by Howard White
Refuse the ending. Tipping the A-frame: water, weeds, fishes, silt—redirect
heaven & Raphael’s swinging feet—
Thoughts crawl through the gables, squirrels scratch my wasp-infested skin, everything itches. Barn boards swarm with swallows, old souls, still—longing for voice: alphabet, omega, words might speak to the woman in the portrait, converse with these shadows; whose hand rises, falls, burns this green stick?
Winter, spring, day, night; the marten scratches at the window. Dog & I asleep in the cottage, in the A-frame on Roblin Lake—this seasonless season; Al smokes a cigar & the war seems endless—
Lynn Tait
Challenging the Law of Superimposition
and I am angry remembering
remembering the song of flesh
to flesh and bone to bone
the loss is better
—Al Purdy, “Listening to Myself”
I had no poem to write, nothing to offer,
though buried speechless in the same landscape
brought me closer to him.
In his place, my space, the land speaks—
childhood memories ingrained with visual clues.
After a 20-year absence, I walk through woods behind my house,
find my secret hideaways, the quarry, even the raspberry patch;
everything as I left it, only taller,
and I am angry remembering.
Too young. Too young
to travel, what seemed great distances alone.
Family car rides weaving through back-roads—Hastings,
Prince Edward County—it was all the same to me.
I was the Canadian Shield—a geological landmark that did not belong,
leaving chatter marks in places that should not exist,
a fossil even then, and when I reach his grave site,
we enter a convergent boundary—two landmasses
remembering the song of flesh,
the lyric leaching out,
purple milk under my skin,
creeping towards each other
like his blue heron shifts along thin rivers,
closer and closer, flesh
to flesh and bone to bone.
Reading his poems now, swear I was by his side—
know his nurse log, have seen the golden apples
abandoned and white capped.
And though hear his Nature’s sighs and calls
and think of death often,
prefer to remember him hung over,
slugging back coffee in downtown Trenton,
rather than a renewable resource.
The loss is better.
Purdy Country Literary Festival, 2009
Steven Heighton
Maps of the Top of the World
New moon—a starveling
curled on blue earth and quickly
swallowed by snowdrift clouds—
Late in The Lure of the Labrador Wild
the solemn falling of snow in the firwood, the
famine-wood, and before long sly, soft winds,
till drifts oversift the tomb of the tent
like an A-frame in a snowbelt storm
—and inside that canvas husk
a smaller husk now exempt from struggle, the ardent
anomalies of consciousness, animal heat
and shunted blood. Sink now sleep a fugue
of crackling maps, wistful misnamings echoing
in talus-grey defiles—
Providence Point
Cape Homer
Homeward Cove—
of firepits
once more warmly
antlered with flame.
The explorer’s dream
is just the yearning of doomed
molecules for eternity, ancient urge
to impregnate barrens with menhirs,
cairns and runes, with
ruins,
and you there likewise,
Purdy,
in your oxygen tent,
mind off elsewhere
stumbling in a blizzard
of drugs—
you too came this far,
imprinted the ice shelves and foolscap floes
of how many blank sheets
and pharmacy notebooks,
wanted to “do the country”
so you kept afoot, always moving
against the stasis to come, always
talking back at the silence to come
and that final forecloser,
repossessor, who serves the body
such intimate writs, gives pressing notice
each breath is borrowed, the warmed and
wobbling space you occupy
is leased—
And maybe all this movement and exploration is really
in hopes of finding—founding—some new “Vinland
the Good”
somewhere out beyond
all vital eviction, where poets, friends,
like dogged squatters in life’s rickety A-frame
vie and recite over homebrew, wild grape wine,
with invincible livers on a pine-box patio
that never will sag further than this
—and the day holds, hovering at the late August hour
of light’s most inebriate angle, on the relic
phonograph Paul Robeson revived to the lap
and backbeat of lake-waves, woodwind breezes
through the weeping willow’s green marquee,
and the old rowboat is straked and caulked so that later
a few might row it across to the brook mouth
and alongside the pioneer graveyard, knowing
its bottomless appetite is finally sated
and the living forever barred….
He loved the poetry of place-names most
and set them down accordingly—
So sink now sleep a fugue
of crackling maps, wistful misnamings
signposted in permafrost
Ft Good Hope
Mt Somerset
Pt Victory
the pit of the belly
once again warmly
furnaced with flame,
and “know where the words came from”
Christine Smart
Stone Song
in the river’s white racket
the shore trembles
like a stone song
—Al Purdy
A pall descends
a long shadow without end—
the slant of light on a mountain,
a snaking ochre tree, wet with rain
in the river’s white racket.
Illumination itself, warm as the sun in summer,
the body no longer a boat, a vehicle, a fluid
instrument except for three breaths
lying still, open and floating
the shore trembles.
The river cascades, pain ebbs
and fades, limbs soften
and dissolve. The flowers sound
like bells and I am free
like a stone song.
Solveig Adair
Lament for a Small Town
in beginning darkness / at the end of hunger
—Al Purdy, “Lament for the Dorsets”
they find a small doll
hand stitched, a roll of copper
wire cradled by
a rotting wagon the house
already sinking
into the forest’s regrowth
the plates were on the
table—food too old to rot
it was like they sat
for lunch and were distracted
by the whistle of
the train which no longer stopped
fading out midbite
disappearing with their town
no roads on that side
of the river the
railway
the artery that
suddenly vanished, starving
the town into nothing
these ghosts, these dead dreams
appear sometimes in pictures
people and buildings
frozen into the land’s bones
we will not keep them
in our own dreams and stories
no thousand years of
myth to give life to these dead
the last man in town
crawled out from his decaying
house, his decaying
body to the train that no
longer stopped they found
him lying across the tracks
or so the station
master says when he’s drinking
that last man his wife
and child dead as the old town
no place to travel
and the old cart rotting out
making not a meal
but a burnt offering to
empty chairs and hearts
leaving a small doll against
the telegraph line
that never came arteries
slowly cutting off
as he crawled out into the
sun
Karen Solie
The Sharing Economy
This performance of
“I Want My Fucking Money”
broadcast live from the street will conclude
when the last human being on earth
has perished.
The Freshly Renovated Bachelor Suite has its ear
to the ground, has the ear
of the Paying Guest
who’s found a bed down there among
the learning experiences
and automatic functions,
decor objects from HomeSense’s
Blunt Force Trauma Collection
above which the house hovers like a spaceship
in a super-convenient location
and the Hosts walk overland.
A pilot light flickers
like an awareness of self,
chaos whispering through the fittings,
pipes singing, patterns
in the textiles repeating, the weeping tile—
between sound and silence
is music.
The Paying Guest rises in the middle of the night
to turn off the radio where no radio exists,
a disturbance imminent over the sea—no
the lake—
it will come clear in a minute.
The furnace knocks twice
then hesitates, and the Paying Guest
lying in the lettings
remembers the old joke about the drummer
and now the Paying Guest is laughing on the inside.
John Oughton
Long Reach: Thanksgiving, 2000
for Al Purdy
In placed, willow-dragged waters
of the Long Reach
a muskrat swims on its back
human as myself on holiday
working at doing nothing: it
is just as true that I, floating on
my back, water rilling off whiskers,
recall the muskrat’s
climbing cells shelved
in the library of my genes.
As it drags Quinte Bay water along,
my course makes the smallest echo
of a southbound duck flight’s V
And I backswim 40 years ago
where no muskrat or man
in right mind floated here,
because gentlemanly Bob Hayward,
clean white shirt and tie,
was beating back Yankee hydroplanes
with beautiful Miss Supertest,
her supercharged 16-cyclinder Rolls-Royce Griffon
powering polished wood up to 160 mph
kicking up a rooster tail tall as six-story
buildings that, thank God, still aren’t
along the Long Reach.
Now Miss Supertest hangs
in the Ontario Science Centre, her roar
shrunk to a single plaque, memento
mori of Bob Hayward barrel-rolling to death
on the Detroit River and
Supertest gas stations, those odd little castle
keeps of Canada’s internal combustion cult
are extinct as Fina, and your body from this life,
Al Purdy. The mystery of how water becomes fire.
Some poor dumb herbivorous dinosaur
two hundred million years ago reached
for tender branches just a little
too far over the pond and went in.
Time cooked her down
to high-test fuel hammering
Miss Supertest’s stressed, polished pistons
rhythmic as big Canadian presses pumping
out Al Purdy poetry books
which taught me to see
timewise, my eye extending
not only the facts of the past,
but the emotions that pool in a place
sung by local ghosts
buried inside the green dissembling
of goldenrod, milkweed and
caterpillar, all of them wanting.
Wanting made matter
spell out a nucleus, then gild it with scales.
Wanting inspired a fish mocked by slimy neighbours
to go walkabout on fins,
made me contemplate this
Long Reach deadhead that becomes
a muskrat’s head examining me.
Who is further along the scale
of evolving? I who want so much
in both senses—desire and lack?
This muskrat who wants nothing
and slips underwater
before I can interrogate him.
Just another Hermes in a slinky fur suit,
one of many messengers the world
shoves in my face, urging
“Pay attention, fool!”
It’s in that silence
that the 16 cylinders of thought
power up a rooster tail of words.
Call it poetry if a term is needed
or nature talking:
me just the mouthpiece,
a ripple on the surface,
and gone.
Glen Sorestad
Cactus Cathedral
remembering Al Purdy
The poet betakes himself into the desert
accompanied only by the morning breeze to enact the daily rite
of purging his bowels of the previous day’s excesses,
picking his prudent way amongst a mute choir of cacti,
diverse in shapes and sizes—barrel, prickly pear, dagger
and pincushion, lechuguilla and yucca—lurking
like a minefield to punish his stumble or misstep.
At the designated site, he locates the technology
of the desert crapper, seizes in one firm hand the lawn chair
with toilet seat firmly affixed, while the other grasps
the long-handled spade, a scepter orbed with a toilet tissue roll.
Thus equipped, he strolls off to his own seclusion
to meditate on desert life while the sun creeps above
the Chisos Mountains. Although the poet is no Muslim,
nor even a practising Christian, he turns the lawn chair
to watch the February sun begin its morning crawl.
He begins his communion with the morning breeze
in this c
athedral of spines and prickles, but his mind
fastens on the possibility of lurking beasts—an aggressive coyote
darting from behind a yucca to snap at his bared buttocks;
or a cougar come down from the mountains; or a pack of javelinas
drawn to the noxious fragrance as to one of their own,
then turning on the intruder like outraged parishioners
routing out a promiscuous pastor.
But here, in the Chihuahuan desert, the poet ruminates,
undisturbed, by anything but his own thoughts, and now,
his rites concluded, he buries his offering, leaving no evidence
of his passing, hole filled in, desert left unsullied.
He returns spade and chair to their former location,
gingerly picks his way, rejuvenated, towards the climbing sun.
Kath MacLean
Too Tall for Antiquity
Sometimes it just
rains.
& the river rising, swells,
draws in its breath & falling,
dreams its drowned thoughts.
Bubbles rise to the surface. Frothing,
the lake laughs.
(You are laughing too) I think
before—
yesterday’s dandelions breathless
& seedy, poke about the grass,
stems of nothing ask
for a poem as if—
Listen, I say,
grass ripples by the lake,
rocks cradle a ragged shore. Where
I sleep a kaleidoscope:
ash & berry branches, leaves
stroke your face in the bark of a willow,
watching—
Weeds rub green to green.
A mating dance, a swish of swan,
shade, & feathers beat
about the beach.
Pebbles, small thoughts
from your chair. Rain
fogs the sky without matches, without
light. Neighbours burn
sheaves of poems. Shelley’s wind,
although well-spoken, doesn’t
speak to me or
I don’t listen.
Careful, mice frantic for freedom;
cry in their steel traps. I let them
go and one by one they come back.
Knives, forks, spoons in the drawers fill
with their nightly visits. Yours, more