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)
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