“It was the same wind as the wind of my boyhood, still careless in the prairie grass.” – W.O. Mitchell
My dad, my brother, Mike, and I spent a lot of time fishing Ontario lakes from small boats powered by Johnson 5.5 to 15 (!) HP engines. My dad, a champion tennis player when young, could reel cast farther and more elegantly than I ever learned to. What I chiefly learned from fishing with my dad is how much silence should be valued. And, that love often needs few or no words to be understood.
Fishing
the lure arcs … shims morning water,
is reeled through my father’s shadow
of a summer five decades gone.
My dad and mum too are gone and
Hawking’s heaven posits I shall not see them more,
though the lure arcs still, shims, is reeled.
JMD: 15.06.10
Lament
Scattered doves madden under parched clouds.
The voice of my neighbour’s wife wells in the still morning,
its notes mournful as a dove, his voice its spillway.
I think to tell my mother, now scattered ash, of this—I do.
There is a white sail miles out on the great lake.
JMD: 02.07.09
“East of Eastern” was written for Sheila Joy David, M.D., in 2008, after we’d been to the ballet and I was driving the lady home. The remembrance immediately following I took to her funeral in June, 2013.
_____________
She liked dance, and to dance.
She once told me when we were at the ballet that soon after seeing West Side Story, she could sing and would dance to all its songs, particularly Maria’s “I Feel Pretty.” I imagine all that black hair swaying, her lithe form, her dark eyes in her luminous face. How pretty she must have been at 16! She was lovely all the short time I knew her.
As Carlos, who I understand dances better than any of us, I’m sure well knew. I never had the pleasure of meeting Carlos, whom Sheila first described in Oct., 2008, as “my jealous Columbian boyfriend,” with whom, she later wrote, “I am […] in love.”
While she was chatelâine of 29 Maclean Avenue in Toronto’s “The Beaches,” Sheila and I went to the ballet a few times. But, after a February, ’08 performance of The Italian Straw Hat, we were never again able to go. We planned to in Jan.,’10, but her dog Nutmeg’s death prevented us. Her “beloved Nutmeg,” whom she rescued from a much harsher and doubtless shorter life than he would have had on the Caribbean island where she found him.
I wrote “East of Eastern” just after we’d seen ‘Straw Hat. It was snowing as we drove along Eastern Avenue to 29 Maclean, and B.B. King was playing on the radio.
Driving Doc Joy home east on Eastern
snow descends
lands languid on the windshield
as the Doc talks of saving another dog
from a country where tourists are guarded on the beaches.
On the radio, blues, bb blues,
blues for the hurt and sick like those the Doc attends,
blues the Doc and I mmm and echo
yachting east to beachy Queen,
Where blues are blue ooh blues.
In August 2002 I was asked to read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 at the wedding of my beloved older daughter, Mary. My beloved younger daughter, Alice, asked me twelve years later to write something for her marriage. On June 2, 2014, the day of Alice’s wedding, I read my “something,” which offers respectful argument and continuity to Sonnet 116.
Of this argument, Lawrence Switzky, PhD (Harvard—English) Assoc. Prof., Univ. of Toronto, wrote me in 2014
I adore your gentle, pointed reply to Shakespeare, and I appreciate the gracefulness of your closing couplet against the defensiveness of Shax’s. In fact, I hadn’t ever quite noticed how deliberately overwrought, anxiously rhetorical, Shakespeare is here. Your style strikes me as affirmative and more relaxed, not a preemptive defence but an acknowledgement and a series of reflections and admissions. [Your] ‘breath become light to end beyond wonder’ is gorgeous in meter and metaphor. I like the opening out into mystery at that moment.
The verses here derive from nine photos and five remembered images of my always English mother, Patricia Patience, b. 1922, whose last names were those of Dick, her foster father and a hard Sergeant Major of the Inniskilling Dragoons, of Bobs, her feckless natural father and scion of a famous family, of Meredith, my beloved alcoholic dad, and of Doug, her second husband and a good man. Pat was usually taller and prettier than women she befriended. She was admitted to Cambridge at 17, but war saw her on duty at The Admiralty, where she met a handsome Canadian naval officer who took her from all of England which made her less than she could and should have been.
Patricas
Patsy hugs Paddy
‘cus I love him best
and hate my wooly suit
the tickley furry rug
Dancing colleen
Red and green the tints by hand applied,
the cailín poses strongly—
the dance is just begun.
At the seashore
Bunty simpers but Patricia
smiles—
larger than the little women posing
on the now obesiant shingle.
Admiralty wave
The few fall down from an English sky:
all are alive as never again.
Pat looks sure at the smitten eye
as right as an English reign.
By the sun dial
sober-suited Patience smiles the promised kiss of Springtime.
Paddy’s now a setter, sitting. Granny’s clipped lawns surround,
like a Rolls rug handed on,
lovely ‘innocence.’
Bride
Groom inward, the bride engages
dark clouds far awaying.
Unpocketed silver is like the moment—given.
HMC navalperson and Guilford girl are married in ‘44.
The dead cowboy
Flung head down on the bungalow stairs,
the dead cowboy is six and hasn’t been dead for long,
his shuttering lashes say—
Mummy’s coming! peek a little surprise her when don’t smile!
Oh, look! Another dead cowboy!
Kawandag
“. . . the loveliest night of the year”
the cowboy sings up to Daddy, the stars,
reaching home along the road.
In the paper
the young matron, engineer’s wife,
will travel to Monte Carlo (where the Rainiers live)
to see her Father whom we’ve never
seen in the prairie Tribune.
On the terrace
great merry is made for Pat is forty.
Paddy keeshond leaps to sunlight shivers bush
and the Siamese do not sulk.
More glamorous by far than any at Rick’s,
Pat and Doug in black number/white jacket ship the bar—
smile beauty/handsome is
neo-noir
Regality
Patrica rex, as ‘t were, regales us all
with laughter—
the moment modish, lush, slips past a certain age,
her century halved.
Choking the cowboy
Iodine fog sees Inniskilling:
the murdered self claws likewise.
Abandon all Bobs, Dicks and Heartfords, ye who’d exit anger.
At the swim meet
brother Guinness, the younger, is sober among others, also so.
Damp mud beneath our bums—swimmers grin victory.
None enchant: no cowboy wins.
Pat, 70, is in white shorts beckoning maritime clouds.
For my Mother on her Eightieth Birthday
July 2, 2002
J.M.D.
On this hill of millionaires
I recall her fingers on my wrist as quick as the rush of winter birds in the flooding sun across the Spanish bay.
Removed, their absent warmth is the sun behind old mountains;
the cold bay’s thin light strings are the city below,
where Muslim princes once sold for more their slaves who had by heart
more poetry.
My boyhood (and still good) friend and I watched when we were teenagers a T.V. show called Route 66, whose two main characters, the abbreviate Buz and Tod, every week for an hour on the road to elsewhere in a convertible ‘vette championed the oppressed, dared fate, learned life—in short, met high adventure riding across America. GMS and I rode our bikes most places in a Montreal suburb’s variously treed settings of our daring adolescent doings, one of which is remembered in this graphically oddball poem made for his 66th birthday.
My good friend Joe is a longtime Bahá’í whose faith and its manifestations I admire even more than the Boys’ Own derring-do I read maybe too much of as a kid. Anyway, Joe (now also an internationally distinguished architect) tells me he’s OK with starring, in his words, as “a ship of Faith” victorious in the lingo of at last redeemed bad men.
HMS Joe
“A sentence that felt like pulling a bumpy chain out of your mouth.”
To wit—”Pass the link along if you like.”
HMS Joe ‘er anchor’d slipped ‘long many a distant shore,
From safe roads ‘ere to far Shang’i,
Where soften’d oar did save us once from frightful Chinee wrath,
And darkling moon vouchsaf’d us path t’ richly shinin’ Indie.
Easterin’ then did lovely Joe outpace pursuers all,
ran swift and hard ‘fore Christy winds, all horizon by,
‘til out the dawn rose sudden tall,
a line ship name Bahá’i—
“Dump ‘er cargo, run the guns, e’ry man t’ station!”
our Master scree’d, his eye a-bulge at thousand yard o’ billow
soon quick abeam our pitchin’ Joe, our Doom upon us certain,
‘is sky a vasty oneness …
Taken prize, fast tether’d to Bahá’i, we swept to’rd ancient Perzhee,
whence song we later forth did sing of all for all as ‘came ‘e.
The Skater Long lean straight horizon south across the great lake. Skater, miles out, nearing, cuts ice. Is here, skate edges fountaining. Later, he owns a summer's shore, through his many rooms hosts you especially, and yearns for miles of ice. JMD:28.07.17
Anna’s Bike
is locked to the porch stairs rail
in November’s light,
its accoutrements integral—headlamp handbrakes, bell, back wheel carrier—all flowing silver of her mind,
which art of heaven
I must meet
this women love, marry, live ‘til death with her or, and only, write this
of her bike.
