Wednesday Poems

Image: Twist and Shout, oil and cold wax on panel, 20” x 20”
            (design based on ice patterns on a pond)

The Four Nations Hockey Tournament ended last Friday with one of the best games ever.
Not just because Canada won, not just because we’re all feeling very Canada-proud these days,
making the win that much sweeter, but because it was good hockey.  Really good hockey.
The kind I love to watch – great skills on display, fast end to end skating, crisp clean passes,
few penalties, amazing goal tending …  How I wish the NHL would get back to that kind of play –
I’d watch again, if they did.  Anyway, a poem that features skating seems in order for this week,
so here is Surfaces, from Bewildered Rituals (Polestar).

Surfaces

The hollow scrape of blades
moves skaters through crisp air,
this cold, a particular winter
of toques and scarves and gloves
as superfluous as buttons.
Jackets flap in the wind
of our movements.

So many trajectories,
a community singing on ice
the lake almost large enough, people make space ─
pucks and sticks
pause for these wobbly legs to pass
and no one points to laugh.
The only borders here
are where lifeguards hack at the ice,
check for thickness and rope off
spots too thin for safety.

We slide or glide or stumble
away from treacherous areas
into indiscriminate welcomes
to all who venture onto the lake,
this surface beneath our feet
the only skin of concern.

In the centre of a city,
echoes of unhurried sound
take me back to the Tantramar ─
redwings in the rushes,
their harmonica call a microcosm
of what I miss.

What is it about place that seeps
into your soul
mindless of miles, however far you move ─
plays out the string and holds you,
tempts a false nostalgia.

I catch myself believing
this momentary release from rancour
holds the possibility of a city
reclining into country life, as if back home
there was never anything like a frozen pond
abandoned to power, boys
claiming ownership of the top, slap shots
tripping girls' attempts at circles ...

At some point every conversation
comments on the relief
of outdoor skating:  no one dictating
now to the right, the left,
backward only, just couples,
muzac piping out the pace.

Our music is disparate voices
mingled with the language of blackbirds
ducks and crows, our patterns as random
and predictable as their flight.
Wings slant and turn snug in the sky,
feet sculpt curves and crossroads into ice.

Such a freeze is rare here ─ the need
to get to the middle, irresistible
just to see what it's like to look
at the path from the lake for a change.

Searching for perspective, almost everyone
explores the iced-in cat tails and reeds
where the heron hunts when it's water
where we turn from relics of summer
locked in the frozen surface:
styrofoam, cellophane, plastic trash,
lost tennis balls and toys.

We look without seeing
how fragile our smiles
when it's youths who feel free
to nod to the aged,
whites to the black or the brown,
then skate or stroll away
from subtle assumptions behind
who welcomes whom

We sing in the same
clutches and gaggles as ever,
leaving implications, like our litter
for someone else to face.

Written sometime around 1990 when Trout Lake in East Vancouver
froze enough for us to lace up our skates and get out on the ice for a few days.