7.
Church
was a place of hard pews and musty prayer books,
good
ol’ fashioned sing-a-longs and strawberry socials.
Still
I hated it, whether it was the Christian-lite of
the
local United Church, or the incense-laden masses
at
the Catholic school I attended. I never understood
how
priests could love miracles, but hate magic, when
it
seems to me Jesus was a magician raising the dead,
multiplying
bread for the masses. Want to hear
a
confession? God is dead, and the real magic is living
righteously
anyways. Once, I found a moon wafer, a host,
the
body of Christ, after mass, and cupped it tenderly
in
my hands, as if I could hurt God acting carelessly.
I
returned it to a priest, but then stayed up all night
worrying
and praying. The dark mute-deaf to my pleas.
12.
Do
you mind if I get personal? The I is just a place-holder
in
this poem anyways. The self that writes, “Truth is simply
a
kingdom of telling, not of facts”, is not the self that will
read
this a day later, crossing out words, adding new ones,
hoping
it all leads to some sort of elegance, of understanding,
which
sounds boring and ordinary, I know— the I knows
what
it knows—but at least the words come out half-right
in
the declining light, though few care as passionately as me,
the
me who wants to be moved by poems, me who wants to
know
all the ways of knowing what people think about sparrows
and
clouds and windfallen apples so I read books. The I inside
writes
some too. Language is the real school. I sit in the back
of
the class looking out a window at a small grove of trees
where
sits a giant bronze sundial, the hour getting late.
18.
I
never read Berryman’s Dream Songs or Lowell’s Notebooks
but
here I am, improvising a long sequence, trying not to leave
anything
out, my intelligence a little restless, my imagination
a
little inclusive. I am hoping to put the then back in authentic,
the
now back in knowledge, my concerns free-ranging and
arbitrary,
although I am the first to admit I am not ideally
suited
to restraint, when it is amplitude, expansiveness I seek,
outfitting
my poems with pennies on train-tracks, absinthe in
Prague,
black-flies in June, death on repeat. I want to pack it all in;
everything
I mean. The highs and lows. The kitchen sink. I cannot
tell
if I am fussy, or not fussy, already eleven lines deep, and still
I
have said nothing about Mars, or Japanese Ghosts, or prizes
in
cereal boxes. So I sacrifice a little intensity for immensity,
trying
to piece together a tower of Babel that won’t fall down.
25.
This
is not an urn of images, nor is it a proper self-portrait.
I
couch-surfed for years between the ordinary and the ecstatic,
between
my head’s penthouse, my heart’s studio apt, waiting
for
language to unveil the lived moment. Now I have this
double-chin,
wrinkles like parentheses around my blue eyes,
while
the everyday and the otherworldly still duke it out in
an
alley outside. The duende long stopped caring who wins.
But
I do, or at least, I think I do. I’m halfway to the grave,
and
yet still a boy obsessed with Jaws and great white sharks
in
1975. A starry-eyed hipster cutting across McGill to get
to
a poetry workshop at Concordia in the 90s. An alcoholic
shivering,
sweating in bed…does it even matter when? Caring
what
other people think is one of my deep interior fears. Take
this
as insurance, send it to the papers, if ever I disappear.
27.
My
first poetry love affair was Al Purdy, then Gwendolyn MacEwen,
both
taught in my intro-to-Canadian poetry class, Gwen already dead
two
years from trying to quit alcohol without medically detoxing, so
I
had to take her voice out on record from the reserve desk in the library,
to hear her read poems like The Red Bird
You Wait For, Manzini:
Escape
Artist, Dark Pines Underwater, her work already newly minted
Canadian
classics. I read her opus by undertaking an independent reading
course.
Even read the novels Julian The Magician and King of Egypt,
King
of Dreams.
I would listen to her voice on record, then stare into
her
kohl-blackened eyes, thinking about those poems in her last book,
Afterworlds, ones about the Tao
of Physics. Purdy was still alive, giving
readings.
A friend interviewed Purdy who rowed my friend onto a pond,
made
him drink beer because the doctor told Purdy he couldn’t anymore.
Now
they’re all dead. Their voices just this spooky action at a distance.
