Total Strangers

Jan 30 2016

I had to ask for help.

I fear this will happen more and more

as age hobbles me,

the small infirmities

take their toll.

Like jackals, dogging me,

yelping, nipping

clawing at my back.

One after the other

steel-trap jaws, clamping-on,

their muscled mass

dragging me down.

Every step, all the baggage you haul.

Like the death grip

on the soft tendon behind your heel

you try shaking-off

but can’t.

You’d do anything, but ask.

But be the object of charity,

obliged, failed

unmanly.

Because we pity dependence

celebrate strength.

I remember in my 20s,

eyes set, gait brisk

pretending not to hear.

How invisible

the old lady was,

down on her luck

on the crowded bus

in a cramped plastic seat.

And the car in the ditch

in the murk of dusk

in the rear-view mirror,

conveniently receding.

But despite illusions

of the sovereign self,

we are social animals

and never alone.

In loco parentis.

Among neighbours, and friends.

With fellow citizens

we have never met

but nevertheless belong;

the imaginative act

that makes nation-state

more than name, geography, law.

So when you ask for help

with no expectation at all,

how humbling it feels

when a stranger responds.

Even total strangers, themselves worse-off,

stepping-up without a thought. 

I wrote this after reading the following piece (see below), which appeared as a personal essay in the daily paper. Every weekday, the Globe and Mail publishes one such piece, solicited from their readers.

It was in Tennessee Williams I first heard the expression the kindness of strangers (“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers” – Blanche Dubois; A Streetcar Named Desire). Which speaks to us because we all do, whether we acknowledge it or not:  in a complex technological and specialized society, we by definition rely on strangers and complicated systems and long chains of small acts to meet even our basic needs, without which we would be helpless. This interdependence is the basis of “society”. And it also means that the libertarian ideal – that particularly American myth of the rugged individual and self-made man – is a mere conceit. Because no one is self-made; and this belief is a fatal kind of pride.

I have a bad hip. I feel it shovelling snow. As one ages, one becomes aware of this creeping debility, of the inexorable accretion of small infirmities. And one is forced to confront a hypothetical future of need. ( …I think I may have gone on too long about this; too pleased with my extended metaphor to let it go!) Will I be able to ask for help? And will I even deserve to, having been not very helpful myself? 

This embrace of the stranger is an act of imagination. The idea of the nation-state is, as well. After all, what do I have in common with someone who lives across the mountains, thousands of kilometres west? What affinity? What mutual responsibility? What sense of tribal belonging? A nation state is artificial, a fact of mere geography. Yet we easily refer to our “fellow Canadians”. And, more than that, we actually act on this belief. A basic part of this social contract is that we are responsible for other people’s children. (I’ll refrain here from getting into the highly frustrating conundrum of responsibility without authority!) So the childless willingly pay taxes to send other people’s kids to school. And adults are expected to act in loco parentis in public spaces:  picking up kids when they fall in the playground; admonishing bullies. (Or at least used to. I fear that these days, even the most innocent interaction between an adult and a stranger’s child is fraught.)

From the moment I started writing this poem, I was working toward the expression total strangers. I like the redundancy; it has an almost child-like quality to my ear. I'm thinking of the expression "bare-naked" (as in the cheeky musical group Bare-Naked Ladies.) Or something like “very unique”, a phrase at which the pedantic sneer (me, for example!) But it’s true:  there are degrees of uniqueness. No one would deny that we are all unique; but some inhabit the big bulge of the normal distribution curve, while the very unique hang out in the long tail. Anyway, I think it makes a good title. And I think the way it’s used – in the 2^nd last line, immediately after stranger – lets it have a little fun with itself.  

Here’s the essay I mentioned. It was written by Alison DeLory, who wrote from Halifax:

After a loss, I went looking for hopeful things. What I found was a gift I hadn’t expected

Class had just started when the text arrived announcing my friend was dying. “It’s in her major organs now. There’s no more treatment. Sorry to tell you this way.”

I turned off my phone and stood to greet my students. I was present in the room and in the moment, yet simultaneously vacant, both standing in my body and floating outside it observing my own attempts at normalcy. My mind struggled to operate on both levels and ultimately failed. I handed out an exercise and asked students to write independently for the hour.

The next day, my friend was moved into palliative care. She died two days later, the morning after she’d said goodbye to each of her three children.

To ward off despair, I set out seeking beauty. And to my surprise I found it. In a splash of warm sunshine on my face, in the curiosity of a toddler examining a flower and in a yellow butterfly that came by right after I received word.

But despair still hovered, threatening to suffocate me.

There was the wake and funeral, songs and stories. My clichéd offer to her husband, “If there’s anything I can do to help please ask,” met with, “Thank you, I appreciate it,” but no direct request.

So I set out again seeking beauty. And once again I found it. In a couple walking hand in hand over an arched footbridge, in notes from friends, the collective strength of neighbours and in a shady graveyard where families will be eventually reunited.

Routines continued: sleep, eat, shower, work, cook. Get everyone to school and practice, homework done, litter box emptied, garbage to the curb, laundry washed, gas in tank, papers marked, lectures prepared, library books returned.

Yet, in the empty moments in between, my quest for beauty continued. I found it now unexpectedly in my own home and routines, in the measured chaos of a family dinner and the quiet company of a soft cat.

Incrementally I moved on, as one does, as one must. Slowly. Confusion receded but didn’t disappear until I had a chance encounter in a pizza restaurant.

I had zipped in, correct change in hand, to buy dough and get out as quickly as possible. From the corner of my eye I saw a woman rising from her table with difficulty. She was leaving at the same time as me, a takeout container in a plastic bag draped over one arm. Her other hand balanced on a cane. She struggled to push the door open enough to get through, so from behind her I extended my arm and opened it wider.

“Can you help me, please?” she then asked me, looking ahead to the curb. Her voice was clear, direct and accented. We linked arms briefly as I led her down to the parking lot.

“Miss, are you going to Walmart?” she asked. Her brown face was covered with age spots and skin tags.

“No, sorry,” I answered, glancing ahead to the street where cars were already bumper to bumper. Home was in the opposite direction and I wanted to leave before the traffic peaked. I’d finished my workday, had fresh pizza dough in hand and was anxious to pound it out into dinner for my family.

“Okay, miss. Thank you for all your help.” She shuffled toward the bus stop. Although it was warm she was wrapped in layers: paisley scarf around her head; denim, faux-fur-collared jacket; long black skirt with a slit that exposed one gauze-wrapped leg. Her gnarled toes with long neglected nails poked over the end of flip-flops.

I got in my car, wondering how she would manage on the bus with such limited mobility. I pulled up next to her and lowered the passenger side window. “Let me drive you. It would be my pleasure.”

She slid into the seat and asked for help again, this time with the seatbelt. Once settled, she praised the city’s young people as being the kindest and most willing to help. “Middle-aged people just walk right by,” she said.

She was on her way to buy toothpaste. “It is a necessity, no? It used to be that sanitary pads were a necessity. Not any more for me!” She laughed. When she was a girl in Sri Lanka, she told me, they wore white robes as uniforms at her all-girls school. If a girl got menstrual blood on her robe she would camouflage the stain by drawing over it with white chalk.

It wasn’t typical small talk, but I followed the twisting path on which her words meandered. I asked what had brought her to Canada. She told me she had come 10 years ago to reunite with her brothers. They have both since died.

“Do you have any children?” I asked.

“No. My husband died 36 years ago before we had any. He had a heart attack when he was 38 and didn’t get to the hospital in time for treatment. Now I’m alone.”

We pulled into the parking lot. I got out of the car to open her door and help her to her feet. She reached up and grabbed my shoulders, pulling my face toward her own. She kissed me on the right cheek, then on the left. “God will bless you,” she told me.

I had not set out seeking beauty that day, but beauty sought me out instead – in the form of a frail old woman, unafraid to ask for help, and thus offering it.

© Copyright The Globe and Mail Inc. All Rights Reserved

Rule of Thumb

Jan 29 2016

I watched as he nailed the steps.

Not so much hammering

as launching the head

into easy flight;

fluid wrist

           …dead aim

                         …perfect strike.

So the nail ends straight

flush against the wood.

A chorus of hammers

is all erratic sound;

like a crew of roofers

bending busily to work.

So how uncanny

when, by chance, they converge

in a single solid thud.

 …Only to disperse,

flying-off

like startled birds

scattering.

I am reassured by this;

that sound

can condense out of noise

all on its own.

Just as beauty appears

in a random universe

no matter what.

Measure, measure, cut.

The rise, the run,

the rule of thumb.

The uncanny proportion

of the standard step,

so muscle memory

guides me up

and feet descend themselves.

Well-made stairs,

sturdy, and workman-like.

You only notice this

in a starter house

built by a self-taught man.

Where the stringers are steeply strung

the gaps uneven.

Where the stairs

creak all the way up,

and you stumble and stub

and white-knuckle clutch

the rickety banister,

eyeing your feet

with every step.

Who knew

a simple stairway

was so perfectly tuned

to the human form.

Pleasing the eye,

like the golden measure

of classic art.

As dependable

as fine-grained wood,

clear, and trued

and thoroughly dried.

And as good a fit

as well-crafted shoes;

slipping them on for the first time

as if they've been worn for years.

I had no ideas for a poem. But I did have 3 conditions:  nothing about snow; nothing about weather; and whatever it was, it had to be something small and everyday.

Who knows why an image of a stringer came into my head:  a carpenter in work clothes; a hammer in his hand; the beginning of staircase.

I have an outdoor set of stairs that roughly follows the curve of a slope. My carpenter consulted me about the rise and the run. I had not idea, of course:  I’m not handy, and I can’t build or fix anything. But between my direction and the exigencies of topography, this stairway ended up odd. You can’t negotiate it with any kind of natural gait. And I realized – and my carpenter confirmed this – that there is a reliable rule of thumb in the construction of a standard staircase. And I also realized how I had always taken this for granted, racing up and down stairs all my life by muscle memory, never giving it a thought.

The poem ended up beginning with the hammer and not the stairs. One hammer led to a crew, and then took a slightly philosophical turn. Only then do I finally get my teeth into the staircase, the rule of thumb, the perfect organic form.

Which is a very typical poem for me. It’s about something small and everyday. And it’s about the beauty and wonder that – unless you take your time and look closely -- hide in plain sight.

The title, if you’re aware of the origin, might give pause. Because “rule of thumb” actually comes from old English law. It was the maximum thickness of  the rod with which a man was permitted to beat his wife. Luckily, this connotation is lost on the vast majority of readers! And I like it because it’s very tactile:  it suggest manual labour and handiness. And also because it suggests a kind of quiet practical confidence. This is how my old carpenter (now, sadly, deceased) went about his business. He worked by eye and hand and in his head, almost intuitively. There were no computers or calculators or architectural plans. And, when it comes to actual staircases, there is a rule of thumb (thank you, Google): The rule of thumb for treads and risers is that the sum of each should equal between 16 and 18 inches (40 and 45 cm). So, if your riser is 7 inches (17.8 cm) tall, your tread should be anywhere from 9 to 11 inches (23 to 28 cm) long.

Ossuary

Jan 28 2016

After so many years

the bones are disinterred

and consigned to a charnel house.

While the flesh has returned to earth

and friends are dead

and relatives long departed;

except for distant ones

who will not remember.

In our prayers

we talk of eternity, reverence

amends.

But we are temporal,

and humility 
becomes us best.

As in everything, an end.

The bankrupt graveyard.

Precious papers

burned in the fire.

Old tapes

machines no longer play.

And most of all, fame.

I lead a small life

with no illusions of consequence.

So it’s odd                                                     

how bone persists.

Ossuaries, older than millennia.

Ancient bones, rattling in their boxes,

yellowing, hard

anonymous.

I will grind them into dust

and work them into the soil.

Fertile earth,

like the flesh they once wore.

Apparently in Europe, our North American concept of a graveyard as an eternal resting place does not apply. You contract for a certain amount of time; then the remains are disinterred and your place given to someone else. Your bones end up in an ossuary, or charnel house. I suppose when the first settlers arrived in this vast and limitless land, they saw endless space for the dead. There was no such luxury in the cramped cities from which they came.

I heard this on one of my regular podcasts, Planet Money (NPR). Then, on the next one I listened to (The Moth) there was a delightful story about an encounter in a graveyard. As I’ve said before, I try not to write about death (because I am preoccupied by morbid thoughts, and I fear every poem would contain the words “dead” or “die”!) But I suppose these two pieces worked on my subconscious, and when this poem emerged like automatic writing, I went with it. And it’s not as bleak as one at first might think. Because there is, for one, the notion of continuity and unity in returning to the earth. And then there is the laudable notion of humility:  a useful counter-weight to the solipsism and self-importance of our individualistic culture.

Even in New York

Jan 27 2016

Even in New York,

gotham

polyglot

cosmopolis.

In the non-stop city,

solipsist, insomniac
cacophonous.

In the squalor and squabble

on the island of  urban chic

the snow was pristine,

in the unnatural calm

in the lull after the storm.

Grand avenues blocked.

Cars swamped

by sculpted drifts.

Towering mounds

where it was ploughed and carted and dropped;

pure white, in blinding sun,

under sky as blue as Iowa.

Soon

it will all be churned

to soiled slush, and dirty slop.

Soon

it will seep into boots, sully socks,

the life-blood of commerce
obstructed.

Soon, the din of horns

and siren call

and slip-and-fall,

the constant hum of noise.

But how beautiful, winter in New York,

when it becomes soft

and small

and Midwestern,

just like the towns

its residents fled from.

That ephemeral moment

when the city is closed

and people are home

and snow is luminously fresh.

When less is more,

and Mammon grudgingly rests.

There was a record-setting snowfall along the US mid-Atlantic coast. I was looking at photographs, and was struck not only by how much there was, but by how consistently pristine it was; so unlike the usual appearance of urban snow. I’m supposed to inhabit a winter city. But even here, the amount of snow is small, and it looks as you’d expect:   rutted, soiled, done.

How fresh snow transforms a city; even one as iconically urban and sophisticated as Gotham. And how it transforms the inhabitants:  snowball fights in a square in Washington DC; people on XC skis on New York’s Park Avenue. That city may be all about hustle and money and commerce. But a snow-day upends the usual values, and compels even its most competitive and driven inhabitants to think about other ways of being.

When I wrote island of urban chic, I was not only thinking of the city’s geography in the Hudson river, but of that notorious cartoon of  a world map as drawn by a native New Yorker:  the insular view from the “centre-of-the-universe”. And of how New York is so unrepresentative of the rest of the country, of middle America.

I’m still not sure about “luminously” in the 3^rd last line. As usual, I have trouble with adverbs. Because they’re often unnecessary. And worse, can patronize the reader:  as if she needs to have the obvious spelled-out. The context can say it just as well. And when the reader does that little bit of creative work, it’s far more powerful than being led by the nose.

Beneath the Snow

Jan 24 2016

The land is dormant

beneath the snow.

I imagine dry white powder,

immaculate crystals

trapping air

in a lattice fine as lace.

I have dug myself in

or avalanched under;

a snow angel

lying flat, looking up.

The weight

is holding my eyelids shut,

as if a steady finger

had drawn them firmly closed.

Fixed gaze

mercifully covered.

It’s surprisingly warm

beneath that thick white quilt,

and in the low light

and muffled wind

I am adrift.

Heat rises

from the centre of the earth

the living soil.

On the hard surface

skittish mice scurry and burrow and sniff

with the constant worry of prey.

Deeper down, worms rest

and roots are fat from fall.

Subterranean water flows

through cracks in the rock,

where caves drip

and strata shift

imperceptibly.

The democracy of snow

has levelled the world

concealing its imperfection.

I, too, dwell underneath;

suspended

in this liminal place

as near as death can be.

Depending

on the alchemy of cold

to keep.

Beautiful white powder today. I thought about the perfect insulation it makes. (Or at least before it becomes corrupted by freeze and thaw; is packed down or blown off.) I wanted to burrow in and wrap it around me like a cozy quilt.

I also heard a news item about refugee children from the Middle East:  how they had seen snow for the first time, and were utterly thrilled to toboggan like the fully “Canadian” kids they’ll soon become.

But there is also a big storm on the East coast, and people are freezing, crashing, and snow-stayed.

So snow is a two-edged sword. It conveys both beauty and peril, adversity and fun.

I begin the poem just as I said:  burrowing into the snow; lying at rest with the earth at my back and a blanket of snow above me. And from there, the poem proceeds in a state of suspended animation, hovering between life and death. And then there are the other forces that contend:  warm and cold, beauty and threat, earth and air. And the poem ends with the contradiction of hypothermia:  wanting the snow to keep me warm; needing the cold to save me.

I enjoyed my excavation down through the earth (in the stanza that begins with Heat rising). Because I think this is a good example of how the poetic imagination works:  it takes us to unseeable places; it encourages us to be unrushed and observe closely.

But I think my favourite part is The democracy of snow/ has levelled the world/ concealing its imperfection. (Even though I’ve shamelessly plagiarized myself with democracy of snow. But as I’ve said before when this has happened:  I’ve given myself permission to keep returning to a device or image or turn of phrase until I finally get it right!) I like how the “levelling” and the “concealing” are quickly followed by the image of me under the snow:  still, quiet, unseen.

Muse

Jan 17 2015

The erotic poet,

drunk, dissolute, debauched.

The earnest poet,

who writes of love, and longing

and loss.

The modern poet,

who is bored of sex

too correct to care.

Jaded by porn,

craving more, and more.

The godly poet,

often disappointed

He's never there.

Who wants to obey

but becomes a liar.

Whose vow to be chaste

leaves him mad with desire.

And the impoverished poet,

too poor to procure

too pure to lie.

But who whores out his words

for bare survival.

Where is the muse

on whom he will lavish praise

the male gaze

illicit eye?

Who'll take his breath away

and leave him inspired?

For the Victorians

a flash of ankle sufficed.

So if less is more,

he'll remember her scent

her heat

her voice.

Like Josephine,

who was young and ripe and smelled of sex

and instructed not to bathe.

Like the dream-girl

you obsessed about.

The virgin, whore, coquette

who was wise, naive

depraved.

The insatiable muse

you wish you could channel.

Who takes you in hand

tracing out your words,

purrs in your ear

like silk on silk.

Urging you on

complicit, helpless.

A stirring, deep down in your gut

you almost forgot,

rising-up in your belly

to carry you off.

This began with the realization that I pretty much never write erotic poetry. Whatever happened to the stereotype of the poet as drunk, dissolute, and debauched; never mind preoccupied with sex?!! Perhaps I am lacking the besotted passion, the erotic muse. By temperament, maybe I shouldn't be a poet at all: too cool and rational and detached.

Although it can be argued that all creative acts are a kind of seduction: the artist preening, styling, posing; displaying his/her "fitness" to the opposite sex. So here, all the various poets are somehow touched by the erotic: by sex or love or desire.

The ancient Greeks thought the source of inspiration was external: the muse acting through us, and we simply channelling. It feels this way when the writing is going well: like automatic writing; as if the thing writes itself. I suppose in the poem, the opposite occurs: the writer must draw on his own imagination, as well as his memory, for inspiration.

The poem also touches on the compartmentalization of sex and love (at which the earnest poet -- who, so unlike the erotic poet, is all about denial -- fails utterly!). And, too, on the ambivalent male view of women: the virgin/whore dichotomy; the conflicted desire for one idealized woman to be all things.

I apologize for once again having some fun with "inspire": that is, setting its metaphorical meaning against its literal one (Who will take his breath away/ and leave him inspired?). And, as usual, I just couldn't resist a little shot at religion (what's new?!!): that is, the absent God of the 4th stanza.

I'm not sure how true it is that Napoleon wrote Josephine asking her not to bathe on her way to Elba. (Or something like that.) Or whether we quite understand what he actually meant, seen from our modern context. But it was too much fun to resist. ...I especially like ripe. (Maybe the muse working through me after all!)

I'm not sure about the abrupt change in person in the final 2 stanzas: from 3rd to 2nd. Why does "he" become" you"? I suppose what I'm doing here is implicating the reader. It's all observant and detached ...and then, suddenly, the reader is being challenged to own up to his own illicit thoughts and forbidden desires. I generally try to be more disciplined about changing point of view like this. But maybe, in this case, it works.

In the end, I think the poem does get erotic. Not explicitly (which is easy and cheap and pornographic), but with the subtle indirection that lets the reader decide.

(We're all impoverished poets, btw. Or if not impoverished, it's certainly not thanks to our versifying. And even for the few who do make money, they aren't alive to enjoy it!)