Blog - Wednesday Poems

Insomnia has been a fairly regular companion of mine lately, and it struck again earlier this week.  As I lay wide awake, I remembered going through spates of this when we lived in Vancouver, and how on one of those occasions I began composing a short sequence of poems – so I’ve chosen those for this Wednesday’s post.  The sequence is modelled after the form Brian Bartlett created for his poem, Shuffles, a combination of anagram and haiku features.  A couple of years ago, after artist Annie Smith taught me how to make accordion books, I put together a few, in a limited edition of 3 each (these are labour intensive!).  The only one still available is the last copy of the Midnight Relay accordion book (image above).

Midnight Relay

Run off their feet, wet
creatures munch to music.  Night
rains on little leaves.


            *


            Creatures munch rain,
            run off on little feet –
            leave their wet night to music.


            *


Feet run on, rain leaves
their music wet. Creatures munch off
little tonight.


            *


            Night run.  Two little
            creatures munch off leaves.  Rain on, music.
            Wet their feet.

      
                                                                                            - from Cedar Cottage Suite (Leaf Press)
 

The idea for the anagram side of things is to use the same words in each stanza, arranged differently each time, but here I tweaked this in various small ways. For example, I changed “to” to “two” in the last stanza and combined “to” and “night” into “tonight” in the third.  Kate Braid and I talk a bit more about Brian’s form for his Shuffles in the Lipogram chapter of In Fine Form: A Contemporary Look at Canadian Poetry (Caitlin Press).

Image: “After breakfast and for the rest of the day we were greasing the ventilators to make them easier to turn. Took them all off and scraped old grease off. Then we red leaded the inside of them. I had Tim take a picture of me inside cowl of one.” (Jack Shreve, Journal entry, April 29,1936.)

My friend Pam Galloway (a fine poet!) sent me a lovely note last week from her home in Manchester, England. She belongs to a poetry appreciation group, which she explained is “one of the offerings of the U3A which is ‘University of the Third Age’, a national organisation which brings people of retirement age together to share their talents and skills.”  Since they were to meet the day after Labour Day, their theme was work.  And Pam’s contribution to the discussion was one of the poems from my book, Waiting for the Albatross (Oolichan), a collection of poems I crafted using segments from the diary my father, Jack Shreve, wrote at age 21 while working on a tramp freighter during the Great Depression (for more about this book, check out my Books page).  So, with thanks to Pam for that honour, and to celebrate Labour Day (a few days after the fact), this week’s Wednesday Poem is On Hands and Knees.

On Hands and Knees

This life isn’t all it's cracked up to be –
painting with cement wash
on hands and knees;
red leading all day, then

more painting with cement wash.
Not an exceptionally hard job
to red lead the ventilators –
but dirty as hell.

Not an exceptionally hard job to soak rags
in “transmission grease”, either –
but dirty as hell,
oiling decks and steam pipes.

We soak rags in “transmission grease”
and apply with vigour
when oiling decks and steam pipes.
Chipped rust off the forepeak bulkhead

then with vigour
cleaned coal out of winches and
chipped more rust and paint in forepeak.
Filthy dirty, clothes and everything to-night.
 

Cleaned coal out of winches,
soogeed bridge and midship decks.
Filthy dirty, clothes and everything to-night.
Had a bath after supper, in a bucket!

Soogeed bridge and midship decks
on hands and knees;
had a bath after supper, in a bucket.
This life isn't all it's cracked up to be.

A couple of notes about terms used in this poem:  Cement wash is a cement mixture used to protect steel from salt water corrosion. Red lead is a paint compound containing lead tetroxide (which is highly toxic), that was used as a rust inhibitor on iron and steel.  Soogee is a cleaning product.

On Hands and Knees is a pantoum, one of my favourite poetic forms. As with most of the poems in this book, forms featuring refrains were my go-to approach, as I felt they worked well as a metaphor for the repetitive nature of life at sea. I particularly like the way the refrains in a pantoum cascade down through the stanzas with a kind of rocking motion. Here, I was a bit loose with the refrains, varying them when it suited the narrative of the poem.  The repetition pattern for a pantoum is: lines 2 and 4 of the first stanza become lines 1 and 3 of the next, and so on to the end, where lines 3 and 1 of the first stanza become lines 2 and 4 of the last, so the poem ends as it begins – but with that final line containing so much more than it did at the start. For more about this form, and other examples of how several other poets have approached it, see In Fine Form: A Contemporary Look at Canadian Form Poetry (Caitlin) which Kate Braid and I co-edited.

Image: Bowl of Fruit, 11” x 14”, acrylic on canvas

This week I received a copy of my Quebecois friend Lou Lemelin’s latest zine .  There are three so far, each a short pamphlet featuring her character Omalou’s poignant life stories, illustrated with her delightful line drawings. As she explained to me in her translation of the first one, “Omalou is my avatar; in real life, it’s my granny name; Oma is Granny in Dutch.”  The latest zine is called Omalou et Satan, and is “dedicated to all those who suffered, as children, the cruelty of religions. To all women who, even today, feel guilty, inadequate, unsure of themselves and doubt their value or the legitimacy of their choices.”  Like her first two zines, this one makes a powerful statement – no surprise coming from a woman with a long history of storytelling through decades of award-winning journalism and documentaries.

Her subject reminded me of my poem, Glassy Apples, which riffs off the biblical Eve as temptress tale, turning it upside down by empowering Eve and taking Satan out of the picture entirely, replacing him with an ordinary worm. 

Glassy Apples

            —after the painting by Mary Pratt

The truth is, the snake had nothing at all to do with it, in fact
was not even a serpent, but a worm poking his little head
out of an apple as Eve passed by

                                                      gathering food in the orchard
for her wedding and the green maggot wanted an invitation
to the feast. Being a woman,

                                              Eve knew all about
buffets, how a table should please the eye first, then the palate,
so she plucked only the finest fruit. Set aside

                                                                        one particular
red delicious, its skin as smooth as her own and Adam's youth,
sliced it open to expose the magic

                                                       pentacle centre, perfect
brown seeds in a bed white as sheets – for luck and long life as
each bit into half, sealing

                                        their marriage vows,
and all in the garden cheered, except the worm who cursed
the whole affair from afar, vowed

                                                     revenge, thought up
the story of forbidden fruit while he watched the guests gobble
what he wanted:

                          those gorgeous apples in glass bowls,
on that glass table top she put there on purpose to catch
the glimmer of sun

                               on his favourite fruit, placed in calm
repose upon a bed of reflections where tongues of light
licked skin, now burnished

                                          to a passion he'd never imagined
possible, and kept where he couldn't get at it. I'll make
them pay for this, he snickered,

                                                          gripping his pen
and, knowing a grub was too abhorrent to be believed
even in Paradise,

                             used snake as pseudonym, named
Eve temptress, Adam sinner, and invented a God
of vengeance; kept his eye

                                            on the glitter of envy and
avarice while he made up shame and never even noticed
at the bottom of it all, left of centre, his own

                                                                      small heart
bursting with unrequited love.

Glassy Apples is one of three ekphrastic poems I wrote after visiting Mary Pratt’s exhibition, The Substance of Light, at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1996 (see Wednesday Poem #9: Improvisation for another approach to the form).  A note to this poem in my book Suddenly, So Much (Exile Editions) explains the wedding vow reference: “At Gypsy weddings it was customary for the bride and groom to cut the apple, revealing its pentacle, and eat half apiece. Such marriage customs may suggest the real story behind Eve’s sharing an apple with her spouse.” – Barbara G Walker, The Women’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects, Harper & Rowe, 1988, p. 480).

Image:  Come Dance With Me (oil and cold wax on cradled panel, 16” x 16”)

Tonight, the Lantern Festival will once again take place at Vancouver’s Trout Lake Park. This festival started out as the Illuminares, organized by the Public Dreams Society in 1989. At the time, we lived just up from the park, and the festival was meant to be a local arts and culture event, a model for other city communities to take up in their neighbourhoods.  As it happened, the Trout Lake festival became such a big hit, everyone flocked to it rather than create the intended smaller events throughout the city. In just a few years it grew to attract thousands of people. 

We stopped going when it got so crowded you could hardly take in any of the acts.  But that first one – it was so very special.  A few hundred people from the area gathered to slowly walk around the lake, lanterns in hand, pausing often to enjoy a variety of performances. A choir of women singing in the huge willow tree by the swimming area; a musician playing jazz (saxophone, as I recall) on a raft in the middle of the lake; fire breathers and jugglers and more at other stops.  A highlight for me that year was two men dancing. It looked to me like they were performing some kind of martial art in tandem. Not as battle, but as beauty.  Which is what inspired me to write Dance (from my book, Bewildered Rituals, Polestar Press) – today’s Wednesday Poem.

Dance

This is how the body can move –
with grace and fortitude.
Remember them, two men
to the beat of one drum,
their gymnastic limbs swinging
over and under, around
in the soft night air of a park;
karate kicks just this far from skin
never come to blows;
hands open into air
slow motion, a precision pose –
anger transformed to the beautiful
in a dance.

In a dance,
anger transformed to the beautiful
slow motion, a precision pose –
hands open into air
never come to blows;
karate kicks just this far from skin
in the soft night air of a park,
over and under, around
their gymnastic limbs swinging
to the beat of one drum.
Remember them, two men
with grace and fortitude –
This is how the body can move.
 

A year or so after I watched these men dance, we visited Pender Island, where I picked up a chapbook that included a palindrome – a poetic form I’d not encountered before (see Wednesday Poem #10 for more about this). It struck me that this form might nicely embody the back and forth movement of the dance I saw during that first magical Illuminares festival.

Image:  Anything Is Possible (acrylic on canvas, 16” x 20”)

I love synchronicity.  Today’s Wednesday Poem is #17… and in a few days, on August 17^th, it will be Bill’s and my 45^th anniversary.  So, a love poem seems appropriate for this week.

Although tulips are not mentioned in the poem, I chose this image of abstracted tulips to pair with it, largely because of the title I gave the painting. It’s an early one, and one of the first I did that I felt succeeded.  I never imagined I would be able to paint, but just a couple of years after first picking up a brush, I managed this one.  So I called it Anything Is Possible.  In a way, that title suits this anniversary, too – because, all those years ago, when our friends heard we were getting married after being together for just five months, most said “it’ll never last”.  Well, here we are… and here, to honour love’s longevity, is my poem Touch, from my 1997 collection, Belonging (Sono Nis Press).

Touch

for Bill 

This morning’s sun lingers in our yard,
sheds gold on leaves –
eases up the stairway to our porch,
a casual presence

so like the lightness of your hand along my back
as you amble past me, out the door.
A filigree of touch, so delicate
I stand in stillness,

savour every subtle path your fingers traced,
their warmth of reassurance.
I bask in what we take for granted,
this absent-minded, second-nature care

blooms on and on like garden gloriosa,
saffron streaked with fire, their daisy faces
tilt imperceptibly to catch the sun’s caresses –

the way we turn to one another
with these small moments always in our hands.

Image:  Storm Warning is part of my Living With Cancer series.  I painted it after my first biopsy came back positive for breast cancer. (A later biopsy found the cancer was stage 4.)

Fifteen years ago today, I lost one of my closest friends to cancer.  Ann Sullivan and I met while working for our union, Local 2 of the Association of University and College Employees at Simon Fraser University.  Ann, her partner Arn, my husband and I spent a lot of time together over the years and it was through them that Bill and I  found our way to Pender Island.   A few months after Ann died, I lost another friend, Star Rosenthal - also a union pal - to cancer.  

I have been thinking of Ann and Star a lot lately.  How each handled her experience with cancer, and how being with them while they went through it has helped me, all these years later, deal with my own diagnosis.  So today's Wednesday Poem is Diagnosis, the one I wrote in their honour a couple of years after they died.  

Diagnosis

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes     

—e. e. cummings

What shall we say to Death
with Yes defeated by No
and only the winter of loving left
only the snow?                              

—Al Purdy (“Questions”)

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for leaf-mulch and garden-thaw
spiked with lily beginnings, for their wrap-
around skirts unfurling a fragrant sashay,
for bird-song surround in thrush-
colourful shade… While this sap-singing
uprising-everywhere spring rides in,
what shall we say to Death?

For the leaping greenly spirits of trees
are at it again, wind-waving away as gum-
booted slicker-dressed we yank weeds
plant spinach plant peas, hope for the best
from this golden-crowned sparrow-full
ground all bird-scratch and peck, knowing
even a well-tended garden is filled
with Yes defeated by No

and a blue-true dream of sky and everything
vivacious (o Flicker o Downy your drill-drumming
rat-a-tat-tatting all-day-denting metal
reminder: o sustenance o noise). When
after-bloom and wilt come along shock-
sudden with never we’re-ready-for-it news
we give in we protest until we have
only the winter of loving left –

which is natural which is infinite which is yes
to black-and-white dazzle, its every-
colour-under-the-sun-in-our-eyes shimmer;
yes to the unexpected in less, to first
flake-fall and last, to whatever is next yes
even thanks to the meantime of blizzard
and drift. Yes to what is, after all
only snow.

Diagnosis belongs to the glosa family, a form popularised in Canada after P.K. Page published her collection of glosas, Hologram (Brick Books), in 1994.  The traditional form borrows four consecutive lines from another poet, then uses them, in the same order, as the last line of four ten-line stanzas.  The lines are ten syllables each and lines six, nine and ten rhyme.

My poem is a double glosa, which means I chose to borrow two sets of four lines from two different poets.  The lines from e. e. cummings are the first line of each of my stanzas and those from Al Purdy are the last.  I decided to make the stanzas eight lines instead of ten, and as is often the case, I ignored the rhyme scheme and sylllable count.

Kate Braid and I discuss the glosa in more detail, along with poems that follow the form closely as well as poems that vary it, in In Fine Form, A Contemporary Look at Canadian Form Poetry (Caitlin Press).

Above: Varied Thrush, manipulated digital photograph

Summertime is festival season all across the province, and that includes Pender Island.
Last weekend I had a table at Art in the Orchard, a fabulous one day event that showcases
a wide variety of artists and musicians.  And this coming weekend, Ptarmigan Arts’ annual
Mosaic Festival, featuring musicians, artisans and more, will move from its former Hope Bay
location to the Pines Forest behind the community hall. 

All this music and orchards and woodlands brought to mind my poem, Love
Song of the Varied Thrush, first published in my chapbook, Level Crossing (Alfred Gustav Press).

Love Song of the Varied Thrush

The thrushes are singing again. Sharps and flats
rise from the firs, then subside – as if the trees were filled
with minstrels tuning their instruments.
                                                                  Once a year,

the varied thrush brings back its woodland chant
pitched to unravel a world of heart-broken laments.

Incantations roam the woods, like lovers lost in a maze
of sharps and flats, rising
                                             and subsiding
with the firs waving their batons to the music.

This poem is a disguised triolet. Traditionally, a triolet features a rhyme and metre pattern,
but as usual, I largely disregarded those. The eight-line form also calls for two refrains:
lines 1, 4 and 7 are one; lines 2 and 8 are the other.  Here, the two short drop lines can be
considered part of lines 3 and 7 for the purposes of locating the refrains.  Though, visually,
they suggest a 10-line poem, which, along with the radically altered refrains, is part of the disguise.

For more about triolets, Kate Braid and I discuss them, with examples, in the Rondeau Family
chapter of In Fine Form, A Contemporary Look at Canadian Form Poetry (Caitlin Press).

Above: Elder, 7" x 5", framed archival digital photograph (sold); 

For quite some time now, friends and I have been bemoaning the state of our memories.  This past week has been another one of forgetfulness for me, topped off a few days ago by missing an important film I wanted to see.  We all know this is a normal part of the aging process, though we can't help but worry just a bit about dementia.  For most of us happily, so far, dementia is not the issue.  Thinking about this reminded me that one of the poems in my "Tai Chi Variations" sequence is on point.  So today, I'm posting "Needle at Sea Bottom" from my book Suddenly, So Much (Exile Editions) (more about this sequence follows the poem).  

Below: Gone to Seed, 6" x 4" digital a photograph - one I sell as a birthday card - but only for folks with a sense of humour! 

Needle at Sea Bottom

In middle-age you begin 
to forget little things, lose them
like dropped stitches.  Just yesterday,
even the needle disappeared into the depths
where the misplaced wait 

to be retrieved.  Now you stroke the air 
as if you are crawling through water,
but the movement becomes a dive deep enough 
to touch bottom.

All the way down you peer into green
light, caress memories you have long wanted
back, gather them into your arms
until it is time to breathe again
and resurface, buoyantly
empty-handed

I began the Wednesday Poems blog last April with another poem from this sequence.  What I didn't mention then was how these poems came to be.  It was 1997, my third book had just been published and I was in that common but always disturbing space of wondering if I would ever again have anything to write about.  At the time I was in a wonderful group of women artists and writers (Sex, Death and Madness ). When I mentioned how I was feeling, Claire Kujundzic suggested I look for something new and different to do, something that would take my mind off worrying about what might come next for my writing.  It was the perfect suggestion.  I decided to follow in the footsteps of my mother and one of my closest friends, both of whom practiced and taught Tai Chi. I found a class at my local community centre and started in, with zero intention of writing poetry about it. I just wanted a new experience, a practice that would be good for body and soul.  But the minute our instructor began naming the poses, the writer in me was off and running. The names themselves were poetry:  which meant each week I came home after class inspired. And there began a wonderful cycle of learning Tai Chi movements, discovering their beautiful names, then spending the following days crafting the poems those names called up.

Above: Detail of reflected cattails and reeds taken in 2016 from the walkway in the Sackville Waterfowl Park, alongside the old railway bed that now forms part of the Trans Canada Trail.  Below: A small stretch of the railway where I played as a child – photo taken in 1980, before the rails were removed.

The other evening, friends were reminiscing over dinner about our childhood antics.  A few of us described a summer ritual of putting pennies on railroad tracks to see what shape they would take after the train ran them over. Then as I perused my Facebook feed the next morning, up popped a photo of wild strawberry jam, posted by a close friend of my sister's. That picture brought back memories of growing up in the Maritimes and especially the glorious scent of those berries filling the air as my sister and I picked them for our mother, who also turned them into a delicious jam.

These two events reminded me of what I think of as my quintessential summer /nostalgia poem.  It seems fitting to make this one of my July Wednesday Poems, so below is Wild Strawberries, from my book Belonging (Sono Nis Press). Though written in the third person, the ‘she’ in the poem is very much me.  Also, I should note that when I wrote it, I was experimenting with letting line breaks take the place of punctuation, following on something I’d read by Al Purdy about superfluous periods and commas etc.  Looking back, I’m not so sure the experiment was useful, and am always tempted to add punctuation at the ends of those lines.  But for now I’ll leave the poem as I wrote it. Oh – and a geographical note for those unfamiliar with the Maritimes:  The Tantramar marshes are on the Chignecto Isthmus around the Bay of Fundy, and are part of the traditional territories of the Mi’kmaq First Nations; the Northumberland Strait is the body of water between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia on the one side and Prince Edward Island on the other.

Wild Strawberries

On this July morning, the Fundy breeze makes waves
on its distant bay
sends gusts like messengers to the marsh
where a young girl stands
still and silent, only her wild hair flying

These are the days when freight trains still speed
across the Tantramar to Cape Tormentine
She rolls the word, terminus, in her mouth
imagines the end of the line, the engine and every boxcar
rising into the sky, their bulk a weightless chain
with the will to glide high and soundless as clouds
above the blue Northumberland tides
Then come to ground at the edge of the Island
ease their wheels back onto beginnings
wherever the rails wait

the way she waits, now
for the rhythm of elsewhere
the click-clack of dreams
and for the call to Come Alo-o-ng, Come Alo-o-ng
an impossible song on a soft wind
that cups her face like the comfort
of her mother’s hands
on this hot day

The girl kneels, knows to put
her weight down slow on the stones
nudge out a blunt nest for her knees
She places her hand on the rail, feels only heat
no shudder
Leans low to listen, ear to steel
her brown eyes wide, watching, just to be safe

She adores the smell of rust and tar and it is
best this close to the track
but on this day the air is also sweet
her nose tingles with the idea of sliced strawberries
She lifts her head
centres her penny on the rail

sniffs at the air, transformed to her rabbit self
leaps across the tracks as if startled
though her flight follows a geography
of other summers, the knowledge of red, ripe
and speckled with the seeds of sunlight

The train rumbles toward her now
its destination west and one day she will follow
see the rest of the world for herself
but this is her place, already she is certain
she will return

What she cannot imagine is a future
when the last caboose will fade into the distance
forever, the rails here lifted from their beds
stacked and abandoned on some vacant lot
herself long gone

She picks up a penny, a good one today
heads home with the promise
of a new shape of copper shining in her hand
the shout of wild strawberries on her tongue

Image:  Things Fall Apart, 36" x 36", oil and cold wax on cradled wood panel.

Today, instead of posting one of my own poems, I thought I’d post a classic: The Second Coming, by W. B. Yeats, which in large part inspired the above painting.

For the past decade, this poem has haunted me.  History, it seems, is repeating itself, too often featuring the worst of human failings.  When Russia invaded Ukraine, I was experimenting with oil and cold wax on a large cradled wood panel. As I laid down layer after layer of disparate shapes tumbling through space, a line from that poem, “things fall apart, the centre cannot hold,” kept coming to mind. I soon realized I was painting the first phrase of that line. I still hope the second phrase might not come to pass, though since then the world seems to be slipping further into the abyss, with yet more unconscionable wars raging, a worsening climate crisis and the rise of the far right (though happily, the recent British and French elections held the latter at bay, at least for now).

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   
The darkness drops again; but now I know   
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
 

- William Butler Yeats, 1920