Fish House

Nov 26 2017

Four inches of ice,

and already the bay

has sprouted its village of shacks.

Like a jigsaw of children's blocks,

a colourful jumble

of sturdy boxes

in roughly finished wood.

Some, crudely hammered.

Others trim, and snug, and measured exactly;

a democracy of huts 
   –  untitled, untaxed   –

squatting on communal ice.

A study in still life.

The small ritual hole

enclosing calm black water.

Bearded men, planted around it.

A tumble-down shack

on its customary patch of lake.

When an auger sparks, and catches.

The grumbling throb

of an idling machine,

the protesting whine

of pulverized ice;

pitch dropping, as carbon steel bites,

winding higher

as the screw breaks free.

Smoke rising

from the thin corroded pipe

that punctuates each roof,

a frugal stove

glowing warmly below.

I imagine the stale air inside,

a blend of men's bodies, wet socks

cheap tobacco

and strong drink.

While outside

pale-bellied fish, scales glinting

lie in sunlit snow,

immaculate white

stained with bright red blood.

Gulls circling, crows squabbling

excited dogs

scrounging for guts.

And anglers, ever hopeful

the fish will bite, the lake stay frozen,

the rustic hut

cozy and warm.

Men, mostly

who come to get away.

And the prize they will bring back home,

steady providers

presenting their catch

to understanding wives.

Triumphant hunters,

doing as ever

men have done.

The lake has frozen, and after drilling a few holes, my neighbour told me it's safe to walk on: he measured 8 inches, and apparently all it needs is 4. (Both of us, apparently, too old to bother with metric!)

A couple of days later, I finally began catching up on my Prairie Home Companion recordings, hours and hours of which I've been saving from the last couple of seasons before Garrison Keillor retired. Keillor has some tried-and true-tropes, and the familiarity of these is one of the great pleasures of his Lake Wobegon stories. And, true to form, the first monologue of my first episode evoked the usual romanticized image of fishing shacks in a northern winter on a Minnesota lake; an image that stuck with me, and for whatever unknowable reason, demanded a poem.

So the 4 inches was a natural starting point. The rest of it: stream of consciousness, as usual. Especially since I've never spent a second in a fish-shack, or run an auger, or hardly fished at all. So I can't vouch for accuracy. And I'm not sure if there's any point to a poem like this. Except that it's fun to write (and, I hope, to read). And maybe gets at a version of manliness that has a certain appeal, despite its essential shallowness; and that has a modicum of truth, despite verging on caricature. But mostly, as the poem says, it's a still life; and since I have absolutely no talent with a brush, affords me the great pleasure of trying to paint with words.

Jellyfish and Aqua-Men

Nov 24 2017

The mid-winter thaw

is becoming predictable

in this age of extremes.

The atmosphere thickening,

the world on thinning ice.

Like an old couple, re-breathing stale air,

sunk

into over-stuffed chairs

in their over-heated home.

The smell of mildew, boiled cabbage,

the pulpy must of books.

And oceans, like an acid Coke

without the fizz or can.

Or stewing in a tepid bath

so long you wish you hadn't,

a scum of soap, and bits of skin

a ring of grunge and lather.

So I listen to the dripping eaves

as if counting down the seconds,

clomp along in gumboots

through sloppy sucking slush.

Wet snow

gloppy as cold oatmeal

in the dull grey light,

and that wet penetrating cold

that chills to-the-bone

despite the mild weather.

They say a high pressure system is on its way,

a brisk west wind

and clear blue sky.

When the ground will freeze

into beaten metal

that could use some fresh white camouflage.

But still

the water-planet warms, its trackless oceans rise.

Is this

where our feckless journey ends,

webbed and finned submariners

as our ancient forbears began?

Jellyfish and aqua-men

and not much else,

drifting through the fabulous city

at the bottom of the sea;

skyscrapers, thrusting up

from still black depths,

dark abandoned streets
choked with rust, and silt, and weeds.

As the comments that introduce this blog say – and which still hold, even though they were written 10 or so years ago – I assiduously avoid writing poems about politics and advocacy and issues of public policy. Because that's exactly what the essay, which is so much more suited to argument and debate, was made for. And because poetry – which should show instead of say; should allude, instead of comprehensively cover; and should feel, instead of analyze – can hardly do justice to complicated issues. Preachy poetry sounds heavy-handed and pretentious. No one wants to sound sanctimonious, self-righteous, and pious. And when poetry gets didactic and argumentative, it just doesn't work.

But sometimes, a poem grabs me by the nose, and I can't help but follow. So when I looked out the window, and thought a poem about the predictable mid-winter thaw – even if more unpredictably frequent and intense – might be something to play around with, it was pretty inevitable that climate change would shoulder its way in. And anyway, it seems about time: since climate change is something I feel so strongly about, my persistent avoidance of the issue has come to seem insincere, as if I'm betraying a fundamental principle.

I hope I've succeeded in making this a poem, and not a polemic. That I resisted arguing, stating, and laying out all the science and culture and politics that plague this issue, and instead simply focused on imagery and simile and surprise, on word-play and sound and musicality. That I managed to say something big; but say it in a small way. Which, paradoxically, can be much more powerful: by sneaking up on the reader; by making a more personal connection.

My original title was Re-Breathe. I thought it captured the nub of the issue, but in a way that's small, relatable, and emotionally affecting: distilling the complicated issue of pollution down to re-breathing our own stale air, swimming in our own tepid bathwater. But then, I ultimately couldn't resist Jellyfish and Aqua-Men. It's the kind of intriguing title you see in a table of contents, and have to turn to immediately just to see what it's about.

Children Safe in Bed

Nov 19 2017

On a still winter day

on a solitary walk

into dark brooding forest

I stop,

contemplating silence.

But even here

the squeak of cold dry snow

crunching underfoot.

The rush

of my own hot blood

pulsing in my ears.

Frigid air

funnelling through

my dripsniffling nose.

Or pause, chopping wood

sweating in the cold.

The crack of an axe

on seasoned wood

that splits clean and true;

the hollow ring

as pieces land

on a solid concrete pad.

And anarchic thoughts

that ricochet and multiply

despite me,

making their own insistent noise.

A cacophony of voices

out here in the wilderness

as loud as city streets;

demanding attention

yet desperate for rest.

The succession of stars

as darkness deepens

in the silent vacuum of space.

Wood-smoke, curling-up
a roof groaning with snow,

a crackling fire, shedding sparks

and children safe in bed.

But still, the sounds in my head

I am helpless against.

As the body in which I live

does its unseeable work.

As my mind rambles on

its desultory walk

through a still and darkened woods.

As the axe drops

of its own weight

and my hands come up again.

Only the rhythm

of a steady gait

to ground me.

The regular thunk of the axe

keeping body and soul in step.

An Atheist Prays

Nov 16 2017

Can an atheist pray?

Perhaps the secret to his prayers

is the certainty

they have no effect.

So the non-believer

has no hope of intercession.

Is not asking for the grace

to do the right thing

or have His will revealed.

Is not bargaining for love

justice

strength.

No, an atheist's prayer

is an intentional act

of gratitude

and wonder

and praise.

For the accident of birth.

For improbable life

on this unlikely planet.

For the sweetness of fruit

plucked from its stem

on a hot summer day,

warm juice

sticking to his fingers

dribbling down his chin.

An expression

not intended

for omniscient eyes and ears,

but simply to be said

for its own sake.

To intensify the wonder.

To clarify

those moments of transcendence

he feels his boundaries soften

attachments fray.

I cannot reconcile

the virtue of humility

with the personal God

who accompanies the faithful.

Because I am insignificant,

unworthy of such attention.

And also because

I do not believe in justice

when evil so often prevails,

cannot abide myths

of mercy and love

when the good too often suffer.

I do not kneel, clasp hands, close my eyes.

Do not repeat

the prescribed incantations

or speak from the heart

or cry-out in extremis.

But I still do right,

if only because

I choose to be the kind of man who does.

Still give thanks,

if only because

the countless contingencies, and accidents

and blind intersections of fate

that led to this

are so much more marvellous

than any man-made god

who simply waved it into being.

The consolation of prayer is seductive

and I, too, feel its allure.

And I also know that faith is hard

and how the faithful struggle.

How its constant companion is doubt,

and how the space between the two

is filled by prayer.

So many voices

rising up, all at once

in a symphony of longing,

new ones chiming in

as weary ones decay.

Who ask for nothing.

Who sing their praise.

Who give thanks

for the sweetness of days,

the warm touch

of night's embrace.

By Their Names Shall You Remember

Nov 11 2017

Like the jagged rocks

that hobble horses

and bend the blades of ploughs

when frost and thaw disturb the soil,

Belgium's verdant earth

still gives-up its bones;

the remains of men

a century after

the war to end all war.

I must confess, I did not know this.

I've heard of unexploded bombs,

but not the remains of soldiers

buried where they fell.

Where shattered bodies mixed

with cold wet soil,

with horses' blood and bone and flesh

who bled the same hot red;

dumb conscripts

to human folly

straining at their loads.

His name is etched

on a consecrated wall

on a green manicured field,

surrounded by headstones

standing at attention

in vast monolithic ranks.

Where once in a lifetime

a distant relative will come,

with an offering of flowers, a mumble of prayer,

the simple gift 
of being present.

Will lay his hands
on the cold hard slab,
chiselled letters
unembellished
immortalized in stone.

Then, with a soft lead pencil

will take a careful etching

of a fallen soldier's name,

seeking answers

in marble and granite

to questions endlessly asked.

For all these years, someone saved the letters home,

crimped careful script

on thin yellowing paper.

And like the men who returned, broken and damaged

who never speak of war

the letters also never spoke.

No echoing

the pious rhetoric

of poets and kings;

not a single word

about the honour and glory

the horror and gore.

Rather, they asked about home

offered humble reassurance

requested chocolate, and smokes.

The legacy of war

is not put to rest

when the night-sweats end

or the veterans are dead

or the remembering falters.

Because in the children they beget

the scars still fester;

damaged men

who were bad at marriage

and drank to excess

and struggled at fatherhood.

The legacy of war

is generational,

and will last, I suspect

as long as cold wet soil

keeps pushing-up its bones.

Sometimes, instead of trying to forget

try harder to remember.

Because what you know, and name, and face

is drained of its power.

And the better we know history

and the names of its victims

the more likely it is

we may save ourselves.

For a period of time, I wrote a poem each November 11 (Remembrance Day here in Canada; Veterans Day in the U.S.). After several years of neglect, it's good to get back to this annual ritual. My thanks to R.H. Thompson (the well-known actor, and producer of The World Remembers project) for inspiring this. He had a beautiful piece in today's Globe, a thoughtful reflection on remembrance and silence and the men who died: men whom we collectively honour, but are rarely spoken of by name. The central image of the shattered bones heaved up by the frost is Thompson's, as is the content of the letters home. And the idea of naming names is his, as well: his passion to commemorate not just the folly of war, but the individual soldiers who were its victims.

Here's Thompson's piece, as published in The Globe and Mail, November 11, 2017:

Re­mem­brance should be by name

We observe silence for those who died fighting for Canada – but Nov. 11 has never given us the time to remember each individually

IN THEIR NAME, BUT NEVER WITH THEIR NAMES

At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.

On Nov. 11, we think of the men and women (mostly men) who died fighting for Canada, yet they are never named. But it seems such an obvious thing to do, to name them. At the ceremony, many words are heard: How proud we are of those that serve – and we are; how well Canada did in the wars – and we did; and most importantly, that Remembrance Day is when we remember them. Abstract nouns are also included, but I am never sure of their purpose, whereas there is a silence in the name of a dead soldier that can wear away the wall between myself and the past.

I like the two minutes of silence because words don’t crowd my remembering. The wars played heavily in my family: My father was in the navy in the Second World War and his five uncles were in the army in the First World War and, in my mother’s family, uncles and great-uncles served. We had no family deaths in the Second World War, but seven of my great uncles lost their lives in the First World War. I know those men (mostly young) only through the hundreds and hundreds of letters they sent home. The letters are deceptively simple because, mainly, they ask for news from home and rarely do they write about the fighting. Their sentences are also absent of abstract nouns such as freedom, valour or democracy, since soldiering for them was probably a practical, if deadly, business. In the silence on Nov. 11, I reflect not only on my great-uncles, but also on my great-grandmother, their mother, who also read the letters until the death notices arrived – usually in a telegram.

The letters cease seeming simple when you realize the context in which they were written. When a letter’s date is cross-referenced with their regiment’s war diary, the events of the day become clear and sentences in the letters become crowded with meaning. On Nov. 13, 1917, my great-uncle George Stratford wrote “the battalion had done the odd bit of fighting.” The record in the regimental diary says that they had been fighting the battle of Passchendaele – one of the great slaughters of the First World War. George’s understatement of his war collides in my mind with our heightened remembrance language, the epitaphs on monuments and even sometimes with the architecture of the memorials themselves – all honourably intended. Yet, in my heart, I would prefer something simple.

George’s remains lie somewhere near Passchendaele, although exactly where, no one is sure. He was killed four days after he wrote that letter. His soldier brothers wrote their mother not to fret since “he was killed instantly” – but he wasn’t. He took at least half an hour to die after his friends had dug him out from where he’d been buried alive by a shell.

His name is one of the 54,000 on Belgium’s Menin Gate. They are the names of the Commonwealth soldiers who, as with George, were never found or whose pieces were never identified. Wondering where his bones (or pieces) might lie, last spring I made a quixotic trip to Passchendaele, taking with me a pencilled map that was among the letters. It had been sent to George’s mother and was a sketch of a field by the road to Ypres where his friends had dug the quick grave. I was looking for a place that had been hidden for 100 years.

I travelled with my great-grandmother (in my imagination) since she never knew his resting place. I took with me the map and George’s last letters. There was the possibility that George’s pieces may have surfaced one spring (because bones appear every year, heaved up by the frosts) and had been officially reburied. So I searched the Commonwealth cemeteries with their fine words and perfect headstones, but nothing. I also read wild and passionate words, written by Irish First World War soldiers, that had been chiselled into the stones in Ireland’s Peace Park in Belgium. And not far from Passchendaele, I visited Vladslo cemetery, which holds 25,000 German graves. Even with so many, Vladslo doesn’t display much memorial language. Instead, kneeling among the graves are two stone figures, a mother and father on their knees before the thousands.

The Grieving Parents were carved by German sculptor Kathe Kollwitz and they maintain a silence that would put our silence to shame. In the cemetery of George’s enemies, the father’s eyes are fixed on a grave marker a few metres away. Seeing where his gaze lands, I read the name Peter Kollwitz – Kathe’s son. At that moment, my greatgrandmother seemed even more present, since she was accompanied by another parent’s grief. The deaths of sons are equal burdens to mothers, as the bodies of the sons, both enemy and friend, lie equal to their graves.

But with no known resting place, George’s memories also have little rest. With the pencilled map and the help of Belgian researchers, I finally found the place in a field of young corn where his soldier friends had hastily buried him. Yet, the continued shelling had probably reworked that land, redistributing what had been quickly buried, including my great-grandmother’s son. I saw a piece of cast-iron shell casing and a few balls of shrapnel that had heaved to the surface, but nothing else.

George’s bones must be somewhere, I thought. Except for a light wind and the motion of the corn, there was nothing but silence around me. I stood with the quiet of the dead. No words or language of remembrance crowded my thoughts. I stood with the grief of my great-grandmother and all the mothers for their sons who we had asked to fight our wars and who had never come home.

For years I have worked on naming them by building a commemoration simply called The World

Remembers. What I really wish is that on the morning of Nov. 11, our silence lasted more than two minutes – an insignificant passage of time. Twenty minutes might be a start and two hours would begin to be significant. Remembrance Day has never given us the time to remember each of them by name, although there was plenty of time for each of them to die.

( Actor R. H. Thomson is the greatnephew of George Stratford, killed in 1917, and the producer of The World Remembers project, which seeks to name each soldier killed in the First World War; theworldremembers.org.)

The Blackness of Crows

Nov 5 2017

Except for its lustre

the blackness of crows

seems to suck up all the light.

How odd

that a creature of sight

and intricate flight

and piercing eyes

would be so plain;

an anarchic Goth

instead of flamboyantly garbed

like some beautiful tropical bird.

Each big personality

in the same drab uniform.

Who looks down from his perch

with supreme indifference

as I pass beneath,
confined to the ground
and lost in my head. 

Whose guttural caw

conveys no desire to please.

Who flock

in funereal black

on branches of leafless trees,

an assembly

so glinting with mischief

and hinting of menace

it could almost be human, at least.

I never feel more an intruder

out in nature

than when being observed by crows.

They seem to own the place,

tolerating my presence

with amused detachment

the commanding swagger of height.

But I have always admired

these smart gregarious birds.

Who possess such tiny capable brains.

Who play

simply to amuse themselves.

Who carry a grudge

remembering who threatened or harmed.

So I make myself small,

passing respectfully

with a slight deferential nod.

And who gather to mourn,

a murder of crows

wheeling in ritual flight.

Do they too, seek comfort

in the presence of others,

struggle with unknowable gods?

I stop for a moment, and watch.

A solitary bird

on a bare branch

on a cold winter night,

tilting skyward

as if in thought.

Back-lit

against a full moon

he looks even blacker,

a crow-shaped hole

punched in the firmament.

The origin story to this poem is unimaginably indirect. I was reading a piece in the Atlantic (Nov 2017) by James Parker, a 10 year retrospective on the terrific film Michael Clayton. In describing the opening scene (and where the film also concludes) he describes a tableau of 3 horses using the term “animal indifference”. (Here's the whole line: “The horses watch him, three velvety dinosaur heads scanning this end-of-his-rope man with a balance of priestly inquiry and animal indifference. They breathe, they nod, incense of horse-exhalation in the cool air.”)

That expression really struck me. Although the image it evoked was not of horses, but of crows. I very much admire and am fascinated by crows (and ravens, as well as all corvids, for that matter). So what a propitious convergence of language and imagery. Which was all it took to get going on this poem ...one that has absolutely nothing to do with either Michael Clayton, George Clooney, or skittish horses!

Except an attentive reader will have noticed that animal indifference appears nowhere in the piece. In the end, it fell to editing. Because I think that while the expression so nicely fits a dumb animal – emphasizing the gulf between our awareness (not to mention our self-importance and solipsism!) and theirs – it doesn't fit the crow, where animal and human seem to converge: a creature in which it's not so much animal indifference as smug hauteur. So what ultimately emerges in the poem is supreme indifference. And later, amused detachment.