Wednesday Poems
Image: Embraced,
acrylic on wood panel, 8” x 8”
On Valentine’s Day, CBC broadcast a wonderful love story from
New Brunswick. My high school English teacher’s widow, at age
90 has found love again – and it all came about through a fabulous
seniors support program set up some time ago in the rural communities
that encompass her home at Murray Corner by the Northumberland Strait.
Here’s the story: well worth checking out! I decided to honour them with
one of my love poems, this one, Making Love, from Belonging (Sono Nis).
Making Love
Making love with you I feel
my body wrap around the earth ─
a warm cocoon, content long after
making love with you. I feel
at home with everyone all day,
cannot imagine indifference after
making love. With you, I feel
my body wrap around the earth.
This one is another triolet – a wee eight-line poem with two refrains, each appearing three times.
I often shake things up quite a bit in form poems, but here I kept the refrains intact, using changes
in punctuation to shift emphasis. Enjoy! (For more about this form, and more examples check it out
in In Fine Form: A Contemporary Look at Canadian Form Poetry and my Wednesday Poem #31.)
Image: Winter, acrylic on canvas, 24” x 24” (sold).
Well that second snowfall from last week stuck around for a while, and even now some shady trails and driveways are a bit icy. The other day, when I ventured out to bring in some wood, I heard a high-pitched gushing sound and worried that the neighbour’s pipes might have frozen and sprung a leak. But as I investigated, it turned out their pipes were fine (whew!); what I heard was an extended orchestral suite, compliments of the many juncos that hang out here. Which reminded me of a snowy spell back when we lived in Vancouver, when variious birds flocked to feast on the seeds we’d scattered for them. So today’s Wednesday Poem is Carnival Yard, from Cedar Cottage Suite (Leaf Press).
Carnival Yard
Thrushes back! Juncos!
Yard’s a-hoppin’ – towhees, too…
Winter carnival!
Whee! to winter! Yard-
hopping, too! Carnival’s back:
Thrushes. A junco.
Hoppin’ juncos, yard’s
a towhee carnival! Two
thrushes. Winter’s back.
Winter yard: Juncos,
thrushes, towhees hopping back
to a carnival.
Back yard towhees hush;
juncos stop hopping. Winter
carnival at rest.
This sequence is another one inspired by the form Brian Bartlett created, which combines haiku and anagram. For the anagram, I varied some words, but limited myself to using the same letters in each haiku (except for when I replaced the ‘g’ in hopping with an apostrophe).
Image: Leftovers, oil and cold wax on wood panel, 12” x 12” (sold)
Last weekend, Pender Island got its first snow of the season. It wasn’t much and didn’t last long, but we all braced for the worst, what with the forecasters being uncertain about just how much we’d be in for. As it happens, the second snowfall was larger, and is sticking around. Still, I was reminded of what I thought of as a west coast idiosyncrasy when I first moved from New Brunswick to British Columbia. Years later, I wrote a poem about it, so here, to kick off February’s Wednesday Poems, is Out of Season, from Bewildered Rituals (Polestar).
Out of Season
Beneath a street lamp, the soft chaos
of snowflakes falling, as they nudge themselves
between gusts of air like a picture
of someone breathing;
then driven straight against their inclination
into angled arrows, they are weapons
of a wind that comes up out of nowhere,
as if to ridicule
the stubborn faith of people here
in out-of-season rain gear.
I cannot acclimatize myself
to umbrellas in the snow,
a hopeless coastal habit of denial …
or, is it a kind of resistance to lingering winter,
and in my condescension of mere difference
have I missed their February sense of it:
that tomorrow will bring rain poking holes
in the feeble snow, for crocuses.
Image: In the Woods, oil and cold wax on canvas, 12” x12” (sold)
January here on Pender has given us unusually glorious weather – crisp sunny days, perfect for walking in the woods. We should be getting a big dose of our annual rainfall this month, but that’s not happening – which is a worry. But in the meantime, there is much to enjoy. All of which reminded me of my father’s love of nature and being in the woods. A sentiment he expressed beautifully near the end of his 1936 diary chronicling his first job away from home on a tramp freighter during the Great Depression. So, here is Land, from Waiting for the Albatross (Oolichan) – a collection of poems I crafted using segments from his diary. (For more about this book, check out my Books page)
Land
i.
A Bluenose type schooner sailed right by us this morning
and left us gaping.
Woke up and noticed we were lying off Cape Canso.
I could see land
outlined against the sky and three lights.
Gerry called me at 5.30 and told me there was land all along
the port side. I got up to have a look-see. Huge cliffs with a sheer
drop to the sea of at least 500 feet.
Quite thickly settled all along
the shores and a lot of the farms are still of small frontage but cut
straight back into the woods for several miles.
We passed Fame Pt. at 10 a.m. Fred and I were on the poop
watching a car speed along the highway; up and down hills, around
corners and finally out of sight
with the dust slowly settling behind him.
ii.
The smell of the woods is wonderful.
You begin to realize you are nearly home,
sighting Seal Island, Cape East, the Magdalens,
smelling the wonderful smell of the woods.
After supper, admired the scenery, how the hills
changed colour at dusk. I almost got the channels,
when I smelled the thickly forested shores
and began to realize we were nearly home.
To get the channels means to be excited and anxious to get ashore, especially after a long time at sea.
Image: Wild, acrylic on canvas, 20” x 16” (sold)
I was thinking that this Wednesday I might stay with last week’s ‘weeds in the city’ theme, when a nice surprise decided the matter for me. A few days ago I posted a sunset photo on Facebook, and poet Pam Galloway, who now lives in Manchester, commented on it, saying the sky she saw while driving the Sea to Sky highway was the same deep crimson. What? Sea to Sky? That’s not in Manchester! It turned out Pam was visiting family in BC, and although this time we weren’t able to see each other in person, we did get a chance to have a good long chat on the phone. And I remembered that, some years ago when Pam was visiting Pender, she bought one of my paintings, the one shown here – which pairs nicely, I think, with my poem Wild and Unwieldy from Cedar Cottage Suite (Leaf Press), a glosa on lines by English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Wild and Unwieldy
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
– Gerard Manley Hopkins (“Inversnaid”)
In ditches on fringes by boulevard and berm
where green on the verge of descent meets gurgle
and rush draining downward and down
flowering the flow of sorrel, dandelion,
buttercup tease, their runners and taproots inching
in from the edges until we take up trowel and digger,
dig deeply and deeper, up by the roots
what the world would be. Once bereft
of thistle and burr, the prickle and burn of
the unwanted other, we’d miss them, rush off
with digger in hand to redefine wildflowers –
from ditch and berm we’d fetch them,
bring back to our gardens and hearts in the concrete
wilderness what we long to control but can’t
though we cultivate and cull, shovel and shove. Let’s
let them be left. O let them be left,
the chickweed and clover, to decorate lots we’ll leave
open for them; give foxtail its place
in sidewalks and patios to fill in the cracks
nobody mends; let henbit and Joe-Pye splatter
our streets with their feisty palette, a summer bouquet
over aquifers of a past still trickling beneath our feet
as we peer through barricades of rain in a mindset
of wet. And wildness. Wildness and wet
just past the back door, another bountiful feast
in brambles. Punctured and drenched, we stand
purpled and bursting with the plump and the luscious …
There are harvests larger than we’re meant
to collect, like the wild and unwieldy thriving
in the midst of our densities to feed and protect
the feral and winged, their dens and their nests –
long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
P.K. Page describes the glosa as "... the opening quatrain written by another poet; followed by four ten-line stanzas, their concluding lines taken consecutively from the quatrain; their sixth and ninth lines rhyming with the borrowed tenth." (Hologram, A Book of Glosas, Brick Books). Here, I’ve altered the form a bit, using eight-line stanzas instead of ten. As Hopkins’ lines are rhymed couplets, I didn’t set out to adapt my stanzas to the glosa rhyme scheme – yet wound up with some stanzas rhyming at the end anyway.
Image: Untitled #2 (Chaos), acrylic on canvas, 10” x10”
Earlier this week, my friend, poet Barbara Pelman, posted a photo on Facebook showing downed trees and debris on a vacant lot across from her. Vacant, as she pointed out, unless you consider what had been there before: Garry Oaks, lilacs, fir trees, ferns, salal, daffodils… Barbara is heartsick about it, and this reminded me of how I felt early one morning years ago in Vancouver, when on my way to work I found myself standing in front of another lot, transformed overnight from a wild patch to stubble. It also brought to mind the all too frequent times here on Pender many of us have found ourselves grieving the loss of forested areas to clear cutting. So, today’s poem is Lament, from Suddenly, So Much (Exile), written after I walked past that lot in Vancouver.
Lament
Beyond a borderline of grass, and past
lilies of the valley huddled underneath the fallen
needles of the spruce and hemlock,
someone cut the brambles down.
Just yesterday, this space was air designed
for chaos, archways thick with leaves and warblers,
an untamed strip of land along a public path.
Perhaps some passerby complained
of wayward branches, thorns attacking ankles, or
an eyesore — saw weeds and wildness where
more properly a city lawn should front the trees.
The ground is stiff and stubbled now
and without song
starlings poke their beaks at broken branches.
The unrestrained has met the blade.
Today, November rain.
Image: Into the Wild, oil on canvas, 20” x16”
One thing I love about holidays is getting more time to curl up with good books. Every once in a while I come across one I know I will re-read, and that reminds me of others on my shelves that I’ve read more than once, and will no doubt revisit again. Just one of those is Mark Hume’s gorgeous River of the Angry Moon: Seasons on the Bella Coola (with Harvey Thommasen; Douglas & McIntyre) – one of several he’s written about the ecology of BC rivers from the perspective of a fly fisher/conservationist. His description of bears at rubbing trees inspired my poem, Footsteps, in Suddenly, So Much (Exile). It feels like a fitting poem for my first Wednesday post for the new year…
Footsteps
At rubbing trees and only at rubbing trees, bears walk in the paw prints of those who have gone before them. — Mark Hume (River of the Angry Moon)
How does anyone know whose steps to follow, where
anything, even your own footfall
alone, might lead?
Somewhere in the rain forest,
a quiet, like the moment after a raven laughs,
is falling.
A Douglas fir rises into the silence, exhales
the resin scent of a permanent wound — its ridged bark
worn away by bears
who approach this tree, step
by measured step, sink into a lineage of tracks
the long-since dead laid down,
observe the meticulous ritual,
then scratch their backs. A small thing prefaced with such
reverence, there is
a hint of wonder in this place,
a mysterious ursine way preserved in these huge prints,
as if the bears must honour
those who have gone before,
and choose to do so here instead of there, bowing
their great heads
in a humble dance. Then again,
I have seen two coyotes, north of here and snowbound,
traipse one ahead of the other,
shrugging their shoulders
at the cold as they snuffled white air for otters
near a fishing hole. Almost
without looking, the one behind
placed each paw precisely in the leader’s tracks.
Nothing
to it. Heel, toe. See?
This way.
Mark’s latest book is Reading the Water – Fly Fishing, Fatherhood And Finding Strength In Nature (Greystone), another beauty, full of moving insights about becoming a fly fisher and how that inspired his approach to fathering his daughters.
By the way, the book I just read, and am sure to re-read is Orbital (Grove) by Samantha Harvey. Meditative and philosophical, full of intriguing information told with countless deliciously original and exquisite sentences.
I'm taking a wee break from posting the Wednesday poems;
will start up again on January 8, 2025.
Thanks to everyone who follows these posts. It's fun to put
them together and even more fun to get your appreciative
feedback!
Image: Poetry Postcard with digitally manipulated heron photo
It’s that time of year, so no surprise, we got hit with another windstorm last weekend. Thankfully, for us, it was merely inconvenient, with a brief power outage. But those 90k gusts can be unnerving. I grew up with big winds off the Bay of Fundy and the Tantramar marshes. As a child, I found the winter winds that whistled and howled around the house at night kind of thrilling. Cozied under the puff in my bed, I felt safe and secure, knowing my parents would deal with any calamities that might come our way – and as it turned out, none did. Thinking about this reminded me of another time I felt protected in wind storms. We were living in Vancouver, I’d been on stress leave from my job and I realized it was past time for me to move on. The day I applied for a new position, one I very much wanted, a heron arrived to spend the night in the Douglas Firs behind our house. It was winter, a windy one, making me nervous in part because a few years earlier the top of one of those trees came crashing down in a storm, just missing our neighbour's garage. Anyway, that heron came and stayed every single night for three months, until the job I wanted was mine. And then it left. Which prompted the poem I’m posting today, Guardian, from Suddenly So Much (Exile Editions).
Guardian
Hope sways with the heron on a black bough
gone wild — the storm sleepless, trying
to pitch them from their nest into the night
like brittle wings clipped and dumped with the rest
of the dead, the broken and fallen crushing mauve
primrose and hyacinth; faith fading to darkness
as bleak as the back of the moon where nightmares menace
unfettered by a lucid dawn, gentle
breeze or daydream. Yet the heron on a black
bough gone wild in a wind storm, sleepless
throughout the night, faced with the rest of the dead,
the broken and fallen, the crushed primrose and hyacinth
at the edge of a bleak and moonless future filled
with a nightmare menace unfettered by dawn's lucid
tread, gentle breeze or daydream — regains
his precarious balance, holding on to hope.
This poem is roughly patterned after a passage in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, 16 lines in which Adam extols Eve’s beauty. The form he used was, as Edward LeComte says, “a figure of repetition known as epanadiplosis, or ‘the recapitulator’.” In essence, this is a series that starts and ends with the same word; there is a turn in the poem in which the negatives become positive (from John Milton Paradise Lost and Other Poems, (Mentor, 1981), pp 132-133, ftnote). Milton’s recapitulator can be found here: https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/content/paradise-lost-book-iv (scroll down to lines 641 – 656, starting and ending with the word "sweet").
Image: At the Door (acrylic on canvas, 24” x 18”)
I love going to live plays, and here on Pender Island, Solstice Theatre puts on a couple each year. This fall they mounted an Agatha Christie classic, And Then There Were None - but I missed it because of a bad cough I couldn’t shake. This was doubly disappointing to me, as I am a huge mystery fan. I hear the play was a smash hit, too. Ah well. To honour drama and mysteries, this week I’m posting “The Eleventh Situation” from my book Suddenly, So Much (Exile).
The Eleventh Situation
Gozzi maintained that there can be but thirty-six tragic situations. Schiller took great pains to find more, but he was unable to find even so many as Gozzi. — Goethe
Another enigma. You're drawn in again, tempted
again to convict the obvious suspect without question.
Except it doesn't work. The lover's alibi,
clearly designed to beguile anyone looking
into his whereabouts, holds up. You assume the problem
lies elsewhere, begin to search for a subliminal hint
lurking in the kitchen. Surely this is where such a hint
would take shape. Bare counters. Cold stove. You're tempted
by aromas, follow them outdoors where a minor problem
takes your mind off the all-important question.
A small voice you ignore tries to suggest you've overlooked
something. You're too busy sniffing two intricate alibis,
morning glory and roses, hopelessly intertwined. Alibi
four steps forward, obsessively dissembling, hints
she likes roses too. You lose track of what you were looking
for, wander back inside where you try tempting
the husband with incriminating questions.
His answers implicate the maid who was away. The problem
seems to be your inability to solve problems.
Stonewalled by everyone, even the most obtuse alibi
secure, you suspect you never knew how to question
suspects. In the corner of your eye a new hint
ducks in and out of the garage (perhaps you can tempt
the chauffeur with a trap) but the camera is looking
at the victim's sister watching the game and you're looking
at third strike for the third time. Face it, the problem
was out of control the minute you forgot that temptation
involves deceit. Was it really a perfect alibi
that led you astray? Did you imagine every hint?
You're not quite ready to question
your own motives — if you start that line of questioning
there'll be no end to it and you're out of time as it looks
like the end is near. At last an obscure hint
surfaces, explaining nuances until the problem
dissolves and the case is cracked with a broken alibi
(finally!). The small voice interrupts when the ads attempt
to tempt you with mattress sales and a barbecue hinting
at your hunger. It says the only problem worth looking
into is all you will buy without question.
This poem is a sestina, which features a specific pattern for repeating the last words of each six-line stanza. As Kate Braid and I explain in In Fine Form (Caitlin): “If the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 represent the end words in the first stanza, then the pattern for the end words in each of the next five stanzas (when compared with stanza 1) is: stanza 2: 6-1-5-2-4-3; stanza 3: 3-6-4-1-2-5; stanza 4: 5-3-2-6-1-4; stanza 5: 4-5-1-3-6-2; stanza 6: 2-4-6-5-3-1.” All six words also appear in the final short stanza, in the middle and at the end of each line, in the following pattern: 2-5 / 4-3 / 6-1
The eleventh situation is the enigma.