31.12.18

Vancouver Writing: Evelyn Lau

Green

and already the leaves have arrived,
my doctor, that blur of green you spoke of four years ago
thickened while you sat, spread in your chair in the sun,
children scuffing bicycles down the alley to the grocery store.
it was not really green, a fog of green,
a thought of green you could only call light.

I awoke from a dream panicked
thinking I'd missed the arrival of the leaves.
a landlady was taking me from room to room,
each one barren and small and filled
with the sound of typewriters. there was a view
of a beach in the distance, the encroachment of a wave
like a finger, spray hitting the empty shore,
a foreign beach the color of dust.
the trees were black arms holding up the sky,
crookedly, along the sidewalk in front of the building
that fine mist, that vague rain of green had gone,
and the branches were bent with a new burden of leaves.

four years ago we had word-associated this thought of yours,
this green that wasn't there,
back when mysteries were still abundant
and could be uncovered. yesterday everything was plain
and unbudging as a jug sitting in the sun.
the beach was the color of your shirt, sand,
the color of your face new to the sun.

in the morning there was no way of telling
if the leaves had come, since there were only buildings,
every room a bleak room. the phone rang loudly
while you, my doctor, went hunting in the park for the hint
of green, the cloud of green that was still mysterious
and therefore solvable, the green that failed to exist.
it breathed along the backs of your thick white hands
as the phone rang in my chest
without a sound, and you groped further and further
down the beach with the voice of the sands.

- from: Oedipal Dreams - Evelyn Lau

30.12.18

Vancouver Writing: Meredith Quartermain

Night Walk

west on Keefer Street
past the dark park, the SRO house
heavy-metal whines from a window
to a husky on the porch
rows of bunkhouse doors
single-room occupants
some sunk below the street.

Chain-link fence at the schoolyard,
man pushes a shopping cart east-
plastic bag on head- Bishop's mitre.
Through windows, men in their armchairs
with newspapers.
Turret house- its witch's hat
for the school's first principal-
snapped up by a landscape architect
his hostas and bananas,
whites tars of Clematis.
On a bench, elderly Chinese-
one pushing the bench,
the other sitting. Talking.

Further on, Joy Mansion-
lo-rise cubicles for old folk,
bank of mail boxes,
brown carpet wall-to-wall.
Then Good Fortune Rooms,
dusty pipes and patched ceilings,
red-letter EXITS to skinny halls-
custodian lends you 10 bucks at 50%,
you don't pay, he'll rough you up good,
if you don't die of smack or crack.

Gore Avenue- north,
red and green awnings,
shops shuttered, barred.
Street-market trinketeers gone home.
City barricades still up.
Lichee nuts, gailan, durian
at the place on Keefer that's always open.
Pender Street, east, back of Strathcona School.
Shouts of boys holding hockey sticks-
revved up with the game.

Pender and Campbell Avenue-
the mill owner's street-
Sacred Heart-,
its school and chain-link yard,
its rows of upper windows-
glass and bars-
single-roomer nuns or priests.

A grinding buzz-
the church's transformer- starts up
in the yellow dimness of street-lamps,
the blocks of housing for the poor.
A man scrapes along the sidewalk.
Muffled television thumps
over the asphalt
to the locked crossed doors.

- from: Meredith Quartermain- Vancouver Walking

29.12.18

Viajé de autobus a San Pancho para comida, beben, y playa.

28.12.18

Pavé para céna por favor.

27.12.18

Viajé de autobus. Pelícanos y pollos, tortillas y salsa.

26.12.18

Cardiac arrest on Boxing Day. The feral perros came to town, tormenting the dogs domesticated by leash and meals daily. The roosters were silenced throughout the three hour standoff. On-line comments regarding the layered night life symphony were tucked in near the bottom.

25.12.18

Before 9 am each morning a motorcycle of medium horsepower can be heard driving on the road to town. The man on the bike wears a straw hat, sunglasses despite the cloudy skies, and a sweat stained button up shirt. Behind him are five horses in tow- all chestnut coloured, healthy, and seemingly happy to get out for a trot. This inverted push and pull reminded him of the sculpture a painter once applied finishing touches to. Poised to fly but firmly anchored to its stone plinth.

24.12.18

It was settled. This was the year he would make a splash at dinner. The only problem was how to eat. Perhaps he could take his French knife and slit a line between the teeth, carefully maintaining  the crowns. Turkey would be chopped fine. Mashed potatoes no problem, Brussels to be avoided. The main hazard was splitting the mouth even further while drinking from the wine cellar, for these in-laws frown in the presence of Glasgow smiles.

23.12.18

He turned the key. Might be over for good this time. Pushing the door inward on creaky hinges he foresaw cinema without projected critiques, or deep incredulous sighs. There would be pasta el dente without debate, drain catchers left askew, three week ice cream eaten in spoonfuls, flowers left to die and curl into crusted pod stalks. Turning to his left his eye caught the writing on the wall. A sharpie on the floor. An empty wallet. With glue and a stack of dailies he newspapered the room in times roman, occasional helvetica. On speaker phone a mattress was ordered.

22.12.18

He struggled to fall back to sleep. The roosters outdid the parrots flocked in the yard, who overtook large pea fowl gorging yellow fruit in the tree by the dirt lane. Dogs yipped and danced under weaver bird nests hung low but just out of reach. Ants skittered up the yellow wall beside his bed. This carpet of noise and distraction merged and settled, smoothing the way for the mermaid to resurface and embrace him tenderly, her soft exhales fogging up the mask of his helmet.

21.12.18

As roosters chortled in the yard he managed to boil camp coffee in a saucepan. Jacaranda trees hid the streets on both sides but there was no way to block the noise of diesel trucks and whining motorbikes racing to town.

20.12.18

Vancouver Writing: Evelyn Lau

HOW IT BEGAN

DEAR DOCTOR

In dreams, it takes all night to reach you—
blind driving down unfamiliar roads,
twisty mountain passes, suburban cul-de-sacs
not on any map. Then at last,

the mirrors in the green stairwell.
The mirrors so close to the entrance
I could have walked straight into myself.
For years this was the shape of the world.

The plain room and its myriad dimensions,
radiating outward like meaning
from the bound lines of a poem—
the meaning in the space, the breath.

The silence. Clouds of curry rising
from the Indian restaurant below,
the shuffle of mail through your meaty hands,
the worn patch on the seat of the leather armchair,

duct-taped together. Last night I dreamt
I rode a boat through choppy water to see you.
You lived on a high cliff above wintry seas.
It was a paradise of pastoral beauty,

drenched in the syrupy light of summer.
Cottages with paned windows,
gardens overgrown with roses, wildflowers.
Bees bumbling through brambles,

furry as tiny bears, freighted with honey.
Butterflies like lofted petals
tearing through the sappy air.
How I longed to live there too!

Only the ocean lay between us.

- Evelyn Lau: as published in Geist  

19.12.18

Vancouver Writing: Evelyn Lau

HOW IT BEGAN

NOTHING HAPPENED

This was the house on the corner, the one
I passed to and from school each day.
He would have seen me twice
a day, from an upstairs window
or bent over his weeds in the garden—
an ugly girl, clad in scratchy plaid,
moping past. One fist dug deep
into my satchel, searching for day-old
shortbread hidden in a greased bag.
Sweaty bangs, furtive eyes behind
lenses as thick as goggles—
some adults said I was shy.
She’s sly, my mother declared, up to no good.
She won’t look me in the eye, a teacher complained,
and my father whipped round in his seat
at the parent-teacher conference:
What’s wrong with you?
What are you trying to hide?

One afternoon, the man asked me in—
past the stone lions, pots of lavender,
into the tiled foyer. The tiles were painted
with lemons, oranges, clusters of olives.
Nothing happened. Or something did—
the threat of something, creeping in the air
between us. It thickened my throat,
stuffed my sinuses like pollen.
He fetched his violin, the old man
with his nut-brown bald head,
played it for me like a suitor
in a sunny square, slicing note
after note into the air. His hand on my knee
a shy spider. (Am I making this up now,
digging diligently as an archaeologist,
searching for where it all went wrong?)

But nothing happened. Dust in the corners,
a brass umbrella stand, the bulky Nikes
belonging to his teenage grandsons.
The bow sawing the violin,
horsehair fraying.
The air so thick it seemed fibrous,
knotting around me like a mesh net,
like pantyhose yanked over the face.
His dark thoughts pouring into me
like motor oil. Maybe I wanted something
to happen, anything at all—
a way out, even this way.

But then he opened the front door. 

- Evelyn Lau: as published in Geist  

18.12.18

Vancouver Writing: Evelyn Lau

HOW IT BEGAN

JANNY

I remember my cousin Janny
hunched over the kitchen sink
scrubbing the household dishes at dawn
that summer we visited Grandma
in California. Treated like a slave
in feudal China, brunt of Grandma’s wrath—
piece of trash, monkey on her back,
good-for-nothing bastard daughter
of her own fourth child, Auntie No. 4
who had Janny out of wedlock—

still a shocker for a Chinese family
in the ’70s. It was rumoured
my aunt never knew the father, or that
he rightly washed his hands of her,
this tired baggy-eyed woman
who trudged home from work
at the fast food restaurant, reeking
of grease, ripping the brown-and-yellow
paper hat off her head as she sat down
to dinner in her stained uniform.
Auntie No. 4, who decades later would die
in a homeless shelter for battered women…

Janny barely spoke during our visit—
scrawny-shouldered, shaking
with shyness, beaten down by the daily
hail of Grandma’s hatred. I remember
the way she flinched at loud noises
or sudden movements, with a look
of such tense, whimpering terror in her eye
it made you want to hit her—

yet somehow she escaped. The news
of her life filtered through to me, over the years:
Your cousin Janny’s going to school.
Janny’s getting married, moving to Texas.
Janny has children now.
How? I always wondered. It was a puzzle,
the laws of the universe upended,
the sky swimming with fish and the sea
crammed with clouds. Maybe
there was an escape route, a hidden exit,
a trap door I hadn’t found in all
these years of wild searching.
Maybe my cousin had stumbled upon it
in her despair, crawled her way out
into a normal life. I pictured her
in some sun-soaked small town—
white picket fence, toys in the yard—
waving to her kids on the school bus,
folding herself into the tanned arms
of a man who loved her.

The call came this weekend:
Your cousin Janny passed away.
She killed herself. Her fifteen-year-old son
(a straight-A student, my aunt hastened
to add) came home from class to find her
overdosed on the living room sofa.
I thought she had escaped
her fate, and maybe there were days
she thought so too, living out a normal life
like someone else’s dream.
Living a life like it was rightfully hers.

- Evelyn Lau: as published in Geist  

17.12.18

Vancouver Writing: Evelyn Lau

HOW IT BEGAN

GRATITUDE

“It’s too, too, too beautiful.”
—Jun Lin’s last Facebook post, accompanying a photograph of a park,
days before he was murdered, and his body dismembered,
allegedly by Luka Magnotta

We don’t yet know how it began.
Perhaps he posted as a potential friend,
invited you for Starbucks and biscotti
after class, or Labatts and chicken wings
on the weekend, hockey on TV.
Perhaps you looked forward to the visit,
bounding up the stairs bearing some small gift
like a good guest, some small token
to appease the gods of hospitality
at the front door. That was
the sort of man you were—
on time every day, hoping to find in Canada
not money or status, like your classmates,
but love. A romantic. This painful light

shines in your face in photographs,
moon-bright, a little shy, eager
to please. An A student, studying computers
and engineering, a decade older
than your classmates, old enough that in China,
you wrote, they would respectfully
call you “uncle”—
what you wanted were peers.
Friends, lovers. You were lonely,
vulnerable in your loneliness.
Wanted someone to ride with you
on the midnight subway train in Montreal,
its flickering hospital-green half-light
you captured on film, deserted snowscapes
you posted to friends in China—
you were the only figure in all that ground.

But then there was that day in the park.
It was too, too, too beautiful—
a park others rushed through every day,
heads bowed over texts and tweets
while you stood gaping in awe, in a daze
of wonder, craning your neck
to see the sky swimming with green,
the drowsy parasols of the maples
sprinkling your delighted face
with sap, silent gust of wind swelling
through the stately willows, the vegetable whiff
of mown grass, too much, you thought,
it’s too much, days before it was taken
from you in a blaze of rage. Montreal,
released from the frozen grip of winter,
leafing out in the spring.
You had worked and saved,
worked and saved for years
to arrive at this place.

- Evelyn Lau: as published in Geist 

16.12.18

Vancouver Writing: Robert Creeley

Yesterdays

Sixty-two, sixty-three, I most remember   

As time W. C. Williams dies and we are   

Back from a hard two years in Guatemala   

Where the meager provision of being   

Schoolmaster for the kids of the patrones

Of two coffee plantations has managed   

Neither a life nor money. Leslie dies in   

Horror of bank giving way as she and her   

Sister and their friends tunnel in to make   

A cubby. We live in an old cement brick   

Farmhouse already inside the city limits   

Of Albuquerque. Or that has all really   

Happened and we go to Vancouver where,   

Thanks to friends Warren and Ellen Tallman,   

I get a job teaching at the University of British   

Columbia. It’s all a curious dream, a rush   

To get out of the country before the sad   

Invasion of the Bay of Pigs, that bleak use   

Of power. One of my British colleagues   

Has converted the assets of himself and   

His wife to gold bullion and keeps the   

Ingots in a sturdy suitcase pushed under   

Their bed. I love the young, at least I   

Think I do, in their freshness, their attempt   

To find ways into Canada from the western   

Reaches. Otherwise the local country seems   

Like a faded Edwardian sitcom. A stunned   

Stoned woman runs one Saturday night up   

And down the floors of the Hydro Electric   

Building on Pender with the RCMP in hot

Pursuit where otherwise we stood in long   

Patient lines, extending often several blocks   

Up the street. We were waiting to get our   

Hands stamped and to be given a 12 pack   

Of Molson’s. I think, I dream, I write the   

Final few chapters of The Island, the despairs   

Gathering at the end. I read Richard Brautigan’s   

Trout Fishing In America but am too uptight   

To enjoy his quiet, bright wit. Then that   

Summer there is the great Vancouver Poetry   

Festival, Allen comes back from India, Olson   

From Gloucester, beloved Robert Duncan   

From Stinson Beach. Denise reads “Hypocrite   

Women” to the Burnaby ladies and Gary Snyder,   

Philip Whalen, and Margaret Avison are there   

Too along with a veritable host of the young.   

Then it’s autumn again. I’ve quit my job   

And we head back to Albuquerque   

And I teach again at the university, and   

Sometime just about then I must have   

Seen myself as others see or saw me,   

Even like in a mirror, but could not quite   

Accept either their reassuring friendship   

Or their equally locating anger. Selfish,   

Empty, I kept at it. Thirty-eight years later   

I seem to myself still much the same,   

Even if I am happier, I think, and older.

- Robert Creeley from: The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975-2005.

15.12.18

Vancouver Writing: George Stanley

Verlaine's Ride on the 99 B-Line

The Broadway streetscape framed in the bus window
reels backward, halts, recedes again,
turning shop signs to stuttering banners,
as solitary walkers retrogress.
Phone wires & trolley wires loop & cross
with the strange allure of a signature.

The reek of wet clothing, the growl of the diesel
over the fast pulse of its idle
(like the muffled roar of a captive giant),
then suddenly, all around, crows cawing.

What is all this to Verlaine, who sits quietly
in a side seat, the unread Province in his lap,
transported by a vision? - a white form,
a sweet, insistent voice addressing him,
while he, in response, murmurs the syllables
of a Name whose cadence quells the bus's rumble

- George Stanley from Vancouver: A Poem 

14.12.18

Vancouver Writing: John Newlove

Good Company, Fine Houses

Good company, fine houses
and consequential people,
you will not turn me
into a tin factory.

I know where the lean and half
starved gods are hiding.
I have slept in the mountains.

I have slept among them,
in their mountains turning
nightmarishly between teh rocks
and the reaching plants.

I have seen red eyes
on my throat from behind
every bush and waterfall,
greedy for blood.

Good company, fine people,
except for the shooting,
how much will your funerals cost

in your consequential houses?
I know where the god is
hiding, starved. I have slept
in the turning mountain.

- John Newlove: Vancouver Soul of a City

13.12.18

Vancouver Writing: Peter Trower

Chainsaws in The Cathedral
   - for Al Purdy

Morning  the crumpled land  the hills

heaving up the sky  the rain

beating down like blood  the darkness

lifting from the trees  the waste place

where the trees were  leaving

a gray residue of mist

Camp at the mountain's foot  men

grunting from bunks  hawking  grumbling back

into splinterwalled stockstink

of bunkhouse reality  struggling

into dirtstiff overalls  straggling

breakfastwards to the guthammer's jangle

Soon the crummies will strain up the switchbacks

with men for the mountain  the song

will be sung again in the high hard places

donkeys will roar on the ridges 

chainsaws will roar on the ridges

chainsaws whine in the cathedral

of virgin trees, the harsh mad music of loggers.

- peter trower: chainsaws in the cathedrals- collected woods poems

12.12.18

Vancouver Writing: Joy Kagawa

What Do I Remember of the Evacuation

What do I remember of the evacuation?
I remember my father telling Tim and me
About the mountains and the train
And the excitement of going on a trip
What do I remember of the evacuation?
I remember my mother wrapping
A blanket around me and my
Pretending to fall asleep so she would be happy
Though I was so excited I couldn't sleep
(I hear there were people herded
Into the Hastings Park like cattle.
Families were made to move in two hours
Abandoning everything, leaving pets
And possessions at gun point
I hear families were broken up
Men were forced to work. I heard
it whispered late at nights
That here was suffering) and
I missed my dolls.
What do I remember of the evacuation?
I remember Miss Foster and Miss Tucker
Who still live in Vancouver
And who did what they could
And loved the children and who gave me
A puzzle to play with on the train.
And I remember the mountains and I was
Six years old and I swear I saw a giant
Gulliver of Gulliver's Travels scanning the horizon
And when I told my mother she believed it too
And I remember how careful my parents were
Not to bruise us with bitterness
And I remember the puzzle of Lorraine Life
Who said "Don't insult me" when I
Proudly wrote my name in Japanese
And how Tim flew the Union Jack
When the war was over but Lorraine
And her friends spat on us anyway
And I prayed to the God who loves
All the children in his sight
That I might be white.

- Joy Kagawa: Vancouver Soul of a City

11.12.18

Vancouver Writing: Frank Davey

VANCOUVER

I watch the workmen
take the steel braces
from between the frail concrete
of a new building,
while next door
an old redbrick one
is battered into slag
and burnt.

Years ago there was a tent here
- you see the picture in the Centennial Anthology -
then the campfire ashes
were kicked aside
and frame and clapboard
- still scented with the breath
of first- seen timber -
hammered together.

Later
grey stone brought in from somewhere east
shining bricks
                      from Clayburn
- short years of barter
bringing it about
short years of human eyes
regarding one strip
of sterile dirt.

        In the mountains you can see
        the ghost
        the ghostly towns abound:
        Huntingdon
                            a skeleton of noble streets,
        Barkerville
                            a green- hung
        grey- board mummy,
        Fairview
                      some grassed- in ashes
        pheonix moved on.

But here
the ashes are made
and hurried away,
by generations of men
whose children
fight to build castles
daily in the sand.

(see Frank Davey's blog here)

10.12.18

Vancouver Writing: Robin Blaser

TOMBSTONE

Sacred to the Memory of

Josephine

who died Sept. 24, 1923

Beloved Wife of Late

Chief Tom

of the Squamish band of Indians

Also

Her Father

Chief George Capilano

who met Captain Cook in A.D. 1782

and was first to meet, welcome

and escort Captain Vancouver into

Burrard Inlet on the 14th June

A.D. 1792. He advised his people

to follow his example in welcoming

the adventurers

(North Vancouver)

- from: Vancouver - Soul of a City, ed. Gary Geddes

(nb the historical record noted in this poem is oddly mistaken, time conflated - "Chief George Capilano" could not have been her father if he had met Capt. Vancouver or Capt. Cook - further research required)

09.12.18

Vancouver Writing: George Bowering

VAN, CAN

Sometimes in mid-April we fill our hot-tubs
with Perrier water, we are so pacific, west
coasting through spring, casting not a thought
to our poor cousins in Toronto, slogging

through dirty snow to their cute restaurants
with nifty names. Casting not a thought
but delivering an image if we can, posing
wisely as the people who were foresighted enough

to create a city with warm winters. Would anyone,
they ask in gelid Ottawa, live on the edge out there
except for the weather? This will make
a good enough question for a gentle poem to pose.

(Even in something that sounds like prose.)
Sitting in my Perrier water, nibbling on sushi,
I will respond-in time, in time. But first,
pass the pale wine. Listen to the peaceful wind

in the glass chimes. Put war from your mind.
Note yon billboard-it was commissioned
by an eastern firm. It tells us to buy snow tires
for a Canadian winter. It is a pretty billboard,

I like it. I just have no time for the fancy man
who insists our season past was not
Canadian. Not Canadian, he says, hardly glancing
at the Japanese plum blossoms. Not really Canadian,

that pretty whale. Not interesting, your poems
with no snow, no stoic drone. Take off your pants,
I say, and step into this tub. Oh no you dont,
he says, I know every stereotype in your town.

Here's the story: there's no more truth in that story
than there is music in this poem. Why dont I
buckle down and fix it? Maybe I will, but
not right now-let's have a spinach salad

with avocado. Let's encourage those bristling
folk on Bloor Street, let them fancy we never think
but dance, never put on our pants, let chance
and the Japanese current whisper when our ship

comes in. Laden with little foreign cars. Light
as the touch of our soft flowing guilt.

 - unpublished, 1999

08.12.18

Vancouver Writing: Earle Birney

VANCOUVER LIGHTS

About me the night       moonless      wimples the mountains
wraps ocean      land      air      and mounting
sucks at the stars      The city      throbbing below
webs the sable peninsula      The golden
strands overleap the seajet      by bridge and buoy
vault the shears of the inlet      climb the woods
toward me      falter      and halt      Across to the firefly
haze of a ship on the gulps erased horizon
roll the lambent spokes of a lighthouse

Through the feckless years we have come to the time
when to look on this quilt of lamps is a troubling delight
Welling from Europe's bog      through Africa flowing
and Asia      drowning the lonely lumes on the oceans
tiding up over Halifax      now to this winking
outpost comes flooding the primal ink

On this mountain's brutish forehead with terror of space
I stir      of the changeless night and the stark ranges
of nothing      pulsing down from beyond and between
the fragile planets      We are a spark beleaguered
by darkness      this twinkle we make in a corner of emptiness
how shall we utter our fear that the black Experimentress
will never in the range of her microscope find it?      Our Phoebus
himself is a bubble that dries on Her slide      while the Nubian
wears for an evening's whim a necklace of nebulae

Yet we must speak      we the unique glowworms
Out of the waters and rocks of our little world
we conjured these flames      hooped these sparks
by our will      From blankness and cold we fashioned stars
to our size      and signalled Aldebaran
This must we say      whoever may be to hear us
if murk devour      and none weave again in gossamer:

                                                These rays were ours
we made and unmade them      Not the shudder of continents
doused us      the moon's passion      nor crash of comets
In the fathomless heat of our dwarfdom      our dream's combustion
we contrived the power      the blast that snuffed us
No one bound Prometheus      Himself he chained
and consumed his own bright liver      O stranger
Plutonian      descendant      or beast in the stretching night--
there was light

- 1941

-  Earle Birney: from Fall by Fury

07.12.18

Vancouver Writing: Earle Birney

THE SHAPERS: VANCOUVER

1

a hundred million years
for mountains to heave
suffer valleys
the incubus of ice
grow soil-skin

twenty thousand for firs to mass
send living shafts out of rock

2

with saw of flame
vice of thong
jade axe
the first builders contrived their truce
with sea and hill

out of high cedar slid the longboats
out of sweet wood the windslivered homes
set tight against the rain's thin fingers
a prose for endurance

out of human fear and joy
came the Shapes beyond lust
the Fin totemic
the incomputable rhythms
the song beyond need

3

set down a century only
for the man on the spar-top
the pelt of pavement
quick thicket of boxes
the petrified phalli
out of the stone

in the screaming chainsaws
we hushed the old dreamers
in the hullabaloo of bulldozers
dynamite dynamo crane dredge combustion
buried them deeper than all computation

walking alone now
in the grandiloquent glitter
we are lost for a way
for a line
bent for the mere eye's pleasure
a form beyond need

is there a rhythm drumming from vision?
shall we tower into art     or ashes?

it is our dreams will decide
& we are their Shapers

-Earle Birney: Vancouver Soul of a City

06.12.18

Vancouver Writing: Ethel Wilson

SWAMP ANGEL

II
You can drive from Vancouver to New Westminster along a highway bright with motor hotels, large motor car parks, small shops, factories of various sizes. At night everything is bright with lights and Neon dazzle. In the daytime you will see that some of these motor hotels are set in old orchards, and among the rows of neat homogeneous dwellings stand old cherry trees, sprawling and frothing with white blossoms in the spring. Later, when the blossoms fall, the gnarled trees in their ingenuous beauty remind the urbanites and suburbanites, speeding past, of another kind of place. The delicate impression is crowded out and vanishes, obliterated by every modern convenience.

-Ethel Wilson: from Swamp Angel 

The swamp angel was an 8-inch 200 pound gun used during the US Civil War circa 1863; also, the name of a small revolver manufactured by Forehand and Wadsworth.

05.12.18

Vancouver Writing: Patrick Lane

AFTER

(for Pat Lowther)

After the machine on the gypo show
caught his arm in its mouth
and chewed the nerves dead
from elbow to finger tips
he sat in the bar
telling stories for drinks

His best the one about
how he'd lost the use of his arm
changing it every other day
until he ran out of variations
and no one would listen to him
the arm getting in his way
bumping into things
and hanging useless

until the only way
he had of getting a drink
was to lay the dead piece of meat
across the table
and stick pins in it
saying:

It doesn't hurt at all

men laughing
and buying him a drink
for every pin he could hammer in

with his empty glass

-Patrick Lane: Vancouver Soul of a City

04.12.18

Vancouver Writing: Pat Lowther

IN THE SILENCE BETWEEN

In the silence between the
notes of music
something is moving:
an animal
with the eyes of a man
multitudes
clothed in leaves

It is as if huge
migrations take place
between the steps
of music
like round
stones in water:
what flows between is
motion so constant
it seems still

Is it only the heart
beat
suspended like a planet
in the hollow body messages
of blood
or the sensed arrival
of photons
from the outer
galaxies?

A journey that far
we begin also
advancing
between
progressions of music
the notes make neuron
paths where we move
between earths
our heads full of leaves
our eyes like
the eyes of humans

-Pat Lowther: A Stone Diary

03.12.18

Vancouver Writing: Pat Lowther

NOTES FROM FURRY CREEK

1

The water reflecting cedars
all the way up
deep sonorous green -
nothing prepares you
for the ruler-straight
log fallen across
and the perfect
water fall it makes
and the pool behind it
novocaine-cold
and the huckleberries
hanging
like fat red lanterns

2

The dam, built
by coolies, has outlived
its time; its wall
stained yellow
as ancient skin
dries in the sun

The spillway still
splashes bright spray
on the lion
shapes of rock
far down below

The dam foot
is a pit
for the royal animals
quiet and dangerous
in the stare
of sun and water

3

When the stones swallowed me
I could not surface
but squatted
in foaming water
all one curve
motionless,
glowing like agate.

I understood the secret
of a monkey-puzzle tree
by knowing its opposite:
the smooth and the smooth
and the smooth takes,
seduces your eyes
to smaller and smaller
ellipses;
reaching the centre
you become
stone, the perpetual
laved god.

-Pat Lowther: Time Capsule

The cruelest of ironies, Lowther was murdered by her husband Roy Lowther in 1975 in the their home @ 566 East 46th Street. Her body was deposited near Furry Creek at the base of a cliff and later discovered by two hikers. Roy Lowther was charged with her murder and died years later in prison, the motive allegedly based on Pat Lowther's affair with another poet. (see Eve Lazarus for further details).

While immensely tender in her lyricism, many of her poems touch on themes of violence, revenge and death. In her photo above there is a suggestion of Joan Didion: sharp, elegant, uncompromising.

02.12.18

Vancouver Writing: Pat Lowther

INTERSECTION

At Fraser & Marine, slapped
by the wind from
passing traffic

light standards, trolleys
everything has edges
too real to touch

taxis unload at the hotel
the Gulf station fills them up

the lego apartment block
is sharp as salt

And the sunset is tea rose
colour strained, clarified
between navy-blue clouds,
the moon in its first
immaculate crescent

it's an axis
  double intersection
    transparencies

the thumb end
where you press
and the whole universe twirls out
a long seamless skin
a rill of piano music

/

the calla lily is seamless
yet divided

that cream skin wall
deceives the eye
following round and around
like fingers on ivory

refractions hook under
the eyelashes
you imagine that you can see
honeycombs
                   jewels
                       individual cells

texture reveals nothing;

to touch is to bruise

/

diesel trucks negotiate
left turns,
their long trailers creaking

headlights spurt
at the green signals

it was just here
at this bus stop
I lost my glove
my forty-cent transfer
my book
of unwritten profundities

I tell you they fell upward !
I saw them
            glinting
                      catching light
from the thin, solid moon

/

The Blue Boy Motor Hotel
advertises:
try our comfortably
refurbished rooms
with color TV

the clouds are ink-blue
in the west
mercury lights lie along
the streets' contours
like strings of blue rhinestones

the bus stop bench
is painted blue, it
advertises Sunbeam bread

Don't touch the bench
it could burn you
or crystallize
your molecules with cold

keep your eyes on the sidewalk,
not paved here,
the puddles from recent rain

the Gulf station
could swallow you like a prairie

you could walk into
that phone booth
and step out between the planets

- Time Capsule: Pat Lowther - Time Capsule

01.12.18

Vancouver Writing: Al Purdy

HOME-MADE BEER

I was justly annoyed 10 years ago
in Vancouver: making beer in a crock
under the kitchen table in a crock
under the kitchen table when this
next-door youngster playing with my own
kid managed to sit down in it and
emerged with one end malted-
With excessive moderation I yodelled
at him
          "Keep your ass out of my beer!"
          and the little monster fled-
Whereupon my wife appeared from the bathroom
where she had been brooding for days
over the injustice of being a woman and
attacked me with a broom-
With commendable savoir faire I broke
the broom across my knee (it hurt too) and
then she grabbed the breadknife and made
for me with fairly obvious intentions -
I tore open my shirt and told her calmly
with bared breast and a minimum of boredom
          "Go ahead! Strike! Go ahead!"
Icicles dropped from her fiery eyes as she
snarled
          "I wouldn't want to go to jail
          for killing a thing like you!"
I could see at once that she loved me
tho it was cleverly concealed-
For the next few weeks I had to distribute
the meals she prepared among neighboring
dogs because of the rat poison and
addressed her as Missus Borgia-
That was a long time ago and while
at the time I deplored her lack of
self-control I find myself sentimental
about it now for it can never happen again-

Sept. 22, 1964: PS, I was wrong-

-al purdy: rooms for rent in the outer planets, selected poems 1962-1996

30.11.18

Vancouver Writing: Al Purdy

PILING BLOOD

It was powdered blood
in heavy bags
supposed to be strong enough
to prevent the stuff from escaping
but didn't

We piled it ten feet high
right to the shed roof
working at Arrow Transfer
on Granville Island
The bags weighed 75 pounds
and you had to stand two
of the bags to pile the top rows
I was six feet three inches
and needed all of it

I forgot to say
the blood was cattle blood
horses sheep and cows
to be used for fertilizer
the foreman said

It was a matter of delicacy
to plop the bags down softly
as if you were piling dynamite
if you weren't gentle
the stuff would belly out
from bags in brown clouds
settle on your sweating face
cover hands and arms
enter ears and nose
seep inside pants and shirt
reverting back to liquid blood
and you looked like
you'd been scalped by a tribe of
particularly unfriendly
Indians and forgot to die

We piled glass as well
it came on wooden crates
two of us hoicking them
off trucks into warehouses
every crate
weighing 200 pounds
By late afternoon
my muscles would twitch and throb
in a death-like rhythm
from hundreds of bags of blood
and hundreds of crates of glass

Then at Burns' slaughterhouse
on East Hastings Street
I got a job part time
shouldering sides of frozen beef
hoisting it from steel hooks
staggering to and from
the refrigerated trucks
and eerie freezing rooms
with breath a white vapour
among the dangling corpses
and the sound of bawling animals
screeched down from an upper floor
with their throats cut
and blood gurgling into special drains
for later retrieval

And the blood smell clung to me
clung to clothes and body
sickly and sweet
and I heard the screams
of dying cattle
and I wrote no poems
there were no poems
to exclude the screams
which boarded the boxcar
and traveled with me
till I reached home
turned on the record player
and faintly
in the last century
heard Beethoven weeping


- Beyond Remembering: The collected poems of Al Purdy

(photo: cva) 

29.11.18

Vancouver Writing: Al Purdy

FOR CURT LANG
          O Lydia, Lydia, why are you sound asleep
          while all night long I suffer in the alley?
                                                                                                   - Horace

How awful to spend the night in an alley
trapped in a little English Prefect
wide-awake and dreaming sexual dreams
at age 17 in 1952
beer-drunk and comically romantic
forbidden to love delicious Norma
afflicted with a permanent erection
condemned to this dreadful fate
by your hard-boiled friend Purdy
thus allowing Norma a good night's sleep
Yah

As yes the parallel to Lydia's boyfriend
is obvious - but skip from Rome to Canada
Curt died of cancer in Vancouver
two months back and I am now 80
unfit for all but literary endeavours

Well I remember going our to the Prefect
again to see if Curt had killed himself
for love or lust or both
and thinking "migawd the poor guy"
his pale face at the car window
imploring the night piteously
"Oh Norma, Norma, why are you sound asleep?"
and will you hate me forever Curt?
- but now its 1999 and he's dead

Talking to Norma on my return
to the house - she quite agitated
and possibly aroused
but wanting her beauty sleep
and that is the way it was?

But Norma has forgotten the incident
as she grows old and me older
the new millennium around the corner
which makes such things trivial
but think how luck I've been:
this lifetime of writing excitement
and itching torment to get it right
a double reward for being alive
like a rolling Niagara of what I am
thus reversing the low of time's river
stand confronting that Greek mountain
(yah Parnassus)
admiring but without envy
of all the dead great masters
reversing time to meet myself there
with the same feeling of
                              triumphant discontent
I've always had and thinking
                              poor Norma poor Curt
entombed in a verse that may last
at most fifty or a hundred years
and poor Lydia deep in Roman earth
asleep for two thousand years
and Horace the master of us all


- Beyond Remembering: The collected poems of Al Purdy 

(photo: by Curt Lang)

28.11.18

Vancouver Writing: Al Purdy

MOUNTAIN LIONS IN STANLEY PARK

Canadian as the Winnipeg Gold-Eye or
the Calgary Eye-Opener and
regional in this province as Strontium 90 and
international as a boundary they
live here before night's fuses were blown -

Remember the child?
                  He thought darkness had a nucleus
                                    something plotting
outside his range of vision something
                  that moved and shambled
                  laughed without logic
                  and drooled -
It's rather a comfort now
to see the caged cougar's
fierce eyes focused
                              serious
                                          (non-idiotic) and
to be involved in the cougar's simple problems
(the snap of a bone in the head exchanging
                                         light for darkness)
and walking to the edge of this floodlit concrete
not stopping at all
on the edge of the great trees -

Running
where the wild tribes go
beyond boundaries
and desolate cities
naked hairless lost one
and sin-bright cougar
into the forest
toward our dark beginnings

                                                                                              Vancouver

- Beyond Remembering: The collected poems of Al Purdy 

27.11.18

Vancouver Writing: Al Purdy

VANCOUVER

A state of mind of course this city
some geographic quirk
can sparkle in the sauntering eye
or glimmer grey in sullen heart
reflect the moods of trees
- on certain mornings of such clarity
mountains are seen to have moved
stumped on stone legs to Granville Street
- at the traffic light's first green
rose-red spring salmon migrate
the intersection at Hastings & Main

There have been Kitsilano sunsets
that dodge around the glum hotels
a huge red ten-dimensional face
hangs from the horizon's picture
window and never does descend
                           Surprise Surprise
for every tourist corner turned
discover other suns come trundling
from planetary cradles to join
them at the sea's doorway
and finally merge
in one gigantic rose suspended
from a clock tower in the sky

Less lyrical the fog
- mooing tormented voices
of ships whispering in from the Gulf
at Coal Harbour fishing boats
mutter together in the tide slop
There is a lostness even inside buildings
secretaries peer from office windows
wanting to be safe with their lovers
pedestrians walk with hands outstretched
colour-blind in a kind of sleep
in an invasion of the grey flowers
and after a week or ten days of it
the world becomes Biblical
the god of sextant and astrolabe
haunts ships in the harbour

City of great trees
metropolis of sawdust
and blackberries growing wild
a million black suns
at False Creek mouth
City at the continent's edge
where everyone was born three
hours younger than the grey East
and sometimes light is so luminescent
the air glows internally
and nobody breathes for a moment
City of mountains and sea
I have changed much
in my viewpoints and intolerant attitudes
but some things are unchanging
they deserve your love
the fog and the sea and the mountains
the streets of summer

- Beyond Remembering: The collected poems of Al Purdy

20.11.18

Turning west walk about fifty paces to the corner of Hastings and Hamilton. It was at this point that Lauchlin Hamilton at the tender age of 33 drove a stake into the ground to officially mark Vancouver's first intersection in District Lot 541. The plaque was installed in 1952 on the wall of the building standing at the southwest corner. Since removed for an extension of SFU to be completed, the Pre-Reconciliation marker has given way to textbooks and a cafe.

19.11.18

Marker #2: The original cenotaph was constructed in London, England out of plaster and wood, and designed by Edwin Luytens in 1919. A call was made to erect a permanent structure in Whitehall a year later in 1920.

The Vancouver cenotaph at Victory Square was erected soon after in 1924, built of Nelson Island granite- a common foundational stone found in numerous Vancouver and Victoria buildings. Inscriptions are engraved on each face, memorialized in the act of remembrance. On approach the "All ye that pass by" text welcomed and warned.

18.11.18

Marker #1: This is a city of few monuments. Many carry mass significance in volume and memory, while others are purely ephemeral; residual in play and crafting. We came across this marker on 7th Ave just off Main. A tinfoil poppy or spoiled jiffy popper?

19.04.18

Protruding from rain worn mitochondrial nerve centres the fungal mats announce themselves with the deep fug of monumental decay.

18.04.18

On a palindrome field trip seeking elfin saddle elfin.

17.04.18

Overheard on Bleecker Street

One of those faces
out partying while
her mom was having
a heart attack in the
hospital at least Apple
got something right,

so much about that
too much,
it preyed
on your fears, she's like
know what I mean,

honk, honk, honkety
so it's true shittt,
oh no oh
my wife and I have
separated for
the last time,

so my rent has 
gone up, can't move
on account of
the turtle, who
has outgrown 
his tank

16.04.18

Along the No. 20 Line: The above image is captioned "View of Cordova Street looking west from Carrall Street, 1890." (CVA)

For a fine overview of streetcar rail scars in the city and what to look for see Scout Magazine's article here.