“It was the same wind as the wind of my boyhood, still careless in the prairie grass.” – W.O. Mitchell
When Alice was a baby in her carriage I took her one day to see an older lady living near us in (old) North Toronto who had been part of Greenwich Village life in the later 40s. As she bent to pick up Alice, Alice smiled. The lady said, “This child smiles with her whole being!”
Alice, Sixteen, Smiles
Wider than her several suns—
at rest on clay rays, distracted,
than one and many-planed stars on drywall—
than her early aureole,
each Hendrix hair ironed,
impressed on captured paper,
is her smile.
Glass and leaded straining of its light
through sombre trees—a carousel on fired pots—
cannot dim it.
Alice smiles and favoured kingdoms
leave war’s raging discontent its broken streets,
join hands, beat drums, sing long
of this smile and those to come,
and all waters rush here,
leaving moons to their quiet dust,
and the light of suns everywhere is tributary
to its radiant celebration
this September day.
JMD: 06.09.96/ed. 06.09.2016
To Terri on Her 50th Birthday
(poem in progress)
here is the electoral map of Notre-Dame-de-l’Ile-Perrot
its acid bars sunlight through the slats of the adirondack chair we shared picnicking in March
you in sealskin I in suede neither then endangered
a champagne splash on a chair arm
clouding in the cold
sketching the window onto Atwater’s ascension of the mountain
from which had we climbed it
could Toronto have been seen
or the square sisaled balcony where
we first showed darling Mary to the nestling sky
sweet unrainy
when came we to still our house then expanse now small
a playhouse of boards much trod its bills little changed
until from your determination
her own light
Alice
passages of nannies friends constant and tried
and family ah family
decades of tended grass spilt wine hard words
and soft
dog and cat we loving embrace our lovely daughters
your daughters T your face quickened lit
beholding them
To My Father at Fifty
We are driving fast over prairie in a protoMustang
north to a conifer bush to cut the Christmas tree,
my father, and brother and sister,
and I.
My breath is short
as the prairie day—
the light—dazzling.
My brother and I fight over the axe, by turns hack.
Smoking a Sportsman, his boots laced to his knees, Dad carries Pam.
He’s as tall as the trees.
That summer we tour the Imperial refinery—all it makes, he sells. As the late evening sun lights its oil storage,
he remarks that the sunset’s red light on the white tanks
is lovely
and his wide smile proves it so.
J.M.D: 02.09.95
The word “Wegmar” is a meaningful amalgam of three initials and an ambiguous abbreviation of the sources financial and spiritual of our cottage of the same name in Prince Edward County, Ontario. The pond is one begun the summer of 1991 by our beloved daughter Alice, who has ever since been its firm-lipped directrice.
Pond at Wegmar
Alice this year enlarged her pond,
and another smaller, higher dug.
Between them Lesseps a feeding stream
(when the hose is on).
New four mil reclines along, within the sand,
and goldfish of aquarium airs
are poured among the old pond
overwinterers.
There’s roil and ending before the croakers come to blend
to the sheens of summer light.
Paling thyme and ivy, zinnias and the kerria bush
are fullest in the longer shadows,
measures of the restless lake.
Board and straw now shelter fish and frogs
for whom this year are exits added.
December, and the Muslim moon is high.
Below, teal throws upon the nearing cedar
are weft with brightly from the house,
where Wenceslas, God and sinner
(as in us sing)
may round and gracing meet.
My widely esteemed father-in-law, Edmund Joseph John Walters, Q.C., was (he died in 2015) a tough fiercely ambitious Parkdale Polish kid who become the astonishingly hardworking and, eventually, wealthy senior partner of an old West End Toronto law firm. He could also play Chopin on his various pianos with an intensity that might have distressed but would more likely have pleased the composer.
After 40 years at law Ed retired for another 30 to a large house he built and maintained with his own hands on a hill just east of Malaga. He seldom allowed himself to enjoy the exhilarating view he had of the port and bay of that ancient city, though I did see him once take a half day off to contemplate it on a New Year’s day he was nearing 90.
When 75 (the summer of ’91) and with us at Wegmar, he fenced two decks here with 36 + ’ of rail and 168 balusters, power sawing each vertical member to length and hand sawing and chiselling out space for each in the deck planking, built an eight-tread set of stairs, and installed a four-drawer, 15-cupboard kitchen he’d designed and built in his cramped Toronto furnace room workshop and transported in the trunk of his ’67 Eldorado, together with his circa 1950 table saw (a Sutton Tool & Die [Brantford] 8″ tilt-able, mounted on a homemade plywood box frame fastened to Beaver Power Tools [Guelph] steel legs and powered by a Teco/Eatons of Canada 1/2 HP electric motor).
It must be said this work did take him nearly a week of 10-hour days, and saw him briefly hospitalized for what was first thought to be a heart attack but was soon diagnosed as just pericarditis, the result of too much use of a 20 oz Estwing curved claw hammer (with “laminated leather grip”) I gave him, which he returned to me in his later 80s as then, finally, “a bit heavy” for him.
We afterward inherited from Ed a cut tin Portuguese rooster with green glass eyes, and one of two handmade white-on-black arrow signs which, nailed to roadside trees, used to indicate the Avon Bay, Muskoka cottage he built, improved and maintained for more than 30 years with his own hands but sold when family no longer wanted or could afford to use it.
After my dad died when I was 27, Ed was for me over 40 years an often if not continuously admirable and emulable father figure. I will always be grateful to and honour him.
E.J.J. is 80
this autumn
sun floods across miles of great lake to fill the eye, and in the air are scents
like those along the ancient coast
an ocean east of here,
where high ensconced another eye may blink
and sweep the harbour of imperial ships
while breathing green
in a low-walled garden,
or
under the house at the heat pump
(whistling and bluing the air by turns)
lips may firm
and the string hammock sway empty,
light through its net casting
onto the tough blade grass below,
while here
in yet another county named for feckless royalty
shadows long toward this platoon of balusters
trained up one by one several summers ago,
and the house they serve (from his energy born)
honours him with emulative work
and remembers him with plaque and sign—
“E.J.J. Walters shaved here” and
“WALTERS,” an arrow in white on black,
the first beneath a mirror to loved faces,
the other guarded by a litigant rooster,
his one green eye glass to the young maple
by a corner of the churchyard fence,
its leaves shimmering through all golds radiant
in the westering light
wise as stars in a further heaven
welcoming all to the festive table.
Papa
To this extent,
Dad, forgive my long pause at
“It’s cancer, John.”
And your good cheer
thereafter,
for now the kingdom I serve
loves vowels, knows the endings of names
and the price of all things,
the costs of courage, betrayal, ordinary cowardice
longing,
slight ease in the afternoon,
the evening’s step
to dream,
the age of ending,
father,
my father.
Summer—1982-1998
Her season with us longer
than some dated in the burying ground
up the hill,
our good dog! good girl!
weaves among the melting stones
bent from older grief,
her restless nose leading fall breezes
through the hair along her spine,
as she walks us home.
Where now
she is absence—
empty bowls, bed, back seat, streets,
parks, sand road, winter beach—
Where now
she still races—
sounding joy annoyance warning—
down the stairs along the hall the dock,
and springs at dimming shapes,
is caught up by arms
beyond our ken.
Wegmar, Late Summer
We’ve moved the bird feeder
metres further from the scrub cedar,
whence too often launched the chipmunk,
outstealing the jay, the grackle even.
On a new ladder (aluminum) we reach
to fill the plenum (two margarine tubsworth)
and see in a day the seed subside and deeper
carpet its mezzanine
this year re-varathened.
Summer’s wane allows a fire at night
of applewood and carpenter’s ends,
made warmer by a heft of birch
from the last beneath the porch.
Mid September and the halvèd moon
is west, steelwoolenwisped.
The lake assuages weaving shale, and settles granite.
Immediate, flung stars jostle, partnering
in a recessive heaven
athwart the foursquare ends of earth.
Terri and I lived for 29 years on Albertus Avenue in Toronto, a short walk from an old but in 1998 still well kept lawn bowling club set in a ravine overlooked by variously large houses, one of which looked like a Mediterranean seaside villa even when icicles hung down its cream stucco walls from its ochre tile eaves.
Father Valentine
Thank you for winter sun
in a far blue sky
and for the yellow Sunlight bottle
in the window over the front door
of the mock-Tudor on St. Clements,
seen as we walked our old dog,
my valentine, wife, friend
of thirty years of war, and surpassing peace, and I,
walked, slipped, descended into the
ravine of the padlocked lawn bowling club,
inched up ice to tributary streets,
then turned by the iced cream villa
to the vista of presbyter trees,
their branches aqueducts of the sun’s rush through breaking eyes
to the heart.
To T
From J
14.02.98
My admirable friend Piet, professor and longtime animateur of McGill’s School of Architecture, had in 1996 some of his students build to seat-of-the pants spec on the front campus a (down)scale replica of the Pantheon in ice, a necessarily temporary but radiantly educative project. He’s more recently had a robot in an out-of-the-way basement room at McGill experimentally build various items of ice, including the first words of a line of poetry he’s long liked.
Dutch prof. sculpts up ice temple—Happy 100th, McGill Architecture!
“I had help,” admits Piet.
Pantheon Redux
now of snow, and ice—scaled down, sure—
and the gods have stepped away
from their niches.
The frieze will cloud in the spring sun,
the dome become water, earth,
grass beneath the feet of generations,
who yet may meet the builder, the absent heroes,
returning.