Civil Elegies: And Other Poems (2 page)

Night one more time, great
lobotomy. Come on over here with your body, lie down, tomorrow
it all starts again.

So much is gone now, bright and suicidal,
so much is on the verge.

What good are words among the
rock, the glittering wreckage?

Fallout falls; the empires breed
the nightmares that they need.

The only words are lives.
Friend.       Friend.

Powerful men can fuck up too. It is Thursday,
a mean old lady has died, she got him his
paper route and there is still that whiff of
ju-jube and doilies from her front hall; a stroke; he can
taste them going soggy; some in his pocket too, they always picked up
lint; anyway, she is dead.
And tonight there are things to do in the study, he has a
report, he has the kids, it is
almost too much. Forty-five years, and
still the point eludes him whenever he stops to think.
Next morning,
hacking the day into shape on the phone, there is still no
way — routine & the small ache,
he cannot accommodate both.
At Hallowe'en too, in her hall.
And I know which one he takes and that
night at six, while the kids are tackling his legs with their small tussling,
how he fends them off, tells them “Play upstairs”; one day
they will be dead also with their jelly beans.
In her kitchen, she had a parrot that said “Down the hatch!”

That one is me too — belting thru

school to the rhythms of glory, tripping,
blinking at vanishing place-names

Etobicoke Muskoka Labrador then Notting Hill Gate but he could
never keep them straight,

though as they ran together they always had
people in them, like ketchup on his shirt.

Extra-gang spikers and singalong, I believe that was
Labrador? Teachers. That

girl in Stockholm — Christ! what did they
expect? the man was otherwise engaged.

For there were treks, attacks and
         tribal migrations of meaning, wow

careening thru his skull, the doves &
dodos that descended, scary

partnerships with God, new selves erupting
messianic daily — all the grand

adrenalin parade!
He was supposed to wear matching socks?

It was a messy pubescent

surfeit of selves but there were

three I didn't know about,
the sabotage kids.

They never budged.

One was perpetually leaving his
   penis behind in garbage bags. One had a

bazooka stuck in his throat, hence had some
difficulty speaking.

The third would sob all night in the lonesome night,
crying for something damp, and close, and warm.

I came across them far too late.

They kept on dousing
epiphanies, misdirecting traffic.

They kept on daring me to
break down, like a carburetor with a passion for wildflowers.

Ordinary       moving
         stoplight & manhole
         maple tree       birch tree    oak
dandelions crabgrass
         ferry boats Andromeda
         fathers and mothers, and

heaven and earth and all
         vivacious things that
         throng around a man
will not approach until he
         hears himself pronounce “I
         hate you” with his body.

Walking north from his other lives in a fine rain

      through the high-rise pavilion on Walmer
lost in the vague turbulence he harbours

      Rochdale Anansi how many
      routine wipeouts has he performed since he was born?

and mostly himself;

drifting north to the three-storey

turrets & gables, the squiggles and
arches and baleful asymmetric glare of the houses he loves

Toronto gothic

walking north in the fine rain, going home through the late afternoon
he comes to Sibelius Park.

Across that green expanse he sees
    the cars parked close, every second licence yankee, he thinks of
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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 gunfire,
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.