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.) 

Pseudacris Crucifer

May 24 2019

The peepers

must have some long taxonomic name

that would make me sound learned

but would convey nothing of the sound

that inaugurates spring

as reliably

as trails turning to mud

the smell of earth.

The mating urge of males

that even pools of ice-cold water

cannot suppress.

Who somehow survived winter,

and in their tiny frog minds

grasp the need to procreate,

the imperative

that animates nature

with its drive

desire

haste.

Despite the precarious weather

that can see-saw overnight

from freeze to thaw and back.

Such a loud piercing call

from so small a creature.

Who fall silent

as the dogs and I approach

resume as we pass,

uncannily alert

in their hidden amphibious world.

I have never seen a peeper

know no one who has.

But their chorus fills the nights

and seems to shout

longing

toughness

rebirth.

The promise of spring,

when a young man feels his blood

and wants to make some noise

and goes searching for love;

or at least something 
that feels close enough.

In a few weeks, we will hear just the single peep

of the the pond's last inhabitant,

who couldn't hit the high notes

or sang too soft

or was awkward with the girls.

A lonely bachelor frog,

singing out another spring

like every spring before.

Somewhere Not Here

May 22 2019

It is strawberry season

somewhere not here,

because it is always spring

somewhere in the world.

So the supermarket shelves

are spilling over

with luscious red fruit,

tiers of clear plastic clamshells

like some neat cornucopia

of only one sort.

Looking forbidden

libidinous

ripe.

And filling the aisles

with an intoxicating smell

that draws us in like fruit flies,

that cloying scent

with its elusive notes

of rain-rinsed freshness.

The boom and bust of fruit;

a glut of cheap strawberries

that look like they're on steroids,

as red as sex

and ornamented

with crowns of bright green leaves.

Primary colours

that shock the eye.

They grow wild, here

in clement patches

in sheltered scrub

in our short intense summer,

that one fecund month

of long hot days.

A place we keep to ourselves;

like a precious secret

among intimate friends.

A modest fruit

that rarely fully ripens

before forest creatures strip them clean.

While supermarket fruit

is almost obscene

in its excess;

so succulent, voluptuous

luridly red,

turgid

with sweet and sticky juice.

And the cardboard taste

that disappoints

beneath the gloss.

As will most of our desires.

The seductive promise

of the things we chased

we learn too late

was false.

I sat down to write a poem about religion, and the human impulse for surrender, security, belonging: the comfort of fatalism, the delusion of certainty, the longing for community that religion can fill. How we seek this out. And how even I, with my skepticism, Vulcan rationality, and preference for solitude am also susceptible. But I wasn't really comfortable with this: too philosophical to do justice in poetry, and probably too confessional for my comfort if I was to write the way I wanted, which is to be both personal and particular.

So inspiration came instead from a quick glance at the small plate beside me, as I sat with pen in hand, nibbling on strawberries: an unseasonably cold wet day, toward the end of May, when the last sheltered remnant of snow still persisted in the shade of a row of cedars. How odd, then, to find the supermarket shelves suddenly overflowing with this delicate fruit, and at such unreasonably low prices. It struck me how out of season this seemed. And then how immaterial seasonality has become, in a globalized society of industrial agriculture.

So I wrote this poem instead. Poems always work better, it seems, the smaller they are. How much better to focus in a single piece of fruit than on the great existential and metaphysical conundrums that can never really be solved, and hurt your head to think about.

(The fruit, btw, was both organic and delicious. I would recommend never buying the non-organic type, because strawberries in particular require heavy doses of pesticides and herbicides. And, as the poem says, they almost always have no taste or texture; even the beautifully red ones can be cardboard. I should also note that a recent New Yorker had a fascinating piece about the stoop labour involved in harvesting strawberries, as well as the search for a machine that can replace this shrinking work force. Here's a link:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/15/the-age-of-robot-farmers )

Never Content to Rest

May 26 2019

For those who think about death,

and wonder

if there is a bus, picking up speed

and heading in our direction

and how, for us, it will end

there are never certain answers.

My old friend

who recently died

was 72 years young.

I try not

to contemplate his final moments,

pinned against a rock

in a rushing torrent

on a cold spring day.

But who else, at such an age

would be running rapids,

like a kid

in a colourful boat

of smoothly sculpted plastic

that looks like it's in motion

even when still?

And he, too, a man in motion

who was never content to rest.

While I will die in bed, I imagine,

fearful, frail, old;

the act of dying

so much worse than death.

I once rescued him

in the same river

when we both were young.

But have let myself go, while he did not,

doing something he loved

until that unstoppable bus

lined him squarely up

and in the intersection of time and place and fate

held him under the waves

beneath a muffled roar.

Then carried him downstream

to the final destination

even the poets and preachers and healers

cannot explain.

So in the place of answers

offer consolation.

And in the simple act

of our communal presence

commemorate a life.

The picture is a stock photo, but it reminds me of our days on the rivers, doing what we called “play-boating”, and what is often called “rodeo” in competitive white-water sport.

I wrote this just prior to a small gathering of friends and acquaintances who came together to reminisce. In the end, I missed this get-together, and so perhaps failed to honour, in a personal sense, the simple act ...of presence. But the concept still stands: we seek community in mourning; we recognize death in formal ritual as well as simple togetherness.

The poem may seem unduly solipsistic in the way it dwells on my personal angst. But I felt it necessary to write with the intimacy of the first person; and I think, in these circumstances, we all can't help but reflect on our own mortality, as well as how we are doing at life. The title, though, was all Robin: a doer and adventurer; a deep thinker; a restless spirit.

Here is Robin Sare's obituary, as it appeared in the Thunder Bay Chronicle Journal. (He was christened “Robert”, but his friends all knew him as “Robin”.)

At 72 Robin did not have time for getting old - Peter Pan with a dental practice. He could debate healthcare reform, discuss ancient Persian politics, ski the glades and beat his 30 year-old nephew in a sprint down the beach. Our beloved Robin died May 18, 2019 while living the life he loved - at full speed. Growing up in Montreal, Guelph and Lac Ouimet, Robin was especially adventurous, always leading with true purpose, a song at the ready, or reciting a poem. As a young man, his days were filled with sock-hops and malts, a summer spent lifeguarding at the Banff Springs Hotel scavenging leftover lobster to afford rides by horseback through the Alberta wilderness. He put everything into fuelling his adventures - writing home for money because he had saved none; having second or third helpings from friends on camping trips because he believed in travelling light. After university in Toronto, he began his dental career with C.U.S.O in Uganda until forced to leave by the politics of the region. He was drawn to Thunder Bay by its rugged wilderness and vibrant culture. There he married, raised a family and immersed himself in local activities. His life was one of searching - for everything: truth, the meaning of life and how much of it could be experienced. Old man of the river, he outlasted generations of his paddling partners and still kept a characteristic spring in his step. Together, and over decades, they constantly defied the river's grasp, with heroics to the end. The bravery and endurance of his last paddling partner and the recovery team cannot be overstated and will always be remembered. A celebration of Robin's life is planned with his loving family on Tuesday, May 28th in the Valhalla ballroom from 11 a.m. until 2 p.m. with words of tribute beginning at 12 p.m. In lieu of flowers or donations in Robin's memory, please help out someone in need.

He is the moss on the hills, the rushing water, the loon's cry echoing in the bay. He will be with us always.