by Dennis Lee
the war and the young men dodging, his wife inside
with her counsel, her second thoughts
and the children, needing more than they can give;
and behind him, five blocks south, his other lives
in rainy limbo till tomorrow
Rochdale, yes Anansi
the fine iconic books, sheepish errata
shitwork in a cold basement, moody
triumphs of the mind
hassling printers hassling banks
and the grim dudgeon with friends — men with
deep combative egos, ridden men, they cannot sit still, they go on
brooding on Mao on Gandhi
and they cannot resolve their lives but together they make up
emblems of a unified civilization,
the fine iconic books;
he is rooted in books & in
that other place, where icons come alive among the faulty
heroes & copouts, groping for some new tension of
mind and life, casting the type in their own
warm flesh
hassling builders hassling banks
and he is constantly coming and going away, appalled by the force of
wishful affirmations, he thinks of the war, he
hears himself 10 years ago affirming his faith in Christ
in the lockers, still half-clasped in pads & a furtive
virgin still, flailing the
lukewarm school with rumours of God, gunning for psychic opponents
though he could not hit his father and what broke at last was the
holiness; and he can’t go back there any more
without hearing the livelong flourish
of Christ in his mouth, always he tasted His funny
taste in every arraignment but it was himself he was burying.
And the same struggle goes on and when
he drinks too much, or cannot sleep for his body’s
jaundiced repose he can scarcely read a word he wrote,
though the words are just but his work has
the funny taste and his life pulls back and snickers when he begins.
And then Sibelius Park!
The grass is wet, it
gleams, across the park’s wide
vista the lanes of ornamental
shrub come breathing and the sun is filling the
rinsed air till the green goes luminous and it does it
does, it comes clear.
II
Supper is over, I sit
holed up in my study. I have no
answers again and I do not trust the
simplicities, nor Sibelius Park;
I am not to be trusted with them.
But I rest in one thing. The play of
dusk and atmospherics, the beautiful rites of
synthaesthesia, are not to be believed;
but that grisly counter-presence, the warfare in the lockers, myself
against myself, the years of desperate affirmation and the dank
manholes of ego which stink when they
come free at last
— the seamy underside of every stiff
iconic self — which are hard which are welcome
are no more real than that unreal man who stood and took them in;
are no more real than the fake epiphanies,
though they ache to bring them down.
For they are all given, they are not
to be believed but constantly
they are being
given, moment by moment, the icons and what they
suppress, here and
here and though they are not real
they have their own real presence, like a mirror in the grass and in the
bodies we live in we are
acceptable.
There is nothing to be afraid of.
Coming Back
Saying crabgrass, plantain, begonia,
saying Queen Anne’s lace, devil’s paint-brush, flag.
Time I was young I thought
letting them go was holy.
Quartz, saying granite, saying dirt-farm, outcrop,
limestone, fossil, saying shale.
Coming back who needs it — giving up the
things I never owned?
Saying city, chewy, collision the sirens;
hungry, saying finger, saying food.
Words for the Given
If I take up space in the silence, master, friend —
let it be, we all live here and do not matter.
So I did my shabby trick again; we
both saw it happen, I won’t get away with it.
And nothing is enough. I did not say that
for content, it was a greeting.
No listen, I still don’t know but what does that
matter? Listen. It is. It is. It is.
II
CIVIL ELEGIES
Pro patria
Man is by nature a political animal, and to know
that citizenship is an impossibility is to be cut
off from one of the highest forms of life.
George Grant
Do not cling to the notion of emptiness;
Consider all things alike. My friend,
There is only one word that I know now
And I do not know its name.
Saraha
1
Often I sit in the sun and brooding over the city, always
in airborne shapes among the pollution I hear them, returning;
pouring across the square
in fetid descent, they darken the towers
and the wind-swept place of meeting and whenever
the thick air clogs my breathing it teems with their presence.
Many were born in Canada, and living unlived lives they died
of course but died truncated, stunted, never at
home in native space and not yet
citizens of a human body of kind. And it is Canada
that specialized in this deprivation. Therefore the spectres arrive, congregating
in bitter droves, thick in the April sunlight,
accusing us and we are no different, though you would not expect
the furies assembled in hogtown and ring me round, invisible, demanding
what time of our lives we wait for till we shall start to be.
Until they come the wide square stretches out
serene and singly by moments it takes us in, each one for now
a passionate civil man, until it
sends us back to the acres of gutted intentions,
back to the concrete debris, to parking scars and the four-square tiers
of squat and righteous lives. And here
once more, I watch the homing furies’ arrival.
I sat one morning by the Moore, off to the west
ten yards and saw though diffident my city nailed against the sky
in ordinary glory.
It is not much to ask. A place, a making,
two towers, a teeming, a genesis, a city.
And the men and women moved in their own space,
performing their daily lives, and their presence occurred
in time as it occurred, patricians in
muddy York and made their compact together against the gangs of the new.
And as that crumpled before the shambling onset, again the
lives we had not lived in phalanx invisibly staining
the square and vistas, casting back I saw
regeneration twirl its blood and the rebels riding
riderless down Yonge Street, plain men much
goaded by privilege — our other origin, and cried
“Mackenzie knows a word, Mackenzie
knows a meaning!” but it was not true. Eight hundred-odd steely Canadians
turned tail at the cabbage patch when a couple of bullets fizzed
and the loyalists, scared skinny by the sound of their own gunfir
e,
gawked and bolted south to the fort like rabbits,
the rebels for their part bolting north to the pub: the first
spontaneous mutual retreat in the history of warfare.
Canadians, in flight.
Buildings oppress me, and the sky-concealing wires
bunch zigzag through the air. I know
the dead persist in
buildings, by-laws, porticos — the city I live in
is clogged with their presence; they
dawdle about in our lives and form a destiny, still
incomplete, still dead weight, still
demanding whether Canada will be.
But the mad bomber, Chartier of Major Street, Chartier
said it: that if a country has no past,
neither is it a country and promptly
blew himself to bits in the parliament John, leaving as civil testament
assorted chunks of prophet, twitching and
bobbing to rest in the flush.
And what can anyone do in this country, baffled and
making our penance for ancestors, what did they leave us? Indian-swindlers,
stewards of unclaimed earth and rootless what does it matter if they, our
forebears’ flesh and bone were often
good men, good men do not matter to history.
And what can we do here now, for at last we have no notion
of what we might have come to be in America, alternative, and how make public
a presence which is not sold out utterly to the modern? utterly? to the
savage inflictions of what is for real, it pays off, it is only
accidentally less than human?
In the city I long for, green trees still
asphyxiate. The crowds emerge at five from jobs
that rankle and lag. Heavy developers
pay off aldermen still; the craft of neighbourhood,
its whichway streets and generations
anger the planners, they go on jamming their maps
with asphalt panaceas; single men
still eke out evenings courting, in parks, alone.
A man could spend a lifetime looking for
peace in that city. And the lives give way around him — marriages
founder, the neighbourhoods sag — until
the emptiness comes down on him to stay.
But in the city I long for men complete
their origins. Among the tangle of
hydro, hydrants, second mortgages, amid
the itch for new debentures, greater expressways,
in sober alarm they jam their works of progress, asking where in truth
they come from and to whom they must belong.
And thus they clear a space in which
the full desires of those that begot them, great animating desires
that shrank and grew hectic as the land pre-empted their lives
might still take root, which eddy now and
drift in the square, being neither alive nor dead.
And the people accept a flawed inheritance
and they give it a place in their midst, forfeiting progress, forfeiting
dollars, forfeiting yankee visions of cities that in time it might grow
whole at last in their lives, they might
belong once more to their forebears, becoming their own men.
To be our own men! in dread to live
the land, our own harsh country, beloved, the prairie, the foothills —
and for me it is lake by rapids by stream-fed lake, threading
north through the terminal vistas of black spruce, in a
bitter, cherished land it is farm after
farm in the waste of the continental outcrop —
for me it is Shield but wherever terrain informs our lives and claims us;
and then, no longer haunted by
unlived presence, to live the cities:
to furnish, out of the traffic and smog and the shambles of dead precursors,
a civil habitation that is
human, and our own.
The spectres drift across the square in rows.
How empire permeates! And we sit down
in Nathan Phillips Square, among the sun,
as if our lives were real.
Lacunae. Parking lots. Regenerations.
Newsstand euphorics and Revell’s sign, that not
one countryman has learned, that
men and women live that
they may make that
life worth dying. Living. Hey,
the dead ones! Gentlemen, generations of
acquiescent spectres gawk at the chrome
on American cars on Queen Street, gawk and slump and retreat.
And over the square where I sit, congregating above the Archer
they crowd in a dense baffled throng and the sun does not shine through.
2
Master and Lord, where
are you?
A man moves back and forth
between what must be done to save the world
and what will save his soul,
and neither is real. For many years
I could not speak your name, nor now but
even stilled at times by openings like
joy my whole life
aches, the streets I walk along to work declare
your absence, the headlines
declare it, the nation, and
over and over the harried lives I
watch and live with, holding my breath and
sometimes a thing rings true —
they all give way and declare your real absence.
Master and Lord,
let be. I can say
nothing about you that does not
vanish like tapwater.
I know
the world is not enough; a woman straightens
and turns from the sink and asks her life the
question, why should she
fake it? and after a moment she
shrugs, and returns to the sink. A man’s
adrenalin takes hold, at a meeting he makes
his point, and pushes and sees that
things will happen now … and then in the pause he knows
there are endless things in the world and this is not for real.
Whatever is lovely, whatever deserves
contempt, whatever dies —
over and over, in every thing we meet
we meet that emptiness.
It is a homecoming, as men once knew
their lives took place in you.
And we cannot get on, no matter how we
rearrange our lives and we cannot let go for
then there is nothing at all.
Master and Lord, there was a
measure once.
There was a time when men could say
my life, my job, my home
and still feel clean.
The poets spoke of earth and heaven. There were no symbols.
3
The light rides easy on people dozing at noon in Toronto, or
here it does, in the square, with the white spray hanging
upward in plumes on the face of the pool, and the kids, and the thrum of the
traffic,
and the people come and they feel no consternation, dozing at
lunchtime; even the towers comply.
And they prevail in their placid continuance, idly unwrapping their food
day after day on the slabs by the pool, warm in the summer sun.
Day after day the light rides easy.
Nothing is important.
But once at noon I felt my body’s pulse contract and
balk in the space of the square, it puckered and jammed till nothing
worked, and casting back and forth
the only resonance that held was in the Archer.
Great bronze simplicity, that muscled form
w
as adequate in the aimless expanse — it held, and tense and
waiting to the south I stood until the
clangor in my forearms found its outlet.
And when it came I knew that stark heraldic form is not
great art; for it is real, great art is less than its necessity.
But it held, when the monumental space of the square
went slack, it moved in sterner space.
Was shaped by earlier space and it ripples with
wrenched stress, the bronze is flexed by
blind aeonic throes
that bred and met in slow enormous impact,
and they are still at large for the force in the bronze churns
through it, and lunges beyond and also the Archer declares
that space is primal, raw, beyond control and drives toward a
living stillness, its own.
But if some man by the pool, doing his workaday
job in the city, tangled in other men’s
futures with ticker-tape, hammering
type for credits or bread, or in for the day, wiped out in Long Branch
by the indelible sting of household acts of war,
or whatever; if a man strays into that
vast barbaric space it happens that he enters into
void and will go
under, or he must himself become void.
We live on occupied soil.
Across the barren Shield, immortal scrubland and our own,
where near the beginning the spasms of lava
settled to bedrock schist,
barbaric land, initial, our
own, scoured bare under
crush of the glacial recessions
and later it broke the settlers, towing them
deeper and deeper each year beneath the
gritty sprinkle of soil, till men who had worked their farms for a lifetime
could snap in a month from simple cessation of will,
though the brute surroundings went on — the flagrant changes
of maple and sumach, the water in ripples of light,
the faces of outcrop, the stillness, and up the slopes
a vast incessant green that drew the mind
beyond its tether, north, to muskeg and
stunted hackmatack, and then the whine of icy tundra north to the pole —
despotic land, inhuman yet
our own, where else on earth? and reaping stone
from the bush their fathers cleared, the sons gave