Traverse
Page 4
LXI
Still a bard of backtalk—or “extremist” exuberance—
and Vice worked with gusto,
I look back, tonight, Canada Day, 2005,
thirty years after having begun,
in Halifax again, where I am right now,
with the Blessing who is my daughter, A.M.-C.
While fireworks light up the dark harbour,
I marvel at the P.E. Trudeau Fellowship Prize,
plus U. of T. tenure—or immunity from prosecution,
plus Health still holding (letting me hold onto Love),
and I gotta admit, I gotta say,
“It is good....
‘ I feel good.... ’*
Sorry for all my ill deeds.”
*Cf. Brown (1965).
CODA: 1 /12/13
Beauty for beauty....
—ANNA MINERVA HENDERSON
LXII
854 lines captured in one day:
61 “Rap Sonnets”* raptured in one day—
July 1, 2005—to laud July 1, 1975,
my esoteric assent to making.
All that water under Macdonald Bridge since,
and under Longfellow Bridge now,
must be anti-climactic or antediluvian.
On that long holiday of drafting,
I was serving my second marriage.
Last March, I got handed my third bachelorhood—
a timing that crosses this thirteenth collection:
Traverse.
(Jeez, just last week, it was still titled,
“Thirty Years [1975-2005].”)
*Rhapsodic sonnets.
LXIII
Thirty years it still is now,
since 1983 and the starter book.
Too black in heart, I’ve been smart at treachery
( Lechery), though my tax returns
aspire to Righteousness: Nothing less!
And I do weep for my wrongs:
If this will make anyone like me more,
I confess I’ve lost much since “Oh-5.”
I scribed “Thirty Years”—and 61 days later
my Dad was dead,
impossibly: I couldn’t imagine
he was no more, that no more
could I argue against him,
or say that I loved awful him awfully.
LXIV
Morphine-delirious, he’d hollered for me,
out his hospital bed, but I was gone,
far off to Finland (for the first time)
and next to Auld Scotland,
and so I landed in Canada to whiplashing alarms:
“Your father’s in the hospital.”
( Can’ t be! )
I dialed his Doc who popped me an opiate:
Hope. “You got time.” Nope: An hour later,
Bill Clarke, 70, was deceased.
I jetted, YYZ to YHZ, wet-faced irrefutably.
Called I Alexa McDonough, M.P.,
ex- Kindergarten teacher (mine), asked,
“Could you arrange a burial plot for W.L. Clarke?”
LXV
She did. He lies in Fairview Cemetery,
nigh the Titanic drowned
and Halifax Explosion crushed.
Flabbergasted were the gravediggers:
“An M.P. called and demanded
that we open a space.
We had to make one. The cemetery is closed.”
But there really is no space
to hold that man’s conversation.
In our last talks, he bashed the bankers (“bandits”),
and I mentioned I’d been to Dealey Plaza
and saw where Camelot came apart,
and how paltry is the site—
despite its majesty in mythology.
LXVI
His will was his Diary 1959:
“For George, so he will understand.”
May ’59: His paternity germinating,
I unfolded in ma mama’s womb.
But he was in love with a different woman,
and was loving different women—
a Zen praxis his motorcycle finessed—
from Halifax to Harlem to Hochelaga.
Also, his railway job let him “make tracks”—
to skip to Moncton once romances mouldered,
and put away the purple B.M.W. and pick up paints
and make good art and take good money.
But, once born, I was dying; so Grammy telegrammed,
“Come see your son before he’s dead.”
LXVII
If my lusts look “predatory,”
it’s hereditary,
right? “That’s no excuse,” say mad, sad mates.
No, but it’s an explanation,
though no Expiation,
to plead, “I am my father’s son.”
I cracked the Diary:
Drafting that unending novel, “The Motorcyclist,”
Bill’s psyche got transplanted right into my head.
My craft brought me then to drafty Rhodes—
orange-blossom, lemon-fragrant Rodos—
isle of colossal winds, rock-smacking seas—
lip-smacking ouzo, and a Nordic belle—
Sixties sun-goddess—not one iota platonic.
LXVIII
We plucked shells from blue surf by Durrell’s house.
Round back, mong the Muslim headstones,
she split part a eucalyptus pip
and bid me smell. Love fired up, pungent.
Her hair? Red flame. Her eyes? Mediterranean cerulean.
I couldn’t profess my feeling. Not then.
I oppressed myself, pressed myself to work:
Trudeau: Long March / Shining Path blazed
a way to now praise Bill Clarke, proletarian artist.
Whylah Falls got rendered in Mandarin,
thus acquiring Cathay cachet. Another title roared
out in Romanian, and brought me lira
non-negotiable, plus a bronze statuette
I winged home: Academy award.
LXIX
I should list here I & I, a verse-novel
as pulp-fiction, ballpointedly penned—
as a teen, pointedly, when I was criminally innocent of Art....
Illuminated Verses discloses ebon nudes—
women lookin sharp, or well-rounded,
thus disconcerting closet, Canuckistan Puritans.
Jon Paul Fiorentino felt his way through Blues and Bliss—
Selected Poems—to collect the Hoffer Prize.
2010: Whylah Falls came garbed in a Third Edition,
and Blue—and Black—each got a Second Edition.
April 2011: Red blushed onto newsstands.
That same spring, I exited the marital abode,
elected exile to the Upper, Upper Beaches,
and wrought a home with—at last—room for my child.
LXX
An Ivory Tower Black, I gotta ink, chalk up, essays:
So, Directions Home delineates Africadians.
But an overseas elderessa oversees Illicit Sonnets
(that The [London] Guardian approves—
as an apéritif to Ed Snowden’s heady confessions).
Venezia issued my verses in Montale’s tongue*,
and so I’ve enjoyed quaffin a lot of Punt e Mes.
Lasso the Wind: Aurélia’ s Verses and Other Poems
is fresh out, children’s lyrics crooned by a Harvard Prof
(just visiting), but also the Poet Laureate of Toronto
(appointed under a mayor admittedly prone to crack).
I’ll pause here: I pray for increase of Love—
and for flourishing Health and for nourishing Art.
But Ecclesiastes 12 owns the last word.
*Cf. Joseph Pivato, ed., Africadian Atlantic (2012).
COLOPHONIC
I think beauty should be circulated.
—REID KENNETH WHITE*
/> *Cf. John DeMont, “‘Scrummager’ shares sunshine,” The Chronicle-Herald (Halifax, N.S., 30/11/13.)
CROSSING (OVER)
Hero incognito? That’s Mr. C.P.Z.,
he of the “Pound-plain poems” whose edits
better other poets,
especially I. When—If—I score plaudits,
they’re echoes of his protocols in poetics,
the provisos of his verses, always best.
My ally and comrade now for thirty years,
Choucri Paul Zemokhol also advises poets
to treasure fonts—their tenor and tone.
Thus, I point out that Exile has typeset Traverse*
in Bodoni SvtyTwo, Constantia, Cochin and Trajan fonts,
and I thank the two Callaghans, Barry and son Michael,
for impressing this book, with requisite art.
Whatever here be maladroit betrays my hand.
*The work was writ in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 2005 and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2013. It was edited in Cambridge (MA), Zurich (Switzerland), and in Ottawa and Toronto (Ontario), with the stringent assistance of Mr. C.P.Z., who is, as usual, blameless for infelicities in style and/or inaccuracies in story. Cf. “The Revelationist Manifesto.”
George Elliott Clarke’s many honours include the Portia White Prize for Artistic Achievement (1998), Governor General’s Award for Poetry (2001), National Magazine Gold Medal for Poetry (2001), Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award (2004), Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellowship Prize (2005-2008), Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction (2006), Poesis Premiul (2006, Romania), Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry (2009), appointment to the Order of Nova Scotia (2006), appointment to the Order of Canada at the rank of Officer (2008), and eight honorary doctorates. He is a pioneering scholar of African-Canadian literature and is the E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto, having previously held posts at Duke University and McGill University. With poetry translated into books in Romania (2006), China (2006), and Italy (2012), Clarke was appointed a Visiting Professor at Harvard University (2013-14) and Poet Laureate of Toronto (2012-15).
Author photograph used with the permission of Camilia Linta