Unbroken Lines

Unbroken Lines Collected Poetic Prose 1990-2015

James Deahl

Unbroken Lines: Collected poetic prose, 1990 – 2015

By James Deahl

© 2015 by James Deahl Cover: untitled 24″x20″ mixed media

by Patti Sullivan pattiartist@charter.net All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the express written permission of the author, except in the case of written reviews.

ISBN 978-1-929878-60-4 Library of Congress control number: 2015949878 First edition

PO Box 5301 San Pedro, CA 90733 www.lummoxpress.com Printed in the United States of America

Dedicated to my sweetheart

Norma West Linder with love.

Foreword

By Katherine L. Gordon

Here is the definitive book of prose-poems, destined to be a classic of the genre on every reference shelf. A new adventure in the evolving presentation of Canadian poetry, a welcome innovation of compact vision, allowing many threads of existence to wind together on a brief, powerful page.

The lyricism, the heart-tug of common human experience, is strongly present, just as the emotional highs we have come to expect of great poetry.

James Deahl’s prose-poem form allows the freedom of disparate experiences to be gathered with meaningful connection into the paragraphs poetically linked. The form is not limited to a single insight, but has the sweeping vibrancy to allow geography, time, season, and circumstance to flow together, like a stony riverbed, ever changing, ever the same, as we imprint personal events onto the backdrop.

A story unfolds and surprises inside each prose-poem here, enhanced by natural setting, a history straddling the tides of our memories and experiences in cities and towns that have watchfully witnessed our arrivals and departures.

Unbroken Lines heralds a welcome new experience in poetic expression, leaves you hungry for more. The introductory poem, “Damp Stones,” encapsulates the hammer power of compact lines, shadowing myth, beauty, fear, desire, old yearnings caught in knots of the woods in all our subconscious minds.

Deahl’s poem “The Meadow” expresses these revelations searingly: “only the realm of indestructible forms remains, a realm outside the tarnished world of matter, like a meadow of endless spring living in the imagination of a child.”

iv

James Deahl has a very special gift, it marks him as one of our great contemporaries: he can impart the geography he has absorbed into his poetic persona, make it places that resonate with the joys and sorrows of those who lived in those places, leaving them mute testimony to change and often decay, a part of our bones. Here the stalwart Yankee beginnings, his travels to Europe, old DNA touchstones, the wilds of Canada that hold and transfix. The prose-poem is a perfect vehicle for this complex painting.

I anticipate that Unbroken Lines will herald a freer form of lyrical expression for coming generations of Canadian writers.

v

Author’s Preface

The pieces in this collection were written over a quarter of a century: from May of 1990, while I was in England, to May of 2015, when Norma and I were in Connecticut. In general, they fall into four principal categories: pure nonfiction (much of it autobiographical), pure fiction, nonfiction with fictional elements mixed in (some of it slightly autobiographical), and prose-poetry. Two examples of my straight non-fiction are “Apocrypha” (relating to my adventures in U.S. Naval “boot camp” during the winter of 1963-1964) and “Obsessions” (relating to my adventures with my sweetheart Norma at the Canadian Stories convention in 2013). Examples of fiction are “Pioneer” and “Conch”. Most of the pieces collected here, however, are a mixture of fact and imagination such as “The Man Who Did Not Favour Brahms” and “The Proud And Splendid Chambers Of The Night”. The ratio of fact to fiction goes from about 80% fact – 20% fiction down to 30% fact – 70% fiction. Finally, many of my older pieces, as well as a few very recent ones, are prose-poetry (or poetic prose texts). Two examples are “Concert At Port Eliot” and “Crawfish”.

I came to be interested in prose-poetry/poetic prose after I read Robert Bly’s The Man in the Black Coat Turns in 1983.

I consider his “The Ship’s Captain Looking over the Rail” to be among the finest examples of Bly’s work in the short prose form. Shortly after the oldest of my prose-poems were written while I was touring Britain in the spring of 1990, I was introduced to the work of the Frenchman Francis Ponge via Robert Bly’s translations. And in the autumn of 1992, I encountered the early prose-poetry of Canadian Allan Cooper.

By the mid-1990s I had belatedly discovered the prose-poetry and occasional short travel pieces of James Wright; “Old Bud”

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is a flawless example of Wright at the top of his abilities. Since the turn of the present century, I have been delighted by the short poetic prose of the New York-born Canadian writer Robyn Sarah, collected in 2012 in her Digressions. Through books by Swedish Nobel Prize-winner Tomas Tranströmer and the Canadian-born American writer Mark Strand, I learned different possible developments of this form. Even people not known for prose-poetry, such as Michael Wurster and Norma West Linder, can bring forth outstanding short pieces like “After the Flooding” and “Brigadier Jefferson C. Davis” (Wurster) and “Manitoulin Gothic” and “From the Train” (Linder). The works of the above writers form the basis of my understanding of prose-poetry, creative non-fiction, and what Mark Strand has called “pure prose, impure poetry”.

The pieces that follow are not derived from the poetry or prose of others, however strongly I might admire their books.

These pieces are more closely related to my own poetry than to anything else. Indeed, I consider the present volume to be an extension of my established poetic concerns.

James Deahl Sarnia, February 10, 2015

vii

TO BRITAIN & BACK

Damp Stones From this hill overlooking Lancaster, house lights shine scattered like stars cast into a void. Each point of radiance is a window, a fragile pane waiting for the flare of light or the flare of darkness. They are the lights of the void reaching down into cobbled alleys of turns too narrow for the touch of moonlight.

For centuries Catholic men feared to enter the Forest of Bowland or the vale of the Ribble as they would fear to enter a witch, would fear her damp recesses, her bed of lice. Within the bones of witches children cry when the burning torch is lifted from the kindling. The flaring torch lights the knotted fingers clutching a rosary, each black bead a prayer to the night, round and whole.

And so the water drips darkly when the tide goes leaving damp stones at the harbour’s edge. Along the quay everything lies hidden save the sound of water trickling away, secret as the coaxing touch of a woman, her eyes burning and fragile, her skirts black in the nighted trees whose every branch hangs rich with the dark weight of new buds.

-1-

Sunrise The stone arches of Glasgow Bridge stride across the Clyde from darkness to light. Its pillars stand rock solid in the residue of night as they pull their river into the dawn. A crow’s hoarse croak comes out of a line of poplars, and the great city awakens, grey as flint.

Refuse is piled at curbside in paper boxes; buses commence their daily runs through streets immersed in deep shadow. The first people arrive, walking out of darkness. Inside these people live other people — the real women and men of the city. All the while, the outer people stare at shop windows as if nothing important could ever happen.

Within Glasgow lies a hidden city of willows that, leaning east, dip green sleeves in still waters. The secret Glasgow unrolls bolts of white cloth, pure and virginal. Fields stretch all around the white city where ravens once lived. It is a weekday morning. Along Clyde Street women are singing their way to the cathedral.

Cloudbanks separate and bright sun streams over slate rooftops to catch Saint Andrew as he stands one rung below Heaven’s gates. He, too, pulls the silent river, pulls it toward that first light into which the children dive.

-2-

Surprised By Joy In High Street

for Tessa Ransford

No one can count the chimneys on High Street. They rise into a sky heavy with clouds blown in off the North Sea, heavy as the massive flues of stone and brick each building supports. It is here, above the lower city, that John Knox developed his religion. One can almost see Knox, sitting in a small-paned window, watching the chimneys soar towards Heaven. And he, self-willed and self-conscious as Calvin, would have understood the process of placing one block upon another, higher and higher, like the unfolding of an idea . . . that divine progress, simple and direct, of one thought to another in the minds of the elect.

The city ascends upon itself, generation by generation, added to, altered, renewed. I study the roofs, noting the different architectural periods represented in just this one small section, and I suddenly become aware of my happiness. Although cloudy, it’s a fine Saturday in the spring of the year, the day before Whitsunday, and I think of my father, stiff-necked and unmoving in the Presbyterian church. He, too, understood bricks; in his mind the redemptive power of work was never in doubt, and he would have respected the sheer effort building Edinburgh clearly required. And I know that, in my own way, I also understand the city, standing so handsome above its firth.

Impatient as the wind, sea birds wheel in from the harbour to strut along the gabled and peaked rooflines; then, flapping up again, their calls reach across the city like the first tang of salt after years of living inland. They form a congregation existing above our normal, human street. Their world lives between ours and the sky’s wild freedom; but for us to escape the weight of our world we must relinquish our very form, must leave the body behind. Incomprehensible.

I watch birds and chimneys . . . such a joyous morning! I feel as though I could move beyond the limitations of this life, could experience creation in an immediate way, without the distortions of consciousness.

The whole day lies open, a radiant promise and a gift.

-3-

Haworth Old Church

in memory of Patrick Brontë (1777 – 1861)

All that remains of the original church is the square English tower, stolid and unpretentious as moorland stone. The sanctuary, once graced by a three-decker pulpit, was razed in 1879, an act Reverend Brontë never lived to witness. Gone are its wooden box pews that kept drafts at bay; gone also are all but a few sepia reminiscences locked forever in the heads of longdead congregants, many interred in the churchyard. Like the widowed grandmothers and great-grandmothers of generations past, grey hair dry as birds’ nests, faith too frequently has become mere memory or lifeless habit, empty of content. And the dead? Their journey to another realm is long completed, the minerals and salts of their bodies undisturbed within the dark embrace of the vault, that silent portal where, some say, truth is finally revealed.

-4-

Concert At Port Eliot The notes of a piano carry out of the Round Room and across the long green sweep of the lawns. The music is soaked with human emotion, passionate and heavy. Today leans into an early summer where the rhododendrons run together with honeysuckle. Wisteria twists up a rough stone wall.

I sit on the grass and watch the sun going white into the glowing west. Cattle and sheep dot distant pastures where the mists of evening already overspread the richest parts. In this landscape I don’t know whether I should walk down to the port or sit quietly among the fringes of night.

Not far away is a bamboo grove — dense, impenetrable, brittle. I had not expected bamboo in Cornwall, nor those towering palms near the reflecting pool. The concert continues.

I’m reminded of the three Brontë sisters, how they sought redemption through love, how surrender to the unconscious was a kind of sanity.

I look north as if expecting the moon to rise from a clump of pines. Shadows move in the dark pools, a footstep on dry gravel, a rustling among the reeds. Surely we are relieved of our sins and failures. Surely we discover the mound at the heart of the maze, return to the long house of night.

The grazing animals have wandered off. A silence spreads up from the Lynher where tides ebb and flow. And I know that the moon will come stark, and without warning. By then the piano will be a pure note of crystal. The waters will have become that mirror I enter with the last flush of day.

-5-

The Hurlers

for Sir Robert Lima

North of Minions three Early Bronze Age circles thrust grey stone into an onslaught of wind. Cornwall. I walk out under sweeping skies to where The Hurlers break the bleakness of Bodmin. Only a sparse scatter of hawthorns, stunted and brittle, clings to this land where low gullies offer scant shelter.

Evenly spaced, the stones look like a ring of men, broad shoulders ready for the exhilaration of the game. Quickly the ball is passed, a shout rises, cold muscles bunch and then release. The men circle around fields where meaning lies, gnarled and heavy, waiting to be uncovered, yet refusing to open its content to our eyes. Moor and moorstones in their constant turnings point toward heaven, point always away from the weight of earth.

And the sky soars before the coming storm. Under the vacant windows of an abandoned mine, the passionate shadows clockwise and counter-clockwise go. Soon the rain starts again, drifting in with its damp caress to leave the hair wet on shoulders, staining raw stone a darker grey; within this granite prison a silver-grey light shines. It is the light of clouds far out at sea, and the light a body casts as the tempo increases, each willful footfall eagerly extending life’s dance along the cool, stone floors.

-6-

Finding The Fortress Looking down from this granite tor, the fields spread eastward to be lost in Dartmoor’s darkened mass. Around me a drystone wall, three thousand years old, protects what remains of the citadel. And the fields are a green ocean washing between these two high points of Britain’s bony crust. How difficult it must have been to erect this wall! Suitable boulders had to be located and split, then carried up the steep flank of the tor — stones of many hundredweight. And despite all precautions, there were attacks — warriors rushing hard onto the shards, broken weapons flung about. But defenders and attackers are gone, all gone. I and a few friends have come, picking our way slowly through the sharp rocks to stand amazed at these ramparts. The bright fields of a spring afternoon drift away as far as I can see.

Near the village, the woman sits by her well; she is making clothing. Green waters rise cool where the shade of her grove has kept them cool. Behind the water, voices swell into the green cantata of spring, the story of life returning like swifts from their long migration, or the rise of menstrual blood, flowing with the moon.

I look around and my companions are nowhere in sight. Wind sweeps across the moor to pour over this hill of singing rocks.

Their music mingles with the bracken. But the water in her well remains silent; the woman holds it so, patiently, with her hands.

Truly this is a task of love, a task of necessity. She draws the water close, like the blessèd pulse of our world’s living heart.

-7-

As The Band Plays:

Thinking Of Henry Deahl

A military band strikes up in Queen Mary’s Garden as I recline among weekend crowds of Pakistanis and Caribbeans long after the song of the church bells has blown away. A pure light fills the plane-trees with those startling, temporary greens of early spring. And from the pond, every shiver and ripple throws back the sun in a dazzle that blinds my winter-weary eyes.

The wind dies and martial music swells to fill the park. I think of my father berating our neighbours for daring to wash cars or trim hedges on the Lord’s Day. Now older, rough skinned, cancerous, he sits chewing his pain, afraid to abandon his wheelchair for even a moment to enter church for Easter Service. His hair’s gone pure white, and it lifts gently like dandelion fluff in the light breeze that enters his nursing home’s window. It is a shadowed room; this breeze, and the scrap of sunlight that sometimes comes in early afternoon, are all he will know of the world outside.

The music plays on, lifting over the water with the bright clarity of brass. On the other side of the Atlantic, my father sits at the table, unshaven and unbuttoned, his hands useless as loaves of frozen bread.

-8-

The Blossom Of The Yellow Pear The blossom of the yellow pear opens five white petals to the May sun. Deep at its centre thin filaments thrust red tips into light as they complete their annual rites. Within their white house the anthers are rounded, sensuous with spring.

Behind these flowers, young leaves spread a luminous cloud, pale and fresh as the new season. The air fills with pollen when a breeze lifts laden branches to animate each radiant bloom in a tremble of delight. It is the slight trembling of water in my galvanized pail to the low murmur of a morning freight heading out for Detroit, hard steel wheels shaking clear liquid into a dance of concentric rings.

The whole earth lies open as it recreates itself under the touch of its nurturing sun. Around the pear’s dark trunk, fiddleheads unroll their green lace; the first wasp clings to my screen door.

In the east, balconies of light overlook a swollen river where rafts of geese float. Green herons return to the wetlands along the edge of town, their kew ghosting among shadowed rushes.

And the bride enters the sanctuary on the arm of her father, her dress virginal like the pear in spring. She takes tiny steps, delicate and brimming with anticipation. Later, under a white moon, her body glows all night.

-9-

Spring Rain Morning brings a dampness into the orchard. Throughout the woodlot, branches of northern hardwoods shine in their black skins. Early spring — faint green begins to outline the crowns of wild cherry and aspen. Maple blossoms, brought down last night, speckle the path.

The rain starts again, drifting in sheets across yard and pasture.

I go down by the lake where silence has soaked into the beds where reeds sleep. In the lake’s black corridors solitary fish seek the deepest spots. All day water falls into water.

Land fresh from the turning ploughs thickens with mud. Soon I can no longer be sure if this voice I hear belongs to the rain or the opened fields. When night advances from its house in the east, our sky becomes luminous like still waters deep in hidden wells or the first blood of a waking heart.

- 10 -

The River In Early May With the spring rains over, the Maitland settles lower between its banks to sing softly under the wings of migrating swallows.

New leaves hesitate along branches that look down into the waters. Still, odd remnants of last year linger; brittle stalks of Queen Anne’s Lace and common mullein stand between grey, glacial stones that embrace the spillway; seed-pods lie darkly among the roots of locusts.

Hand in hand, lovers already stroll through this first mild evening; sunset joins water and clouds, each an echo of the same lemon yellow, the same fading salmon. Life, so long locked within its fortress of ice, returns.

I feel no disappointment here, nor desire. Killdeer patrol the shallow pools; the whole cathedral sky opens its doors wide to moon and stars. In the village, house lights come on, each window throwing its bright square into the purple river.

- 11 -

Grape Vine Dark green and veined like the back of a hand, grape leaves catch the patch of light that has tumbled through the boughs of this spreading cottonwood. Hungry for sunlight, filled with a blind desire to ascend, wild grape tendrils grasp a young buckthorn. And, wildly stringy, the vines climb stray shafts of light toward that distant hole in the canopy left when one or two great branches fell during last autumn’s storms.

Even now, the vine’s survival in not secured; should it continue to stretch branch by branch into the sky, it will learn the pain of light, will twist and knot, binding that darkness where past and future merge. Then its bark will take on a tough coarseness, become an old man’s skin — splintery and dry.

The wild grape drags its long, snaking body higher through the buckthorn; still it is never enough. The thirst for the sun grows as the vine grows. The old men are silent; they know they watch a dance where only one can live. By now their bark hides all the soft, vulnerable fibres. It is harsh, like the armour of a snapping turtle concealed deep within a muskrat lodge.

The sap also has its hidden sorrow . . . a pale, sugary taste known only through sacrifice. On summer afternoons, boys stand beneath the severed vines to trap, with eager tongues, the drops of darkness falling.

- 12 -

Crawfish

Let darkness seize upon it.

— The Book of Job, 3. 6 Even in death the crawfish remains fierce, its armoured claws edged with a double row of yellow nodes and climaxing in points the colour of dried blood. The long, plated abdomen is gone, eaten by the predator along the riverbank. The head and thorax form a torpedo, for the crawfish also lived the cunning life of a predator. There are two pairs of feelers; one set is short, resembling the riding crops of English huntsmen, the other long and flexible as bullwhips.

Ants have eaten the inside of its head; the delicate crawfish bones are fully exposed, and the raw necessity of the exoskeleton is apparent. Below the fierce exterior lies a vulnerability, hidden within the moist flesh, within the animal heart. How efficient the ants! Every shred of the living creature has been removed, converted into another life, now moving towards its own darkness.

And in that shadow the crawfish must have turned — for the claws are raised, extended — must have faced the raccoon on that final night of unequal struggle. It must have realized at last the undeniable fact of its own brief life, its short passage through the mundane realm, through the day-to-day chores of living.

The sun sinks lower. Finally, I understand the crawfish has become ecstatic. Free of this life, claws held high, it dances along the edge of a river that gathers the night to give birth to our next, fleeting day.

- 13 -

Cattails From the shallows, last year’s cattails thrust bleached and bitten into the sunset. The millpond has been drained, and I walk among the parchment stems where only last week water stood.

Dry heads, stalks, and leaves are the same faded colour; some seeds pull loose, bits of fluff in a slight wind. Beyond each seedhead, a sharp spike points directly to heaven.

These are the few strong ones; they rise from a lake bottom matted thick with their fallen brothers. The defeated ones lie in all directions, some cut down by winter gales off the Great Lakes, others by the relentless force of cold spring floods.

The survivors stand resolute like sentinels alert for enemy movements. They are hard facts, stiff in the night. And their seed will rise in resurrection. Brother to brother, they touch in the silence where truth resides.

- 14 -

The River In Early October The river, which had been slow and shallow all summer, runs fuller now, its waters dark and fast. Bits of foam rush downstream as if the call of the autumn sea grew stronger each day. Long grasses, their stalks deep in the risen liquid, are yellow where the river cuts a wide curve through a pasture with two white mares.

For the first time in months the scent of woodsmoke drifts sharp through still air. The river has shaken the sloth of summer; a red leaf falls to the surface to be immediately swept into the swirling descent.

Everything moves lower; bulrushes, burdened with the season, bend toward their roots; the sap retreats in trees that overhang the bank. In its own way the yellow birch welcomes this changed mood, relinquishing thousands of leaves to the same downward motion, urgently and without regret. And the cherries have long abandoned most of their leaves; they flee like adolescents eager to leave home for the city.

When evening comes, moisture rises from the surface. These vapours, white in white moonlight, ignore the movements of the river despite being almost within its wet embrace. By midnight only two things remain: the mist, still lingering among sedges, and the sound of darkness descending into this world of matter and loss.

- 15 -

Inside The Stone A grey boulder, rounded by the Maitland, yields a purple shell when smashed on the riverbank. Almost like amethyst, but duller, the shell has remained surrounded by its prison of stone since the late Silurian. Lying among weeds its hue matches the leaves of wild carrot, purpled by frost.

The hollow of the shell is filled with sediment, hardened by heat and time. This is the cavity where life once lived, ecstatic and free. This animal, too, is preserved: a mineral tongue locked in its silent vault. Once opened the rock smells like the sea, or like the bride shy in her marriage bed: salty, ready for the dark shadow to enter her loneliness and make it whole. And when the bride cries out in the night, what good will it do us who cannot know if she cries in pain or joy?

As the days grow shorter, we pull smooth stones from cold water to build a dam. Our labour is hard — a service to our community. Yet we cannot follow the woman on her journey.

Her goal is the dark of the mountain — the side furthest from man — and she must travel alone. In her arms she carries a gift of light, like the moon rising from the ocean.

When the bride returns, decades later, her womb filled with life, we will have grown old, our work unended. Only then will she go to her husband’s house and place in his trembling hands the fossil of a shell.

- 16 -

Beasley By Night The darkness of the west harbour lies unbroken now the mill is shut and its flames have long died out. Until the moon rises, docks and water are one, are a mystery too deep to solve. Even the rhythmic motion of small waves remains unknowable; and if the water cannot be seen, does it even move at all?

In Beasley, too, darkness reigns complete. House lights fail, cannot penetrate the sumac alleys, the weed-tree yards where broken fences keep nothing at bay. The roving wind ransacks Hughson, Elgin, and Cathcart, carries no more the stench of coke ovens. Even the whores are barely discernable, describing circles where back lane meets street in a tangle of newspapers or last year’s fallen leaves.

Until moonlight arrives all is anonymous: the widows in unlighted rooms, the dead resting in unlighted graves, the children growing old where night touches their most sensitive flesh — the gentle violence of the night releases them all. Under the grape arbour, under darkness’ fickle kiss, the hand of death counts out, one by one, the coins that close forever the eyes of the blind.

- 17 -

Black Ants During The Recession How strange to see Hamilton Harbour without its mask of drifting smoke, and odder still to look along Sherman in late afternoon and see no rush of cars taking men home from the day shift. My fifteenth spring in the city: the air never so fresh, the days never so bright, and this unexpected freedom to deeply breathe. But what to make of the buildings on James Street North! Revealed by such sudden light, all their scars are visible, every bit of suffering stands out as Renaissance Revival gestures of grandeur slide into abandonment.

The police abandon city parks to cocaine gangs, preferring to patrol the city’s forty-four Tim Hortons outlets as spring renews the urban face where flowers remain and, yes, beauty, too. Still, when the academic year ends, the young abandon their city for Toronto, Vancouver, or Calgary, seeking new lovers and a place to stand. With each decade the old buildings sag a little more on their foundations. I watch a line of ants transverse the clothesline. They hurry east and west like cars on an expressway. Studied closely, the ants appear to carry nothing as they journey from the boxelder by the back laneway to the maple by my back porch. Back and forth, back and forth, industry and discipline for no obvious reason; perhaps for no reason at all.

- 18 -

The Yellow Magnolia At the dinner hour the fog came, not like mist rising from lazy creek bed or moist soil, but blowing in before a storm front like gusts of smoke from a sudden fire. On and on it came, erasing treetops, the houses across the street, even passersby. Then the rains started even though rain and fog seldom mix.

That was the spring Chrysler failed — making cars no one wanted, selling them at a loss; and U.S. Steel shut its Hamilton mills, the streets of Beasley lined with destitute workers. For college students it was the year without summer jobs. I thought of the recession in the ’50s, J & L and U.S. Steel cut back, blast furnaces banked, and of the General in charge of our nation. I thought of how individual people change while poverty never does.

There was a yellow magnolia in a yard on Ashford. When the fog lifted, it cupped sunlight almost too bright to look at.

Laid-off men were cutting grass, preparing gardens for new plantings. Paid always in cash, under the table, that season without hope.

- 19 -

Dofasco Faint dawn with first light skipping across the water. No wind; the ghost flame rising straight into a lightening sky, almost bright enough to be reflected in the still harbour. Four blast furnaces in a line, the work week reduced to four days on, three days off: a twenty percent wage cut. It almost doesn’t pay to run the electric furnace today. It almost doesn’t pay to do anything today.

In the old days it was all Wops and Hunkies and, of course, Poles worked in the mills. Their shops line Barton and Ottawa to this day — a dozen languages on paint-flecked signs. The mill hands who spoke these tongues are gone, but restaurant names retain their memory. Ukrainian sausage, Hungarian goulash, Calabrese bread: traditions rooted in food.

The streets are quiet with the blessèd peace of early morning, the dry goods stores will not open for another two hours. And the ghost flame soars, its light being absorbed now by the brightening day. Eventually, the flame remains but cannot be seen at a distance, much like the life going on behind drawn curtains, in the dark bedrooms, the alarm clocks just going off.

- 20 -

Red Crane The ship’s crane rises at dockside, a florescent red arm stretched above the stacks of steel slabs it has unloaded for processing into coils by U.S. Steel. Slab steel from South America or the sprawling mills of eastern Europe that date from the shadowed decades of Communism. This steel will pass through soaking pits to be hot rolled for auto stamping plants: the excess and devalued labour of the wreckage of socialist policies in the service of an American appetite for the latest automobiles.

But the red crane cares nothing for irony; it stands against blue sunlight and grants shape and colour to this summer harbour.

Seemingly as tall as the stone spire of St. Paul’s Presbyterian Church, the crane celebrates its earthly city much as St. Paul’s celebrates the Heavenly one. Both uplift the human spirit, but in different ways for conflicting ends. Unlike the church, the crane changes the light making the morning brighter, the air more alive. When we walk through the docklands we hear the air ringing, not just from the voices of herring gulls and Caspian terns, but with the vitality of steel billets swinging in great bundles up into a shudder of daylight from dark holds.

- 21 -

Two Observations Of A City Morning James Street on an early Sunday; traffic lights change without traffic and the pigeons have yet to seek breakfast. There is not one homeless person in view. Although far from beautiful, the city has shed its ugliness with the desperate night, and the bewildered souls who haunt The Gore during the darkest hours have found their temporary rest. The light, like spring itself, restores some quality to these streets that people diminish.

Standing in dawn’s unsullied glow, even the C.I.B.C. tower’s deformities fail to offend, while on their high ledge across the street, this year’s peregrine chicks begin to stir.

No one watches as morning comes down George Street. The cafés have long closed, the final notes of “Walk on the Wild Side” have sunk into the paving stones, and even the jazzmen are asleep. Whatever sorrows or joys last night offered matter little now. Only the young leaves of sidewalk trees awaken to accept the gift of another day. Nothing moves save the shadows, slowly shortening as the sun ascends above the downtown office towers, and a pair of sparrows pecking crumbs on the patio of the old Ceilidh House.

- 22 -

After The Shutdown, The Birds Are Singing

Here, where the rose opens,

Where delicate vines and bay leaves embrace each other,

Where the young dove is calling . . .

— Goethe We arrive at mid-spring, the afternoons milder, the threat of night-frosts finally removed for a few blessèd months. On the warmer days I can sit outside under my grapevines and read of Jim and Annie Wright in Italy, their footloose journeys from Verona to Venice to Padua. But I grow table grapes, not wine grapes, and the Niagara Peninsula is not the Italian Peninsula.

Today I am almost bewildered by the silence. Always before, the noise of the mill would enter my back garden: the roar of pressure bursting from the blast furnace’s pop-off valves or the metallic clatter of the cold roll line or the constant grumble of slag trucks with their steaming cargo. This spring there is only birdsong and the wind through the maples; a redeeming angel has briefly relieved us of the brutal business of steel.

How young we seem to grow beneath such clear night skies with the constellations changing the season; how pure the glow of each day breaking over Stoney Creek without a hint of smoke! As I sip my tea the scent of locusts in early bloom is carried on the morning breeze. This year our spring is the story of cardinals, robins, sparrows, thrushes, and the ever-present mourning doves. And I can hear the slight creak of that tree rubbing against my back porch, even insects in branches so high they could never be spotted, and the first tentative drops of rain calling from the far distance to the groundwater beneath my feet, calling from the green pinnacles of air, from solitary grottos of light.

- 23 -

A Pair Of Swans Years have elapsed since he last walked through the Urquhart Gardens only to glance up at a sudden burst of a warbler’s song to see swans gliding on the Desjardins Canal. Yes, those days when he laboured among passion flowers in the greenhouse have passed, as all things joyous must pass. The Dutchman’s fragile greenhouses, so lovingly erected, are gone, another failed venture among so many, a dream that lacked the stamina to survive its dreamer. The Desjardins Canal itself is another dream that outlived its usefulness. No barges transporting goods have broken its smooth surface in years. There are no longer any greenhouses to line its banks, no industry to produce products to ship, not so much as a bookshop since Chapman’s closed. A gull soars through early morning’s silence, its passage not even disturbing a pair of swans.

The war that sent the Dutchman across the Atlantic ended seventy years ago, the same year the man had been born. The few survivors old enough to hold memories of those dark years of death camps and mass slaughter are elderly, are now preparing for their next voyage into another realm. Prince Hamlet inexplicably sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to be slain. But for what reason? Just two random Jews at Court, not party to any crime, except as feckless victims of one. As the drama unfolds, violence, once loosed, becomes its own engine, but nonetheless an engine driven by man.

The war against Nazism is history. Today the man stands on the cusp of spring amid the early, imperceptible murmurings of buds slowly opening, of sap being drawn up from roots. The swans, just returned from the southland, will soon seek a safe place for their nest. Although winter recently gripped the canal in frozen death, the day dawns almost warm.

- 24 -

Baltimore Oriole This railroad died with the age of steam; no streamlined diesels ever tried this grade. And no train could hold off the trucks and buses, or the mass ownership of cars. Today, the right of way has become a trail lined with coltsfoot and the first spears of new cattails rising from scattered wet areas. Below this steep cut, the sprawling city dies, and beyond the city, the lake runs to the horizon where, hours before, the sun rose. Trees crowd around this cut, they form the northern frontier of the Baltimore oriole, whose whistled notes awaken the day.

With no more elms for its haven, the oriole flits from maple to black cherry to white ash, themselves soon to perish from the emerald ash borer. From where, then, will come our baseball bats after the ash trees go? Where will orioles hang their sacks of eggs now the elms have gone? This had been a forest of maple, elm, ash, and cherry since the glaciers retreated. Black ash for baskets; white ash for furniture: the simple needs of farmers satisfied. A peaceful morning. Behind this mutable landscape, the oriole and I taste the incorporeal realm together.

- 25 -

Minus Twenty Just one week before Candlemas, winter closed down hard.

Snow squalls streaked the Pennsylvania hill country, and a sudden cold snap set fresh records. When the winds stopped raging, there was a bleakness to the immaculate white of the drifted pastures, and a silence as total as if death reigned supreme. Despite the intense cold, the farm’s work had to continue. Wood was chopped to keep the fires going; cows were milked twice each day; meals were prepared and eaten around the kitchen table. But the fangs of an Arctic vortex kept people indoors as much as possible, for no one welcomed the agony of frostbite. Inside the farmhouse daily life went on, somewhat gay and spirited, occasionally with forlorn undertones of moods beset by cooped-up feelings engendered by too barren a winter.

On evenings made longer by January’s early dusk, a solitary reader might long for the glowing nostalgia of Whittier’s “SnowBound”. But could such 19th century sentimentality stand up to 21st century scrutiny? And yet, even today a wood fire was a wood fire, logs still flared and spit, shadows still flickered and danced. House dogs, now as in his day, slept by the hearth. But values were no longer passed down and received with the clarity they once embodied. Certainty was less certain. The fortunate Americans of 1866 New England had no Heisenbergs, no Feyerabends; Boston was truly an Athens for their New World.

Deep into January, new snow fell almost nightly to keep their world pure, emphasizing the difference between life on the inside and life in the outer world. On some mornings the brief winter light fell as a blessing into their kitchen to counterbalance, sometimes even suppress, the long months of death and lessen the protracted wait for the tentative signs of a coming spring. Nevertheless, despite a week of unbroken foul weather, when Candlemas came to Pennsylvania that year, the groundhog, frightened by his shadow, summoned the most bitter storms in generations. Along the narrow road winding its way slowly down to Philadelphia, silhouetted atop a towering sycamore as daylight was failing, an impervious winter hawk faced her darkness alone.

- 26 -

The Hard Winter That year for the first time in over three and a half decades the lake froze all the way to Michigan. One could walk out on solid water for miles, even into another country. To do so would be to leave one’s familiar life for a different, new life. When the winter sun set late in the day, its fire went down in total silence, like a frigid January sunset in the white tomb of Nebraska with the harvest stubble deeply buried by drifted snow and all the people sheltered inside their homes. Nothing stirred on the ice except small cat’s-paws of snow picked up by errant gusts of wind. Bald eagles, unable to fish the frozen waters of their home range, were driven from the Upper Peninsula as far south as Stag Island in such numbers as to remind the eldest residents of Anishinaabe legends of the way nature might have been prior to the coming of European settlers. It was a day without clouds, and a man walking by the lake gazed into the distance where the stark white of the snow met the stark blue of an empty sky. Periodically, a solitary raptor would soar out over the unbroken white searching for, but never locating, open water.

The man watched the great bird before returning home. Later that afternoon he opened a new bottle of Old Forester and, as always when cracking a fresh bottle, thought of Carl Sandburg, a man who loved Lake Michigan like no other. Slowly, as if with overpowering sorrow, the blood of the dying sun began to spread over the lake, staining snow and ice alike with the pulse of its life as the sky went black. At dusk, this house by the shore could be anywhere. The nearly extinguished sun could never return. The eastern horizon could remain dark as a collapsed star with no visible light left as the universe approached the end of time. In the centre of the lake, a dark pulsing shimmer, lost in the vast halls of winter, was accompanied by inaudible sounds, like music. A requiem from deepest night that no one could hear rose and fell, and the world began anew.

- 27 -

Author Party With Sax We were listening to Lester Young, an old Verve recording from the ‘50s, his tenor so pure it hurt. Hearing these sessions one would never guess how heavily he was drinking, how sad his life had become; one could only sense the joy of creating such beauty. That was the era when people we knew discussed Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, Truffaut and the new French cinema. That was an era in which people thought they were wise and, dare I say, suave. After the reception for the visiting novelist, we walked the pre-dawn streets, mist beginning to rise above the river. The phantoms of steel mills that years later would disappear before our eyes loomed through the dim light. And it could have been Paris, a row of yellow streetlamps reflecting off wet pavement, all the cafés closed, far too early for the pigeons. I realize I have forgotten the writer and her books, forgotten the wine, and the clichéd small talk. But the graceful phrasing of that solo, blown so sweetly, echoes from the sleeping tenements like a prayer.

- 28 -

Paris Afternoon April in Paris — my first visit in twenty years. A mild day, one of the first of the season, with a touch of spring in the air, and I discover nothing pressing in my schedule, no duties to summon me to work, nothing more important to occupy my day than sip Dutch beer on a balcony overlooking the river. From my left bank perch, I watch the waters as they flow brown with early run-off, the fields upstream still too wet for farmers to work their land. Bare branches overhang the water on the far bank as the river curves to continue its journey to the sea. One can easily imagine this prospect when, in a few short weeks, these trees will be fully clothed in green and the waterfowl will have returned with our returning sun.

Somewhere below a bakery scents the breeze with its aroma of fresh baguettes. Although lovers fill café tables, it’s as though I have the entire day to myself. When afternoon advances, the sunlight falling across the town’s stone walls takes on a mellower tone, and Green Heron Books calls out — as all bookshops must — to the reader in me. An impeccably kept shop owned by a real enthusiast, there could be no finer place to spend an hour than where Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and Colette could almost brush shoulders. So the day winds down and confit de canard, accompanied by pickled chocolate tomatoes and a respectable Beaujolais, awaits in the hotel dining room.

Search as diligently as one may, no false note is struck to mar spring’s perfection. One could, I reflected, die right now and believe nothing of life had been missed.

- 29 -

On Green Dolphin Street

in memory of John Coltrane (1926 – 1967)

The Miles Davis Quintet with its Wynton Kelly intro, then solos

by Miles and Trane. Ever since I first heard it the image of a city haunts me, a city with a street known as Green Dolphin where folks high-step on a Saturday night. Clearly there are cafés with red wine afternoons and brandy evenings. One dreams of long summers and novelists writing of gentlemen callers and chinaberry trees. Sudden, violent storms would break out during July and August: the tang of brine blown in from tidal marsh or estuary would awaken even the most somnolent.

And women, of course, women in chenille robes at one o’clock of an afternoon, with no gods to please: a life that would have captivated Baudelaire.

On the Green Dolphin Street of the mind one is released to conjure everything: in the Café du Monde the elegant woman with the café au lait complexion becomes your lover, you drink Hennessy from jam jars and Tony Bennett sings at midnight.

On Green Dolphin Street there is no disease, no chemotherapy, no need to consume poison. Every evening the tenorman plays forever, his saxophone solo never truly ending. Listen closely, its sweet echo faintly sounds as a new day brightens the louvres.

At noon there will be beignets in the café. Under that green and white awning we will all speak the same language, those dark and silent words only our hearts understand.

- 30 -

A Rainy Night In Brighton All day travelling to Brighton under heavy skies, skies so low their clouds appear to brush the blades of the windmills. Then a night so protective of its silence freight trains are clearly heard across the fields of summer. Shortly after dusk, rain commences, thin as Irish mist drifting through grey light. The corn waits in its wet acres, moisture beading the tassels. And grey-haired women, keepers of Brighton Light, come bearing their loneliness to the abandoned lighthouse as it stands lost in night’s darkness deep in the harbour’s throat.

- 31 -

Dead Larch At Gros Morne On a slope near the foot of Gros Morne, a barren larch rises from a patch of ripe partridgeberries. The constant winds off the Gulf of St. Lawrence have scoured away most of the bark exposing its soft wood. These winds have steadily pushed the larch towards the mountain, and its emphatic lean gives direction to a relentless force, grants shape to the invisible. Without bark and needles, its pure structure lies revealed: the intelligent design that underpins all created things. This larch, although it struggles to survive, must perish.

Dressed with its needles, the tree would be a golden flame lighting autumn’s cold. Shorn of its finery, it’s a skeleton of bleached white bone. Things pass away throughout every season on Gros Morne; tuckamore, dogberry, and white birch pass away, even the rocks that form this mountain will eventually succumb. But life begins in the valley of death. Land clear-cut for the pulp mill at Corner Brook sustains a forest of young evergreens and mixed hardwoods. In this hour before sunset, long rays create a shadowland of bare rock and moss.

Ferns line a brook. Crows start to return as evening draws close.

Walking this Appalachian Mountain path, I am stunned by the unbearable beauty that lives in the heart of death.

- 32 -

Green Point Cliffs These cliffs are said to define the border separating the Cambrian and Ordovician periods; they also blur the boundary between the mineral and the human, for in one place will be a man’s nose, mouth, chin, and goatee while in another place an eye looks straight through you. It is the eye that sees all a man’s failures, that perceives his every lie and deception. It knows when he has been unfaithful to the woman he loves and can discern the instant he no longer loves her.

The older we get the more we become inflexible as stone, the more we become the ocean-battered face of a cliff. A sickle moon hangs over mountains slowly darkening under the long shadows of the sun’s afterglow. It reminds us that death stands near, that no one is strong enough to live forever. Ice will cling to the cliffs at Green Point all winter. Sea-ice will grind at the cliffs’ base as moon-pulled tides rise and fall. But tonight, inky clouds rise into an autumn sky. After lovemaking I lie silent, every nerve alert, my arm around my wife as she drifts gently into sleep. At this moment I am the happiest man in the world.

- 33 -

The Lights At Port aux Basques The hotel sat atop a rocky hill overlooking village and harbour.

Despite a recent drop in temperature, an end-of-season rose still bloomed as autumn deepened and the long months of snow stood near. All was quiet. Several of the shops were closed although it was a weekday. But, in any event, there seemed to be few potential shoppers about. That evening, following a late supper of moose stew and sweet corn, the man stood at the window of his room, which opened onto a fine view of the harbour with its tiny fishing fleet. Darkness covered the village except for a scattering of widely-spaced streetlights. The sea was completely calm, its surface an opaque black with no whitecaps except where a small shoal lay near the mouth of the inner harbour.

Scanning the village in which only a few houses showed lights in their windows, he noticed patches of diffuse purple, reminding him of long-exposure photographs of distant nebulae. Some patches remained small and highly localized.

Others were more spreading and less well defined. These vague nebulae also drifted gradually from place to place, and some would vanish altogether for a moment or two before reappearing. These purple lights were the only actual colour in an otherwise black, grey, and white village perched on the edge of the great Atlantic, itself a black sheet on an almost motionless night. It was as if a ghost nebula visited Port aux Basques in the small hours when all were asleep, visited the empty streets only to leave behind its mystery, a residue of light so pure it could not be seen except under the most extraordinary circumstances.

It was a light that would be gone long before the sun arose.

- 34 -

The Promise Of A Clear Night One Monday towards the end of October, Indian Summer came to pig country, much later than usual for it had been such a strange year. While almost every tree forming the ragged woodlots displayed the handprint of autumn, if not actually the searing pain of a full frost, most of the gay leaves remained on their boughs. Transports were busy hauling fattened swine to abattoirs in Hamilton and Burlington. Children were busy preparing for Hallowe’en. It was almost time to change the clocks, though few country people could see much sense in that. None but fools thought the mild days would last into November, but most farmers were in hopes, if only for the delayed corn harvest. Farmers were always in hopes, or they would not be farmers. Should the price of pork remain high, it would surely be a merry Christmas.

Late October: a time of quiet and waiting, a time when some things end while others begin. The stench of death is not here; the slaughter happens in a distant city, far from these fields and barns. As evening falls the trucks return empty, their drivers ready for supper. The sun sets with the promise of a clear night, and far in the east, a couple of the brighter stars ease above the horizon. Along the narrow road the farms sing their private songs.

- 35 -

Belfast A short nine nautical miles across Penobscot Bay from Lowell’s Castine — and a long 2,592 across the North Atlantic from C.S. Lewis’ other Belfast — Thompson’s Wharf thrusts into the estuary of the Passagassawaukeag. The old post office still looks down Main Street past the Masonic Temple to the harbour, but the once-spirited fishery is largely gone. No longer is the culture wholly Protestant, either Methodist or Baptist, although St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church stands her ground against a rising tide of day-trippers. Mostly, the town sleeps through the months of fine weather, lifting and subsiding to the regular pulse of its ten-foot tides. But now the year’s turned to January: a slate sky above wild grey waters, the only touch of white is found among shoreline rocks where the surf surges up to dash itself against raw land. Despite an endless, angry sea, this is not the water’s world; winter, as no other season, is truly the wind’s kingdom.

January in Maine is a time of impermanence when nothing lasts except faith, and often not even that, for the storms from the sea are not like the winds from the west. Tonight, the wind roaring out of the unreachable depths of the Atlantic contains all the emptiness of the earth, all the emptiness of its oceans, all the emptiness of the soul during the darkest reaches of the night. The boats have been lifted from the harbour and the old streets stand deserted as they climb the hill away from the ravings of sea and wind. Having at last gained the hill’s crest, one can look down over the town’s steeples and chimneys into the vacant heart of Belfast Bay. If you’re Yankee-born, the winter night of the sea east of Maine is your beginning and your end: the darkness each of us emerged from and the dark womb that awaits our return.

You leave the sea with nothing except a greediness for life, to return bearing all you have made of that gift. And the waves ceaselessly rise and fall in the long-drowned desolation of night in northern New England, a night the lights of the town fail to penetrate even for a few yards, a night all the whisky served in the booths of the Front St. Pub will never warm. Out beyond Isle au Haut the wind never sleeps.

- 36 -

IF MEMORY SERVES

November During the winter of his years, he occasionally recalled that twelve-year-old boy who would, on lonely autumn weekends, walk through the desolate fields of Dog Hill, wind gusts loosening the terminal leaves from the few scattered trees that grew just below the ridge crest. A boy he hardly knew, indeed, perhaps never had known. Yet, on rare afternoons, there seemed to be little difference between that na誰ve lad and the white-bearded man walking the Wawanosh Wetlands. And while wetlands were not hills, and the passage of decades had changed much, this was also a Carolinian forest harbouring the same bird and animal species. Most importantly, November was still and always November, a period of pause prior to the final dying.

Dog Hill had for many years been a sub-division of inexpensive houses. It had gradually become home to different dreams, to different imagined futures. But no matter, all the pages of the book of the future are blank, and have never been otherwise. In fact, it could be that there was no hill, no boy to ramble across it when the wind turned chill; maybe such a scene lived only in the memory of one old man, to eventually die with him. Could it ever be proven? But every year November is certain. Even today, skeletal goldenrods shake as winds sweep over the water, turning the slate sky more grey, the mind ever sharper.

- 39 -

When The Coal Came When the coal came — as it always did in mid-October when the hours of darkness came sooner and began to cool — the fistsized black lumps would tumble down into the nearly empty bin from the narrow window. The dry coal that had hidden in darkness all summer would be crushed by these new arrivals, and dust would spread throughout the cellar. Outside the window, early-turning trees would be half naked, although the stalwart oaks would still stand green. Clumps of asters would only be starting into full bloom. The deliverymen were black as the coal, for such heavy and dirty work was never considered proper for white men. Their arms would shine with sweat.

The new coal would also shine wherever the lumps split. It was trucked in from the southern part of the state because the original mines under the town had long been emptied except for small scraps only the poor would salvage. The town sat atop a nest of worked-out tunnels, now home to acid-water and bats. Above ground, the bins in the houses had to be filled before winter advanced from the northwestern woods. But the coal when it came, the new coal, still harboured a vitality.

There were rooms within the lumps full of life as if the forests that had formed the thick, black layers vast eons ago still lived.

From these rooms the coal spoke during long nights in the dark basements. And when all were asleep and none could see, lights appeared in the coal, sparkling like stars in a summer’s night, like angels of mercy watching through winter’s empty hours.

- 40 -

The Meadow The jalousies would be opened every morning following breakfast, except during the brief annual visitations of winter.

The time was after one war and during another, yet people seemed happy, perhaps because rationing had at last ended and the economy was expanding. Later in life the man, then a mere boy, would make up stories not unlike his own past, stories of spring breezes, the precious weeks when school was out and the marsh lay stilled under summer’s heat, or of autumn woods awaiting the first snow, but never of the war. For his thoughts were of the morning air entering through the porch windows, an air that always seemed enchanted, that promised eternal delights. With the jalousies opened, the street presented its own vivid stories: the incomprehensible mysteries of passersby, their hidden lives and fears. While a few of the younger men were off fighting in Korea, plenty of people could be observed on the sidewalks or in the shops. But who were they? And the widow living next door all those years, what could really be known of her? The world was brimming with occult lives he could study, but never understand. All this has passed into memory. The jalousies that admitted the morning breeze belong to a stranger.

That war in Korea ended decades ago and another one rages.

Most of those people passing on the sidewalks are dead. Only the realm of indestructible forms remains, a realm outside the tarnished world of matter, like a meadow of endless spring living in the imagination of a child.

- 41 -

When Vines Become Rivers

Dead poets stalk the air,

— Josephine Jacobsen The school was cut into the crest of a hill overlooking the borough’s park. First came steep slopes knotted with trees and underbrush, then the level part down near the creek, a creek said to be tainted with polio virus, although nobody knew for certain. At best, a dubious claim, but better to be safe. Between woods and creekbed, a baseball diamond would eventually be built where a marsh lay. And deep below the cries of the youthful baseball players, the silent coal hid, the seam a mere remnant that had been left unmined: a drift no one dared enter and some considered to be haunted.

They came alive in the 9th grade: Poe and Whittier, Longfellow and Dickinson, not one of them making it into the Gay Nineties, let alone the 20th century. The Laurel Poetry Series at thirty-five cents per book, poets who in their time, as today, defined their country. In summer with its gracious freedom from the classroom, a boy could sit, back against a tree, and read “Birchbrook Mill” or “In the Churchyard at Cambridge” as if their past were always immediate. Sunlight filtered slowly, diffusely, through the hardwoods, and vines of wild grapes ascended tall ladders of light into the kingdom of crows. One could sit close enough to hear, but never see, streetcars as they squealed and rattled their way along the boulevard and into the city.

In the summer of youth, all seems possible. An endless streetcar ride that transcends the changing seasons, leaving its winter echo in the August grass, or a ballgame that is never cut short by the fall of night . . . all possible. And the vines, scaling their host trees into the elusive canopy, become water, become the voice of a dead poet that, rising like a river in spring, surges forward. When light catches a ripple for a flashing moment, its music lives forever.

- 42 -

Windfalls Many suburban families had planted apple trees as ornamentals when they purchased their new homes after the war, planted them for their pinkish-white blossoms, not for food. Every year the apple trees glowed brilliant with flowers piled heavily on every bough, their scent filling the April evenings like a sonata of spring. Come autumn the red fruit was a gay reminder of everything in nature that chose to resist the dark months of the onrushing winter. But homeowners seldom ate their apples.

And so it was that the man with long, grey hair and badly worn pants would ride through their neighbourhood on a children’s bicycle, stopping to collect the windfall fruit until the cardboard carton he balanced on his handlebars was full. What he did with box after box of overripe apples has remained uncertain, but that was by no means the only uncertain thing about this old man. He had bought the final house in the row, adjacent to a small woodlot where boys liked to play. He lived with a middle-aged woman who seemed sullen, and was perhaps dullwitted. Townspeople generally assumed her to be his unmarried daughter. Of course, no one could say for sure because no one knew anything about the strange couple. Although this was an era when neighbours socialized, often forming life-long friendships, none knew how the man and woman lived for neither worked and it was on rare occasions that either was to be seen upon the streets of the community.

In the universal and obnoxious manner of schoolboys everywhere, the unkempt man was teased and taunted as he cycled up and down the residential streets collecting the often bruised and damaged apples from front lawns and sidewalks, taking one carton after another to his home. Even on chilly, overcast days he wore no coat, his only concession to the rapidly advancing season being a baseball cap displaying the emblem of a team not the local one. No one addressed him directly if they could avoid it or engaged in any kind of conversation, so his identity remained a mystery, his purpose in life obscure.

- 43 -

On the final day of October one particularly cold year, five rather courageous, or so they chose to think of themselves, trickor-treating boys decided to try something new: go to his door to demand a treat or threaten a trick. This heroic act was intended to impress their girlfriends, who watched from the sidewalk and were expected to suitably reward this display of manly valour. The boys had waited until most of the night’s activity had died down, the younger children with their pillowcases stuffed with candy safely home. As usual, not a single light shone in the windows of the house at the end of the row, its two inmates preferring to sit in darkness. When the front door was finally opened, their black world within poured forth to join the eternally dark mystery of the October night, binding together in the heart of each boy all his grief and hopes, his inchoate fears and longing for childhood’s end. Later, when recounting the tale, none of them could say if it had been the man or the woman who answered their knocks; all that was visible in that late hour was the pure caress of moonlight along the exceedingly sharp blade of a butcher’s knife.

- 44 -

Middlemarch

The unmapped source that still fed nostalgia . . .

— Amy Clampitt A half century on the shelves of the public library and still unread, so he bought them — two plump hardback volumes — for a half dollar coin, and slit their pages open with his boy scout knife as the tale unfolded. How strange Victorian England was, people lost following ideas that led to, and could prove, nothing: lifetimes spent on labours to be soon forgotten. Such elaborate and sedate suffering for a Christian society surely must have held the promise of fulfillment? And yet there was magic in the telling. Victorian nostalgia for an idealized world carried forward a century and yet fully living: a quavering identity, vivid and alive. Through a society of lavender sachets, Turkish carpets, pale moonlight through small diamond panes, and the enchanted pleasure of a studied melancholy, a high school boy could wander as though it had actually happened or could still happen. A nightgown slipping from white shoulders, a locket lovingly unfastened, the passion of a married man not your own — an ardour not hidden away like the whippoorwill, secreted in deep woods, that one hears but never sees, but lived openly and gloriously — all this, real and breathing. And the author, could she retire from the world?

Could her energies be absorbed by housewifery? Hardly, for there was always more to write. Herein, as he slit page after page, the boy stumbled upon a great lesson: never question the blending of fantasy and fact, but embrace all. In this you write your own true story, your only story.

- 45 -

That Nighttime Glow And Smolder Of Hell-Fire Is Pittsburgh Strung along the Monongahela one mill after another — Jones and Laughlin South Side, U.S. Steel’s Homestead Works, Carrie Furnace, the Edgar Thomson Works, the Duquesne Works, McKeesport’s sprawling National Works — lit the sky all night, a flaming rosary throwing its glowing embers to the river. Those were days when steel was strong, long before the mills closed, long before the antiquarian bookshops, jazz clubs, and writers living in lofts above antique stores. In the era of steel, the lanes and alleys of the South Side were largely deserted after dark except at shift changes. When a breeze blew from the mills, the stringent scent of sulphur dioxide would drift through the neighbourhood, and at certain periods in the process of turning iron into steel, flames would soar above the tall stacks of the open hearths. Slag trains moved slowly on the rails along the river, some of their submarines glowing from the heat of their burden of molten slag. Although they were being phased out, older mills still had Bessemer converters not unlike those used during the late 19th century, the heavens over Bessemer Terrace often painted a fiery orange when they fired up.

During the era of steel, Pittsburgh was a city of night. Always had been. During the daylight hours there was such a volume of busy activity that the mills could almost be forgotten. Nighttime was different. With empty streets, the mills became a savage force smouldering by the Monongahela River, filling the sky with flame and smoke and casting long shadows over the South Side, Homestead, Rankin, Braddock, and McKeesport. For the few people abroad, there was the inescapable longing of dreams unattained, of opportunities waited for and missed, of a hunger for human intimacy as yet unfulfilled. These men were the brothers of darkness moving through deserted streets, past the shut stores, and lounging by traffic lights that silently changed but directed no traffic. And while they might be brothers, each man understood that the truth lying in the heart of the night had to be confronted alone.

- 46 -

Coal barges moved upon the face of the river, the lights of their attendant tugs piercing the near-total darkness. It was by the river one could think clearly, for somehow that water coming down from West Virginia held the power of darkness.

The Monongahela contained the power of coal miners, of coke oven rakers, of railroad firemen as it travelled its long miles to Pittsburgh from its birth among the sweet gum hills and mistchoked hollows. Its waters bore all the grief of the Civil War and the loneliness of dirt-poor hill farms. It was the anthem of night that awoke the burning mills and stirred the people who answered its call. Every man who heard the river’s music also heard it within his own heart, and in his living pulse, beating as steadily as footsteps on the pavements of dawn.

- 47 -

The Proud And Splendid Chambers Of The Night Tompkins Square with its celebrated bookshop and gritty East Side alleys. Tompkins Square and Charlie Parker’s bebop, the neighbourhood jumping at one o’clock. The glory of the ‘50s and ‘60s: a bottle of Dago red in a paper bag, the sublime bliss of bricks cooling after a day of summer heat, and the nocturnal beauty of a wild riff echoing from dingy walk-ups. This was her world, the world of a woman willing to take guff from no man. Her world was also the brutality of cold-water flats, rusty fire escapes, and homeless figures flitting through darkness by the East River. It was the angry fix of Ginsberg’s hipsters and benzedrine dreams on listless afternoons that would drift effortlessly into garish nights bright with miles of streetlights.

Her world was the all or nothing of New York.

Avenue B, and Rabbis from the Talmud Torah school mixed with Puerto Rican Catholics; kosher chicken “fresh killed daily” and girls in first communion dresses, all whirled in a welter of pigeons, rising in waves from sidewalks. And over all the bells of St. Brigid’s making holy the Kingdom of the East Side. The music of her body adorned the night and there was splendour in her walk, in the roll of her hips like a girl from the southern seas. And, like the bells, the woman also made the district holy, all the way from Broadway to the saintly East River, elevating the mean streets into a sort of grandeur and, when she turned the corner, a little smile touching her lips, didn’t it just feel like going home.

- 48 -

The Lummox Press has published over 240 titles in the past 22 years, including chapbooks, the Little Red Book series, a series of perfect bound books (the Respect series), the Lummox Journal, an annual Lummox Poetry Anthology and e-copies. The stated goal of the press is to elevate the bar for poetry, while bringing the “word� to an international audience. We are proud to offer this book as a part of that effort.

For more information and to see our growing catalog of choices, please go to www.lummoxpress.com/lc

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“A poet to contend with.”

—Toronto Star

“Deahl is a poet for whom location is a spiritual debate . . . Deahl’s quiet line resounds.”

—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“His work of the past few years reminds me very much of Andrew Wyeth . . . [Deahl] does in poems what he does in paint.”

—Michael Wurster

“Here is the definitive book of prose-poems, destined to be a classic of the genre on every reference shelf.”

—Katherine L. Gordon, from the Foreword

“James Deahl is prolific. More importantly, he never

writes the same piece twice. In content as well as form,

he seeks to expand and diversify his body of work. His life is dedicated to the pursuit of the perfect poem.”

—Patrick Connors

This is a sample. To order the complete 150-page book, please visit our website: www.lummoxpress.com