IV: Something Rich
In spring the grass grows long and thin,
reaching for the sun and driven by the gathering rain.
But would you believe that in autumn it's the thickest?
In autumn it prepares for winter
by sending out its runners
underneath the soil.
Now is the time to feed your lawn,
regrow the bald spots and brown patches.
Go to the garage and bring out all the tools,
the spades and sacks and trowels and buckets.
A hollow-tined fork will pull plugs from the soil.
Poke in some unused earth, or peat and sand,
and top it off with something rich.
A kind of madness smoulders underneath
the skin. In favelas and river forests, in
the desperate scars of deserts, worked-out
old men and women and children who never
had a flicker of our luck were spent before
their minds could inch beyond survival and
then topped off with something rich.
Let's be fair. When our foreign President addresses
Congress he genuinely believes the things
he says about the young American soldier
generous in triumph before the grovelling Iraqi.
And behind the young American's back the Iraqi
can see the power naked that the young American
knows clothed, the pornography of men larger than
any citizen, two bullies in conclave with
their cronies spinning thrills with resources
that movie men must envy.
This is a kind of madness, but no vision,
a cosmic laughter that should have been hysteria.
Our leaders give the illusion of
release that tightens all control.
Their speeches are a rope that feels
like hands, their reach is sure, their
laws secure, their minds have the tautness of
dry skin: a neck is snapped, a future severed,
a past is dead, and powerful men relax.
O PRAISE
that sweet terrorist who brightened all our lives a while
The great men execute our will
and we conspire.
Against all people.
V: Accounts
WW I
WW II
You must see the page to recognize how
these infectious Euorpeaniana have been
reduced to ciphers, entered
in a General Journal and posted to
who knows whose account, drained of
almost all their power to stimulate
with violence. We now need fresh
wars for TV and our newspapers. But
when I see on Bloor Street "37 flavours
of humanity" (vide Buffy Sainte Marie
in interview) I think that these were
merely boils in a process of
healing, suppurations of a 10
millenium disease of women yielding
to men who, unable to control their
own aggression, inculcated in
expendable youth the power and the
glory of power and glory. Occasionally,
heroes have come from
fellowship and love.
War and the war of power …
War and the war of power and money are not things that I readily understand, but they have such an effect on the world (a subtle effect, I think, the way gravity bends space) that I want to understand them. The best way to understand any process is by doing it, letting it shape your nature, and then hoping you can see what has happened. The action I have committed myself to is writing and especially to that peculiar form of discourse, poetry. I can't know what power and war and money are really like, but I can find analogues, and by the kind of induction that the hunter uses when he imitates his prey, I can try to make myself an avatar of these imponderable forces that clutch and twist us so intimately. And if I induce these states in language, the poems become more than statements:
They become the kind of heuristic
objects I studied long ago locked in
my adolescent bedroom, objects like
transistors, which repeatedly direct
forces that can be described
effectively but never precisely, in
ways that can be described
effectively but never precisely, and
yet it is done, each time
differently and yet enough the same
to be workable, like reading a poem.
There, you see! I know so little about anything but poetry that I am too easily distracted. I am old enough to remember the exalted rage felt over the crimes in Vietnam and we all know now how war has been scrubbed, but it's still the same old reprobate. Just now I heard Schwarzkopf comment on the Kurds, to the effect that any professional army can mop up a bunch of guerillas in the mountains (Sic transit memoria militum!). And the only reason that the third world entrepreneurs don't follow the big-time capitalists into the now-burgeoning arms trade is that they are as yet too small-time or are (vide the USSR) in disarray. We need a spiritual center, a true one, if we are to manage the appropriate moral decisions as a race. Personally, I am confident of my own, but I'm not an ideologue, a preacher, or a historian; I'm a poet, so I feel comfortable only in what follows.
I: 1967
Do you see the grey images shuddering,
shedding ghosts
on the television screen?
A silent wailing, a film without sound,
muffled by the cool words of the journalist
or the choked staccato rage of guns.
Can you see the men? No.
I can't even see the men,
only bushes, grass, a badly focussed longshot
quivering, scattered into small grey points of light.
Is this fear? No.
It's technical failure.
This is what our fear looks like to others.
II: 1991
Objectify. No cameraman tripping over
protuberant roots or having his foot
swallowed by the swilling sand will do.
Present the men in charge, men faithful
to the way things must be done, set square
on a proscenium, the MC's of a deep
technology. We'll see
no one die.
Objectify.
My grandmother had her own East
European way of celebrating Easter's
death and renewal. She would dye
the eggs by boiling them in onion skins.
We'd each grasp one in our fist with
one small round end bulging through the circle
of our forefinger and thumb, and a small
point peeping out below. We'd click them
sharply against each other with our fists
until one broke, and then we'd eat them.
I remember no thrill in the game, only
my grandmother's large, smiling teeth.
Objectify. Money is the corelative
of a reality very resistant to a
poet's mind but known well to
every animal whose food is not
provided and whose shelter is
vulnerable to stronger claws. Men
faithful to the way things must be
done understand that heads must
crack together and many must be
eaten in a wrenching death or poverty
if there's to be any renewal or wealth.
Beneath the waking mind that numbly
casts off moorings as it floats to
sleep lies the narratized incoherence
of our dreams which float on thick
darkness from which depth can arise
a terror so complete that like a
rocketeer sucked out of gravity
we leave behind our lungs as we
are hurled into a bone-dead
shriek.
Objectify.
Money and war are the goddesses
of this deep.
III: Tribute
Europe seemed to be a garden
compared with the savagery of this land.
The crocodile slides beneath the surface
and the monkeys scream above us in the trees.
the sun is bright and hot
and all the days are summer at its full.
The grass is straw,
the rivers run dry, and the fish lie gasping.
Birds can't find food,
the wild dog keeps to its lair,
and when it rains it rains in the city and floods.
I came to city to get some cash
I'm only a boy
I came to the city to get some cash
I found a whore and plenty of laughs
I'm only a boy
Down by the river where lilies sway
and lizards dart
my father plows the earth with a stick
and breaks his heart.
I came to city for a regular job
I'm only a boy
I came to the city for a regular job
and found that a knife draws more than blood
I'm only a boy
Down by the river where trees are thin
and the sun is hot
I heard the radio talk all day
about this spot.
The city's good to the guy who's tough
and knows what he needs
the city's good to the guy who's tough
and goes on taking when he's had enough
the city's good
Someday I'll be rich and fat
I'll live in the centre and have a big car
Boys will run and work for me
and I'll drive by the river where the lizards are.
IV: The Man With Bushy Eyebrows
Did Brezhnev brush them up to flair
in a fierce fur ridge from his eyes?
What evolutionary dust storm,
what effluvial fall would select
for such fat caterpillars on his face?
He kept doves in a cage which he
would rattle for a laugh and did
the same for Gorbachev, promoting him,
taunting him, and murdering his
mentor. Three centuries and more ago
while the French and English enmeshed
the Wyandot and Iroquois in their
violent hunger for fur, the Russians
over terrain at least as frigid, at
least as difficult, were doing the
same until the world was clutched
in a frozen hug where European
met European around the Bering Strait.
Brezhnev was the King of Winter, rich,
fat, and comfortable on the convenience
of a widespread terror. While it is
always startling to imagine an old man
young surely he learned in his youth
the sweet odour of corrupted power from
Stalin who had, in turn, his own long
lineage. We whites are only the most
recent avatars and not the only modern
practitioners of these arts and every day
we are reminded of the commonplace
inevitability of crime.
V: God as Poet
When I saw Jesus preach
the thousands seemed uncountable.
Using parables as thick as earth
and miracles alive as butterflies
he wowed the multitudes.
No one could be indifferent
though in the end apparently
he was easy enough to hate
if you believe the stories
widely circulated about certain
Jews which although I cannot confirm
what I didn't see, human nature
being what it is, I have no trouble
imagining are true and then
I think of all those Jews who
for half a century or more were
his only followers and then
I remember the two millenia
of Jew-hating down to the
bodies rolling in seething piles
before the bulldozers and it's
like two mirrors playing
an eternal tit for tat I hate you
until God's word is drowned or blind.
This, of course, in the world that God designed.
I: Cortege
When my mother was translated
into the unutterable language of death
the tongues of all the bells
sang out her morning.
The entire village rose as one
and donning the blackest grief
marched solemnly through
the rain and mud swilled streets
to our white church
for she was not ordinary.
II: Mother, Remember Me
Mother, remember me.
I am your son,
the one who was so close
before the passion died.
I was the one who broke you first in birth,
who sucked first at your breast,
the one for whom you first awoke
when he cried.
Mother, remember me.
Now it's all ice and glass
and smiles and conversation,
but you are my beginning
and then it was mental flame.
We're still alive. Why should there be an ending?
Why can't it be the same?
Have you forgotten
how you pressed me to your side
in the close warmth of your bed?
Have you forgotten
the intimate laughter
over things done between us
or things unsaid?
O my lover, my dear, forgive me!
I had forgotten
that children grow and parents too.
When ties are cut and memories are broken
we pay a ghostly tribute in what's spoken
to what we cannot do.
Mother, is there in you what there is in me?
I wear a mantle of sociability
but there is iron, molten iron
whirling at the core
and my heart quakes and cracks when I recall
how little we can love each other any more.
III: Snapshots
Pity the woman whose son appreciates suffering.
I still have photos of my mother, her head bent in despair.
I took them. Why couldn't I see
the pangs of human waste flickering there?
Fire can't seal the soul as surely as cold
can and my grandmother's hate was glacial,
implacable, numb.
To a child, a parent's parent must seem mythic.
From where else could such power laid over power come?
And I can feel the ripples of my mother's mother's cold
pulse through me like a radiation
corrupting and bursting cells.
My mother sits before us
nearly seventy and shivering on the edge of tears.
Her words are clear, as hard and clear as ice.
The spectrum of her life is focussed into white.
I hear the child demand with fierce reason,
how can a mother be so frozen,
storming and distant, season to season?
How can she allow an innocence to settle into fear?
and why am I before my son,
alone and old,
responsible,
abandoned here?
1975
I am a stump
that grows shoots in the woods.
Damp fungi grow in my sides.
I absorb the rain and sun
with equal indifference.
I am an apple tree.
When the water rises in the earth to touch
my roots, I will become all blossom,
too delicate for my stiff branches.
Who notices the beauty that's their own?
the things of lasting value
that they cast beside them
as they hasten towards their end?
I'm making apples.
I want to be a mushroom
and feel the warm feet of the chipmunks
press against me as they search
for the dead nuts fallen from the trees.
The sun is very far away.
1955
upon the lumber path there where is
that crack cut wood split old board
splintered into naked cream sharp
a blood-filled capillary of separation
thin as a paper cut and me still
clawing out of the dark caul of a
nightmare gurgling mummy mummy
mummy in phlegmy shrieks awaking
to my father's thick hand like fine bark
stroking me don't worry honey worry don't
cry please please don't cry and still
me snivelling mummy
1975
She entered the woods after the rain had stopped, following a steep abandoned lumber trail. The young birch and aspen were windows of shattered, shimmering light and the thick old trees were walls of darkness. The forest glistened, even in its darkest places. Water droplets trembled on the bushes, even when the leaves were still, and often fell. Among the last year's autumn leaves red trilliums drooped their heads and swayed slightly as the forest air crept over them from trunk to trunk, as if a child's finger were touching them. She longed to give them life.
1986
Invisible and painful as a paper cut, the
years collapsed from emptiness, and
my father a cancerous stick, the
lightest thing for Death to take, telling
me why we are alone, as though I need
to hear.
The wind is best just after rain,
bourgeois and washed,
often mistaken for a living thing.
My father's voice is the wind that flows
through branches; my mother's, the wind
that stopped.
1988
A single link, a child's familiar game, but I have never learned to separate each bar with its twisted shuffling loop from the other. The deep suction of the world that releases the spirit with a pop into the mathematical giddiness of chaos {3. [Math] Stochastic behaviour in a deterministic system} and I the reluctant bride longing to gobble in my body the great wetness of God.
How many degrees of freedom does this simple puzzle have? how many apparent constraints? The slender bars are as heedless and unyielding as the strict logic of a well-trained theorem. My mind is soft and fecund with the possibilities, a womb, or like the worm-rich loam of the rotting forest floor.
As I walked, I began to feel the warmth of the struggling eight AM sun, this time without my father, this time in silence. The moist crumbs of soil rimmed white with chill November slipped and crushed. Brown leaves slithered live against my soles to slide me under. The path was liquefying slowly to a mud that sucked my boots and patiently followed my rhythm in its own slick and slop.
The puzzle stayed cool metal between my cooling thumbs and fingers. I palmed the pieces, breathed the air still stiff with frost and let my mind float in the icy middle sky. I ceased to see and felt only the movement as I walked, only sound, the random chittering of birds and rodents, the soggy split of twigs lost in the humus, until I found a rock to sit on, granite with hard scabs of lichen, roundly irregular, like a diseased head.
I sat and, being still, felt again the insistent poke of the toy nuzzling in my hand. Once more I turned it, twisted and teased it again and again. How many degrees of freedom did I test until I found the right one? My hands slipped free, as though a soul had sighed. Quickly I linked them again, practicing to reach simplicity, practicing until my wrists and eyes knew what will always befuddle my divided brain, passing like a rich man through a narrow space to unlink and link again.