I never knew a dog the world conspired so much against:
the body of a hunting hound, his legs were as short as
a dachshund's, complicated by a case of rickets, leaving
his joints twisted, painful in the frost or damp. And yet,
they had once saved his life: hit by a car, he had been
short enough to shuffle under the bumper & so escaped the fate
of a larger dog. But even as a pup, in the tan, pig-looking
face captured in the photo that gave rise to his last name,
he seemed fully conscious that things would only get worse.
He was wasn't old, we had him only seven years, but the long
winters left him each year more worn out, turning grey-haired,
limping. Irritable, and now cared for by my brother,
he clawed my niece and my sister in-law had had enough.
At the vet's, walking to the pound, he turned
to my brother, knowing. Caged, Horton J. Pig Dog waited
as he always had, sitting on one buttock, a paw bent awkward,
his head erect.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Harbourfront Coureurs de Bois
The still water curls in concentric arcs
from my feathering paddle-tip, over
sun-clear, gravel-bottomed lengths.
City sounds and mallards feeding among gulls
drift through the receding swirls as I meander,
alert to wind-shift, blade and balance.
early 1980's
after paddling Omer Stringer's
12 foot birch back canoe
in the cement pond at Harbourfront,
Toronto
from Providence and the Itinerent
and Selected Works
from my feathering paddle-tip, over
sun-clear, gravel-bottomed lengths.
City sounds and mallards feeding among gulls
drift through the receding swirls as I meander,
alert to wind-shift, blade and balance.
early 1980's
after paddling Omer Stringer's
12 foot birch back canoe
in the cement pond at Harbourfront,
Toronto
from Providence and the Itinerent
and Selected Works
On Our Way to Disney World
She may have been eighty-five,
black, a bandanna holding gray curls back
and a print dress faded and
contoured down grandmother curves,
eating a grape;
not as you or I would eat them,
a cluster at a sitting:
she was leaning on her porch railing,
sucking a solitary grape held in her fingertips
like an egg in an egg cup,
her eyes on us, talking about the city
needing her street, taking her house
and there being nothing she could do about it;
that one grape still in her fingertips
five minutes later when we left, glancing back.
circa early 1980's
from Providence on the Itinerant
and Selected Works
black, a bandanna holding gray curls back
and a print dress faded and
contoured down grandmother curves,
eating a grape;
not as you or I would eat them,
a cluster at a sitting:
she was leaning on her porch railing,
sucking a solitary grape held in her fingertips
like an egg in an egg cup,
her eyes on us, talking about the city
needing her street, taking her house
and there being nothing she could do about it;
that one grape still in her fingertips
five minutes later when we left, glancing back.
circa early 1980's
from Providence on the Itinerant
and Selected Works
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Muse-urge
It is an ocean-bottom river:
currents of feeling-thought that converge
into articulations of erosion;
an elucidation of channels and flows,
a voice that forms and folds
as it sweeps across floors of seas
to the foundations of continental shelves:
the urge becomes resonant and dissonant,
encrusted with the washed and
run-off remains of the world above,
fertilized with soils;
it is an underwater cascade off the shelf;
memory-streams that fall
into submerged crater pools
from the heights above,
and from above the continental shallows,
beyond the atmosphere of wet
in which the urge to compose arose,
fall materials from the unrolling lands
of the air, from the realms of the enfolding sky,
earth clouds washed by torrents unleashed by
thunderheads; by light rains
that drift offshore:
weighted mysteries of mud and debris
that sink in swirls and roils
of dissolution downward;
and it is then that the uttering voice becomes
as substantial as sunlight that dissipates
mists into the shifting dapples and shadows of day,
the words speak an effect into motion,
they become as substantial as moon glow radiating
from the rim of the blackening deep
as dusk darkens the ocean
in which the urge
first appeared as current
from elsewhere, from
inside, within and
without, alternating,
ongoing.
currents of feeling-thought that converge
into articulations of erosion;
an elucidation of channels and flows,
a voice that forms and folds
as it sweeps across floors of seas
to the foundations of continental shelves:
the urge becomes resonant and dissonant,
encrusted with the washed and
run-off remains of the world above,
fertilized with soils;
it is an underwater cascade off the shelf;
memory-streams that fall
into submerged crater pools
from the heights above,
and from above the continental shallows,
beyond the atmosphere of wet
in which the urge to compose arose,
fall materials from the unrolling lands
of the air, from the realms of the enfolding sky,
earth clouds washed by torrents unleashed by
thunderheads; by light rains
that drift offshore:
weighted mysteries of mud and debris
that sink in swirls and roils
of dissolution downward;
and it is then that the uttering voice becomes
as substantial as sunlight that dissipates
mists into the shifting dapples and shadows of day,
the words speak an effect into motion,
they become as substantial as moon glow radiating
from the rim of the blackening deep
as dusk darkens the ocean
in which the urge
first appeared as current
from elsewhere, from
inside, within and
without, alternating,
ongoing.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Suddenly Maureen, Again
A photo on Facebook:
a face unseen in decades,
a name like an icon
clicks open to unexpected
emotions welling, suppressed
memories of forgotten feelings bubble up,
and yet, tagged with too few details, nothing
but overarching images remain: Rosedale rooms
and St. George Street dug from my oldest phone book,
two numbers, a time and two places I can't access
otherwise, a spring of experience distilled over decades
into streams of gladness and regret.
I don't remember how we met or why we parted,
except as possibilities I can't confirm without her to say
what is true and what is not: she's from a time in my life
I can't recall on my own - self-taught as I had become
from the age of ten on - to avoid thinking too deeply
about the patterns of self destruction that I had
taken over from my father.
My shields, like dividing walls,
still separate me from who I was back then.
Only now, days afterward,
because of the age of that phone book,
do I know that I knew her in my early mid-twenties
when I was little more than an adult housing a broken child.
That is why, when I came across her name online,
and then found her photo, buried complexities suddenly
fountained into sense - but not quite sensible - memory;
her smile became visceral, then became the sound of her voice,
her eyes became her laugh, her breathing near me was felt;
my heart remembered her as my mind raced to
understand there was someone I had loved deeply
and forgotten. I messaged her to reintroduce myself,
I received a return hello,
I followed her message - with
not just one - but two of my own;
both written as poles of previously
compartmentalized love and guilt
erupted together from my
no longer divided
subconsciousness.
The emotions were those
of the young me I am now lamenting:
the two notes the older I just wrote
were driven by my need to make sense of
what was happening to me, to apologize
for a past I couldn't remember in light of feelings
for someone I am only just remembering...
To her, they must have seemed like
missives from madness.
Her response came with morning,
the fragile link was blocked,
access denied,
contact severed.
Since then,
I have a sense
of an almost certain
phone call.
My last words to her,
however,
remain beyond recall,
her response
I still cannot hear.
The gist un-knots in my gut
as strands of sorrow and joy.
Only the long practice
of self-forgiveness
for that time
of fragmentation
allows me
peace
with myself
and this outcome.
For even though I had ended it,
I had cared for her in depths
I could not reach; and thus,
some of what was,
survives
beyond
Facebook
friendships
or email.
She is no longer forgotten
and I have a few
memories back
I never meant to lose.
a face unseen in decades,
a name like an icon
clicks open to unexpected
emotions welling, suppressed
memories of forgotten feelings bubble up,
and yet, tagged with too few details, nothing
but overarching images remain: Rosedale rooms
and St. George Street dug from my oldest phone book,
two numbers, a time and two places I can't access
otherwise, a spring of experience distilled over decades
into streams of gladness and regret.
I don't remember how we met or why we parted,
except as possibilities I can't confirm without her to say
what is true and what is not: she's from a time in my life
I can't recall on my own - self-taught as I had become
from the age of ten on - to avoid thinking too deeply
about the patterns of self destruction that I had
taken over from my father.
My shields, like dividing walls,
still separate me from who I was back then.
Only now, days afterward,
because of the age of that phone book,
do I know that I knew her in my early mid-twenties
when I was little more than an adult housing a broken child.
That is why, when I came across her name online,
and then found her photo, buried complexities suddenly
fountained into sense - but not quite sensible - memory;
her smile became visceral, then became the sound of her voice,
her eyes became her laugh, her breathing near me was felt;
my heart remembered her as my mind raced to
understand there was someone I had loved deeply
and forgotten. I messaged her to reintroduce myself,
I received a return hello,
I followed her message - with
not just one - but two of my own;
both written as poles of previously
compartmentalized love and guilt
erupted together from my
no longer divided
subconsciousness.
The emotions were those
of the young me I am now lamenting:
the two notes the older I just wrote
were driven by my need to make sense of
what was happening to me, to apologize
for a past I couldn't remember in light of feelings
for someone I am only just remembering...
To her, they must have seemed like
missives from madness.
Her response came with morning,
the fragile link was blocked,
access denied,
contact severed.
Since then,
I have a sense
of an almost certain
phone call.
My last words to her,
however,
remain beyond recall,
her response
I still cannot hear.
The gist un-knots in my gut
as strands of sorrow and joy.
Only the long practice
of self-forgiveness
for that time
of fragmentation
allows me
peace
with myself
and this outcome.
For even though I had ended it,
I had cared for her in depths
I could not reach; and thus,
some of what was,
survives
beyond
friendships
or email.
She is no longer forgotten
and I have a few
memories back
I never meant to lose.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
In Light of my Father
In the aftermath of my father's death before Christmas and
the memorial nearly two months later, I have begun to figure out
that there is a reconfiguration taking place in me, a realignment
of polarities.
The gravity well of his presence once defined
the positive and negative return posts in the ellipsis of my comings and
goings, the alternating currents of my personality and character
around which I would then make my many ways between the equally powerful
bi-polarities of my mother. She, still alive, like me and my brother and
sister have just begun to sense ourselves in his absence.
Dissociated,
because the resonance that came from him actually being here has been lost,
I cannot simply re-conceive him as memory or even spiritual presence, because
there is an absence now as real as he alive had been. What is left can be
traced by memory, or re-envisioned as eternal,but even then
the imagination has no cure for flesh and bones and blood reduced to ash.
Dad,
tangibly gone, however present he may still be, has left me searching for
him in spaces he once occupied, and in those places instead, I catch glimpses
of me as I was.
I disturb me.
I dissolve myself through ache, shades of my father's own darkness still
haunting corners of my psyche, like ghosts released as I disintegrate.
In the shadow of his death, they remain, lost children, ruins of selves, forgotten, freed now.
Left behind,
the broken me's are gathered up as my father becomes light, his shadow
only slowly no longer shading me from those lost selves, burning them into one, revealing me as I am, other, waiting to be born different into the circumstances and incoherencies I have lived with for so long.
the memorial nearly two months later, I have begun to figure out
that there is a reconfiguration taking place in me, a realignment
of polarities.
The gravity well of his presence once defined
the positive and negative return posts in the ellipsis of my comings and
goings, the alternating currents of my personality and character
around which I would then make my many ways between the equally powerful
bi-polarities of my mother. She, still alive, like me and my brother and
sister have just begun to sense ourselves in his absence.
Dissociated,
because the resonance that came from him actually being here has been lost,
I cannot simply re-conceive him as memory or even spiritual presence, because
there is an absence now as real as he alive had been. What is left can be
traced by memory, or re-envisioned as eternal,but even then
the imagination has no cure for flesh and bones and blood reduced to ash.
Dad,
tangibly gone, however present he may still be, has left me searching for
him in spaces he once occupied, and in those places instead, I catch glimpses
of me as I was.
I disturb me.
I dissolve myself through ache, shades of my father's own darkness still
haunting corners of my psyche, like ghosts released as I disintegrate.
In the shadow of his death, they remain, lost children, ruins of selves, forgotten, freed now.
Left behind,
the broken me's are gathered up as my father becomes light, his shadow
only slowly no longer shading me from those lost selves, burning them into one, revealing me as I am, other, waiting to be born different into the circumstances and incoherencies I have lived with for so long.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Making It
The car sputtered & steamed up Highway 5 from the Third Line towards Clappisons Corners at Highway 6, rising westward up the long side of the escarpment to crest above Hamilton, I said the diesel injectors were clogged but it could be something worse, threatening us with a stalled engine while a torn heater hose bled coolant over the motor & vapourized into miasmas that wafted through the dashboard heater vents as we climbed. I sustained the fuel pressure & the core temperature rise through the ball of my foot as shoe & pedal fought for continuum, while beside me you held your hands in your head and tried not to break down before the car: we held chaos at bay even as the upward nudges of the heat gauge verged on eruption & the fuel stream squeezed molecule by molecule between the gap sustained as forward motion while my will and your prayers crested that long slope under mounting pressure, our breaths held until we thought we'd failed on 6 in the northward drive when sputter & steam & fume came to a stop in Puslinch, where I stood in the dark night beneath the one light in the hamlet and coaxed the baked coolant scented car back into life & we made it home, only united in relief once we had parked in our spot behind the row-houses on Grange.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
