Beneath The Surface: A Telling Silence

Minus twenty degrees in creaky-cold Edmonton...another reason to look back to the West Coast. Here's one of mine from a few years ago that was published in The Antigonish Review:

Beneath The Surface

Shadows rub against the surface
of the lake like ghosts at a window.
They move towards me on the
shore - tangles of orange, black, flashes
of red. A rubbery mouth yawns from
the depths groping for a mayfly or the soft
belly of wet bread. A frog pops from the
mud; dragonflies veer left and right.
The wind is silent in its telling.

I close my eyes and feel
a breeze through my veins stretching
into a gale. I remember days blind
as a Vancouver weather
forecast, English Bay, slow
coffee - faces at a window.

(photo by Yewco)

Live! At The Gaslight Café

Come you ladies and you gentlemen, a-listen to my song
Sing it to you right, but you might think it's wrong
Just a little glimpse of a story I'll tell
"Bout an East Coast city that you all know well... ~ Hard Times in New York Town

The other night I fulfilled a long-standing dream of treading the boards at the legendary Gaslight Café in Greenwich Village, now known as 116 MacDougal St. During its heyday from 1958-1971, the Gaslight hosted the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Mississippi John Hurt, and was "overrun by every guitar-picker who had ever migrated to Greenwich Village," according to the late Al Aronowitz.

This time it was all about the inspired word - sans guitar. I signed up for a full evening of poetry and panic bliss and had a blast. The room is literally underground, beneath MacDougal, and is easily missed if you're not looking for it.

I first heard of the Gaslight when I came across a three-record box set of Dylan's Gaslight Tapes on sale at Track Records on Seymour St. in Vancouver in 1987, just before my first busking trip across Europe.

It's a fantastic album, full of classic folk standards, audience murmers and the odd clinking glass. I knew it was only a matter of time before I'd discover the remarkable room in a New York City village that conjured both Jimmy Dean and the Child Ballads...

Dialect Of The Heart: Jack Gilbert

"What we feel most has / no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds." ~ "The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart," Jack Gilbert

This week was my birthday, or "birthweek" as we say in our home, and I'm happy to report I'm still following the songlines of dreamtime. When you're young and naive, dreams flare easily into life and often continue giving off heat well after life cools. Then you hit your late thirties or forties only to find you've been running on the fumes of your twenties. Or worse; you've turned off the engine.

Kullilla Art

I've got a sackful of dreamtime and I'm relocating back to Canada after a decade of living abroad. What else could I ask for? (Okay, maybe that 1964 Plymouth Valiant convertible I saw at White Rock beach the other day, but I digress). Something else I'm doing is reveling in the poetry of Jack Gilbert.

The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not laguage but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

Married

I came back from the funeral and crawled
around the apartment, crying hard,
searching for my wife’s hair.
For two months got them from the drain,
from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,
and off the clothes in the closet.
But after other Japanese women came,
there was no way to be sure which were
hers, and I stopped. A year later,
repotting Michiko’s avocado, I find
a long black hair tangled in the dirt.

Mud Pies: Lessons In The Earth

(Class photo from grade 4...I'm in the front left with the dirty-knees beside the yogi)

I wrote "Mud Pies" to celebrate life's most valuable lessons - those learned outside of the classroom.

Mud Pies

Miss Young never mentioned the mud pies
but she watched us at work
bobbing below the ground
amphibious in a ditch
at the edge of our playground

Within the freedoms of recess and lunch
we practiced our lessons in the earth
far away from textbooks
and other prescriptions

After the bell we would show up
late for row-call
porous and slippery
with our creations dripping in the cloakroom

But Miss Young never mentioned the mud pies
or gave a lesson outside near the earth
Instead she stuffed us
with the text-gristled curriculum
while everyday outside
the ditch crawled closer and closer

Miss Young was my 2nd Grade teacher at H.T. Thrift Elementary. She was a nice woman, but obviously had misplaced priorities. The poem appears with five more of mine in An International Anthology Of Poetry from Hidden Brook Press.