Old Poems

 
No one who passed
through the ruins
liked it much except
for small moments like
Jean arriving on Friday nights
– boots shrugging back
the snow – to cut
holes in the shadows,
easy laughter, nothing asked,
a candle in the room
and hands that
made the ruins glitter.
Everyone in the ruins was
a fugitive from something
arriving from all directions
and for all reasons
    none of them gentle
cops and cries and alimony
or just no strength to run any farther.
I lived there a year in the
sweat and noise and cracked plaster
dog shit on the walkway
and the Andersons
slapping each other
for hours so they could make
fifteen minutes of exhausted love
in the next apartment,
a year with a pen and notebook,
long streaky nights of
wine bottles, freshly dead,
dope smoke in the stairwells
and motorcyles skidding
across scattered dreams.
I remember
the mechanics in 32,
a pensioner with a scarf
and the silent hooker in 36,
my door forever creaking
and the sun forever sinking
through filmy windows,
Jean the only sprig of spring,
big heart, good eyes,
the two of us
in a sleeping bag
and Dylan, always Dylan,
Forever Young, Idiot Wind.

© 1974-2009

All spring
and half the hazy summer
the old man tried
with every fly and
form of bait he knew
to hook the big trout
from the pool below the bridge,
the slyest trout he’d stalked
in all his years of fishing.
Outwitted
cast after cast
at dawn, at dusk and
in the long afternoon
he was
     unprepared
when the big fish, who’d
never erred before, left
a thousand hooks untouched,
struck and fought with
lunging savagry
on a placid August day.
Startled, the old man,
caught his spinning reel
and yanked, embedding the
already driven barb,
and the big trout
leapt and thrashed
at the end of the line.
It was over in minutes
and in the silence
the old man held his prize,
saw the proud head
and long sleek body, the
magnificent fins and tail,
limp now, blood edging from
the glistening gills,
eyes glazed and dead.
The ripples were gone
and the pool was still
when the old man
put the catch in his basket and
reeled in his line and left.
He gave it to Ned
who liked trout and caught
less than he, and
then went home to
his silent house where
he put his rod in the back closet,
his tackle box on the back shelf
and cleaned his rifle.

© 1971-2009

Half drunk, all of us,
inside that nameless bar in
Houlton, Maine,
you took us home with you
two strangers at two a.m.,
and sat at your grand piano,
eyes burning, and played
until almost dawn,
Barney, the Farmingham
truck driver, and I
your spellbound audience.
I remember Autumn Leaves
flowing like a sacrament
from your fingertips
and then you told us
you were thirty-eight and had
two more years to live.
And all that now remains
is a memory of
snow on a window ledge
and this withered
yellow page.

© 1971-2009

two kids and a dog
frozen full of sunlight
on a field in Arkansas,
an image flicked
by the tongue of time
across the dark Mississippi,
and it means nothing
at all that I can tell
in America’s 200th year,
nothing to the memory
of the Rebel South,
nothing as we the people
sail beneath the overpass
and slingshot on the wind
past a sign that
reads Union 76,
nothing in a white ford van
that flies on the
guard-rail wings
of too much throw-away
Budweiser, and John
blowing hash
through a pen in the back,
just an image that
will not erase itself
as Al steers west
to the heartland through
this soft green hour of day
running going streaking
away away / or is it
coming home wierdly
sober at last to
wrappings ripped off
something sharp inside,
and there is a half-recalled
hooker in midnight Nashville
receding in heels down
Tin Pan Alley as
a siren wails and
rain slants into the neon,
all waiting solemnly
for two Arkansas kids
and a peanut dog,
womb figures
unknowing yet of a
hovering rip-tide continent
and heads cut off like
grass on America’s
insistent lawns.

©12 May 1976
(Route 40 west of Memphis)

The last trace of truth
died today
on Parliament Hill
without a bulletin
on the CP wire.
Some guard found the corpse
behind the Centre Block
and threw it into
the Ottawa River where
it wouldn’t
embarrass the MPs
en route to Question Period.
No one knows what it was
but it was all they were
talking about it
tonight in Hull
which is about as close
as truth got to Ottawa
in its last days.

© 7 November 1974

Like a general
marshalling troops
the short Italian lady
draws her brood around her
scooping them like ducklings
       into the crosswalk
at Church and Wellesley.
Eyes darting, purse waving
she exorts them forward
with wild mascara eyes
waving, barking
       staccato
       commands
that do not fade until
all are safe on the other side
and they vanish
like movie credits
around the corner
by the drug store.

© 6 August 1972

there is no formula
for joy
one day it might be
the arc of a gull
or the wash of a whitecap
the next
the laugh of a lover or
the grip of an old man’s hand.

© 24 April 1970

They lurk that way on the edge of dusk their piston feet pummeling dreams of Bourbon Street until the euphoric chords of mardi gras no longer giftwrap lovers or hold voodoo dolls at bay and yet the sun must still be somewhere running soft fingers down tanned backs and swaying through magnolia trees in a song not fraught with paper elephants or soldiers deserting or lost young tenement women running to the bathroom to vomit up their loneliness at four in the morning the clock the clock ticking life sentences from the mantle and a saxophone mourning kings and jacks flattened in the chaos and why do paper elephants always arrive uninvited and leave bodies behind in rumpled sheets heartstrings snapping like toothpicks until there is only the silence of winter sun on a crashed plane and nothing holding tight to nothing until one small sound rises at last in the vaccuum and a door opens in a small cafe and two hands touch and something flits in the pastel dawn and dancers rise from wooden chairs and flow wordlessly into the morning as paper elephants starve in lights too bright to feed upon.

© 28 March 1975

The big saw slashed
             headlong
into frozen spruce logs
all morning
at my father’s mill
          powerful
          defiant
cursing the cold
feeding the fires
in the boiler shed
until the whistle
blew at noon and
the men retreated
with thermoses
and lunch pails,
eating quickly
smoking
hand-made cigarettes,
and then filed back
again. I remember
steam hissing in
through the pale afternoon
noises colliding
sawdust, bark and slabs
         chains labouring
as though whipped
around pulleys,
pushing hard planks
       out clanking chutes
to shivering workmen.

© 1 February 1975

the sun sets
the way it does
over any batch of
bad buildings
mired in smog
but there is the feel
even the first time
of something
    quivering
caged with energy
Manhattan maybe
calling across the clatter
or a home run
       rising still
from the ghost of
Ebbets Field,
Dylan maybe
crouching on the E train
or a cop with a gun
pointed into danger
it’s there, something with
      long fingers
a hero in trouble
a soul passing
as day dies in Brooklyn.

© 17 January 1976