Ouroboros

April 27 2018

The snake eating its tail.

A closed loop, wriggling and writhing

that inch-by-inch constricts,

a tightening noose

consuming itself.

The mystical circle

that represents wholeness,

the insoluble knot

cinching closer and closer.

Like the question that answers

and so endlessly asks,

tautologically

circling back and back.

Like the life too-examined

that ruminates and frets,

too mired in the past

to move ahead.

Like the toxic vices

of greed and pride,

so self-referential

self-satisfied.

Oh, how the serpent is despised.

Its muscled mass, priapic strength

that lethal tongue

blindly tasting its prey.

The quick-silver slither, that whispers like silk,

the silent strike

the alien killer.

Its cool dry skin.

Its jaw unhinged, swallowing holus-bolus.

And like the ouroboros

how we can eat ourselves up

with envy, regret

self-loathing.

A rustling in the tall grass

stealing closer and closer.

Sunrise Senior Living

April 23 2018

I spy her in a shapeless dress

but my eyes are fixed on her hair,

more white than grey

and frazzled, neglected, unkempt;

looking finger-in-socket wild,

or as if left by itself to dry

in the close institutional air.

The awkwardly long stare

before she recognized her youngest.

Only later would I notice

the scrawled reminder

among the random scraps and cryptic notes

see Brian Sunday.

An antique table, I recall from home

littered with reminders,

its burnished finish dull

and the joint of the rim splitting

in the dry winter heat

of her cramped rectangular quarters.

80 degrees, the thermostat says,

while out the narrow window

cars idle under falling snow

four stories down.

It would be kind

to call her absent-minded,

when the brain is riddled with holes

and she knows just enough to know

how her mind is failing.

The surprising flashes

of mental sharpness.

The essential self, both good and bad

than seems indelibly her;

both stubborn and kind

polite, and paranoid,

her old familiar impatience

combined with uncommon grace.

The loneliness

of an unbreakable couple

when you're the one who is left behind,

and there seems no point to life

except more of the same.

I try to travel back with her,

but even in the distant past

she seems unsure.

And I realize

that as her memory goes

parts of my life are going as well;

the matriarch

we depended on

to remember for everyone else.

We counted on her as the glue

    —   from curating birth-weights, to cousins-once-removed   —

but now the custodian of our story

barely navigates these corridors

and loses track of days.

The busy foyer

where residents shuffle by,

and Filipino women

with smooth oval faces, and lustrous black hair

dutifully shadow them.

Where she sits, purse clutched,

bulging with stuff

no one can fathom.

Where she putters and straightens and neatens-up

with that politely fixed smile

that seems both apologetic, and driven,

perhaps

her sense of order still offended

at our unmade beds

and the mess of growing boys.

So which is tougher?

Getting older

in a broken body, with a healthy mind?

Or in a body that's oddly robust,

only to be betrayed

when the mind fails?

I cannot help

thinking of myself

when I see her this way.

Will my final days

be filled with rage

or grace

or someone to care?

Or will I, too, end badly,

in some dreary place, like this,

fingers fitfully picking

at dignity's tattered threads

as the sun descends

in its steady arc?

A shadow of herself,

peering out

with agitation and doubt

through the gauze of incomprehension,

confused by a world

in which she finds she has lost her place.

Old age,

where loss after loss

is what you learn to live with,

and memories fade

to the eternal limbo of now.

For the first time in a long time, I visited my mother in her senior's home (yes, Senior Sunrise Living) in Toronto. And yes, I have been negligent in my filial duty (my hatred of travel notwithstanding).

My two examples – birth weight, and the remote relative – are chosen quite deliberately. Because birth weight is where this started: it's utterly insignificant, I know, but sometime during this visit the thought crossed my mind that no one in the world now knows what weight I was at birth (oh, I suppose it's recorded somewhere; perhaps surviving as a small paper entry in the dusty recesses of an ancient medical records department) except her; and she was the one who sent out cards and kept track of family and remembered every significant date and anniversary. Now, no one does any of this, and the extended family atomizes.

She has deteriorated substantially. Clearly, she will soon need to move to a higher lever of care. Since the loss of my father and then her move from home, I get the impression she is waiting out the clock. As seems to happen with dementia, one's enduring traits and underlying character are unmasked and sharpened. So she can be both frustrating and endearing. Her hearing is going, which I know adds to her feeling of isolation. I can't tell if she is lonely, or if she simply forgets the social life she leads there. One consoles oneself that forgetting can be a kind of blessing, but it can also be accompanied by distress. Especially when I observed how agitated she got in the early evening, becoming disoriented and demanding: the so-called “sun-downing” phenomenon, which is a common feature of dementia.

I owe the third last stanza to my niece Jacqueline, who is a new mother herself. She commented on how lucky she was that her two grandmothers are still alive, then added how ironic it is that one is riddled with infirmity and pain but razor-sharp mentally, while the other is in good physical health but losing her mind. I had to wonder which I would chose. My niece's answer was quick and clear: she thought losing you mind was better, because presumably you wouldn't be aware of it. Trouble is, you are: only in the advanced stages of dementia do you lose insight. My mother will frequently lament how her once incisive memory is now so poor, and clearly gets frustrated at her disability.

This is a long poem. There are details and tangents and discursions that may seem excessive or distracting. But in my writing I've always taken pleasure in close observation, which I think is the poet's calling. And I think l these small excursions have purpose: for example, the table from her past life that is deteriorating from neglect; the falling snow, adding to the sense of bleakness; the caregivers' hair, in contrast to my mother's.

And don't we all wonder how we will end? Who doesn't give in to this very human solipsism? Is a parent's fate our own destiny? Will the mean curmudgeon I fear lies just beneath my surface emerge as my mental faculties and social defences are stripped away?

And how ironic that some regard the ability to live in the moment as the highest form of enlightenment, when in the case of my mother the “eternal now” seems more life sentence than liberation.

Dark Continents

April 6 2018

I love old maps.

The artistry.

The singularity

of something inked by hand.

The thick vellum

of an object meant to last.

The heroic certainty they convey

despite all the guess-work,

as assured as the conquerors, and settlers

on their civilizing mission.

The exotic people, and romantic places

one easily imagines

where sirens beckon

and dragons lurk.

The possibility

of all that vacant space

beyond the known world.

Dark continents,

when the vast interior

was incognita

and oceans dropped over the edge.

Before we could look down from space

and the world seemed to shrink

and it was easy to believe

we were its masters.

Even the gas station road map

I found crammed in the glove box

of the old Buick hard-top

rusting out back.

Its paper brittling and fading and frayed.

Its accordion folds cracked.

The cramped notations

in my mother's hand

in sharp ball-point pen;

like a palimpsest

of best-laid plans.

The whole Eastern seaboard

from New York to Disney World

with its approximate coast

and darkly ruled interstates

and flatly rendered terrain,

guiding us

into the glamour and zing

of middle America.

As if towns and roads and rest-stops

were all that counted

from the commanding heights

of the 20^th century traveller.

My dad, a different man, with work on hold;

one hand, lightly on the wheel

a sunburned elbow jutting out.

My mother, navigating fretfully

who rode shotgun next to him.

And 3 boys, in the back bench-seat

jostling for room.

With me, the youngest, stuck in the middle,

legs hunched

over the hump in the floor

so my feet had nowhere to stretch.

Everyone sweltering

in the high summer heat,

before cars had air conditioning

and seat-belts were undreamt of.

Where I saw the first black man

I'd ever seen.

Except back then

we called them Negroes, or coloureds

and I probably stared.

Terra incognita, heading south,

following the map, deeper and deeper

into the tantalizing heart

of the dark continent.

Remember, this was early 1960s Toronto: a wintry and provincial Presbyterian city that was overwhelmingly white; hardly the vibrant cosmopolitan place it is today. So I really do think I saw my first African American on one of our family road trips south of the border. And I can only imagine Buicks when I think of this era, even though there is no rusting car out back. Not even an old road map, in fact. Although for young people today, navigating by one of those paper accordion-folded maps and not GPS would probably seem as ancient and inconceivable as a rare medieval one.

I do love old maps. I think they're beautiful. I admire the skill of their illustrators and engravers. I'm utterly mystified how they were made, at the plodding pace of human travel and without an eye in the sky. And I'm particularly in awe of the perseverance of the wilderness explorers who mapped this country, through interminable winters and black-fly season and down treacherous unmarked rivers into the unknown – unknown to the Europeans, that is.

I like the inversion that ends this poem. Historically, we in the west have patronized Africa: calling it the “dark continent” when really, it was simply we who were in the dark because of our ignorance. (Similar to “dark continent”, there is “the dark ages”: a period of history as dynamic as any other, no doubt, but which we have regarded as benighted simply because of our own lack of knowledge. And going back to Africa, one might also consider how the distortion of the standard mercator projection significantly under-represents that continent, making it appear relatively smaller than it should be.) So applying “dark continent” to America is both self-deprecating – a gentle swipe at my own ignorance as a young boy – and an ironic comment on the darkness of the civil rights era, and perhaps as well on the bourgeois sensibility and superficiality of middle America and tourist culture. (Terra incognita also has a certain resonance with terra nullius, the self-serving theory that the newly discovered lands of North America were unoccupied, and so free for the Europeans to claim as their own.)

Pebble

March 27 2018

There are consequences, no matter what.

Like concentric rings, rippling out

from the small rock

in the still water

you idly tossed that day.

But even when you kept on walking

and never bent

and never lobbed

inaction still has its effect;

like the lie of omission, the thing unsaid,

the best of intentions

that went unexpectedly wrong.

So either way

damned if you did, or did not.

Even in death

which you'd think would be the certain end

the world grinds relentlessly on,

secrets revealed, trust betrayed

memory corrupted, or lost.

Because events inexorably unfold.

Because we control so much less than we thought.

Except that time I paused

and watched the ripples decay.

Until the small pond

was at rest, again

and it appeared nothing had changed.

Just one more stone, set on the bottom,

smooth and small and grey.

And how many more would it take?

Water seeking its level.

The pond

eventually drained.

In a column in today's paper, something Niall Ferguson wrote really struck me. I thought every history teacher should start the first class by chalking this up on the board, and then leave it up there for the entire course: The only law of history is the law of unintended consequences. I thought about the truth of this, and what a humbling corrective it should be for all who confidently believe they should lead, and for those ideologues who pursue their beliefs with such intransigent conviction. I also thought how it applies not only to what we do, but to what we choose not to do. There are consequences to everything. Choosing inaction can be as consequential as blundering on. Or, to paraphrase the poem, you're damned if you do or you don't.

So I thought it would be interesting to play around with the theme of “unintended consequences”, and this poem is the result.

As I often do, I like to toy with cliche.

It's a challenge, locking yourself into a cliche while at the same time trying to be fresh and original.

It's kind of ironic and self-mocking, as well: the last thing a poet wants is to fall into platitudes and triteness. So intentionally jumping into the deep end is like a wink and a nudge between the reader and me.

And I like interrogating a cliche: taking a tired metaphor, and rendering it instead as something literal and concrete. Which at least wakes up the expression, making it at the same time more illuminating yet utterly silly.

Sweet Water

March 22 2018

Before the white froth of surf.

Before the green glass 
where the swells start to flatten
then bottom out.

Before the majestic procession of waves, glinting with sun

that roll metronomically shoreward

I can hear its dull roar.

And even further inland

where I first encountered the smell,

overwhelmed

by the sharp tang of brine

and mucous-coated life
and warm stagnant waste,

the fishy stink

and rotting weeds

and decomposing flesh.

The cool astringent air

heavy with fog.

And when my journey ends
at the rich inter-tidal,

teeming with shelled creatures scuttling

and soft burrowing worms,

probing birds

on bent pencil legs.

With algae, limpets, crabs.

With barnacled rocks

damp and knobbly,

tenacious plants, inured to salt,

their long bedraggled tendrils

a deep absorbent green.

Which is all too much for me

accustomed to this small land-locked lake.

Its thin water

fresh enough to drink.

Its shallow wash

over cleanly scoured stones.

The few solitary fish

slipping through the dark

of its cold still reaches.

How simple to comprehend,

how comforting

in its changelessness.

Nothing here

of the amniotic sea,

the churn of the shore,

the rich abundance

of subaquatic life.

Even the trees are marginal.

Spindly fir

and witchy black spruce,

small sheltering cedars

and struggling pines   —

the descendants

of once great whites.

Leggy aspen

in dense weedy patches,

and striking silver birch

that grow too slow to flourish.

Where I feel at home,

immersed

in its sweet water,

the earthy spice

of its sparse boreal woods,

its brisk northern air.

Far from the stench and mess and vastness

of the one great ocean

that spans the world;

the danger

its black surface conceals,

the desperate drama

of life and death

in silent bottomless depths.

This is the second time I've entitled a poem Sweet Water. (I note, too, that I've posted the first poem twice: apparently, an updated version as well as the original.) It just fits this poem too well to resist. The expression emphasizes the essential contrast that runs through the piece: the thinness of my small land-locked lake compared to the rich ocean and inter-tidal; between fresh-water and marine. Which could really all be simply contained in salt vs sweet.

This is something I've often considered: my aversion to salt-water swimming; my preference for freshwater lakes over open ocean. This probably says a lot about me: more comfortable with a simpler ecology, with smallness and stability, with less life and mess.

But what triggered this poem today was reading a piece in the latest New Yorker (March 26 2018) by Jill Lepore about Rachel Carson – the celebrated write of Silent Spring – and her earlier and more prolific writing about marine biology (The Right Way to Remember Rachel Carson). Lepore's opening paragraph was beautifully written: really, closer to poetry than prose, and something I must have re-read at least 3 times. Here it is:

The house, on an island in Maine, perches on a rock at the edge of the sea like the aerie of an eagle. Below the white-railed back porch, the sea-slick rock slopes down to a lumpy low tideland of eelgrass and bladder wrack, as slippery as a knot of snakes. Periwinkles cling to rocks; mussels pinch themselves together like purses. A gull lands on a shaggy-weeded rock, fluffs itself, and settles into a crouch, bracing against a fierce wind rushing across the water, while, up on the cliff, lichen-covered trees—spruce and fir and birch—sigh and creak like old men on a damp morning.

Frankly, I think her paragraph puts my poem to shame. But, of course, I'm writing about something different, and felt impelled to have a go at it not in the spirit of competition, but simply to say what I've been thinking about saying for awhile now. And at least my poem has given me an opportunity to share this lovely little paragraph.

Sense of Place

March 19 2018

They used to build

on the ruins of the old,

accreting layers

like a sea creature's shell

encrusted with age.

Impatiently striving

ever upward

no matter what had come before.

Yet beneath such busy lives

the past still dwelled;

scorned, perhaps

but at least preserved.

While we heedlessly raze it,

the debris carted away

the ground neutered.

Until all that are left

are soaring towers of steel and glass

anchored in bedrock,

untethered cities

floating on air.

No ancient tells, or tell-tale mounds of sand,

no carefully sifted layers

where further down

is further back.

In fact, no past to speak of.

So future archaeologists

will be starting from scratch

beginning with this benighted century.

A good metaphor, I think

to represent the discontinuous present

the breathless self-importance of now.

And to raise the question

have we become so forgetful

we are doomed to repeat our mistakes,

our humility lost

our sense of place?

And to wonder, when history ends

without murmur or trace,

    who will remember

        . . . who will remain?

When Seeing is Believing

March 17 2018

Dogs do not see red.

Their rich olfactory world, drenched in smell

is bloodless.

Ripe fruit

might as well be sour green

and hard as pith.

And this sunset, magenta-pink

never existed;

its brilliant light replaced

with a dull wash

of bluish-grey.

As I am blind

to infrared, ultraviolet,

my world thin

my view impoverished.

We think we see reality

as it is,

our eyes capturing light

our minds processing it.

Because how would you know what you've missed,

squinting

through a narrow aperture

at partial glimpses

and shifting shadows,

surface the eye cannot fathom.

A manic dash

after the bright orange ball

that will always incite her,

as if taunting the killer

who lives in her core.

Or what weak yellow light is left;

orange

bled of all its redness.

But she is infallible

in fierce pursuit;

following her nose,

digging it out

from deeply drifted snow.

Then triumphantly holds up her head,

eyes glowing

with the thrill of the hunt,

jubilant tail

a brownish blur.

I've often idly wondered why these balls come only in orange. True, it's bright and easy to find – for me. But to the colour-blind dogs who are chasing after, it's at best a dull yellow, the orange bled of its red.

I've wondered something similar, driving at night, following the red glow of the car in front. Does the brightness even register? Is there at least some kind of grey ...or are they totally invisible? The latter, I have to believe: with no receptors for red, these brake lights simply cease to exist, no matter how brightly they shine.

And tonight, admiring a beautiful sunset, the same thought came to me: do they see this part of the sky as utterly dark, absent all colour and light? ( ... Which is academic, of course, since not only are the dogs' noses glued to the ground, sniffing everything in sight, but they never look up at the sky or take an interest in what's overhead – ever.)

A typical human retina has 3 types of cones: red, green, blue. While butterflies, with their tiny insect brains, have either 5 or 6, depending on the species. And the mantis shrimp may have up to 16! So the world we see is not actually the world as it is. Our version of reality is incomplete, and our intuitive understanding that seeing is believing is mere conceit.

Just imagine: the ability to see various shades of ultraviolet, or to perceive magnetic fields, or to see further into the electromagnetic spectrum. An alarming thought, actually, considering how we are bathed in radiation from all our electronic devices and the WiFi that connects them; from satellites beaming their signals down to earth; from all the microwave transmissions that invisibly fill the air; and from the stray energy that leaks from hydro lines and appliances and who knows what. Perhaps better to remain blind after all!