Civil Elegies: And Other Poems

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