Calendar

Dec 30 2019

My real estate agent

sent me a calendar and card

in an elegantly lettered envelope.

As he has reliably done

for the past 25 years

since he sold me this house.

Apparently, he is a patient man,

content to enter

his second quarter century

waiting for me to move out.

And old-school, as well;

a paper calendar

postal mail.

It's a handy size

with a magnet on the back.

So I attach it to the fridge door

where it best catches the eye,

confronting me

with the passage of time

whenever I reach for a snack.

The stock pictures

of baby animals

and natural vistas,

the glossy pages

I one-by-one tear off.

300 months, so far

and counting.

A long time

to have remained fixed.

All my things

in their familiar places

if a little worse for wear,

the genteel shabbiness

of a contented man

who tends toward complacency.

And the concrete foundation

that has nicely settled in

to this shallow sandy earth,

the thin soil

where little grows

but black spruce flourishes.

How persistent we are, how steadfast.

The real estate agent

who isn't “mine” at all.

I, a model of stability

but perhaps more stuck than stable.

And those sparse and witchy trees

whose tenacity and hardiness

I can't help but admire.

Yes, the house could use a coat of paint

the roof a few new shingles.

As I, too

have gotten thinner on top.

While what were saplings, once

now crowd against the sun,

and the older trees

rot from inside out.

But the same picture

of a square-jawed young man

has appeared on each calendar

year after year;

frozen

on a disposable document

that is all about transience

and keeping track.

The inexorable passage of time,

only he

has somehow contrived to evade.

Actually, it's a husband and wife team: Glen and Carmen Kannegiesser. As the name suggests, he's of Finnish stock, and very much does have the square-jawed handsomeness of his people. But the picture has never changed; and even though it hardly feels it, it actually has been 25 years since I last saw him: surely, the passage of time must show in his face as much as it does in mine.

I value loyalty, admire persistence, and commend entrepreneurialism. And I am very much a creature of habit who resists change. So if I ever were to move (however the prospect of moving offends my essential nature!) I'd probably give him a call. Because there is something reassuring about this calendar, reliably arriving each year during the holiday season. In a world of vertiginous and alarming change, a grounding ritual – even one so minor – is welcome.

It's all about the appeal to me of stability: the ritual of the calendar, the changeless picture. Along with the presumption of our ongoing relationship as client and agent; caught just as it was, in the amber of a quarter century.

Length, Turn, Length

Dec 30 2019

The lifeguards at the community pool

are hovering about the pretty blonde

like moths to the flame.

Teenage boys,

at an age when they're also on fire.

So today, the swimmers are on their own.

She is tall, and tan, and lithe

but oddly unsure of herself,

her sexual power

her youthful allure.

I am old, but still remember

just how it felt,

the heat

the doubt

the desire.

But feel, as well

an unbecoming envy

the angst of loss.

Length, turn, length,

attending to circular breathing

my shoulder slot

the steady kick.

And each time I turn my head

catching a glimpse of the deck

through fogged-up plastic lenses.

A chance observer

of the human heart.

If not an anthropologist from Mars

then from an older generation,

keeping his distance

but perhaps not far enough.

Up and down the pool

trying hard to repeat my stroke,

watching length after length 
as life replays itself.

Christmas Lights

Dec 28 2019

I can just imagine the man

teetering on the top rung

of the fully extended ladder,

a trembling arm

stretched overhead

as far as he can,

fingers freezing in the December dusk

hooking-up lights.

As I walk, after midnight

down my usually grey street,

gazing at the brightly garlanded trees

and illuminated houses

on this not quite holiday week,

between the excess of Christmas

and New Year's bacchanal.

Before the old year

has exhausted itself,

the new one peddled

its usual promises.

It's become a picture-book village

as seen through the eyes of a child,

when the world seems new, and surprising

and the smallest things delight.

Even me

as cynical and bleak as I feel.

Pure primary colours

as luscious as tropical fruit
with that warm focused glow.

As fresh snow begins to fall.

As the dry cold

makes the world seem newly made.

I have never put up lights.

My house has always been dark,

like a blackened tooth

in a dazzling smile,

a sullen gap

in a street party open to all.

And I know, in less than a week

most will be extinguished.

Are they proud home-owners, showing off,

like the ostentatious display

of an alpha male

asserting dominance?

Or is this community spirit,

good neighbours doing their part

for the good of the whole?

All I know is how lifted I feel,

how little it took

to give me hope.

So, are displays like this beautiful,
or tawdry, and tasteless?
Am I some simple-minded grown-up

to be so easily swayed?

A few multi-coloured lights

in the short dark days

of a quickly dwindling year.

Which are now getting longer

bit by bit.

The incremental journey toward spring

and earth's perennial rebirth,

when the festive lights

will have been long retired,

the enchanted street returned

to its usual humdrum sobriety.

Letter Carrier

Dec 26 2019

The temporary letter carrier

filling in for the holidays

has been leaving the neighbour's mail 
in my box.

So every day, I trudge next door

and unobtrusively deposit it

in its rightful spot,

dropping the lid quietly

and anxiously eyeing the door

to be sure no one's home.

Yes, we've been known to exchange polite hellos

coming and going

mowing the lawn.

He's even retrieved my empty trash cans

when they were left too long at the curb,

while I've accepted packages

when he was at work.

But there are limits to neighbourliness

in the private lives

of busy grown-ups.

There is only so much small talk

we have to give,

so many strained smiles

nods of acknowledgement.

A New Year's handshake, perhaps,

an enthusiastic Nice!

over his brand new car.

Mostly bills, some Christmas cards.

But for me, no mail all week.

So either I'm off Santa's list

(which wouldn't be a surprise)

or there are neighbours worse than me

on this proper suburban street

of drawn blinds

and well-manicured lawns.

Where, in the thin light of winter

near the end of a year

that could have used a little more good cheer

we exchange pleasantries

co-exist peacefully

and continue to live together

apart.

“Living together apart” (which is also know by the acronym LAT) is a new variation on marriage: couples who have long term committed relationships, but live in separate houses. I've borrowed it for this poem.

I originally had the final word as “alone”, not “apart”; and indeed, the experts tell us there is an epidemic of loneliness in society today. But I thought that was too strong a word, and it would serve the poem better if I left the reader free to make that inference herself.

Of course, there is absolutely nothing original in writing about suburban alienation. But cliche or not, that doesn't make it any less true or salient. (Actually, more true when it comes to an introvert and homebody like me. After all, I would probably be no less insular if the neighbourhood was instead full of outgoing street-partying and hail-fellow-well-met bon vivants!) I think if the poem works – even if it's not saying anything that hasn't been said before – it's because it doesn't moralize or hector. Rather, it works because it's tone is self-reflective and self-critical, not holier-than-thou; and because it takes as its subject something small and everyday, not big and pretentious. ...Although perhaps suburban “alienation” over-states it. Maybe this is more of a nostalgic lament for a kind of Norman Rockwell-ish neighbourliness that may have never in fact existed. When I was a kid, for example, we weren't any more friendly or involved with our real-life next door neighbours – who actually were the Joneses (talk about cliches!) – than I am now with the people next door.

(In case anyone is fact-checking this poem, my house is actually in the city, not the suburbs. But it's a small spread-out sort of city with a low-rise “downtown”, the kind in which the residential areas might as well be suburban – a low density car-centric place, and hardly cosmopolitan in the way that “city” implies.)

Violation

Dec 25 2019

Nothing artificial.

No tinselled plastic, gassing-off.

No, we must violate

the boundaries of inside and out,

bring a pagan tree

into the house,

redolent of balsam, pine, spruce.

Sacrificed

to rebirth, the return of the light

in the fastness of winter

the darkness of night.

How a living tree

succulent and green

soothes our inner animal,

the way being out in nature

restores the soul.

Even the unbelievers

are seduced by its beauty.

A slowly dying tree

brought inside the home,

its wildness, juxtaposed

with domesticity.

How well we are served,

the self-appointed stewards

given dominion over the earth

but who presume we are gods,

watching its branches droop

needles drop

verdant colour blanch.

Sharp scent, so quickly lost

to the stale indoor air.

I was out for a walk, ruminating on the last poem – Dead Tree, the one I had just finished writing – and trying to recapitulate where the idea originated. And recalled that I'd wanted to come up with something about the incongruity of a Christmas tree inside the house, the violation of boundaries between in and out it represents. And so, as I walked, the bones of this poem revealed themselves.

Perhaps it tries to do too much. There is this idea of violation, as well as the tree's pagan origins. There is the restorative power of being in nature. And there is the irony of celebrating life and rebirth by sacrificing a tree; which is in a way still alive, but also in the process of dying. And, to end the poem, a theme I can never seem to resist: an environmental message about man's hubris, presumption, and our defilement of the natural world. It also contains a dig at religion. Because I am the unbeliever. And the concept of man's dominion over earth, as conferred by scripture, has been conveniently interpreted to mean mastery, when it should more properly be understood as stewardship.

Dead Tree

Dec 24 2019

The dead tree

that had dropped its leaves

before summer had barely begun

now looks like all the others,

naked limbs

that branch and thin

and stand fully exposed,

as if stoically shivering

in this bitter prairie cold.

How sensible, to be dormant

in such an unforgiving winter,

to make yourself small

against the lethal power of wind

the unbearable weight of snow.

Look close, though, and you can see their buds are set

prepared for spring's revival;

skeleton trees

that merely impersonate death.

Except for this one

which I should have cut down last summer.

In the democracy of winter

in the season of drift

a lover of trees

flirting with hope

and lulled by wilful blindness.

The dogs and I often walk through a neighbourhood schoolyard where, in some excess of environmental zeal several years ago, they planted a number of trees. All the same, in the same location; yet one poor runty tree barely produced any leaves, and now looks definitively dead. But they left it standing; and now in winter, when all the trees are leafless and looking forlorn, you could imagine it like all the others, simply dormant.

I love trees, have planted a lot of them, and can hardly bear to even cut a branch, let alone cut one down. And who knows if a tree that appears dead might surprise us in spring: that its surviving roots, deep underground where frost doesn't penetrate, may in fact be gaining strength, and ready for one final heroic efflorescence. I have one maple that that seems to be on the verge of dying; but instead of removing it, I've radically pruned, and each spring it somehow keeps struggling back. Late in the season, but clearly alive. So it's now more a bonsai bush than a tree; but its leaves are healthy enough, and it's gorgeous in fall.

This is the southern extremity of the boreal forest, not prairie. And I could as easily have written some variation of “arctic” cold, or “miserable” cold, or “persistently bitter” cold. In the end, I chose prairie cold not only because the other choices didn't sound as well, but because I love the way it reinforces that image of exposure: the flat bald prairie, where a rare tree bears the full brunt of weather. The irony here is that the definition of “prairie” is a grassland plain, relatively treeless: it's not the flatness that makes it prairie (because the prairies aren't, in fact, flat), it's the paucity of trees.

It has also been very much the opposite of an unforgiving winter: unusually mild. Too mild, for my taste. And, I very much fear, a harbinger of climate change: wetter, warmer, messier winters; with lots of nasty freeze and thaw. Which is unpleasant for me, although hardly what should really concern us about global heating. Still, there are and will be cold snaps; so if accuracy matters, I can still claim it.

I've written before that if I let myself, every poem would be about death. I'm not sure – even though I use dead in both the first line and the title, then skeleton trees and death later on – this is that morbid a poem. Instead, it could easily be argued that it's about life: the renewal of spring; the possibility that this apparently dead tree may just end up rewarding the writer's hope.

Under

Dec 22 2019

The sound of snow falling.

With such a soft muffled touch

you might have just imagined it,

snow landing on snow

feathering gently down.

Because all you hear is absence

when snow blankets the world

deep and undisturbed;

dead air, between the crystals

balanced on their points,

absorbing sound

like thick cotton wool.

But you're sure you heard it once,

in that remote mountain pass

when the wind had died

and you stood perfectly still

taking slow shallow breaths.

Late at night

when the air was heavy

and sound carries best.

So far

from the machinery of human life

you felt like the last of your kind.

Fat wet flakes, near freezing

that seem to fill the sky,

pouring down

and piling up as you watch.

That you fear might bury you

in a solitude of winter

that lasts year after year.

How silent, under the snow.

I wonder if it's like hovering

in the ocean's dark depths,

your neutral body weightless

the sun blotted out.

Where you can only tell down from up

by watching your bubbles rise,

precious air

a life-line to the surface.

A small opening

in front of your face

from warm exhaled breath.

The thump-thump of your heart

the rush of blood in your head.

In a piece in this weekend's Opinion section, there was an email exchange between two people about endangered winter; endangered, that is, by climate change. 2 men (Giles Whittell and Bund Brunner) who love winter.

At one point, Brunner says this: I remember times when I heard snow falling high in the Bavarian Alps when I was cross-country skiing there and there was no wind, no cars or other sound to distract attention. A very gentle sound, like crystals landing. Heavy snowflakes, just around the freezing point. I know physicists are skeptical. They think the pitch is too high to be perceived by a human ear – unlike by the ear of a bat or fish. Maybe I have extrasensory abilities? In any case, I like the idea.

“The sound of falling snow” got stuck in my head, and I thought it might make a good start to a poem. This is the result.

It's uncanny, though, how poems write themselves. Here's a short email I sent, along with an earlier version of this poem, to one of my first readers. It briefly explains my own surprise at what I'd written:

Yes, the rewrite is very different. Amazing what weaknesses are revealed by bringing fresh ears to a piece. On rereading, I notice things I never had in mind. This was really intended to be just a descriptive poem, a mood piece. But it's interesting to note all the morbid undertones:  the dead air, the wind dying, the burying alive, the sun blotted out; all the references to air and breath and vital organs. And, of course, the last of your kind. Combine that with the ambience of peace, solitude, and quiet the poem conveys, and it really starts to read like a rehearsal of death!

Flock

Dec 21 2019

The sky was dark with birds.

Sleek black darts

that wheeled and turned,

flashing through the air

with breath-taking speed

magnificent grace.

As if each were a cell

in a single animal

whose sum exceeds its parts.

Until a bird of prey

scatters them

and they frantically sling-shot apart.

No longer weightless

I can see their hard-working wings

the thinness of air,

a flicker

of indecision

fleet as it is.

How unforgiving

a single bird.

More than the stillness

of the clear blue sky,

it's the quiet

that leaves me unnerved.

This picture accompanied a piece in today's New Yorker website. It's not the ideal picture to demonstrate the flocking of birds. But as soon as I saw it, this poem started to write itself. So I'm including it here not to illustrate or reinforce the poem, but simply to give some insight into my creative process.

Monthly

Dec 20 2019

Once again, the full moon

has caught me by surprise,

appearing, fully formed

in what had been a dark and empty void.

After a week of overcast.

After losing track of time,

which seems to pass faster and faster

as the years go by.

And after my usual habit

of walking head down,

lost in thought

walling-off the world.

No mystery to its occurrence, though;

monthly, like clockwork.

Its silver-blue glow

is even brighter on snow

shadows more sharply etched.

An unearthly light

that seems to flatten distance

and bleed out the reds,

as if we were extraterrestrials

under some alien star.

And if the circle is the ideal shape

as imagined by philosophers

then this moon is immaculate,

a celestial object

as worthy of worship

as Venus and Mars.

Looming large on the horizon, I watch it rise,

steadily ascending

with a slow majestic grace

that so simply conveys

the geometry of the cosmos,

the gravity

trajectory

and mass

that are its instruments.

And then, imagining the moon

as if it were fixed in place

I can feel the earth

slip into gear,

the sphere beneath my feet

wheeling through space.

But how odd

its extremes of size;

from a small coin, suspended high overhead

to this colossal orb

sitting just above the horizon,

Smaller and smaller, the higher it goes.

An optical illusion, we are told.

But if we cannot trust even our eyes

what can we trust?

Night has been transformed

turning to dusk.

And in another month

I will be surprised, once more.

Out here, we have a good night sky for viewing, and I can usually keep tabs on the moon's waxing and waning. But the full moon caught me by surprise the other day, walking well after dark as the clouds broke.

Especially with fresh snow on the ground, the intensity of its light always surprises me. And delights, me, of course. I initially wrote something like “silvery light”; you know, the usual cliche. But then actually looked it up, and Google informs me that the light is in fact heavily shifted toward blue: much more blue than silver. Which probably explains that cool, bloodless, unearthly quality it has.

We've all been fooled by the the optical illusion of the moon's size. Which is easily explained: you only notice how large it actually is when it's close enough to the ground that you can directly compare it to known objects; while higher up, the same-sized moon seems lost in the vastness of an empty sky.