbing nothing,

perfect crystals

that instantly branch, and grow

in flash-freeze cold.

The opposite

of summer's torpid calm,

when I look into water

and see myself;

coherent beams
reflecting precisely
according to incidence, angle, optics.

While snow is chaotic,
inscrutably white
instead of water's silvered glass.

My reflection, vanished,

as insubstantial                  

as a sudden thaw.

In winter's vast indifference

we are all invisible.

Like a key

dropped in its soundless depths
and gone;
nothing heard, nothing left
to follow.

The setting sun
a fumbled key.
Death, by freezing.

Picture Window
Feb 15 2014


The winter scene
through my picture window
is more kitsch, than art.

Cinematic snow, fluttering down.
The high blue sky,
air-brushed
like a glossy cover.
And the wind-blown pine, powdered white
as if some art director

had positioned it
precisely.

The frame is minimalist,
plain blonde wood
so as not to distract the eye.

The sort of thing a connoisseur
would find laughable
in a high end gallery.
Pretty, he'd say
but why?
Which may be the difference
between reality, and art.

Where reality is free
of irony, abstraction
schools of thought.
Is not heightened, distilled

politicized.
Is not instilled
with the artist's doubt, guilt, pride.

Because this picture resonates soul deep,
with the atavistic urge
of origin.
A still life
of our ancestral home,
before words, and pictures
would distance us.
Before ambition
persuaded us
we could remake the world.

As kitschy as a snow globe
gently stirred.
Like the first time

I ever saw one,

a small child

still immersed

in wonder.  

I looked out and thought how beautiful it was. But also realized, that if the same image had been hung there -- as a piece of art -- it would have been patronized as kitsch: a generically pleasant scene exposing my bland bourgeois taste, my lack of refinement, my uneducated eye.  

And my silent protest was this poem. Which is a way of saying: why can't we honour our gut response to beauty? Why can't we honour unprocessed emotion without analyzing and intellectualizing, without bleeding the life out of it?

And the poem also asks why we seem to have this universal response to natural beauty: its healing, how it makes us feel whole. Is the answer that it’s baked in to our DNA? That this represents some sort of "ancestral/atavistic" recognition of "home"?

The Space Between the Notes
Feb 13 2014


Why is it that women
fall for musicians
I wonder?
If only I could play.
A drummer, I’d say.

Is it the romance
of the dangerous man
the bad boy?

Is it the power of song
the human voice?

Or that saxophone,
with its serpent's curve
bent, and broken note?
His finger-tip hold,
light, and firm
and in control?

Or the bass player
with his hollow brooding chords?
Whose owner must be deep
and taciturn,
a complicated man
whose hypnotically beating heart
seems unknowable.

Or the cute one

on lead guitar, backing vocals?
Who stands out-front
loves to be noticed;
the centre of attention,
whose sweetly touching harmonies

are generous, nevertheless.

Or the singer
with the rough raw edge?
An imperfect voice
from too much hard living.
Who knows the power of restraint,
holding back, then letting go
when you're almost crazy for it.

Trouble is
the music grows old
and the road ages a man.
And the adulation of one
can never make up
for the overpowering love
of the audience,
beyond the dazzle of light
sweating, stamping, hollering.

So your life together
will be more like jazz;
a band of two,
making smooth music
only you will hear.
The give-and-take, the listening
the space between the notes.
But without the willing fans
and punch-drunk travel,
bad motels
and morning-afters.

You will scat
and he'll accompany.
A torch song
with soul, and angst,
its normal share

of sadness.


On the brink of Valentine's day, it appears I've written a kind of love poem. Not that I had any intention, starting out.

Although if you have to play an instrument, or hold a tune, I don't stand a chance! I am secretly envious of musicians: the bad boys, who always get the girl. So in this poem, I get to live vicariously. If you hear Paul McCartney on lead guitar, and Rod Stewart singing, then the poem may just have worked. (Actually, it's the best jazz singers who are exceptional at this. You can hear the restrained power in their voice; feel the unbearable tension in the holding back, and the release when they finally let go. The trouble with most rockers is not just that they don't have the vocal chops, but that they're full-on from the get-go.)

The same mythology suggests that women also fall for poets, who are either charmingly sensitive, or irresistibly passionate, or in desperate need of mothering. Not true. (The falling, that is!)

I'm much more jazz than pop (actually, not at all pop!), so I'm glad the poem ends with the rockers losing out to the torch song, the smooth jazz, the quiet soulful duo. In a way, the poem follows the trajectory of relationship: starting with lust, passion infatuation; then ending with the mature love of attachment. And it's not fairy tale love, either: it may not have the bleakness of empty sex with groupies, or the fog of endless travel; but it acknowledges the angst and sadness -- the hard work -- of real life relationships. (Not that I would know, since my significant other involves the unconditional love and obedience(??!) of a Labrador retriever; which is the diametric opposite of hard work!)

The Humble Spud
Feb 12 2014


The humble spud
is never fussy,
a comfort food

we trust.
Baked or boiled, mashed or fried
a standard, true and tried.

They come from the land
dug from warm brown soil.

So pale flesh

is coyly shy
in unaccustomed sun,

and dirt still clings
to russet skin
sprouting curious buds.

A relative
of deadly nightshade
but blandly innocuous,
this dependable tuber
never hurt anyone.

And frugal, tough
they’re no trouble at all,
unlike rotten tomatoes
bad asparagus.

The fat of the land
buttered, salted, ketchup'd.
A godsend to peasants
who stoop to pluck them free,

the lumpenproletariat
who say

"more potatoes, please."

They favour cool, dark, airy

resting quietly,

where they sit, await our pleasure

vegetatively.
Lumpy, plump

irregular,

much like you and me.

River Rock
Feb 11 2014


River rock
is pink and grey
and egg-shaped,
like some exotic bird's
speckled, flawless.

They have surprising heft
nestled in their river beds,
tumbled and buffed, snugly tucked-up
against one another
under rushing water.
A deceptively clear lens,
too deep

to reach the bottom.

Impossible
for such a perfect rock
to come from nature,
a ball-bearing, precision milled
compared to silt, gravel, flint,
obsidian, erratic, granite.

I feel inconsequential
before the sheer-walled cliff,
the passage of time
in its segmented strata.
And this coolly smooth rock
I compulsively touch
again, and again,
its age, too immense
to imagine.


The New Yorker reviewed Elizabeth Gilbert's (of Eat, Pray, Love fame) new book -- Signature of All Things -- with the phrase "flinty, funny, incandescent."

This poem has absolutely nothing to do with that book, or the review. But "flinty" really caught my ear. I immediately wanted to play with geologic terms, and was struck by the evocative short-hand geology offers, despite the mismatch between hard eternal rocks and the squishy transience of living things.

(Just think about the powerful allusion contained in words like bedrock, granite, quicksand, schist (which, not inconveniently, rhymes with "split"). About the metaphorical possibilities in slow metamorphosis and explosive igneous, in the subtle distinctions of slowly accreting sediment. About how you could personify the murky translucence of quartz, the peeling back of mica, layer by delicate layer; asbestos' impassive resistance to fire, and basalt's flat blackness. Or about what could be done with flecks of gold and mountains of tailings, an eternity of radioactive waste.)

The dead opposite of flint has to be river rock: the sharp brittleness of flint; the hefty smoothness of hard rock sculpted by eons of moving water. Which is where I got stuck; and so it became a poem about river rock, and then about the way such a perfect surface signifies an incomprehensible vastness of time. While my exploration of geologic terms ended up being reduced to the abbreviated list that ends the 3rd stanza; a list chosen not just for rhyme and rhythm, but for the contrast of its craggy abrasive irregularity. (An "erratic", by the way, is a large rock that stands inexplicably alone on a relatively flat surface. They were churned up by glaciers, then randomly deposited as the ice sheets retreated north.)

I think the beginning of the second last stanza says something about man's hubris: where "impossible" seems to question, in its scoffing voice, the ability of blind nature to make something just as good, or better, than something made by high-precision industry. The implication is that even if we could match it, the naturally formed rock would still be priceless: because we can simulate time; but can never own time, or even truly know it. This is much the same as comparing a real diamond to an industrial one, or a natural pearl to a cultured one. In both cases, we value scarcity, and there is no faking it. And what could be more scarce a commodity than time?

I like the bird's egg analogy: not just the shape or speckling or nestling, but also the conflation of geology with living things -- what initially inspired the poem. I think there is the idea of surface here, as well: is this like any rock, the same all the way through; or does the surface conceal some complex and mysterious interior? And how easily fooled we are by superficial resemblance?

I also like "compulsively touch": because who can't help but play a cool, smooth, perfectly hand-sized rock between one's fingers -- over and over again, like rosary beads, a talisman? And any time I can get tactility into a poem (or, for that matter, the sense of smell), I do: because, as I repeat too often, the most powerful poems are all about sensation and emotion; while dry description and analytical thought stop a reader cold.

The Greenhouse Effect
Feb 9 2014


In architectural magazines
the homes are floor to ceiling glass,
dream palaces

that look incandescent,

impregnable as stone.

Filled with light, pneumatic air
their roofs are effortless,
as if gravity
exempted the rich.
Transparent walls
seem immaterial,
hermetic, unblemished
buffed.
And their privileged denizens
more perfect versions
of us.

They seem to proclaim
we have nothing to hide
or fear.
Our glass
is unbreakable.
Sun will not fade
expensive art.
Our well-behaved kids
leave no fingerprints,
play out-of-sight.

The greenhouse effect
does not apply
despite the glass,
because giant compressors
keep us cool.
The planet may warm
but we are not fools;
tempered, tinted, triple-glazed
nothing has changed
for us.

The real estate section of the paper got me thinking -- once again -- that there isn't much to high-end modernist architecture these days: nothing more than glass walls and high ceilings and clean lines. I confess I like the look; but I'm not sure those celebrated and highly paid architects have earned their accolades. (Or maybe earned them as engineers, but not as artists.) I was also thinking about the staged perfection of these trophy homes: houses that are hermetically untouched by human hands, or real life. And I was also thinking about the technology of glass: how something that seems so immaterial can be so strong; about the alchemy of turning sand into something so smoothly transparent.

Anyway, all that glass had me thinking I could do something with that old cliché about living in glass houses: about exposure and privacy; about the unintended consequences of living in a greenhouse. And once "greenhouse" entered into it, it was pretty inevitable the poem would end up becoming political. Which is just where it went: about climate-change deniers; and especially about the complacent self-satisfied rich who think their money, which exempts them from so much, also exempts them from the laws of physics. (Maybe I had my brother and sister-in-law mind, who are right now in Turks and Caicos, socializing with their Republican friends -- all climate-change deniers! -- at their various mansions, gazing out in air-conditioned comfort through floor-to-ceiling glass!)

When I chose the title "Greenhouse Effect", I think the idea of "hothouse" effect was also germinating in the back of my mind: the sort of hothouse that comes from the hot air of spouting nonsense; and the sort of hothouse effect of surrounding yourself with like-minded people (either that, or ideological echo chamber), so you hear only opinions that confirm what you already believe. ...Which, unfortunately, can be as true of those on the political left (like me!) as it is of those benighted right-wingers I had in mind!

I generally dislike political poems. The essay is a much better form for argument, the presentation of fact. But I think this piece works as well as poetry as it does as agit-prop. Or at least it saves its self-indulgence and polemics for the final stanza. Which may strike some readers as unfair, conscripting them into investing in a poem that doesn't give the emotional pay-off they were expecting. Then again, it may leave other readers nodding their heads, saying to themselves "it's about time he said something worth saying!"

Falling
Feb 7 2014

In gravity sports,
falling headlong

on the edge of control.
Where the g-force
make eyes bug out

brains, catatonic.
Where a steel-trap mind
makes all of it possible.
And where sudden stops, immovable bottoms

are well beyond

negotiation. 

So why do they call it
falling in love?
Is it like giant slalom
catching a tip?
Is it free-fall
parachute twisted?
Or an open manhole
you just dropped into,
walking along
minding your business?
Like a rock,
straight to the bottom
all the way down.

Are you Wiley Coyote,
brushing yourself off, ever undaunted?
Or the Roadrunner
who never gets caught,

legs a blur

in clouds of dust?

A strange bird.

A flock of one.

Flag
Feb 6 2014


My badly weathered flag
proclaims neglect.
As if a proud nation
had lost its way,
its troops routed, and fleeing
in miserable disarray.

Its tattered edge
that used to snap sharply,
like a freshly laundered sheet
wind-whipped, saluting smartly.
Its saturated red
that used to blush brightly,
as if flushed
with patriotic zeal.

The sun has drained it of life
the wind
torn it to ribbons,
hanging limply
in a gloomy sky.
Like an old soldier
who refuses to die,
slowly fading away.

What about citizenship, duty
national pride?
The home-owner's rite
of keeping up appearances?
Has it, too, had its spirit sapped
as merciless winter
drags on?
It looks that way
flaccid, and listless,
when even the breeze
seems indifferent.

When I buried the wires, I bought a giant flag
for the surplus hydro pole.
But in a hard winter
the rigging is stiff with ice
the turnbuckle frozen.
So, like all the other chores
the flag is on hold
until the cold lets up.

Nothing to be done
until April's here.
Or summer, or fall
or spring next year.

The Long Distance Swimmer
Feb 5 2014


The long distance swimmer
sinks into the rhythm
of stroke, breathe, glide.
Like a flightless nymph
caught in the glue of surface tension
she exists
where air and water intersect,
the glassy plane
where up and down
are meaningless.
Through the affliction of skin, salt-water soft,
of stinging fish, and waves and wind
and sunburn, and exhaustion
she forges on,
an automaton
most at home
in water.

She escapes
from her ocean prison
from sink or swim
incessant pain,
in hallucination
mental games.

She persists
through muscle memory
and bloody-mindedness.

She will not finish
and we wonder why
she tried, and failed, again.
Like the first fish
that crawled up on land,
gills beating frantically, slimy scales dry,
until the tide
swept it back.
Like the first amphibian
who returned to be born,
she is everything
that came before.


The latest New Yorker has what looks to be a fascinating article on the open-water long distance swimmer Diana Nyad, who is remarkable both for her persistence, and her age (60 something!) This poem came to me just having seen the title page: the teaser Breaking the Waves, and a picture of her looking straight into the camera. (As of this writing, I'm still waiting to read it!) All I can imagine is that some of the detail came from newspaper pieces I'd seen previously, when she was in the headlines after finally succeeding in her life-long dream of swimming from Cuba to Florida.

The first line came to me, and for some reason I felt that little surge of excitement I get when I sense the possibility of a poem. I think I was compelled by that hallucinatory state -- that feeling of flow and timelessness and ease, that automaticity and muscle memory, that womb-like feeling of being slightly water-logged in a warm pool -- I sometimes have access to when I'm swimming effortlessly and it feels like I'm on auto-pilot. 

We're unlikely land animals: mostly hairless, and with our relatively thick layer of subcutaneous fat. And, like all mammals, we spend our first 9 months in an ocean of warm salty amniotic fluid, while our blood has the same salinity as sea-water. So just like muscle memory, ancestral memory is baked into our DNA. Life arose in the oceans; and, when terrestrial life is gone, will probably continue to exist underwater (as well as in deep layers of subterranean rock; but that's another poem!) Which is how the poems ends: the ancestral memory of aquatic life. Not that I was heading there; or, really, anywhere in particular. It's just where my stream of consciousness took me.

I like "bloody mindedness" the best: it breaks the prosody, and doesn't rhyme, and is perhaps a little too British for North American readers; but I think the expression best conveys the determination of endurance athletes.
.

Lull
Feb 4 2014


In the mid-winter lull
with no fresh snow
and the sun striving weakly
a little higher, you'd swear
and it seems safe to wonder
about an early spring
the old snow is tired,
coarse, compacted
crusted.

It sags over the eaves
like vanilla frosting
slathered on
when the cake's too hot.
Footprints have softened
and lost their way
and no one can tell who made them,
who came, who went
who stayed.
The ruts in the lane
are dirty ice,
where highway sand
hitched a ride
in wheel wells, and rocker panels.
And road-salt stains the car
like furry white blossoms
of mould.

There is a dullness, and lassitude,
as if the land were exhausted
by a long hard winter,
the temporariness of things
made clear.

Because none of this will last.
Because the world is always waiting
for the next big thing.
The change of season
the accretion of years,
the expected rite
of passage.
The future
you dared imagine,
never that far.

This poem started out rather unpromising. It's one of those "glance out the window and write about the weather" poems that begin as a last resort. How could this possibly interest my hypothetical reader? I'm much rather find something more universal, something more to do with people and emotion and personal experience, something with more narrative drive. Those are the poems that usually work.

But I think there are enough rewards here to keep the attentive reader going. What I like most, though, is the way the final sentence transforms everything that precedes it. Because there is a bleakness as the litany of description accumulates. And even in the opening stanza, there is a fearfulness: is it even "safe" to imagine spring? Then, when the poem is almost done, "daring" abruptly transforms everything, when any future you imagine is within easy reach. So instead of a lull weighed down by lassitude and darkness, the lull becomes a brief interlude of gathering strength, a prelude on the cusp of change.

The alternative makes me think of living in a place without seasons; of living a life without a sense of trajectory; of getting older ("the accretion of years") without wisdom or perspective. Winter may be hard, but it's always followed by spring.

On the other hand, "none of this will last" is not all pollyanna. "Nothing lasts" is also a cautionary tale, and can portend loss as much as gain. Which, I'm relieved to say, is a lot more consistent with my usual pessimism and nihilism! And where "the next big thing" can be read ironically, with a silent eye-rolling skeptical "as if" (which is why I prefer the cliché to something more original). And not to mention my dislike of change: unlike the persona of the writer's voice, the real me is probably content with an indefinite mid-winter lull!

"Temporariness" is a handful of a word. I considered the more mellifluous "transience", or "brevity", or maybe even "fragility", but I like the multi-syllabic word: the way it holds up the reader, sounding it out; the way it makes time to give it thought. And while it's a big word in the sense of long, it's not a big word in the sense of arcane or pretentious. I try to avoid language that makes the reader go to a dictionary: words that interrupt the flow; words that are more intellectual and analytical than emotional and visceral. But "temporariness" is nice proletarian word I'm more than content to live with.

The Theory of Red
Feb 3 2014


The theory of red.

Ripe fruit, the male gaze.

The wash of dusk,
when 2-legged creatures pause, looking up
in wonder
at a sun that flirts with death,
hints
at resurrection.

The naked face
turning apoplectic, or shamed
elated, or drained,
by lust, or love
the act of creation.

I flush easily.
There are no secrets
between me, and the world.
Which is mostly blue and green,
ultraviolet for some.

But we see red.
The colour of violence,
of fight, or fled
or left bled-out.
The inventors of fire
forewarned,
the forbidden fruit's
poisoned core.

Human beings are one of the rare primates whose retinas have a receptor for red. We are also one of the few primates with naked faces. I heard an interesting theory that ties the two together: that our faces broadcast emotion, and so the ability to see red is intimately tied to our nature as social creatures. I had previously heard a theory that it may have had to do with the advantage conferred on (mostly) vegetarian ancestors who could discern the ripeness of fruit. And, of course, there is the colourful display of sexual receptivity: of full lips and flushed skin and engorged genitalia. Surveys have shown that men are preferentially attracted to women in red. Hence the ripe fruit, male gaze, and naked face that occupy the first half of the poem.

How could we look up and take in the beauty of the setting sun without being able to see red? The aesthetic sense, the appreciation of beauty that is so uniquely human, would be terribly impoverished without the full spectrum of colour. But when I thought of sunsets, I couldn't help thinking of the coming and going of the sun as a metaphor for the cycle of birth and death; and couldn't help thinking that a creature who could take the time out from the struggle to survive in order to appreciate the beauty of the sky would also be inclined to contemplate meaning and mortality.

" ...of fight, or fled/ or left bled-out" is not just a clever rhyme, but has its basis in fact: that the innate "fight or flight" response should rightly be amended to "fight, flight, or freeze", because freezing -- or fainting -- can sometimes be just as effective a response to danger. Young children will often do this in highly stressful life-threatening circumstances: they will slip into a sleep of self-preservation; and when it's over (and they have survived) will have no memory at all of the trauma. Adults, too, often find themselves freezing or fainting when they would have expected to fight or flee.

The fruit of knowledge is usually symbolized by a ripe red apple. I think the forbidden knowledge has usually been interpreted as something to do with sex: that Adam and Eve were suddenly ashamed of their naked state. Or maybe it had to do with dissatisfaction with the boring pleasures of Paradise, or the questioning of faith (apparently angering an oddly insecure God), or unbecoming ambition and greed. But I think their sudden awakening had to do with the foreknowledge of death, the existential pain of living. Our awareness of our own mortality is unique to humans. Although, as I wrote following my previous poem, this is a 2-edged sword; because it is death "that gives life its sweetness and urgency". ...Anyway, that's my "poisoned core." The reader is, of course, free to choose her own.