E.J.

PRATT, THE SHARK

He seemed to know the harbour,

So leisurely he swam;
His fin,
Like a piece of sheet-iron,
Three-cornered,
And with knife-edge,
Stirred not a bubble
As it moved
With its base-line on the water.
His body was tubular
And tapered
And smoke-blue,
And as he passed the wharf
He turned,
And snapped at a flat-fish
That was dead and floating.
And I saw the flash of a white throat,
And a double row of white teeth,
And eyes of metallic grey,
Hard and narrow and slit.
Then out of the harbour,
With that three-cornered fin
Shearing without a bubble the water
Lithely,
Leisurely,
He swam –
That strange fish,
Tubular, tapered, smoke-blue,
Part vulture, part wolf,
Part neither – for his blood was cold.
A.M. KLEIN, HEIRLOOM

My father bequeathed me no wide estates;

No keys and ledgers were my heritage;
Only some holy books with yahrzeit dates
Writ mournfully upon a blank front page –

Books of the Baal Shem Tov, and of his wonders;

Pamphlets upon the devil and his crew;
Prayers against road demons, witches, thunders;
And sundry other tomes for a good Jew.

Beautiful: though no pictures on them, save

The scorpion crawling on a printed track;
The Virgin floating on a scriptural wave,
Square letters twinkling in the Zodiac.

The snuff left on this page, now brown and old,

The tallow stains of midnight liturgy–
These are my coat of arms, and these unfold
My noble lineage, my proud ancestry!

And my tears, too, have stained this heirloomed ground,

When reading in these treatises some weird
Miracle, I turned a leaf and found
A white hair fallen from my father’s beard.
A.J.M. SMITH, THE LONELY LAND

Cedar and jagged fir

uplift sharp barbs
against the gray
and cloud-piled sky;
and in the bay
blown spume and windrift
and thin, bitter spray
snap
at the whirling sky;
and the pine trees
lean one way.
A wild duck calls
to her mate,
and the ragged
and passionate tones
stagger and fall,
and recover,
and stagger and fall,
on these stones–
are lost
in the lapping of water
on smooth, flat stones.
This is a beauty
of dissonance,
this resonance
of stony strand,
this smoky cry
curled over a black pine
like a broken
and wind-battered branch
when the wind
bends the tops of the pines
and curdles the sky
from the north.
This is the beauty
of strength
broken by strength
and still strong.
A.J.M. SMITH, SEA-CLIFF

Wave on wave
and green on rock
and white between
the splash and black
the crash and hiss
of the feathery fall,
the snap and shock
of the water wall
and the wall of rock:
after -
after the ebb-flow,
wet rock,
high -
high over the slapping green,
water sliding away
and the rock abiding,
new rock riding
out of the spray.
F.R. SCOTT, THE CANADIAN AUTHORS MEET

Expansive puppets percolate self-unction

Beneath a portrait of the Prince of Wales.
Miss Crotchet’s muse has somehow failed to function,
Yet she’s a poetess. Beaming, she sails

From group to chattering group, with such a dear

Victorian saintliness, as is her fashion,
Greeting the other unknowns with a cheer –
Virgins of sixty who still write of passion.

The air is heavy with Canadian topics,

And Carman, Lampman, Roberts, Campbell, Scott,
Are measured for their faith and philanthropics,
Their zeal for God and King, their earnest thought.

The cakes are sweet, but sweeter is the feeling

That one is mixing with the literati;
It warms the old, and melts the most congealing.
Really, it is a most delightful party.

Shall we go round the mulberry bush, or shall

We gather at the river, or shall we
Appoint a Poet Laureate this fall,
Or shall we have another cup of tea?

O Canada, O Canada, O can

A day go by without new authors springing
To paint the native maple, and to plan
More ways to set the selfsame welkin ringing?
F.R. SCOTT, ALL THE SPIKES BUT THE LAST

Where are the coolies in your poem, Ned?

Where are the thousands from China who swung
their picks with bare hands at forty below?
Between the first and the million other spikes
they drove, and the dressed-up act of
Donald Smith, who has sung their story?
Did they fare so well in the land they helped to
unite? Did they get one of the 25,000,000 CPR acres?
Is all Canada has to say to them written in the Chinese
Immigration Act?
DOROTHY LIVESAY, GREEN RAIN

I remember long veils of green rain

Feathered like the shawl of my grandmother –
Green from the half-green of the spring trees
Waving in the valley.
I remember the road
Like the one which leads to my grandmother’s house,
A warm house, with green carpets,
Geraniums, a trilling canary
And shining horse-hair chairs;
And the silence, full of the rain’s falling
Was like my grandmother’s parlour
Alive with herself and her voice, rising and falling –
Rain and wind intermingled.
I remember on that day
I was thinking only of my love
And of my love’s house.
But now I remember the day
As I remember my grandmother.
I remember the rain as the feathery fringe of her shawl.
DOROTHY LIVESAY, DAY AND NIGHT

Dawn, red and angry, whistles loud and sends

A geysered shaft of steam searching the air.
Scream after scream announces that the churn
Of life must move, the giant arm command.
Men in a stream, a moving human belt
Move into sockets, every one a bolt.
The fun begins, a humming, whirring drum –
Men do a dance in time to the machines.

II

One step forward

Two steps back
Shove the lever,
Push it back
While Arnot whirls
A roundabout
And Geoghan shuffles
Bolts about.
One step forward
Hear it crack
Smashing rhythm –
Two steps back
Your heart-beat pounds
Against your throat
The roaring voices
Drown your shout
Across the way
A writhing whack
Sets you spinning
Two steps back –
One step forward
Two steps back.
III

Day and night are rising and falling

Night and day shift gears and slip rattling
Down the runway, shot into storerooms
Where only arms and a note-book remember
The record of evil, the sum of commitments.
We move as through sleep’s revolving memories
Piling up hatred, stealing the remnants,
Doors forever folding before us –
And where is the recompense, on what agenda
Will you set love down? Who knows of peace?
Day and night
Night and day
Light rips into ribbons
What we say.
I called to love
Deep in dream:
Be with me in the daylight
As in gloom.
Be with me in the pounding
In the knives against my back
Set your voice resounding
Above the steel’s whip crack.
High and sweet
Sweet and high
Hold, hold up the sunlight
In the sky!
Day and night
Night and day
Tear up all the silence
Find the words I could not say …

IV

We were stoking coal in the furnaces; red hot

They gleamed, burning our skins away, his and mine.
We were working together, night and day, and knew
Each other’s stroke; and without words, exchanged
An understanding about kids at home,
The landlord’s jaw, wage-cuts and overtime.
We were like buddies, see? Until they said
That nigger is too smart the way he smiles
And sauces back the foreman; he might say
Too much one day, to others changing shifts.
Therefore they cut him down, who flowered at night
And raised me up, day hanging over night –
So furnaces could still consume our withered skin.
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego
Turn in the furnace, whirling slow.
Lord, I’m burnin’ in the fire
Lord, I’m steppin’ on the coals
Lord, I’m blacker than my brother
Blow your breath down here.
Boss, I’m smothered in the darkness
Boss, I’m shrivellin’ in the flames
Boss, I’m blacker than my brother
Blow your breath down here.
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego
Burn in the furnace, whirling slow.

Up in the roller room, men swing steel

Swing it, zoom; and cut it, crash.
Up in the dark the welder’s torch
Makes sparks fly like lightning reel.
Now I remember storm on a field
The trees bow tense before the blow
Even the jittering sparrows’ talk
Ripples into the still tree shield.
We are in storm that has no cease
No lull before, no after time
When green with rain the grasses grow
And air is sweet with fresh increase.
We bear the burden home to bed
The furnace glows within our hearts:
Our bodies hammered through the night
Are welded into bitter bread.
Bitter, yes:
But listen, friend:
We are mightier
In the end.
We have ears
Alert to seize
A weakness
In the foreman’s ease
We have eyes
To look across
The bosses’ profit
At our loss.
Are you waiting?
Wait with us
After evening
There’s a hush –
Use it not
For love’s slow count:
Add up hate
And let it mount
Until the lifeline
Of your hand
Is calloused with
A fiery brand!
Add up hunger,
Labour’s ache
These are figures
That will make
The page grow crazy
Wheels go still,
Silence sprawling
On the till –
Add your hunger,
Brawn and bones,
Take your earnings:
Bread, not stones!
VI

Into thy maw I commend my body

But the soul shines without
A child’s hands as a leaf are tender
And draw the poison out.
Green of new leaf shall deck my spirit
Laughter’s roots will spread:
Though I am overalled and silent
Boss, I’m far from dead!
One step forward
Two steps back
Will soon be over:
Hear it crack!
The wheels may whirr
A roundabout
And neighbour’s shuffle
Drown your shout
The wheel must limp
Till it hangs still
And crumpled men
Pour down the hill
Day and night
Night and day
Till life is turned
The other way!
P.K. PAGE, STORIES OF SNOW

Those in the vegetable rain retain

an area behind their sprouting eyes
held soft and rounded with the dream of snow
precious and reminiscent as those globes –
souvenir of some never nether land –
which hold their snowstorms circular, complete,
high in a tall and teakwood cabinet.
In countries where the leaves are large as hands
where flowers protrude their fleshy chins
and call their colours
an imaginary snowstorm sometimes falls
among the lilies.
And in the early morning one will waken
to think the glowing linen of his pillow
a northern drift, will find himself mistaken
and lie back weeping.
And there the story shifts from head to head,
of how, in Holland, from their feather beds
hunters arise and part the flakes and go
forth to the frozen lakes in search of swans –
the snow light falling white along their guns,
their breath in plumes.
While tethered in the wind like sleeping gulls
ice boats await the raising of their wings
to skim the electric ice at such a speed
they leap jet strips of naked water,
and how these flying, sailing hunters feel
air in their mouths as terrible as ether.
And on the story runs that even drinks
in that white landscape dare to be no colour;
how, flasked and water clear, the liquor slips
silver against the hunters’ moving hips.
And of the swan in death these dreamers tell
of its last flight and how it falls, a plummet,
pierced by the freezing bullet
and how three feathers, loosened by the shot,
descend like snow upon it.
While hunters plunge their fingers in its down
deep as a drift, and dive their hands
up to the neck of the wrist
in that warm metamorphosis of snow
as gentle as the sort that woodsmen know
who, lost in the white circle, fall at last
and dream their way to death.
And stories of this kind are often told
in countries where great flowers bar the roads
with reds and blues which seal the route to snow –
as if, in telling, raconteurs unlock
the colour with its complement and go
through to the area behind the eyes
where silent, unrefractive whiteness lies.

P.K. PAGE, ARRAS

Consider a new habit – classical,

and trees espaliered on the wall like candelabra.
How still upon that lawn our sandalled feet.
But a peacock rattling its rattan tail and screaming
has found a point of entry. Through whose eye
did it insinuate in furled disguise
to shake its jewels and silk upon that grass?

The peaches hang like lanterns.

No one joins those figures on the arras.
Who am I
or who am I become that walking here
I am observer, other,
Gemini, starred for a green garden of cinema?
I ask, what did they deal me in this pack?
The cards, all suits, are royal when I look.
My fingers slipping on a monarch’s face
twitch and go slack.
I want a hand to clutch, a heart to crack.
No one is moving now, the stillness is infinite.
If I should make a break …
take to my springy heels …? But nothing moves.
The spinning world is stuck upon its poles,
the stillness points a bone at me.
I fear the future on this arras.
I confess:
It was my eye.
Voluptuous it came.

Its head the ferrule and its lovely tail

folded so sweetly; it was strangely slim
to fit the retina. And then it shook
and was a peacock – living patina,
eye-bright – maculate!
Does no one care?

I thought their hands might hold me if I spoke.

I dreamed the bite of fingers in my flesh,
their poke smashed by an image, but they stand
as if within a treacle, motionless,
folding slow eyes on nothing. While they stare
another line has trolled the encircling air,
another bird assumes its furled disguise.
AL PURDY, THE COUNTRY NORTH OF BELLEVILLE

The Country North of Belleville

Bush land scrub land -
Cashel Township and Wollaston
Elzevir McClure and Dungannon
green lands of Weslemkoon Lake
where a man might have some
opinion of what beauty
is and none deny him
For miles —
Yet this is the country of defeat
where Sisyphus rolls a big stone
year after year up the ancient hills
picknicking glaciers have left strewn
with centuries' rubble
backbreaking days
in the sun and rain
when realization seeps slow in the mind
without grandeur or self deception in
noble struggle
of being a fool –
A country of quiescence and still distance
a lean land
not like the fat south
with inches of black soil on
earth's round belly –
And where the farms are
it's as if a man stuck
both thumbs in the in the stony earth and pulled
it apart
to make room
enough between the trees
for a wife
and maybe some cows and
room for some
of the more easily kept illusions –
And where the farms have gone back
to forest
are only soft outlines
shadowy differences –
Old fences drift vaguely among the trees
a pile of moss-covered stones
gathered for some ghost purpose
has lost meaning under the meaningless sky
— they are like cities under water
and the undulating green waves of time
are laid on them –
This is the country of our defeat
and yet
during the fall plowing a man
might stop and stand in a brown valley of the furrows
and shade his eyes to watch for the same
red patch mixed with gold
that appears on the same
spot in the hills
year after year
and grow old
plowing and plowing a ten-acre field until
the convolutions run parallel with his own brain —
And this is a country where the young
Leave quickly
unwilling to know what their fathers know
or think the words their mothers do not say –
Herschel Monteagle and Faraday
lakeland rockland and hill country
a little adjacent to where the world is
a little north of where the cities are an
sometime
we may go back there
to the country of our defeat
Wollaston Elzevir and Dungannon
and Weslemkoon lake land
where the high townships of Cashel
McClure and Marmora once were —
But it's been a long time since
and we must enquire the way
of strangers –
AL PURDY, WILDERNESS GOTHIC

Across Roblin Lake, two shores away,

they are sheathing the church spire
with new metal. Someone hangs in the sky
over there from a piece of rope,
hammering and fitting God’s belly-scratcher,
working his way up along the spire
until there’s nothing left to nail on—
Perhaps the workman’s faith reaches beyond:
touches intangibles, wrestles with Jacob,
replacing rotten timber with pine thews,
pounds hard in the blue cave of the sky,
contends heroically with difficult problems of
gravity, sky navigation and mythopeia,
his volunteer time and labor donated to God,
minus sick benefits of course on a non-union job—
Fields around are yellowing into harvest,
nestling and fingerling are sky and water borne,
death is yodeling quiet in green woodlots,
and bodies of three young birds have disappeared
in the sub-surface of the new county highway—
That picture is incomplete, part left out
that might alter the whole Dürer landscape:
gothic ancestors peer from medieval sky,
dour faces trapped in photograph albums escaping
to clop down iron roads with matched grays:
work-sodden wives groping inside their flesh
for what keeps moving and changing and flashing
beyond and past the long frozen Victorian day.
A sign of fire and brimstone? A two-headed calf
born in the barn last night? A sharp female agony?
An age and a faith moving into transition,
the dinner cold and new-baked bread a failure,
deep woods shiver and water drops hang pendant,
double yolked eggs and the house creaks a little—
Something is about to happen. Leaves are still.
Two shores away, a man hammering in the sky.
Perhaps he will fall.