Civil Elegies: And Other Poems (4 page)

In a bad time, people, from an outpost of empire I write
bewildered, though on about living. It is to set down a nation's
failure of nerve; I mean complicity, which is signified by the
gaseous stain above us. For a man who
fries the skin of kids with burning jelly is a
criminal. Even though he loves children he is a criminal. Even though his
money pumps your oil he is criminal, and though his programs infest the air

you breathe he is
criminal and though his honest quislings run your
government he is criminal and though you do not love his enemies he is
criminal and though you lose your job on his say-so he is criminal and
though your country will founder without him he is criminal and though he has
transformed the categories of your refusal by the pressure of his media he

is a criminal.
And the consenting citizens of a minor and docile colony
are cogs in a useful tool, though in no way
necessary and scarcely
criminal at all and their leaders are
honourable men, as for example Paul Martin.

In Germany, the civic square in many little towns is
hallowed for people. Laid out just so, with
flowers and fountains and during the war you could come and
relax for an hour, catch a parade or just
get away from the interminable racket of the trains, clattering through the
outskirts with their lousy expendable cargo.
Little cafes often, fronting the square. Beer and a chance to relax.
And except for the children it's peaceful here
too, under the sun's warm sedation.

The humiliations of imperial necessity
are an old story, though it does not
improve in the telling and no man
believes it of himself.
Why bring up genocide? Why bring up
acquiescence, profiteering? Why bring up, again,
the deft emasculation of a country by the Liberal party of Canada?
It was not Mr Martin who sprayed the poison mist
on the fields of the Vietnamese, not in person nor fried civilians — he was
no worse a man than the other sellouts of history:
the Britons who went over to the legionaries, sadly for the sake of the

larger peace,
the tired professors of Freiburg, Berlin, the statesmen at Munich, those
estimable men, and the lovers of peace, the brisk switchers who
told it in Budapest. Doesn't the
service of quiet diplomacy require dirty hands?
(Does the sun in summer pour its warm light into the square
for us to ignore?) And then if it doesn't work one is finally
on the winning side — though that is
unkind: Mr Martin was an honourable man, as we are all
Canadians and honourable men.

And this is void, to participate in an
abomination larger than yourself. It is to fashion
other men's napalm and know it, to be a
Canadian safe in the square and watch the children dance and
dance and smell the lissome burning
bodies to be born in
old necessity to breathe polluted air and
come of age in Canada with lies and vertical on earth no man has drawn a
breath that was not lethal to some brother it is
yank and gook and hogtown linked in
guilty genesis it is the sorry mortal
sellout burning kids by proxy acquiescent
still though still denying it is merely to be human.

I am one for whom the world is constantly proving too much —
not this nor that, but the continental drift to barbarian
normalcy frightens me, I am constantly
stiffening before my other foot touches the ground and numb in my
stance I hear the country pouring on past me gladly on all sides,
towed and protesting but pelting very fast downhill,
and though I do not decry technopolis I can see only the bread and circuses
      to come,
and no man will use a mirror to shave, in case he
glimpse himself and abroad there will come obscenity, a senseless procession
      of holy wars
and we will carry the napalm for our side, proud of our clean hands.
I can't converse with friends without discussing Rome, this is
bad news and though the upshot is not that I am constantly
riddled with agonies my thing is often worse for I cannot get purchase on life.

Among the flaws that mar my sleep I harbour more than wars for I have
      friends and lacerations,
brave men and spritely women, lovers of Dylan
whose fears dovetail and though often our gentleness for our lover
is straight and incomparable,
we impose the roles that feed the other's
hankering and go on to
savage what we have made, defacing
images, our own, and thus finally
destroy the beloved
trapped inside the image.
And the nerve-ends come apart and we spend
long nights separate in the same bed, turning and raunchy as if
our dreams were real for there are
few among us who are competent at being, and few who can
let our lovers be.
And some are freed by the breakdown but many at once will
lapse back into the game, projecting our
monstrous images back outside us again, where we will
deface them again and again destroy the beloved,
and there is never any end to it while we are alive.

And some move through these hard necessities
like losers for awhile, but then they
reach some kind of ease in their bodies' loving;
the agony hunger fades, they come to a
difficult rhythm together, around
their job and the kids, that allows for a
tentative joy and often for grieving together.

But mostly each man carries his lover's fate
inside him, which he fears as it stirs because if the drinks are strong
or the conversation proceeds just so it will rise up and contemptuously
destroy him, and at last when he meets the other
with his own fate trapped like a bubble inside her body
there is a baleful chemistry which draws them together for love and the kill.
And out of that horror of life

they take on the crippled roles that each has singled the
other to partner, the voluntary betrayal is
consummated and they are confirmed again
in postures of willing defeat and furious at their own fresh self-abolition
they tear strips off the other who has been their accessory.
And they walk all night in the street for the fate is still in them,
and it is a rash passer who does not see himself on the go half out of his
      mind with the need to fail and be hurt,
for these were brave men and subtle women, spritely lovers
who could not love themselves and it is
hard that we have only
one life for mostly we cannot command the courage outright to exist
and the months slip by and still we have not started,
and every year attaches itself behind and we have more to drag.

Faced with the onus of living our civilisation, here, in this time,
do we also single out leaders because they will
dishonour us, because they will diminish us?
And they act our hearts' desire for always they are
bulldozed by yankees, menaced by slant-eyed gooks and happily there is
no hope that we might come to our own
and live, with our claimed selves, at home in the difficult world.

I come to the square each time there is nothing and once, made calm again
by the spare vertical glory of right proportions,
watching the wind cut loose as it riffled the clouds on the skyline, framing
      the towers at noon,
catching the newsboys' raucous cry of race in the streets and the war and
      Confederation going,
smelling the air, the interminable stink of production and transport and
caught once more in the square's great hush with the shoppers, hippies,
      brokers, children, old men dozing alone by the pool and waiting,
feeling the pulse in the bodies jostling past me driving to climax and
      dollars and blood,
making my cry here quick and obscure among many in transit — not as a
lyric self in a skin but divided, spinning off many selves to attend each
      lethal yen as it passed me — thinking of
death in the city, of others' and also my own and of many born afterwards,
I saw that we are to live in the calamitous division of the world
with singleness of eye and there is
nothing I would not give to be made whole.

Hector de Saint-Denys-Garneau
you came this way and made poems out of your body,
out of the palpable void that opened
between the bones of your spine — if you weren't just
making it up, you thought,
and humbled yourself again.
But your friends could only see that you were a genius,
and humiliated by their nonchalance as they strolled through space, as if
they belonged, as if their tickets had been accepted,
you turned back and fingered the precious emptiness, feeling inside you
the small incessant gush of the cardiac lesion.
And often you left the room when the party was
reaching its climax, and you had been foremost in repartee, Garneau
and fell crouching upstairs in a sweat by the bed, sick with repentance and
stammered out holy names,
destroyed by what was quick and sexual in Montreal.
But you lasted ten years more, in a suave vertigo
assaying the void with your nerve-ends, watching your
friendships go numb, your poems, nursing
the adorable death of the Son in your own imperious cells, a man made
empty for love of God, straining to be only
an upright will in the desert, until at last the world's hypnotic
glitter was made single in the grace of renunciation.

But the kids, and the calm, and the endless parade of lethal desirable things
divide us as they pass by with clowns, the tawdry
yammering goes on inside and it yanks us here and every
whichway, we are on all fronts and forming
new precious attachments and
often they stun us till what is authentic is obliterated and heeding it or
even locating it becomes one more hangup, all that great
longing keeps banging back against the miscellaneous clobber of day to day.

And by these distractions we are saved, for there is a barren route that the
      blood knows,
and the obscure inklings of the implacable imagination declare it,
lonely among bedclothes before the light on Tuesdays;
and though I will not speak of where I have not been it is
the graveyard of many for want of the lore of emptiness,
which once was a sane thing, but now of those who begin
their lonely inward procession I
do not know a chastened handful who survive.

Catatonic exemplar,
cardiac, scrupulous, hagridden — you, Hector,
our one patrician maker, mangled spirit,
you went all out for fame and when you knew you would not survive in the
      world you turned to sainthood,
and you beat down the thought for the pride and retreated to
Sainte-Catherine, you watched your blood lap wide on the lake at sunset,
thinking of John of the Cross, patron of void, thinking of Jesus,
and you watched the ferns come shouldering up through your body, the
      brutal ferns in spring, it was all
detachment you hoped, it was
exquisite penetration, it was
fear of life, the mark of Canada.
And now across
two decades and two nations de Saint-Denys-Garneau, my blessed stricken
original, still haunted by the
space between your ribs, maker and friend and comfortless, my
lone heroic starter, out of my own wrong start I
keep my distance and praise.

The crowds gust through the square, the crowds and the refuse.
The luminous towers preside.
Of high detachment there are many counterfeits;
the world is itself, though sundry.
And I will not enter void till I come to myself
nor silence the world till I learn its lovely syllables,
the brimful square and the dusk and the war and the crowds in motion at
     evening, waiting to be construed
for they are fragile, and the tongue must be sure.

Here, as I sit and watch, the rusty leaves hang taut with departure.
The last few tourists pose by the Moore and snap their proof that they
      were also alive.
And what if there is no regenerative absence?
What if the void that compels us is only
a mood gone absolute?
We would have to live in the world.
What if the dreary high-rise is nothing but
banks of dreary high-rise, it does not
release the spirit by fraying its attachment,
for the excellent reason that there is no place else to go?
We would have to live in it, making our lives on earth.
Or else a man might go on day by day
in love with emptiness, dismayed each time he meets
good friends, fine buildings and grass in the acres of concrete, feeling the
city's erotic tug begin once more, perpetually
splayed alive by the play of his bungled desires,
though some do not salute the death of the body
before they have tested its life, but crippled they summon together
the fury from within, they tilt at
empire, empire, lethal adversary;
but I am one who came to
idolatry, as in a season of God,
taking my right to be from nothingness.

Across the square the crisp leaves blow in gusts, tracing
the wind's indignant lift in corners,
filling the empty pool.
People plod past through the raw air, lost in their overcoats.
I hunch down close to my chest and eat smoke.

But when the void became void I did
let go, though derelict for months
and I was easy, no longer held by its negative presence
as I was earlier disabused of many things in the world
including Canada, and came to know I still had access to them,
and I promised to honour each one of my country's failures of nerve and its
      sellouts.

To rail and flail at a dying civilisation,
to rage in imperial space, condemning
soviet bombers, american bombers — to go on saying
no to history is good.
And yet a man does well to leave that game behind, and go and find
some saner version of integrity,
although he will not reach it where he longs to, in the
vacant spaces of his mind — they are so
occupied. Better however to try.

But we are not allowed to enter God's heaven, where it is all a
drowsy beatitude, nor is God, the realm above our heads but
must grow up on earth.
Nor do we have recourse to void.
For void is not a place, nor
negation of a place.
Void is not the high cessation of the lone self's burden,
crowned with the early nostalgias;
nor is it rampant around the corner, endlessly possible.
We enter void when void no longer exists.