Increase

July 7 2019

Here, in the land of rocks and trees

the forest shoulders in

in that persistent methodical way

of nature,

as if all that matters is more

and increasing itself

life's essential meaning.

Reproduce, survive, grow;

even if the malignancy kills you,

even if you exhaust the earth

and starve yourself to death.

So I have given up

on the manicured lawn.

The patch of garden

behind its wobbly wire fence

on bent metal staves

going to rust.

The flowerbeds

overrun by webs of choking vetch,

dandelions

with their white cadaverous heads,

and alien-looking weeds

on leggy stems

grasping upwards.

So greedily ravenous

I can almost hear them grow.

I am no horticulturist.

My philosophy of gardening

has become live and let live.

So now, like walls closing in

the forest pushes closer

enclosing me in greenery.

A free-for-all of plants

shouldering up against the house

almost blocking-out the sun,

competing

in their striving canopy

and silent underground.

So when I look out the window

I am reminded of my place;

my brief undistinguished life,

my cracked foundation

and rotting beams.

Bury me

at the base of the tallest white pine.

In a hundred years, we will burn,

the forest, renewing itself

while I chimney-up in smoke

spread evenly around the world.

So that every creature on earth

will breathe me in,

a single molecule

of my posterity

in at least one breath.

Way too much math for my taste and for poetry, but when better brains than mine do the calculations, this turns out to be true: we do have an excellent chance of breathing in the same molecules as Napoleon or Julius Caesar did, and possible even the molecules their decomposing bodies released. The planet is a closed system, and matter is conserved.

I had no idea, of course, the poem would end with this. A poem takes me by the hand, and the pen goes where it will. The original idea came from my negligent gardening and lawn care. Especially living out here in the wild, where the forest seems relentless and inexorable, and weeds appear as if by spontaneous generation.

Contemplating this imperative of growth leads me to life's ultimate purpose. Which, when distilled down, seems simply to be more life: more process, than a measurable end or some ultimate meaning. Especially being an atheist, who discerns no divine if inscrutable purpose, the meaning of life seems simply to be to carry on and create more or it. There are no higher or lower organisms, no hierarchy of worthiness and entitlement. So as well as an essential malignancy in this, there is also a kind of unity.

Fire is a great equalizer. The forest is adapted to fire, needs it, and it will eventually happen. Fire allows the circle to close. Instead of life consuming itself and leaving a scorched inanimate earth, there are cycles of death and renewal, and life goes on.

... “A poem takes me by the hand, and the pen goes where it will.” Indeed! Here's the short note I wrote when sending the first rough draft to my first readers:

One of those that wrote itself; which seems to be happening a lot, lately.  There is a pent-up desire to write; there is a central idea, which I've been putting off, but which has been percolating unconsciously; and then there is the actual writing, which disinters all these intuitive connections of which I'm unaware  ...and so the words flow -- as if I'm taking dictation.

It was much the same with the blurb. Just kind of came out. Unlike those letters I write, which are meticulously thought through, constructed, edited. 

A little mysterious, but quite a lot of fun, actually! 

Handful

July 3 2019

Here they go again

calling it dirt instead of soil.

Are we this disconnected from earth

we recoil from its living surface?

Seeing only the mess

the dog tracks in,

the gumbo mud

churned up by rain,

the choking dust

of summer drought

suspended in a heavy yellow pall.

The complex web

of fungi and bugs

roots and slugs

and blind slithering creatures

that give life to the soil

we plow, spray, suck dry.

A handful

of the rich moist stuff

squeezed between my fingers

held up to my nose.

It is black, and lightly packed

and smells of fresh manure

cut grass

humus and loam,

compost left to ripen

into fertile earthy soil.

Determined shoots are breaking through

unfurling toward the sun,

succulent green

with tiny drops of water

clinging to their leaves.

Like a painless birth

from mother earth

creating matter from light.

A friend of mine, with whom I share an interest in science, forwarded an article from the Washington Post about the completion of the “connectome” of C. Elegans: the completion of the entire wiring map of this highly studied worm's neural anatomy. An interesting article, no doubt, and a finding that will not only help elucidate the neurological function of higher animals – including us – but also serves as a sobering reminder of just how dauntingly complicated the same mapping exercise will be in the human brain and body.

But, of course, in my typical pedantic way, my attention was arrested by this sentence:

The worm in question is Caenorhabditis elegans. Thin and translucent as a glass noodle, the microscopic animal lives in dirt and eats bacteria.

No one who has anything to do with agriculture or horticulture or even an illicit grow-op would call it “dirt” and not “soil.” I've frequently encountered this error, and the opportunity for a poem immediately struck me. This is the result.

A Dry Heat

July 2 2019

It's a dry heat.

Not the kind you stew in,

like a soft-boiled egg

soaking in your own sweat.

But where you feel it sucking you dry,

as if a desert wind

greedy for wetness

had blasted through,

all sand and rasp and panting dogs

lolling immobilized.

This heat penetrates my skin

suffuses my body,

joints unlocking

and muscles softening

in the bone-deep warmth.

We are mostly water,

and I imagine the small mound of powder

I would leave behind

reduced to basic chemistry.

The asphalt has also gone soft,

too hot

to even walk on.

Waves of heat are rising off

and rippling down its surface,

as if solid objects

could move at will,

as if the barrier had dissolved

between matter and air.

You tend to hallucinate

in heat like this,

dreaming of a cool lake

and dew-tipped grass,

a tall drink

clinking with ice.

Like the dry cold of winter

the sky is a brilliant blue

transparently still.

Nothing to block the sun

as earth edges ever so slightly

nearer its star.

Such a fine balance

between our only home

glowing blue and green

against absolute blackness,

and a scorched rock

circling an eyeless vacuum

through trackless time.

When the living planet

can so easily tip

into deadly heat.

I've really been hankering to write, but nothing was coming. Until I sat down tonight, pen in hand, and the obvious became clear:  write about the heat.

I wouldn't quite call this a heat wave. I think it has to be well into the 30s for that. And it's nothing like Europe is experiencing now. But really, what struck me most was the absence of humidity. The dry heat is so much easier to take. Which is, of course, where the poem began:  with dry heat. 

I think the poem can also be seen as a commentary on climate change. The final stanza could easily be read as referring to the tipping points of climate, where global warming becomes a runaway train:  positive feedback loops, such as a massive Antarctic glacier dropping into the sea; or Arctic permafrost releasing unstoppable volumes of the potent greenhouse gas methane; or the albido effect, when highly reflective surface of snow and ice is replaced by ever expanding areas of darker heat-absorbing rock.

Ball Park Frank

June 14 2019

They play it in a park.

Not an arena, where gladiators might contest.

Or a court,

its boundaries set by ruled lines,

mercy tested

by hard high-gloss floors.

Or even a ring

with it blood-stained spit-flecked mats

that stink of manly sweat.

But a sanctuary

of manicured grass.

Succulent green

under crisp stadium lights,

keeping at bay

the grim concrete heat

of the encroaching metropolis.

Where the high outfield wall

is merely notional,

and a home-run could very well go

to the ends of the earth

before rolling to a stop.

And where there has never been a clock,

so the game takes

as long as it takes,

and life can wait,

and age is hypothetical.

Where grown men play

hug and dance and sulk,

grumble under their breath

while averting their eyes from the ump.

And where the sudden eruption of cheers

lifts to a full-throated roar,

spilling out

onto dark empty streets.

Startling a passer-by

from his plodding reverie,

reassured

that all is well

with the hometown team.

A ballpark figure

is a merely approximate one,

like a weakly hit ball

dropping into no-man's land,

that vast expanse of cool grass

no 3 men can cover.

And a ballpark frank

is a squirt of hot-salty-fat

from a soft white bun,

bright yellow mustard

dribbling down the chin

of the boy with the too-big glove.

Like the one you remember

in the treasured ball-cap
the real players wear;

the boy who grew too fast

and threw badly

and is up well past his bedtime.

Every once in a while, the compulsion to write a baseball poem overtakes me. I resist, because they're indulgent, often repetitive, embarrassingly elegiac, and filled with an unbecoming nostalgia for what likely never was. Nevertheless, every once in awhile, I also succumb!

After finishing this, I suspected that “”Ball Park Franks” might be a brand name, rather than a generic descriptor. Google informs me that indeed it is. Oh well. I'm sure they won't object to the free publicity. ...That is, if a squirt of hot salty fat is good publicity!

Doldrums

June 12 2019

This friend

sailed solo across the ocean

on a young man's journey

to find himself.

At an age

he could afford to be alone,

unmoored from family

in his Old World home,

and not yet at anchor

amidst the rites of passage

of becoming fully grown.

But at some point

we all make landfall

and find a settled sense of place.

Setting out on the path

of manhood

or motherhood

or the burden of care,

when our sea legs are lost

and we forget the sting of salt

and each small perturbation of wind

matters no more.

While I have never been to sea

and can only imagine how it feels

surrounded by water

stretching out to the horizon

wherever I look,

the surface flat

the air heavy

the sails inert,

as if emptiness

weighed them down.

Becalmed

in the vast uncharted middle,

where it feels like forever

and you have all the time in the world,

that liminal space

where one thing ends

and something else starts.

As expected, when you're young;

the restlessness

the lack of direction

the failure to launch.

But just how long

hoping the wind picks up?

Emir Vidjen, my Croatian-Canadian friend and old paddling buddy, once told me about this great adventure he'd had. Who knew this unassuming engineer's quiet demeanour disguised such unexpected intensity and focus? He was reminiscing about that exalted sliver of life when, as a young man on the cusp of adulthood, he felt free, and could trifle with danger, and needed to test himself.

I imagine the hardest challenge of such solo travel is to be alone with yourself. At least for most people. I'm comfortable with solitude, and I'm good at living in my head, so maybe I would cope well. But enforced solitude is different than having a choice, so who knows. Being busy, of course, is the best distraction. But there is no busyness when the wind dies.

Anyway, I never tried anything so challenging at that critical time of life, when one transitions from adolescence to manhood. And, since then, I seem to have drifted, missing the usual rites of passage into adulthood. So now, closer to the end, I'm distinctly out of sync with my contemporaries. Developmentally arrested, one might say.

Lately, I've been acutely aware of this feeling: stalled, in the doldrums, vaguely dissatisfied. So a poem that started with an image of being at sea – the vastness, the sense of possibility, the awareness of how small one is – became very much about being “at sea”, and took the direction it did.

I hope I had a light enough hand with the nautical metaphor. Because it's tempting to get carried away, to show off one's cleverness.

A Murder of Crows

June 11 2019

The dead bird

gleaming with the wet-black sheen of crows

must have been slow taking flight.

Perhaps a gust of wind, a shift

a misjudgment of lift,

and he was clipped by some roaring tractor

dopplering past.

And now he lay mangled,

an awkwardly angled wing

body crushed flat.

I have seen squirrel, porcupine, skunk,

dead bodies

like discarded objects

stinking in the summer sun,

dark blood

drying on the pavement.

But crows do not die alone,

and two companions

were hopping about the corpse,

inspecting

nudging

hovering in low loose spirals

as I drove by,

uncharacteristically quiet

for such raucous birds.

I have heard that orca mourn for days

and elephants have rituals of death.

And in their agitation

perplexity

or even reverence

I do not doubt that crows, too

seem to grasp mortality.

A body so still

must seem unnatural,

but they see it for what it was.

I wonder if they also see themselves

and their own inevitable end.

Or, like us, do they other the dead

and think they will somehow be spared

such grim finality?

Too quick

too clever

too virtuous?

Too vitally alive

to imagine nothingness?

I don't think I'm morbid, or at least not in an unhealthy way. And I don't think that poets are preoccupied with death and dark introspection, as the stereotype of the tortured artist would suggest. On the other hand, I think I would write a lot more poems about death if it didn't seem so self-indulgent. And isn't any creative act a kind of passive resistance to death, a grasping for posterity?

The thing is, contemplating death gives us an appreciation of how precious and short life is. We might lead simpler more innocent lives without the knowledge we will die, but that knowledge also enriches us with ambition and appreciation and urgency. And humility, as well, because it diminishes our self-importance and solipsism. It forces us to see ourselves as part of nature, with its necessary tenets of succession, regeneration, and the greater good.

Because evolution requires us to die: to make room and free resources for the next generation; to enable the mixing of DNA and the errors of replication that are evolution's engine. Without death, we would still be rudimentary single-celled organisms, millions of years old, floating in the warm slime of brackish oceans.

To comment more specifically on the contents of the poem, I will remind the reader of that recent story about the orca mother who carried the body of her dead baby for weeks, almost starving to death in the process. And in terms of stylistic choices, and despite my naturally conservative aversion to neologism in language, I quite like the “verbing” of other, as well as of doppler. (And, indeed, the “verbing” of verb!)

When I sent this to my first readers, I wrote them this. I think it's worth including here.

Wow! When they come to me, they really come. This is another of those that seemed to write itself:  like taking dictation, or as if my hand had a mind of its own. I started to consider the first few lines of a possible poem as soon as I saw the dead bird. But then quickly moved on to other things, and didn't really revisit the idea until a few days later when I sat down in the mood to write and tried to come up with something. So this is pretty much the first rough draft. Very little has been tweaked. Preciously, poems that have come so easily usually end up being keepers. I have high hopes for this one. 

By Means of Loudness

June 2 2019

There was the dismal spring

a woodpecker attacked the house,

his cacophonous rat-tat-tat

hammering into my sleep

day after day

in the the groggy gloom of dawn.

He would dart from a nearby tree;

his electric speed,

the fierceness

in his sharply sculpted form,

his finely coloured markings

a work of art.

I thought he must be deranged,

his delicate brain

rattling back-and-forth

in that small hard skull.

Feeling sorry for myself,

uniquely afflicted with an addled bird

drilling for grubs

in the long-dead siding of kiln-dried wood,

or boring a nest

with relentless zeal.

But then I learned

that in mating frenzy of spring

male woodpeckers display

by means of loudness,

bad-ass birds

at the pointy end of evolution,

their behaviour honed

by all the generations before them

who thrived by making noise.

Like the songbirds, trilling as they court,

squirrels' chattering

and the peeping chorus of frogs,

one more instrument

in the symphony of spring,

its discordant opus

of desire and display

and sexual war.

I, too, feel my blood rise with the season,

the imperative of nature

my animal core.

Like the young men in fast cars,

the athletes and rappers

and dancers busting moves,

we are all woodpeckers on testosterone

living short and fast

and bashing our heads against the wall

to get noticed by girls.

Who feign indifference,

clutching their friends

and giggling coyly.

At the shy and unsure

who hide their nerves with cool.

At the affected poets

the callow pretenders

the boys who would be men.

There is one theory that all the great accomplishments of men through the ages have been motivated by the need to impress women. It's all styling, preening, competitive display. So if it wasn't for sex, would we still be living in caves?!! (A rhetorical question ...but the answer, of course, is no: I'm sure we'd have done just as well (if not better) with the women in charge!)

The woodpecker story is true. And it was a bit of a consolation to learn that this is a common problem, rather than my own private hell. Which is not over-stating it: the noise really did drive me crazy.

It will disturb sensitive readers to hear how I eventually solved it, so I'll leave it at that. But since then, I am on tenterhooks every spring, nervously waiting to hear that horrible rat-tat-tat once again. So far, this cold unpleasant spring, I have been spared. I can only hope their mating dance hasn't simply been delayed by the cool weather.

(Since posting this poem, along with the illustration, I have learned that the bird was, in fact, a Yellow-Bellied sapsucker; which is a type of woodpecker distinguished by its unusual tongue. Since the Sapsuckerlooks much like the Ladderback that appears in the attached photo (which I also learned was incorrectly labelled on Google images as a Downy), I left it as is.)