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?