on a book rack in the
Panama City railway station
in a cardboard box on
Cook Street
on the porch at Mt.
Newton, the Major’s whisperer
in the potato stalls
of Pasto
at Granny Soot, its
floor slipping into the sea
in the surge of a
tumultuous River Eden
in a union hall
on a faceless,
fatherless bluff
in the new uniform, so
utterly unprepared
in the hundred alleys
of Chengdu, on the thirty-six hills of Mount Song, at the Needle Sharpening
Brook
in A, imploring heaven
on a swollen reef, the
quivering coxswain
on a ladle, a wooden
spoon with a heel
on the pyres of Jesuit
insurgents
in the nibbled wrists
of Bishop Laval
on the gun deck of Qu’Appelle,
on the lisping
potsherds of Monte Alban
in a Halifax blizzard
in incendiary sun
in the phone book
in the salt weather of
sorrow
on the star-wheel of a
caraway disk
under the missile
range
on the rue des
Beaux-Arts: « C’est la poèsie! »
on the Richelieu, with
a black armband, weeping
in the antic camiones
de basura
their infallible encantamientos
on the cobbles beneath
Kit Smart’s knees
in six hundred and
sixty-eight dire words
on a wharf like a
nightstick
near a truck jammed
with reeking bait
on the recovery ward:
ten men, ninety-five toes
having lost way,
taking on water
in blackberries, in
September sun
in the name that is
itself the thing
at eye-level, a
welkin-blue wing
in the hail of
spitballs that morning when Eddie Donaldson, without trouser clips, rose up
to sing, in a suit like Breton’s
“Aux armes,
citoyens...”
in the red notebook
in the pale hub of
dawn
Eddie Donaldson, j’écris
ton nom.
Two recent projects by Colin Browne [photo credit: Marian Penner Bancroft] composer Alfredo Santa Ana were premiered in early April at the Fox Cabaret in Vancouver. A collection of Colin’s texts for music, entitled Into the Air, is in the works. His new book, The Possible, is an account of the visits by Surrealist artists to the Northwest Coast in the early 20th century. The book details the experiences of Kurt Seligmann and his wife Arlette in Hazelton, B.C., during the summer of 1938, and the journeys of Wolfgang Paalen, Alice Rahon, and Eva Sulzer from Alaska to Vancouver Island from June-August 1939.
