Category: 1974-1979

Poems written in Vancouver before I married Pat

 

Poets’ Parlor

Poets, part-time priests of mankind’s
mirror-templed vanity,
lovingly paint the lips and pinch
the pimples of humanity.

July 22, 1974

End of Exponential

Race among the garbage odors:
fly-gyres in summer air,
cyclone clouds of silent wings,
fly circles centered on my stare.

What is not today decaying?
Groceries turn into waste,
poems go to tattered pages;
tongues dry out and lose their taste.

Why do I continue watching,
figuring trajectories?
Somewhere maggot eggs are waiting,
forming new simplicities.

Is there any end to spending
everything we own or steal?
Can we carry on forever
trading money for a meal?

Termite generations cycle,
chewing cellulose to dust —
more discarded cells consuming.
Somehow, calculate I must:

How much longer can we make it?
How much further can we go?
How much more can we discover?
How much less can we still know?

 

(10 July 1974)

Hope

I can feel the stupid phoenix rising
out of the ashes of despair, dumb bird
aren’t you ashamed to be so
gullible?

Edge of the Axe

(a postponed revision of “The Carpenter” from 1966)

I grew in the roots all winter,
wine waiting to rise;
I mellowed in wood till you made me see
the luxury of chair and table
set in a frozen skeleton of maple.
So seeing, I cut and killed the tree.
You made what you wanted
and we moved on.

I swam in a rolling tide of pine.
All the coniferous, brittle
turpentine trees
breathed into me
spirits of ordinary needles.
Then you began to see
how broad pine beams
build structure into dreams.
Again I saw timbers
toppled and trimmed,
treated for use.

Then I spoke in the oak’s rough tones,
grumbling green solidity.
I grew tough,
drew up gnarled and huge.
But soon enough
hard floors and solid stairs
called for the oak, broken and cut.
You cancelled the monument,
moving on.

Kneeling about the base
of a towering cypress temple
tended by storks and egret priests,
I needed to grow to know the grace,
the grand patience of that place.
I rose to an insular spike of pride,
mystical spire spun with thin green,
when again at the edge of understanding
you stepped away and wanted
weatherproof wood
so your structures would stand
when you moved on.

Save me the still willows,
silent, to wait on.
Stay, let me sit a while,
shifting and watching,
sifting my will
slowly away.

(22 July 1975 — a good example of ruining a poem by revision?)

Suicidal

Adam,
cutter of cords,
died giddily in a greedy gamble.
Fading intuition knew and rang the only knell,
and in the reverberations of that solitary bell
mindstrings stirred into mad ensemble,
seeking lost chords.

Death —
resting, maybe —
is this the time to take the test,
to stalk and trap my anmal defeat?
But no.  The echoing knell recedes and bares my grave,
I hold on to my bones and guts and meat,
forget this death like all the rest,
greedy zombie —
living.

(26 Aug 1974)

Now Goes

The present flashes in and out
raising a spray of instants
in its wake.

Riding the moving moment
on a fresh-waked mind
I am in time

until I’m twisted away afraid
out of the stream
suspended

slowly to sink in the lake of today
and swim in all the
used seconds.

(14 July 1974)

Black Hole

I tried to light the emptiness
a dozen billion years;
I’m tired of burning now.
My incandescence dies.

Out of the changes in my heart
neutrinos rise and swarm,
preparing to carry away
my will to be warm.
They fly.
I                 im
plode
folding down upon myself
like a detonated building
more inward than imagination.

I am the id of the universe,
black hole,
the cosmic drain
sucking in suns and dust.
I am the singularity
that must and yet cannot exist.
Under the great gulp
umbrella, my event horizon,
none are seen again.

Photons like panicked bugs
on a four-dimensional balloon
rush to escape with their entropy.
They forget:
every direction in my field
is back
to
black hole.

 

(1974 or so)

Big Bang

In                                         nothingness
the ur-point explodes
mattering violently
shattering vacuum into         spaces.

Suns     plummet     incessantly     away,
spacetime swirls into temporary planets,
order
is hurled into entropy.

Occasionally
carbon cools and catches atoms,
forges chains and rings in chaos —
then the double helix forms,
a local departure from the Laws;
fingers grow to write these words
and vanish.

 

(1974 or so)

something

if on the odd occasion something stoops
to sweep aside your granite benchmark
boil your sleeping shadow’s guts
and leave you with a burnt medallion

if this thing blinks
out of a shot-through animal eye

or if it wakes from tickled loins

or in the judgement of your ape

or in the nightmare of your child

whether it touch you like a tongue
or taste you like a knife

even if you understand

 

27 November 1976

Swallow Dog

I trip on the shadow of some black Other
fluttering
in the corner of my eye.
It is not unfriendly, it wished only to remind
to write what I have seen.
I saw in the same twilight
minutes ago, swallows
skimming the surface of a reedy pond.
They convinced me not to look directly
at reflections
of mountains and clouds, lest they appear apart.
I was a bit dazzled
with the full moon.
And a fat dog ran in the mud
panting and barking
chasing the swallows hopelessly
across the interface that belongs to them.
How like me, I thought,
and the swallow flew in the face of the moon
and in my face
at the same time
and the dog cheered.

 

Summer 1976

Coho

The call caught them
all across the Aleutians.

In the middle of scooping krill
they heard the sound of a wordless shiver
tickling skein and milt.

They eased to South.

They ate hard across the huge current
slashing herring ritualistically
in a dance of secret steps.

As each found far out
a tiny scent of home
the chemistry began in earnest
subtle at first
tasting of sweet death.

Then it was urgent, urgent
eating their flesh with the need to leap
to find the source, to change
utterly
into the mystery.

Spending what they had been
they came to the place
ready to slough their shredded husks
to feed the nursery.

Finally
shuddering off dying confinements
they came free together
thin smoke on the embers
round and newly sparked.

Huddled
in the spaces between the stones
they dream of the next return.

 

01 February 1976, revised 14 July 1976

Steelhead

Quicksilver flash,
in the reel’s screech
you rush from your green shadow
into this rare air —
splash me to shock.

You came here shrewd and wild
home to this river
not to eat hooks
yet now we meet.

Dance with the spirit of Poseidon
against the persuasion of split cane —
soon, lovely alien, you will visit
my world of rocks and dry oxygen.

Now the connection is complete.
Gather your courage to meet my touch
but I disappoint your death,
watch your brief disbelief,
then shout
as your bullet body darts to the depths,
loose.

 

5905 Yew Street, Vancouver, 1975