Civil Elegies: And Other Poems (3 page)

To be our own men! in dread to live
the land, our own harsh country, beloved, the prairie, the foothills —
and for me it is lake by rapids by stream-fed lake, threading
north through the terminal vistas of black spruce, in a
bitter, cherished land it is farm after
farm in the waste of the continental outcrop —
for me it is Shield but wherever terrain informs our lives and claims us;
and then, no longer haunted by
unlived presence, to live the cities:
to furnish, out of the traffic and smog and the shambles of dead precursors,
a civil habitation that is
human, and our own.

The spectres drift across the square in rows.
How empire permeates! And we sit down
in Nathan Phillips Square, among the sun,
as if our lives were real.
Lacunae. Parking lots. Regenerations.
Newsstand euphorics and Revell's sign, that not
one countryman has learned, that
men and women live that
they may make that
life worth dying. Living. Hey,
the dead ones! Gentlemen, generations of
acquiescent spectres gawk at the chrome
on American cars on Queen Street, gawk and slump and retreat.
And over the square where I sit, congregating above the Archer
they crowd in a dense baffled throng and the sun does not shine through.

Master and Lord, where
are you?
A man moves back and forth
between what must be done to save the world
and what will save his soul,
and neither is real. For many years
I could not speak your name, nor now but
even stilled at times by openings like
joy my whole life
aches, the streets I walk along to work declare
your absence, the headlines
declare it, the nation, and
over and over the harried lives I
watch and live with, holding my breath and
sometimes a thing rings true —
they all give way and declare your real absence.

Master and Lord,
let be. I can say
nothing about you that does not
vanish like tapwater.
I know
the world is not enough; a woman straightens
and turns from the sink and asks her life the
question, why should she
fake it? and after a moment she
shrugs, and returns to the sink. A man's
adrenalin takes hold, at a meeting he makes
his point, and pushes and sees that
things will happen now … and then in the pause he knows
there are endless things in the world and this is not for real.

Whatever is lovely, whatever deserves
contempt, whatever dies —
over and over, in every thing we meet
we meet that emptiness.
It is a homecoming, as men once knew
their lives took place in you.
And we cannot get on, no matter how we
rearrange our lives and we cannot let go for
then there is nothing at all.

Master and Lord, there was a
measure once.
There was a time when men could say
my life, my job, my home
and still feel clean.
The poets spoke of earth and heaven. There were no symbols.

The light rides easy on people dozing at noon in Toronto, or
here it does, in the square, with the white spray hanging
upward in plumes on the face of the pool, and the kids, and the thrum of the
      traffic,
and the people come and they feel no consternation, dozing at
lunchtime; even the towers comply.
And they prevail in their placid continuance, idly unwrapping their food
day after day on the slabs by the pool, warm in the summer sun.
Day after day the light rides easy.
Nothing is important.
But once at noon I felt my body's pulse contract and
balk in the space of the square, it puckered and jammed till nothing
worked, and casting back and forth
the only resonance that held was in the Archer.
Great bronze simplicity, that muscled form
was adequate in the aimless expanse — it held, and tense and
waiting to the south I stood until the
clangor in my forearms found its outlet.
And when it came I knew that stark heraldic form is not
great art; for it is real, great art is less than its necessity.
But it held, when the monumental space of the square
went slack, it moved in sterner space.
Was shaped by earlier space and it ripples with
wrenched stress, the bronze is flexed by
blind aeonic throes
that bred and met in slow enormous impact,
and they are still at large for the force in the bronze churns
through it, and lunges beyond and also the Archer declares
that space is primal, raw, beyond control and drives toward a
living stillness, its own.
But if some man by the pool, doing his workaday
job in the city, tangled in other men's
futures with ticker-tape, hammering
type for credits or bread, or in for the day, wiped out in Long Branch
by the indelible sting of household acts of war,
or whatever; if a man strays into that
vast barbaric space it happens that he enters into
void and will go
under, or he must himself become void.

We live on occupied soil.
Across the barren Shield, immortal scrubland and our own,
where near the beginning the spasms of lava
settled to bedrock schist,
barbaric land, initial, our
own, scoured bare under
crush of the glacial recessions
and later it broke the settlers, towing them
deeper and deeper each year beneath the
gritty sprinkle of soil, till men who had worked their farms for a lifetime
could snap in a month from simple cessation of will,
though the brute surroundings went on — the flagrant changes
of maple and sumach, the water in ripples of light,
the faces of outcrop, the stillness, and up the slopes
a vast incessant green that drew the mind
beyond its tether, north, to muskeg and
stunted hackmatack, and then the whine of icy tundra north to the pole —
despotic land, inhuman yet
our
own
, where else on earth? and reaping stone
from the bush their fathers cleared, the sons gave
way and they drank all year, or went strange, or they sat and stared outside
as their cars settled back to slag and now what
races toward us on asphalt across the Shield —
by truck, by TV minds and the ore-bearing flatcars —
is torn from the land and the mute oblivion of
all those fruitless lives, it no longer
stays for us, immemorial adversary, but is shipped and
divvied abroad though wrested whole from the Shield.

Take Tom Thomson, painter; he
did his work in the Shield.
Could guide with a blindfold on. Was part of the bush. Often when night
came down in a subtle rush and the scorched scrub still
ached for miles from the fires he paddled direct through
the palpable dark, hearing only the push and
drip of the blade for hours and then very suddenly the radiance of the
renewed land broke over his canvas. So. It was his
job. But no two moments land with the same sideswipe
and Thomson, for all his savvy, is very damp and
trundled by submarine currents, pecked by the fish out
somewhere cold in the Shield and the far loons percolate
high in November and he is not painting their cry.

Small things ignite us, and the quirky particulars
flare on all sides.
A cluster of birches, in moonlight;
a jack pine, gnarled and
focussing heaven and earth —
these might fend off void.
Or under the poolside arches the sunlight, skidding on paper destroyers,
kindles a dazzle, skewing the sense. Like that. Any
combination of men and time can start the momentary
ignition. If only it were enough.
But it is two thousand years since Christ's carcass rose in a glory,
and now the shiny ascent is not for us, Thomson is
done and we cannot
malinger among the bygone acts of grace. For
many are called but none are chosen now, we are the evidence
for downward momentum, although despite our longing still restrained
within the real, as Thomson's body really did
decay and vying to praise him we
bicker about which grave the carcass fills.

New silences occur in the drone of the square's great spaces.
The light overbalances, shadows
appear, the people walk away.
But massy and knotted and still the Archer continues its space,
which violates our lives, and reminds us, and has no mercy upon us.
For a people which lays its whiskey and violent machines
on a land that is primal, and native, which takes that land in greedy
innocence but will not live it, which is not claimed by its own
and sells that land off even before it has owned it,
traducing the immemorial pacts of men and earth, free and
beyond them, exempt by miracle from the fate of the race —
that people will botch its cities, its greatest squares
will scoff at its money and stature, and prising wide
a civil space to live in, by the grace of its own invention it will
fill that space with the artifacts of death.

On Queen Street, therefore, in Long Branch, wherever the
people have come upon it, say that the
news is as bad as we thought:
we have spent the bankroll; here, in this place,
it is time to honour the void.

Among the things which
hesitate to be, is void our
vocation? The houses on the street
hold back from us, across the welter of city blocks
our friendships keep stalling,
even the square falls away and the acts of our statesmen
will not come real though we long for it.
Dwelling among the
bruised and infinitely binding world
are we not meant to
relinquish it all, to begin at last
the one abundant psalm of letting be?

If only it
held. If only
here and now were not fastened so
deep in the flesh and goodbye, but how should a man
alive and tied to the wreckage that surrounds him,
the poisoned air goodbye, goodbye the lakes,
the earth and precious habitat of species,
goodbye the grainy sense of place, worn down in
words and the local ways of peoples, goodbye the children returning
as strangers to their roots and generations,
and cities dying of concrete, city goodbye my city of passionate bickering
neighbourhoods the corner stores
all ghosts among the high-rise, like bewildered nations after their
surrender as their boundaries
diminish to formalities on maps goodbye, so many
lives gone down the drain in the service of empire,
bombing its demon opponents though they bleed like men, goodbye
and not that all things die but that they die meanly, and
goodbye the lull of the sun in the square, goodbye and
goodbye the magisterial life of the mind, in the domination of number every
excellent workaday thing all spirited
men and women ceaselessly jammed at their breaking
points goodbye who have such little time on earth and constantly fastened
how should a man stop caring?

And yet the death of lakes, the gutting of our self-respect,
even the passage of Canada —
these do not intrude such radical
bereavement merely to
humour us, to bid us declare
how painfully each passing brings us down.
Every thing we own will
disappear; nothing
belongs to us, and
only that nothing is home.
And this is what the things were telling us: if we can
face the rigours of detachment, meaning our
life, our job, our home, permitting it to
break over us, letting it
bring us down till every
itch and twitch of attachment loses its purchase,
at the dead-end of desire and for some it will last
a month and for some ten years, at last we
find ourselves in the midst of what abounds,
though that is not it but now we are set
free to cherish the world which has been stripped away by stages, and with no
reason the things are renewed: the people, Toronto, the elms
still greening in their blighted silhouettes — some
dead some burgeoning but none our property, and now they
move at last in the clearness of open space, within the
emptiness they move very cleanly in the vehement enjoyment of their bodies.

But what good is that in a nation of
losers and quislings? and for the few tenacious
citizens of a land that was never their own, watching the
ore and the oil and the shore-lines gutted
for dollars by men from abroad, watching Canadians
peddle their birthright and for these others, good
stateless men and women and may they go down in civil fury —
how should they clutch and fumble after beatitude, crouching for
years till emptiness renews an elm-tree,
and meanwhile the country is gone?

I think much now of Garneau, master of emptiness,
who in the crowded streets of Montreal
saw not lost souls but a company of lost bodies, and
moving into himself gave thanks when he discovered
nothing but desert and void.
And I know that appetite in my own life,
at work, at home, in the square, and more insistent every day it presses
outward through the living will of the body,
straining to reach its ground, oblivion.

But some face exile at home and sniping at corporations,
manic at times, and the patsies of empire their leaders lying for votes
till the impotence spreads in their veins, there is
shame abounding and sometimes a few good
gestures between the asphalt and sky that might have been adequate
once, and finally dying on occupied soil.

Yet still they take the world full force on their nerve ends, leaving the
bloody impress of their bodies face forward in time and I believe
they will not go under until they have taken the measure of empire.

It would be better maybe if we could stop loving the children
and their delicate brawls, pelting across the square in tandem, deking
from cover to cover in raucous celebration and they are never
winded, bemusing us with the rites of our own
gone childhood; if only they stopped
mattering, the children, it might be possible, now
while the square lies stunned by noon.
What is real is fitful, and always the beautiful footholds
crumble the moment I set my mind aside, though the world does recur.
Better, I think, to avoid the scandal of being — the headlong particulars
which as they lose their animal purchase
cease to endorse us, though the ignominious hankering
goes on; this awakens the ache of being, and the lonesome ego
sets out once again dragging its lethal desires across the world,
which does not regard them.
Perhaps we should
bless what doesn't attach us, though I do not know
where we are to find nourishment.
So, in the square, it is a
blessed humdrum; the kids climb over the Archer, and
the pool reflects the sky, and the people passing by,
who doze, and gently from above the visible pollutants descend,
coating the towers' sheath. Sometimes it
works but once in summer looking up I saw the noxious cloud suspended
taut above the city, clenched, as now everywhere it is the
imperial way of life that bestows its fallout. And it did not
stay inert, but across the fabled horizon of Bay Street they came riding,
the liberators, the deputies of Jesus, the Marines, and had released
bacterial missiles over the Golden Horseshoe for love of all mankind,
and I saw my people streaming after calling welcome for the small change,
and I ran in my mind crying humiliation upon the country, as now I do also
    for it is
hard to stay at the centre when you're losing it one more time,
although the pool
reflects the placid sky, and the people passing by, and daily
our acquiescence presses down on us from above and we have no room to be.
It is the children's fault as they swarm for we cannot stop caring.