. Reckonings: Poems 1979-1985. Fredericton: Goose Lane Editions, 1985.
Livesay, Dorothy. “The Canadian Documentary: An Overview.” Open Letter 6, nos. 2-3 (Summer/Fall 1985): 127-30.
Lynes, Jeanette. “M. Travis Lane, Ecopoet.” In How Thought Feels: The Poetry of M. Travis Lane, ed. Shane Neilson (Victoria: Frog Hollow Press, 2015).
Mandel, Eli. “Discussion.” Open Letter 6, nos. 2-3 (Summer/Fall 1985): 24-30.
mclennan, rob. “The Penultimate Long Poem Anthology, edited by rob mclennan (unpublished).” rob mclennan’s blog, accessed March 15, 2016, http://robmclennan.blogspot.ca/.
Nichol, bp. “Things I don’t really understand about myself.” Open Letter 6, nos. 2-3 (Summer/Fall 1985): 127-130.
Ondaatje, Michael. The Long Poem Anthology. Toronto: Coach House, 1979.
Thesen, Sharon. The New Long Poem Anthology, 1st ed. Toronto: Coach House, 1991.
. The New Long Poem Anthology, 2nd ed. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2001.
Toye, William. The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Zwicky, Jan. “How Thought Feels: The Poetics of M. Travis Lane.” In How Thought Feels: The Poetry of M. Travis Lane, ed. Shane Neilson (Victoria: Frog Hollow Press, 2015).
* * *
1 The conference proceedings were published in Open Letter 6, nos. 2-3 (Summer/Fall 1985), and I base my subsequent comments upon this text.
2 M. Travis Lane, “How Has Canadian Poetry Changed Since 1960?” from Heart on Fist: The Selected Prose of M. Travis Lane (Palimpsest, forthcoming).
3 Ondaatje included Kiyooka’s contribution from ’77.
4 William Toye, The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1983), 515.
5 Tim Bowling, review of Night Physics, by M. Travis Lane, Books in Canada (February 1995).
6 Jan Zwicky, “How Thought Feels: The Poetics of M. Travis Lane,” in How Thought Feels: The Poetry of M. Travis Lane, ed. Shane Neilson (Victoria: Frog Hollow Press, 2015), 27.
7 George Elliott Clarke, review, Chronicle Herald (Halifax), May 21, 1993.
8 Lawrence Buell, Ursula K. Heise, and Karen Thornber, “Literature and Environment,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 36 (2011), 425.
9 Glynis Carr, “Introduction,” New Essays in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press, 2000), 16.
10 Jeanette Lynes, “M. Travis Lane, Ecopoet,” in How Thought Feels: The Poetry of M. Travis Lane, ed. Shane Neilson (Victoria: Frog Hollow Press, 2015), 96.
11 Alanna Bondar, “Attending Guilt-Free Birdspeak and Treetalk: An Ecofeminist Reading of the ‘Geopsyche’ in the Poetry of Don McKay,” Canadian Poetry 55 (2004), 65.
from
HOMECOMINGS
Narrative Poems
HOMECOMING
Dedicated to Neptune
Penelope’s musings and Odysseus’s homecoming take the form of two years for twenty. The Ithaca of this Penelope is often rural New Brunswick; there are moose among the olive trees. Events are recalled which have not yet occurred, and people are mentioned who have still to take flesh.
Late-Winter to Spring
i
Across a balcony of rain,
the headlamp sleeting the lookout tower,
I lean a widow’s hour and hear
the pummelling sea reverberate,
booming along the dark headlands,
cannons of Troy —
the trenches at night, wet tents,
a candle’s spurt,
moth —
and
I smell the moth singe by me; from my hand
clatters and breaks some domestic tool
on the bare house floor . . .
besieges. . . .
ii
Not island now, the lighthouse tower
stands on a rock arm breaking waves,
holding the empty harbour
towards the sea.
Rehearsing combers, war waves, beat
the stone seawall
at siege with water . . . .
Not dead. Not dead —
but obstinate —
in his homecoming.
iii
Pharos: island no longer
its headlamp only a single light,
only revolving the long days —
a sheet of black water between us —
detained by the god —
by no god —
by the sea —
island no longer
the headlamp stares,
fingering water, the brined night,
your poor face swollen with ancient dreams —
a sheet of black water between us,
Odysseus,
the face in the dark,
homecoming. . . .
iv
An ivy-handed ghost comes to me
like a vengeful dream
these salt nights with his bittern’s cry . . .
dead, dead —
but I —
remember the young boy maddened, his mind
shrunk up to the hole of an acorn.
Tied to a tree, his limbs strung out —
tied to a tree, to a bed’s dust,
manacled, mad, with a blank head,
food on the floor beside him —
and the constant nurse.
Remember the happy sailor? Fortunate,
fruit of a moment of grace:
fratelli: the fragile brothers
(the white surf cannoning the beach).
— I saw him shrink —
“scavata è nella mia vita”
v
The many things that in broad Troy
are, and that come to be
in the unnourishing earth. . . .
vi
I watched the dory drag its line
along the sheeted water; a rose sky
glinted where the fisher’s hands
chafed like the blood anemone
and clutched the cod.
Old man, that from your hand-hewed dreams
labours to feed, fog coming, minds the sea,
mind me, half island
in your eye.
And over the echoing waters
slapping along the black gnarled rock
where the wizened witchy branches hang,
dangle in sea pools, heave and swing,
the fear crept to me,
nestling.
vii
The boy’s like him, I dare say. Like he was.
Half dangerous, not one for work,
better at talking.
Now he spends
all his spare time in the herder’s hut
at stone edge, learning epic wars,
playing at death with pebbles,
taunting the sea.
His grandpa teaches him these things.
My arts, to hold,
to gather up, to tie,
he does not care for.
All along the long fence
he has strung dead crows
for a sling-shot tally.
Beware this corn.
Crow hungry larger thieves
stand in the half-dark dining room,
ignore him yet.
Go back to grandpa’s, your safe prey,
your kinder —
garden.
viii
The eye’s duress knives a white spot
on what it sees: a livid scar
on the dark hall here where the door-dimmed strangers,
the soldiers, loiter. Hal —
on his white horse, nighttime, lurched
into the drenching rain and my
Odysseus went with him — all
my sheets and pantry purposes went off —
to reeds and folly.
Fodder for guns.
Rock split the ship.
The wracked house dumped like a chicken coop —
slid from the deck . .
.
a white scar floats —
in the seething grass like a mooring stone:
sea scullery, the death’s head on my lids . . .
marring my kitchened sight.
ix
Dolour is moss: the staghorn floor
wet with the northern shadows,
pallid and frothed as the sea’s waves
foaming the pine’s foot by them.
x
Robbering under the thick elms
the boy-ragged night goes whistling,
brazen and shameless,
with shambled teeth —
bully-boy-bonny —
toward colourless death.
xi
Buds crimson in the masking spring —
all the ascensions redrinking the arts —
Spring dusts the saints, re-agitates
scabby old skirts to a flaunting fan,
and pumps across the polished floor
all those red sailors — thoughts of you,
the suitors your shadows —
their bright limbs
haunting my hall like hawk bright birds,
hungry, febrile, flaring —
predators.
Here:
implacable stones in the forest noon
mirror the wing flit shadows —
cold
under the sliding winds,
motionless,
under the sea’s
beat.
You, too.
xii
Web weib, the spider queen: Penelope,
wit widow, holes in my net. . . .
The dull past
impales its grief on the castle walls
with needle and thread,
butcher bird goyesque,
war memories.
Blotters of beer
all round me; soldiers,
home from the wars. . . .
All this mob hates me.
See them dead.
The flies
that gnaw my weaving work . . .
I would see dead.
xiii
These waters do not wet my land
but slide from the ridge,
fuming like smoke,
burning the sea,
like anger.
The sea outside our sheds is iron.
A country of tree masts, poles,
worn, scabby fields,
homeland:
the nulla patria.
Summer-Fall
xiv
The humming bird in the cacti
shimmered to nothing.
A red throat —
silence.
The frost faked under the cataract
vanished.
The sheathing blare
of the natural world shuts up my sore.
What was that child born out of, he or I
drunken that night, the smell of him then,
— and the white stones here —
the unbearable blare —
heat scented . . . .
A desert of height.
Yellow cliffs swollen with the white past
stir in the mind: uneasy babe
kicks oppressive, the belly immense,
and will not be born, but weighs me here.
Only the stones in the sun are real.
And those nights
nothing
of him.
xv
The sea lay
flat on the red-brown rocks.
A withered moon crept up the sky
which seemed as blank as the blank eyes
of that mad boy when that boy slept,
a hole in his head like a hole in All —
a peace of nothing, a life-lapse,
nature not filling . . .
an unimportant void.
xvi
Contemptu mundi: this
the perennial:
Desert, fundament,
spectral shining,
the fall of things,
that abolishes man
and the coarse
sayer.
xvii
Nothing is here that I want.
xviii
The hives swarm now. The black folk hang
half-frenzied in the summer leaves —
the lookers-on, the plebs,
as at a fight or hanging buzz —
until she mates —
her single flight —
that rises higher than this bush, these barnyards —
when she flies
linking her gold wings with the sun’s —
then sinks —
forever now,
it seems,
to her dark cave.
xix
The little donkey the dusk marked,
marred with the sea’s cross, grieved at me;
weeps for his master Icarus —
wax on the water, an amber tear —
and the weaver weeps in her spinning,
tangling the fish thoughts in her wool.
xx
The olive trees your father tends
knot in the stones as he does, stonier.
Old shepherd king, cave bat —
his loincloth, staff, and flea-bit furs
bleach on the lime escarpments like the saints
tongueless in church, like plaster flakes.
Even the stones are weary.
xxi
Now,
around me all the household fires:
hearthside, bedside, and the fisher’s tower,
and the phosphor lights of the summer sea,
cluster like sparrows in a barn
where the thresher, careless, spills out grain;
and I, the spider on the sill,
watch all the busy folk go by,
various and bright in the bee-filled day,
bored with my web, and, like it,
tattered, dried, grey. . . .
xxii
Nothing is muter than white roads
where nothing hinders or pleases.
Within the rooms of the gaping house
the white paths of the sun dust stream.
The dust mote rides upon it.
The emblem is mortal:
the sea’s crest.
And always Odysseus upon it.
Variations on null.
xxiii
Only the fig
hollow as woman
knows its single moth:
the hid flower,
the opened
fruit.
xxiv
Waking at night for the hungry,
the crying baby
that is not there —
Weary with importunance,
my grief grows in me.
Nothing but grief grows in me.
xxv
Desert:
space that does not cull.
Drugs into distraction
the foilèd fern. . . .
xxvi
Into the silent mirror
the sea witch mused and wept.
The pig sylph changer of robin’s notes
weaves over the day’s dog dozers.
How long? that home with his lies of war,
of giants, of ghosts in the gullies,
of great black kine
with human tongues —
web —
weib —
liar —
the mirror black water —
dug out of my life.
xxvii
I saw the figure in my dreams fall to the sea,
white-jacketed.
A tortoise monster from the depths, unlikely raft,
compelled him, held
the half-drowned man along the waves,
a different order of stars above
him now, and lightning bolts
transparent on his grappling hands —
whitened with all
he grappled with,
the fortunate,
that rode
only a carapace of bone
shielding a fishy thought that
somehow, thought, retained him,
grappling with all that whelmed him, whelmed
by saltier seas than I am whelmed, and he
rode singing, straddling there,
beneath the different different stars
toward Circe’s
yellow
strands.
xxviii
What should he yet give birth to, tied to a mast,
wise as a gull?
Nothing but lies and storybooks —
the nothing maker, the shipless man —
mind in the wave-tossed tempest,
foam in the sun-spilled thighs,
nutshell, empty —
the swollen cliff —
importunate —
Out of my life.
xxix
The long spears planted in the ground
are a picket fence that grates
the belly of the whale-grey fog
that wallows up our coast these falls,
long claws, that scrape
against the past — the rotted squashes
in the fields, image of famine —
At the wayside cross some mother’s son
hangs from a gibbet. Rain falls, cold,
the justice of shorthand. . . .
That swollen leather a nude lust
that greeted the nipple as urgent as worms,
as a maggot in heart to the drenched birds
shuddering under the washed-out nest —
fetid, featherless — birdlet —
An old wound throbbing on rainy days
watches the black sails of the tides,
reigns over phantoms hereabouts,
and the fallen walls.
xxx
Nobody leaving the hollow cave is trouble.
Trouble came out. Nobody
flinging his name in the nets of scorn,
saying, “Trouble,
my name is Trouble.
Hewed from the tree,
from the land’s roots,
pole-axe, name-caller,
Trouble I am,”
and he was.
By our scars we know him.
Nothing but trouble.
Winter
xxxi
The turbid cry stretched from the towers,
The Witch of the Inner Wood Page 3
