Tuesday, October 30, 2018


The Small Death of Sleep
Oct 27 2018


The small death of sleep
is how I make sense of them.

The fugitive dreams
that slip from my reach
in that hypnagogic haze,
the 8 hours
of total absence
when I vanish each day.

I lie motionless, and try to reconstruct the plot
but am defeated by its madness.
The images blossom and fade
like watercolour paint
on thick absorbent paper,
the light touch
of the tip of a brush
as colours coalesce.

How much the same
are those first years of life,
which only exist
in the fixed impressions that survived 
time's hectic passage?
Like the black-and-white photos
in an old family album
where the dates and subjects were lost.
And which aren't black and white at all,
but shades of grey
and a kind of sallow pale
that leaves them looking bloodless,
gazing out
through permanently open eyes.
And given how slippery memory is
even these glimmers are never the same.
Like the familial tales
and the stories we make
to make it make sense.

I know I was alive back then
as I know I slept through the night.
But only notionally
because I must have been.
And because I have photographic evidence
of this small child
who bore my name
and lived in this house with us.

We all fear dying
and most of us fear death.
Yet so much of our lives
we might as well not have existed.
An automaton, and his unconscious dreams.
The small child, who learned how to speak
as if it came to him
in his sleep, one day.

Just as the vastness of time
before we were born
is bred in the bone,
the stories we've been told
as real as own.
Perhaps the time to come, as well.
Because the fundamentals of life
are everlasting,
and in any given moment
posterity abides.




I though it was Shakespeare, but apparently “the small death” in reference to sleep is attributed to the Buddha. (Nevertheless, Shakespeare conflates death and sleep as well, perhaps most notably in the lines “the death of each day's life” (Macbeth) and “for in that sleep of death what dreams may come” (Hamlet).)

There are many things I could say about this poem. But in this case, I prefer to let it speak for itself. I will note, though, that the immediate inspiration was a piece in the New Yorker (Oct 22, 2018) by Janet Malcolm called Six Glimpses of the the Past – Photography and Memory.


Life Force
Oct 19 2018


My gutters are filled with leaves
the downspouts plugged.
Accreting
like sedimentary layers
each unattended fall.
Where they steadily rot
in a swill of stagnant water,
bitter tannins
bleeding out
their stubborn brownish rust.

Long enough
and this brew will turn to soil.
An aerial refuge
of exotic life
in a sagging metal trough,
self-contained
and unexplored;
green sprouts, unfurling in spring
fruiting fungi in fall.

Irrepressible life,
pressing itself
into the tiniest niche.

Perhaps, in the decomposing heat
a spore has arisen, some bacterium evolved;
a molecule, awaiting its discoverer
that will heal
relieve
render us immortal.

Irrepressible life, always finding a way.

Except for today
when the hired man scooped out the crud
and hosed down the gutters.
Like a primordial planet of cooling rock, sterile and steaming
my troughs have been scoured;
so life has no purchase
and time goes unmeasured,
no succession or death
to count it against.

For the sake of order
what has been lost?
The complexity
we are ill-equipped to see,
orders of magnitude
infinitesimally small.
Like the microscopic life
that somehow survives
in earth's black and airless rock,
all the way down, layer by layer
beneath its crushing weight.

I am amazed at this persistence.
The life force
of this blue and green planet.
The rich diversity
beneath the barren surface
we too often fail to see
or even imagine.




I've been looking for someone to clean out my gutters. They've been dripping for years, I reluctantly admit. I can almost imagine the concrete underneath, steadily wearing away into a smooth shallow pool: like the drip-drip-drip of Chinese water torture, speeding up geological time. So looking up at the sagging gutters, I am feeling increasingly negligent for having ignored them for well over a decade. And recall, when I last got up on the roof, scooping out this heavy black muck: decomposing leaves, composting soil, and who knows what dead animals!

This brought to mind a recent article I read, about forms of anaerobic life found in rock deep in the earth's mantle: life that doesn't get its energy from the sun, but from chemical reactions in wet microscopic seams and fissures; and life that metabolizes and reproduces so slowly it might seem to live almost forever. Scientists who study exobiology think this may be a good model for whatever alien life may eventually be found on other planets. (Here's the link: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/10/meet-endoterrestrials/571939/ .)

In both cases, there is this powerful impression of the indomitability of life. And how, when we are only tuned to what is familiar, we can be blind to it. Life everywhere, hiding in plain sight. Life that will persist – somewhere in some form – even after we have finished trashing the planet, as we are so rapidly and irresponsibly doing.


Saturday, October 13, 2018


Edges
Oct 6 2018


It's safest here
far from the edge
on the flat terrain of sameness.

Not for me
any risk-taking, in-your-facing, leap-of-faithing
edginess.
No, it's the comfortable middle, muddling through.

I remember the drop-off
where I lost my nerve,
the sharp edge
of a rock-cut
and a sheer bottomless plunge;
inching up
on hands and knees
and peering over the brink,
sweaty-palmed, and trembling.
The fateful step
that marked before from after.

Like the flow edge, the journey's end
the change in phase of matter.
Not a bright line, but a pause,
where heat is lost
and water's not
solid, liquid, steam;
but becoming
            . . . in flux
                      . . . a state of in-between.
To-and-fro to the tipping point,
when an tiny seed
flash-freezes
and the universe is instantly ice.
In which we are all prehistoric insects,
as if caught in amber
just as we were
in that moment everything stopped.

The glass of water
I swallowed too fast
the clouds that turned to hail.
The scalding steam
the monster wave
the winter ice that failed.
The caustic fog
the blinding sleet
the streams becoming torrents.
The errant step
over the edge
I took, and failed to notice.

The nascent breath
slip into death
ebb into liminal blackness.
The before and the next
I question and fret
and try to make sense of, but can't.

The times I was tempted
and excuses invented
when I failed to take a chance.
How a tentative step
led to the rest
and so my journey began.

The boundaries bent
and borders I tested
when no one would let me pass.
The doors that were closed
the windows I broke
the rivers I bridged and dammed.

The envy and fear
the rush to be clear
so close to the edge
                   . . . and back.



(The image in the fourth paragraph – where I play around with changes of state in matter as a kind of edge or tipping point, and introduce water as a theme – actually comes from a real event. Here's a link: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5288529/Horrific-aftermath-terrifying-ice-tsunami.html. The photo, however does not do this justice. I was originally made aware of this watching a BBC Earth documentary, and their video of the scene made a far stronger impression. I think another similar real life event – maybe even more so – would be Pompeii and Herculaneum.)

Monday, October 8, 2018


Egg Timer
Oct 3 2018


An egg timer
in the shape of an egg.

How elegant is this,
a thing that says what it is
in a simple glance;
no ornamentation,
no need to explain
what it really meant to say.

Like that impeccable sentence
so complete in itself
you wish you could claim as your own;
its essence honed
jagged edges rounded-off.
If only poems
could be so clear,
saying what they mean
without pretension, or extra words.
Without anyone getting
between us, and them.

As irreducible as an egg;
self-contained
and unassuming.
Where function and form
are in perfect accord.

A random egg
you feel compelled to nest
in your warm dry hand,
rolling, fingering
testing its shell;
its smooth surface, brown or chalk,
its lightly pebbled touch.

Small red numbers
circle its waist
along an evenly ruled line.
Where it turns, with a twist
and a soft whirrr of clicks
ratcheting only one way.

Time
begins and ends
in this modest egg
at rest on the kitchen shelf.
So suited to its role.
So true to itself.




In the almost hallucinogenic opening sequence of The Shape of Water, Sally Hawkins boils eggs. She is shown giving an elegantly shaped little egg-timer a little twist. This object struck me as so utterly perfect that a poem leapt to mind. Even though it was very late and I was very hungry for my cooling dinner, I immediately stopped the PVR and sat down to write. I was in love with that little egg-timer, and had to somehow explain and document its irresistible appeal. This poem (many, many versions later!) is the result. I can't imagine an object more perfect, something so true to itself and its role that it absolutely cannot be improved upon.

I admit, an very odd thing indeed to have taken from a celebrated movie. Nevertheless, a found poem is not to be questioned. One is grateful whenever they materialize.

The Shape of Water, by the way, is a movie I probably would have given a pass if it hadn't won the Academy Award. I appreciated the quality of light and lingering pace that gave it a compelling sense of magic realism (if you're able to surrender to that). I liked the evocation of its era (although, as usual, my mind's eye automatically searched out the few subtle anachronisms the continuity team failed to notice, an unwelcome distraction that seems to be my own personal bugaboo in any movie I watch). I could see how the many cinematic references would have appealed to the voters of the Academy. And it's clear that its earnest message of the triumph of the different and disadvantaged and excluded (a mute orphan, a black cleaner, a lonely gay man in the early 1960s) fit the usual high-minded criteria for Best Picture. But some of the violence seemed gratuitous; the characters as written were cardboard thin, if not a little cartoonish; and the movie tended toward melodrama, sorely lacking in the highly naturalistic realism I prefer. Having said that, Michael Shannon and Sally Hawkins were brilliant, Octavia Spencer and Richard Jenkins well worth watching. And the music was wonderful: beautiful pieces from the era of the Great American Songbook, which is the music I most love yet never ever hear in modern movies. I know that a soundtrack only truly succeeds when you don't actually “hear” it; but in this case, it was intrusive to just the right degree. Nevertheless, if you aren't a fan of science fiction or fantasy or noble themes presented with little subtlety, best to give it a pass.

Monday, October 1, 2018


“Mainly Cloudy, Periods of Rain”
Sept 26 2018


A hard rain, marrow-cold.

Not a cloudburst, downpour, deluge
short and sharp and cleansing,
but a steady relentless drip
that seems never-ending
in its dark damp misery,
as if some great scowling malevolence
had stalled overhead
and is testing our forbearance.
Not yet Biblical;
but I'm eyeing higher ground,
and who among us could deny
a reckoning is due?

How long
until the saturated soil
can carry no more
the lakes overflow?
I imagine wild creatures huddling
in inescapable wetness,
as I hold the door
for my irrepressible dogs
meekly seeking refuge,
fur soaked, tails tucked
water heedlessly puddling.
They shoulder against each other,
entering abreast, two-by-two
in an oddly prophetic coupling.

The soothsayers
on the weather page
keep forecasting sun,
but day after day, like a moving target
a clearing sky eludes us.

Not a sun shower
in the freshly rinsed air,
pure autumnal light
glinting off a gentle rain
against an incandescent canvas
of ochre, red, and amber.
And not the steamy heat
after summer storms
as sun burns off the wetness.

Just dull
damp
oppressive.

But in another 2 months, we'll have to shovel it;
the small mercies
with which we console ourselves.
The flood, the covenant
we are reminded of.
The luminous rainbow, return of the sun,
a golden fall
even Indian summer.




When all else fails, the old stand-by: another nature/weather poem!

It began with that image of the sun-shower. After days of rain, I looked up from my easy chair and was pleasantly surprised to take in just this scene: a slanting rain in the foreground, like needles of pure light, against a brilliantly illuminated backdrop of autumn leaves. After several dark days, this felt like the original Wizard of Oz, when black-and-white suddenly gives way to full-spectrum colour. Of course, true to the spirit of this poem, that too proved to be a glimmer of false hope: as I sit here typing this, a glance out the window reveals more dull grey wetness. The tantalizing promise of beautiful fall weather continues to be a moving target ...just out of reach!

The title, by the way, is lifted directly from the Environment Canada weather report for the next few days.