To thine own self be true

This is the hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,
Night, sleep, death and the stars.
–Walt Whitman, published in Inside Poetry (2nd ed.) by Richard Davies & Jerry Wowk (as were the two preceding poems)

(inspired by Erik Satie’s “Trois Gymnopedies”)

“Music that gentlier on the spirit lies.”–Tennyson, “The Lotos-Eaters”

1

uncomplicated blue
a mist on the hill
autumn’s palette
& the cool wet smell
of woods–
never a stiller moment
& bird-respectful silence

2

we walk in the mists
of our youth
turning the pages
of memory
gathering leaves
to press in our hearts
but you & I are ghosts
& the dry leaves
wither in our hands

3

inevitable
the webs of time
that cover you & I
the lake rimed with frost
& golden dreams
that fall like leaves
everywhere

4

we sit in the park
past dusk
in search of
our infant joy
& the faery jewels
of youth

5

voices whisper softly:
I am done
it is done
I am one
it is none

6

under the gossamer
sky of September
erik satie sipped cognac
on a deserted terrace
& realized too late
he could never get it all

In deep November there is disbelief
A loss of faith that winter, not yet here,
Will go about its business and be brief.
Instead the season generates a fear
That winter, once in place will stay that way
Forever–cold and bleak, cheerless and stark–
As icy blasts relentlessly hold sway,
Consigning us forever to the dark.
But then December comes along, and lo!
What lights are these that sparkle, clear and bright?
Instead of darkness, there’s a happy glow
Of red and green that glistens through the night,
And where we feared that coldness might prevail
The warmth of love tells quite a different tale!

–R. Glenn Martin

…………………………………………….

Glenn was my ED Curriculum and Instruction ( i.e., how to teach English) prof at U of A in 1971-2 A.D. He published my first articles in Alberta English, notably one on Canadian literature. Glenn was a generally genial gentleman and a long-time friend. He was a Harvard grad and took a class with Robert Frost who encouraged the students to write poetry. (Frost sent him a Christmas card.) Glenn and I shared a great love of poetry and we often talked of Emily Dickinson. In his last good year, I escorted him to the Edmonton Symphony and we dined out each time. The last time I saw him in hospital, he was happily in his own world, but sort of recognized me and whistled (quite accurately) the melody of a Beethoven piece. (His favorite composer on whom he lectured via a U of Ex Extension class.) It was my honour to read the eulogy at his funeral. He was a brilliant, witty, kind man who talked me into staying in my first/junior high student teaching round when I wanted to quit. After that, I was the only one who ever sent him a Xmas card every year, something he noted and appreciated. One of my literary heroes and major influences, remembered this Sunday winter morn.

There’s a special providence
in the fall of a sparrow.
But it is quite possible
that the world as we know it
is but a trick, and that what we know,
are little certain of, will end–
can plummet from the skies.

I wonder about that airliner
up there disappearing (poof)
as if it never was
its 200+ person load nullified,
black box irrelevant
in unforgiving Atlantic.
The readiness, hardly.

But even more about
the fall of a same-day sparrow
in my wife’s planter
of pink and red impatiens.
Impatient, no doubt,
a predator had decided
to get on with it,
despite the available love-birds
mating in the lilacs.

When life, unsuspecting.
was there interrupted,
(the wrong place, the wrong time)
much like those seat-belted innocents
on their final flight
to obliterating fathoms.

(Strange lifeless bird…)

It hardly bears thinking of–
all this crash and burn.
For my own part (as plausible),
a surprise bite to the neck.
delayed antihistamine,
and voila, an inglorious death
by unseen bug
on a patio in August.
My own, as likely another’s–
all falls thereby imminent.

…………………………

(Hamlet revisited in the first two lines and “The readiness” allusion. “Trick” is the view of life offered by John Masefield in “Sea Fever.” Obviously, the sparrow mentioned by Hamlet morphs into the dead sparrow I found the day this poem was written, the same day as a plane tragedy. It’s one thing when a sparrow or one person die; mass death, though, is something else on an altogether larger, somewhat unapprehendable scale.

There was some mating going on the same day in our backyard; often birth or survival are going on at the same time, as death as director Robert Altman showed in the hospital scene of Short Cuts. Or as Dylan once sang: “he not busy being born is busy dying.” The absurd death–via insect bite, allergy, and no medicine–is the kind of thing that could happen to many people, maybe even myself, so that wrote itself in the last stanza. Why kid oneself?

So in this selection, you have the one-minute presence, one-minute not, on three different levels, in three different contexts. One can be alive one minute, blotted out the next, somewhat absurdly, as the French existentialists (such as Albert Camus, himself unexpectedly killed in a car crash) often remarked on. The simple fact of living is fraught with risk; we take so much for granted. I will leave off the presence-non-presence theme by mentioning that Jane Kenyon’s poem “Otherwise” is the best thing I’ve ever read on the topic. As she puts it, if we’re lucky, each day may be full of good things and the best that presence has to offer. In contrast, she adds ”But one day, I know,/it will be otherwise.”

In another life, Emily Dickinson
befriended Andre the Giant
& bodyslammed him to the mat
at Riverside Coliseum.

Andre was impressed by her
technique & white dress.
‘I have always depended on
the excellence of execution,’ she winked.

For his own part, Andre went gaga
when the Belle rang his bell.
‘Me Andre, you Emily’ & sent her
roses after every Royal Rumble.

Tour guides at Amherst
became embarrassed by
the ghostly sightings of Miss E
in a second-story bedroom

from which she lowered picnic baskets
of bananas & bread to the Giant
who visited her by moonlight,
or whenever his contract permitted.

When Andre died, it was said
she wrote him an ode with caps galore.
His last gift to her was the dropkick of love:
a tribute for all his hardcore fans.

……………………………………………………..

Written in the `90s after a visit to Amherst, Mass., Emily`s hometown. To contextualize this one a bit: My kids watched and seemed to enjoy the WWF for a while, particularly the performance and theatre aspects of their tv events. I wrote this in about 10 mins., `off the top`, while waiting with for wanna-be poets to show up for assistance at a table during a local writers`event .

Something I had learned long ago from W.O. Mitchell was that if you wanted to create humor, irony, or absurdity was to put a character into a context he or she would not be caught dead in. I decided to try this x 2, marrying the contexts of poetry and professional wrestling, and found that Mitchell was right as usual. I will just add here that interesting possibilities arise in real life when you apply the same principle.

Further notes: Only known photo of Dickinson, above. Andre the Giant was very much a real person and a very popular WWF wrestler who probably never read a poem or had a `normal`date in his adult life. Emily Dickinson had her own difficulties connecting with the spear side. She did, however, admire and correspond with a Reverend Samuel Bowles who may have been the `the Master`of some of her more desirous poems. Emily did wear a white dress which you can see on display at Amherst in her bedroom. Very much a recluse, she also did lower picnic baskets with goodies to the neighborhood children who came by. The “caps” allusion is a reference to her eccentric use of capital letters unexpectedly; whomever she loved would have likely received them abundantly.

(for Dean)

1

unread & unknown
I refuse to be still, see
I am the spirit of all times
a pulse that insists,
a balanced thunder,
my voice defying dark.
I happen, muse.

2

they want me like this:
the sum total,
nice straight lines
of experience
& rhymes like ice.
at best I can offer
a plunge, a candor,
ellipsis & perhaps
a great thaw.
(permanence?)

3

first-rate & yet naught
I persist despite
our many gulfs & fuses.
my lightning dances
on your taut skin,
alters neurons
in a sifting process–
makes new laws ‘@&#~*+
(there is hope for us yet.)

4

‘oh god, I’m alive’
thinks the poem
in an unguarded moment
to no one reader
over & over again,
confessing to verities
not wholly common.
mute & alert
I speak of great symptoms,
my shape, a condition
my form, a necessity.

5

remaindered value
to the contrary,
my range jangles your vision
with its absences & tones:
a tingling catechism of words
exorcized slowly…
a rehearsal of eloquence
for other poems listening.

6
this terrible ordeal of verse
conversant with possibility
convergent with failure.
I sound, notwithstanding,
the subterfuges of
critic, school & dust,
an ever-pregnant imagination
in use, a heresy of truth.

7

no longer safely stowed
but conscious of its self,
the poem reaches 7.
the details of its life
fully felt & formed
in a wash of image & blood–
organic now, advancing toward
an appointed equilibrium.
juggernaut of mind & hand
moving confident now
across the page
like a meaning finally read.

…………………………

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”–T.S. Eliot

Frost said that poetry was “a performance in words”. Dickinson wrote “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant–“. This 1990 AD selection is about the artistic process which has its own analogous birthing qualities.

Stanza 2 reflects Dickinson’s quote and certainly the conflict with conformity as the individual seeks to express himself as well. “Permanence?” is that starting hope and possibility that a given poem in process might turn out to be special and have some kind of lasting resonance.

Stanza 3 is about the possibility of connection and communication. Stanza 4 is about the poem as consciousness and self-consciousness, something every artist becomes aware in the process of making whatever work. If the artist is lucky, s/he will have something significant to say.

(Stanza 5) One of writers’ great fears is that their book will end up on a sales table somewhere, resigned to the dustbin of inconsequence. Writing and most art is a kind of exorcism, again a form of birthing or bringing into being for an audience, at minimum, of other artists.

(Stanza 6) Writing, like most of the arts, is fraught with huge risk and may be sabotaged (making a “heresy of Truth”) by critics, schools, and teachers.

At some point, though, the artist or poet has to be true to him/herself and the spirit of whatever s/he is creating, this poem no less. The words begin to flow and ultimately there may be meanings to be read, understood, appreciated, savoured by the creator and his/her audience. I wrote this poem to let the poem speak for itself and to show the creative process from ‘inside’ the work.

I am nothing you can’t handle
and haven’t seen before.
Bent by time and vocation,
I dream of restoration
beneath your healing hands.
Their laying-on a dance and rhythm
to make music of my bones.
You untie the knots of a secret self
I never even knew I had.
Each time is easier–
a little trust and faith.
I ask for nothing and do not presume.
It is simple.
Caring goes a long way.
You excavate the best in me
without fail. Safe and saved,
there is much to be thankful for:
a touch of understanding.

……………………………………….

14 years of massage therapy. Well, speaking of process and life possibilities, this is one area that can really improve and enhance one’s outer and inner being simultaneously. Flow or chi are important to process and to facilitating life possibilities. Call it a plumbing of, tending to, and freeing of one’s physical or outer self. But it does require a certain comfort zone with one’s self and with others in order to work. For me, it has been, like performing–musical performing, for instance– a kind of “letting go”, based on trust that the other is a competent professional who intuitively (through touch) knows where the individual most needs help and cares enough to provide it. I believe that, to achieve total freedom, you must be comfortable in the presence of others with your physical self. If you are, then the freeing of the knots as well as inner self are more likely to follow down the road.

The caring people and various other caregivers are a reminder of the best about human beings; there are many kind folks out there who have a special gift to share–communicating with others and ministering unto them. It takes a very special person to perform this kind of public service–of freeing others and providing relief.

“I built my soul a lordly pleasure-house,/Wherein at ease for aye to dwell”–Tennyson, “The Palace of Art”

You cannot live in Art,
they told him.
Don’t trust in those dreams.
The Lady of Shalott died
by that river, you’ll recall.
(So they insist on ruts
& the thousand deaths
of heart’s desire.)

Keep a clear heart
when forests burn down.
Hang on to stars
when all the maps are gone.
(A fool’s paradise beats
the coffins of convention.)
Who could efface
the red-flowering snow?
The miracle of running water
in a desert of mind.
Imagination’s insistence.

The movie-reel of Time
unloops like an obsession.
Cups of tea, a long afternoon,
the sun through lace curtains.
Measures of quietude,
the lovers’ discourse.
(I guess we all lived here once,
heard concertos in the park
& wondered if the band
would ever play for us.)

Ice & warm hands–
we carry on somehow
with what is left of forgotten love:
What could be & what was.
The garden asleep, its forever
keys for the finding.

………………………………..

Life’s possibilities–Can one live in a palace of art (first proposed by Tennyson)? I’d have to say, Yes, I’ve been ‘there’ for many years going back to my first year of university. There are many artists and art fans who do similarly, quite comfortably. True, reality may not correspond with the aesthetic perspective, but it may offer more inspiration, hope, optimism, strength, humor, love, etc. than a lot of other lifestyles and approaches.

(I’ve never been a fan of ruts, the buried life, quantity as the sole/ultimate measurement or criteria, and what Frank Lloyd Wright called “pig-piling”. One often sees too many absurd, straitjacketing, self-imposed limits in others as well as arbitrary limitations that are foisted on others by limited-minded or limited-perspective folks.)

This here skating biz,
it`s enough to put anyone
on edge.
Bladed ballet for some–
kissing ice for me.

My program is necessarily
a short one: squeezed feet
& aching sacro-iliac.
My style arched & forever
braced for collision.

Free skating–that`s me for sure.
It costs nothing to watch me
circle a pond monotonously.
Nothing fancy–no spins
jumps or lifts.

I love to take the air,
but know too well
the gravity of my situation.

I prefer my etchings on paper,
safe, solitary– a dance on flat white.
Rask, rask–my pen scrawls.

Far safer for everyone, I figure.
Who needs trials or stress fractures?
There`s enough ice & theatre elsewhere.

Still I dig my novice status,
something about lacing up those Bauers
& the piped-in oldies.

To say nothing of the prospect
of going solo again on
the Lake Placid of my brain.

…………………………………………….

Lake Placid-–past scene of a famous winter Olympics

Written and read at a Stroll of Poets event on a rink stage during a national ice skating tournament at the Northlands Agricom. As said earlier, some roles suit us and some we do in our limited individual ways. Ice skating, as seen on the sports channel, is a bladed ballet for some and very much a performance, like so many things we do in life. Writing this poem and writing, period, is a similar ‘risky’ performance–I’m probably better at that than when I’ve been on skates in the past. And yet it was fun to read at the event and to write a poem for it; in short, to imagine and perform vicariously. But as Dirty Harry said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”

Down by the seacoast at Fishermen’s Cove
We haul up the bright nets and empty our load
And if luck’s on our side, we fill up the hold
Then sail for the night lights of town

chorus:
And it’s way-way-way sail away
The sea is our mother, our life, and our pay
In all sorts of weather we fish in the bay
And it’s way-way sail away

I was just thirteen years when my father took me
For my very first trip with his mates on the sea
We ate hard dry biscuits and drank off our tea
The gulls overhead all the while

chorus: repeats

Our wives and our children are glad when we’re home
Safe from the hurricane, safe from the storms
But we don’t linger long for the sea we must roam
So once more we sail in the dawn

chorus: repeats

Now that I’m older, grizzled and grey
A pipe in my mouth, my hair in the spray
I’ll pull my own weight, yes I’ll live life that way
Until the sea calls me home

chorus: repeats

……………………

Song arose from 2 Halifax trips in the 1980s. It was praised by Rita MacNeil.