by Howard White
study the monument, bigger, you’d say
than life size. But he always was. The head
turns far to one side on the long neck
listening for a distant sound or watching
some pretty girl passing in 1956.
I stand there as I planned to, wait
for some appropriate thought to shape itself
or maybe a remembered line or two, expect
a hyperbolic joke, to hear the sound
of a familiar voice—an unexpected phrase
from the other side of light.
I listen, wait for it, the tall man’s
latest trick, what he might have to say
about being immortalized in a public park
among pissing dogs and shitting pigeons
and sleeping homeless men, and the late
last lostness of everything,
like the ghost mouth of Pushkin’s stone guest
the metal lips to open with a whim
or jape by cosmic radio from Ameliasburgh,
whispering across the fields of eternity,
beyond the limits of silence the ventriloquist
offering his one last unlikely and phantasmal poem.
Susan Musgrave
Thirty-Two Uses for Al Purdy’s Ashes
Smuggle them to Paris and fling them
into the Seine. PS He was wrong
when he wrote, “To Paris Never Again”
Put them in an egg-timer—that way
he can go on being useful, at least
for three minutes at a time
(pulverize him first, in a blender)
Like his no good ’48 Pontiac
refusing to turn over in below zero weather,
let the wreckers haul his ashes away
Or stash them in the trunk of your car:
when you’re stuck in deep snow sprinkle them
under your bald tires for traction
Mix them with twenty tons of concrete,
like Lawrence at Taos, erect
a permanent monument to his banned
poetry in Fenelon Falls
Shout “these ashes oughta be worth some beer!”
in the tavern at the Quinte Hotel, and wait
for a bottomless glass with yellow flowers in it
to appear
Mix one part ashes to three parts
homemade beer in a crock under the table,
stir with a broom, and consume
in excessive moderation
Fertilize the dwarf trees at the Arctic Circle
so that one day they might grow to be
as tall as he, always the first
to know when it was raining
Scatter them at Roblin’s Mills
to shimmer among the pollen
or out over Roblin Lake
where the great *boing* they make
will arouse summer cottagers
Place them beside your bed where they can
watch you make love, vulgarly
and immensely, in the little time left
Declare them an aphrodisiac, more potent
than the gallbladder of a bear
with none of the side-effects of Viagra
Stitch them in the hem of your summer dress
where his weight will keep it
from flying up in the wind, exposing
everything: he would like that
Let them harden, the way the heart must harden
as the might lessens, then lob them
at the slimy, drivelling, snivelling,
palsied, pulseless lot of critics who ever uttered
a single derogatory phrase in anti-praise
of his poetry
Award them the Nobel Prize
for humility
Administer them as a dietary supplement
to existential Eskimo dogs with a preference
for violet toilet paper and violent
appetites for human excrement: dogs
that made him pray daily
for constipation in Pangnirtung
Bequeath them to Margaret Atwood,
casually inserted between the covers
of Wm Barrett’s IRRATIONAL MAN
Lose them where the ghosts of his Cariboo
horses graze on, when you stop to buy oranges
from the corner grocer at 100 Mile House
Distribute them from a hang-glider
over the Galapagos Islands
where blue-footed boobies will shield him
from over-exposure to ultraviolet rays
Offer them as a tip to the shoeshine boys
on the Avenida Juarez, all twenty of them
who once shined his shoes for one peso
and 20 centavos—9 and a half cents—
years ago when 9 and a half cents
was worth twice that amount
Encapsulate them in the ruins of Quintana Roo
under the green eyes of quetzals, Tulum parrots,
and the blue, unappeasable sky—
that 600 years later they may still be warm
Declare them culturally modified property
and have them preserved for posterity
in the Museum of Modern Man, and, as
he would be the first to add, Modern Wife
As a last resort auction them off
to the highest bidder, the archives
at Queens or Cornell where
Auden’s tarry lungs wheeze on
next to the decomposed kidneys of Dylan Thomas;
this will ensure Al’s survival in Academia, also
But on no account cast his ashes to the wind:
they will blow back in your face as if to say
he is, in some form, poetic or other, here
to stay, with sestinas still to write
and articles to rewrite
for The Imperial Oil Review
No, give these mortal remains away
that they be used as a mojo to end the dirty
cleansing in Kosovo, taken as a cure
for depression in Namu, BC, for defeat
in the country north of Belleville, for poverty
hopping a boxcar west out of Winnipeg
all the way to Vancouver, for heroin addiction
in Vancouver; a cure for loneliness
in North Saanich, for love in Oaxaca,
courtship in Cuernavaca, adultery
in Ameliasburgh, the one sure cure
for extremely deep hopelessness
in the Eternal City, for death, everywhere,
pressed in a letter sent whispering to you
Laurence Hutchman
Al Purdy’s Place
I
I turn onto the road leading to Ameliasburgh.
Nearly twenty years since
I visited this place where
you wandered under the large beams,
through the old grist mill,
in searching for dusty motes of sunlight
until you stared into the face of Owen Roblin.
The ’73 Ford is gone,
your tall lanky figure does not stride to meet me again.
The waters of Roblin Lake are rough.
Around broken boards I step
to see blue wooden chairs weathered on the deck;
Eurithe, Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Laurence
would have drunk beer here late into the summer’s night.
The old cabin you built as a study is locked.
In the box by the door I see a lamp
that would have shone light
on your hiccoughing typ
ewriter, on the poems
that spoke of Fidel on Revolutionary Square,
of Gus and you before the Kremlin,
searching for the ghost of Helen in the dusty city of Troy,
recounting the tough, angry Tarahumara women in Mexico,
the scenes evoking the ghosts of Machu Picchu and your friend Earl.
You sat in that study until it became the freight car:
across the prairies into the sudden mountains,
until the dust of the land entered you in those voices,
speaking now through your poems.
You were working on Reaching for the Beaufort Sea,
talking about time,
how we continually mourn the past,
how we live on a thin edge,
a slice of time that exists only in the present
before it becomes the past.
II
I remember the letter from Ameliasburgh
that invited me to send you poems.
I still hear your distinct voice,
with its currents of wit and humour,
a gusto, a buildup and release.
I remember the time in Montreal at El Gitano
after so much sangria
when we argued poetry late into the night.
Through the rough gravel of Purdy Lane,
I drive to the cemetery alongside the river.
There, in the wet grass is the black shiny tome
with the words, “The Voice of the Land.”
Someone has left a note
and stuck a ballpoint pen in the earth.
Lorna Crozier
A Cat Named Purdy
If Al comes back
it will be as something gaunt and big—
a tree perhaps, like Thompson’s pine
he tore from a calendar and taped
on the bathroom wall. The last thing
I’d expect is a cat. Unlike Eliot
he didn’t like them. Our last cat
we’d called Nowlan. When I told Al
we’d name our new one Purdy, he shouted,
waved his arms and almost threw me out
though we’d been having a grand time
reciting from memory Leda and the Swan
line by line to one another, our voices
loud above the beating of the wings.
His favourite in-law, Eurithe’s sister Norma,
for years has rescued cats. She finds them
in the wild, brings them home and gentles them
until they’re tame enough to give away. Maybe
she’ll find him wandering beyond the world
of doors and windows, beyond the glow
from someone’s reading lamp,
and he’ll be coaxed inside, wet and matted,
eyes a little mad, Norma, whom,
when he was alive he also loved,
offering a bowl of milk to calm him,
her flannel shirt to keep him warm.
To take this story further and why not,
Eurithe, now that she’s alone, will be persuaded
to accept a scruffy stray—long-limbed,
ungainly for a cat. With quintessential Purdy
I-don’t-give-a-damn paired with a cat’s
he’ll leap into her lap that’s not
welcomed one in years, he’ll sigh and purr.
And with his paws, big as his hands
when he was a boy but now not clumsy
or afraid, he’ll retract
his claws and knead the softness of that
oh, familiar flesh.
Elegies
Doug Paisley
Last Night
The saddest thing I guess
Was I’ve grown used to being here
More familiar than I’d imagined
What’s left is the everyday
The faces are all on photographs
The voices are on cassettes
I can visit them over and over
Like we think we’d like to do
You’re over on the other side of the water
No longer fearful of the dark, I hope
These are the same birds but they wouldn’t know you
They navigate through blinking towers
And narrowing corridors
I wouldn’t bother telling you a damn thing about this world
Selfish isn’t it?
No one waited like you did
No one could enjoy it when it came like you could
Now you’re waiting for everything to hurry up and end
One night at a time
Doug Beardsley
Breakout
At 100 Mile House I try to make sense
of the place 40 years after the fact
of your poem & the book that made
the Purdy name a household word
& this broken-down town, empty of horses
Cariboo or otherwise & no people either—
if you discount grinning Secwepemc kids
from Canim Lake or bored housewives
feeling their first biodynamic massage
in spas sheltered beneath toy mountains
without substance, without weight. No more
horses here, historical, ancient or
anywhichway only the ghosts of horses
& you BIG AL, tall in the saddle beyond all measure
gripping the reins ham-fisted
saddle-bags chocked full of a lifetime
of hands-on experience, readings & poems
stirrups digging in for the last long ride.
Julie McNeill
Trains, Beer & Bronze
the voice of the land
Years after train cars
took your young man’s voice
and roughened it
took your impressionable ears
and pounded into them
the pulse of Canada
you brewed people’s poetry
in the A-frame’s simplicity
and shared it
After the published books
you ambled into the lecture hall
shirtsleeves rolled up
and gave thirsty students
tales for All the Annettes,
The Cariboo Horses…
and carried the hangers-on
to the windy patios
of rooftop bars
Today I hear your voice
in the wind blowing across Queen’s Park
your loose shirt draped in light snow
the pocket pen & notebook cold
but your pages filled
with rich warm poems
while other poets sit in the A-frame
wondering where you’ve gone
leaving wet rings under beer glasses
Patrick Lane
For Al Purdy
It wasn’t the brawling man who wrote of dangerous women with whiskey-coloured eyes, it was the other man I knew in ’62, the awkward one you hid inside the Contact book, the one who spoke of lines that never end. That’s what I heard first and that’s the man I knew. It was the uneasiness you had with the myth you’d made of yourself. You were a mama’s boy and spoiled like only-children are. Even your ride on the freight train back in the thirties wasn’t a real struggle, was more adventure than endurance. Survival had nothing to do with it, though later you’d learn, picking through Air Force garbage with Eurithe to keep food on the table. Three days in Vancouver and you couldn’t wait to hop a freight back to Ontario, homesick, a little scared. Suffering was never your strong point. It took Eurithe to help you with that. But I remember ’66, the night we left the Cecil to visit Newlove on Yew Street and giddy with drink I threw a full bottle
of beer at the sky. You stopped dead and waited till the bottle fell and smashed. Only throw empty bottles at the moon, you said, shaking your head at the waste of a drink. It’s a metaphor I’ve lived with in this life, that moon. Or the time we stole books at the McStew Launch in ’73. You told me to stop taking the poetry. Take the picture books, you said. No one will give you money for a poem. Jack McClelland was railing at us and Newlove was dancing drunk on a table while Farley glowered in a corner because he wasn’t the centre of attention. Clarkson was prissy and Layton was trying once again to get laid. God knows where Acorn was. All names now, men and women either dead or getting closer. And you? I could talk with you about the attributes of Rubus spectabilis and Etruscan tombs. We could go from there to a discussion about the relative venom of Laticauda colubrina. You liked the leaps and made a poetry from space. You went from the yellow-lipped sea krait to the eyes of Eurithe and found love at the end of your complaint. I think love was at the heart of all you did, the only loss you knew. Not knowing what you should learn, you learned everything. An autodidact (I loved that word when I was young, it gave my ignorance a name) you put in everything you could, your mind moving like your body, a poem too big to fit into the world. Sitting at the kitchen table three months before your death you told me you’d never had a friend. Are you my friend? you asked. I’ll never forget your eyes. There were never any cheap tricks in your art. It’s the one thing you taught me. Don’t tell it slant, you might’ve said. Your poems were Möbius strips. Following your mind was like my wandering in South America years ago. I knew there was no end, it was the going I had to learn, the nowhere we all get to. I split the word these days. Right now I’m here. You liked the story of me almost dying from a centipede sting in the jungle east of Ecuador, the little brown woman who nursed me back to life as she fed me soup made from boiled cuy. Like most men you liked stories. All your confessions were metaphors, those tired horses in the dust at Hundred Mile the measure. Or the time you made coffee in the frying pan in Toronto for Lorna and me, the bubbles of bacon grease just something to add body to the day. With you I could almost make it through. I fixed your deathbed, the second-hand you and Eurithe bought at a garage sale. You stood in a reel while I hammered it together. Three days later you were gone. I could say I still have words but none of them add up to you. Whispers mostly in the racket. Poems go round and round, this one too, never quite getting there, but I still live, and your ivory thought is all that keeps me warm some nights, still writing, still alive. It’s a cheap out, Al, but where else to go but back to you grabbing picture books, telling me once again that poems don’t sell. They never did.