What the Stones Remember
Page 30
When I moved here from Saskatchewan I whiled away the hours driving through the many mountain ranges by counting the places I had lived in my life. By the time I passed through Golden in the Rockies I had counted eighty-seven places. When Lorna and I stopped in Vernon to visit my mother I told her the count and she added five more I had forgotten. Ninety-two houses, apartments, and rooms.
Mine has been a wandering life. I have roamed four continents, from the high valleys to the beaches of every ocean there is except the Arctic. I have known the touch of women and men and children from jungles and mountains, and I have grown in their many hands. But all my wandering was only a circle leading me at last to here. My quest has always been to find what I could not leave.
Every stone in my garden is a story, every tree a poem. I barely know myself in spite of the admonishments of wise men and women who tell me I must know my life in order to live it fully. What I know is that I live in this place where words are made. What we are is a garden. I believe that.
When I was a young man I struggled hard to learn how to make a poem. I had no education to speak of other than high school. It doesn’t matter now why I wanted to write a poem. What I knew in my bones was that there was a truth hidden inside words and that I could reveal that truth if I only knew how. There was a hidden truth inside me I wanted to uncover. The speaking it was all.
I sat in my scruffy little trailer, my suffering wife and children long gone to bed, a full ashtray and a half-empty bottle of Seagram’s 83 beside me, and I stared at the patterns my words had made on the canary-yellow paper that stuck out of my little portable typewriter. Thirty words, perhaps forty, but they would not do what I was asking them to do. I couldn’t shape them into what I knew was a real poem. I sipped my beer, smoked my cigarette, and stared at the page. Then I tore it out and began again and then again. That was the beginning of my life’s work.
A few years later I wrote my way to the middle of a poem and stopped at the word sorrow. I was trying to use it so that it was no more and no less important than the words, it, the, gray, or stone, and I couldn’t do it. Sorrow kept leaping off the page and shouting its importance. I am SORROW, it seemed to be saying, Look at how important I am. I even looked the word up in the dictionary in the hope it might help me understand what was meant.
Sor-row n. 1. Pain or distress of mind because of loss, injury, or misfortune, the commission of sin, or sympathy with suffering; grief. 2. An event that causes pain or distress of mind; affliction; a trial; misfortune; woe. 3. The expression of grief; lamentation; mourning.
The meanings seem so simple now, but it was complicated when I was twenty-four years old. Pain, misfortune, loss, woe. I didn’t know how to write the word into a poem. I tried to sneak up on sorrow like the boy who played at war on a small hill and slip the word in the way I used to slip into a make-believe slit trench and bayonet the chosen victim of our war game.
I’ve never forgotten the day I chose the word. I have used that moment to illustrate lectures I’ve given for twenty years to writing students. Learn how to put the word sorrow in a poem, I’ve told them over and over again. I might as easily have told them to try with the word joy. So, why the word sorrow? Why did I choose it? Perhaps now I have an answer.
There are no accidents, there are no serendipitous moments. There are only fragile interludes of clarity and sometimes I don’t understand them fully when they happen. There was sorrow in me as I sat by the Skeena River, but I didn’t understand that. I knew that in the last seven years my six-year-old niece had died of cancer, my brother had died of a brain hemorrhage, my father had been murdered, my mother-in-law had died of a heart attack, my mother was living in a self-enforced silence of grief and alcoholism, I was divorced, and my children were somewhere in Vancouver living with my former wife and another man, their new father.
Was there sorrow in my bones, in my chest, and on the pads of my fingertips as they typed the word? Yes, there was. Did I know it? No, I didn’t. I did not know what Keats meant in his “Ode on Melancholy,” when he said,
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt, sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies.
I do now.
When my mother lay on what would be her deathbed I read to her from The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens. She was asleep in a morphine dream. I was awake in the bottom of a bottle of vodka. I was reading quietly in the hope that she might hear the words from a book she had dearly loved. Halfway through a paragraph she suddenly sat up in her bed, tubes dangling, reached out, and gripped my wrist. She couldn’t have weighed ninety pounds, but her grip was hard, the bones in her hand rigid. She held my wrist and stared into my eyes and said, At every turn there’s always something lovely. She let me go and fell back on the bed. They were her last words to me. Three days later she died.
At one point in his novel, Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry has his central character ask himself two questions: “You like this garden? Why is it yours? We evict those who destroy!” He says they are, “simple and terrible words.” They are. The man who asks the questions is an alcoholic. He is wandering in his garden in Mexico looking for a hidden bottle of gin. The questions weren’t real to me when I first read them. They’re real to me now only because I too have wandered in my garden searching for hidden bottles.
The meditation garden I built is waiting for me. In the back of the pickup are three bags of mosses I’ve collected from the deep rain forest behind Port Renfrew. I go downstairs and walk out to the garden and there I begin to lay down the mosses. They are a forest that laps up against the stone mountains. I huddle the patches of moss against each other until they and the rocks look like a small island floating in a sea of cedar and redwood bark. When all the moss is laid and watered I build a narrow walkway with leftover paving stones. It leads in the shape of a crooked moon up to the Zenigata stone. I am almost finished. I reach behind me and pull from my back pocket a wooden spoon I bought in Chinatown a year ago. It was carved more than a hundred and fifty years ago. The proprietor had found it and a hundred more in an old carton in the basement of his store. He sold me one for a dollar. They’re old spoons, he told me. No one wants them now.
I lean down and dip a spoonful of sweet water from the stone and sip it slowly. Refreshed, I replace the spoon on the moss then look at the cedar round I have placed to the side of a rhododendron for a seat. The ground is already a fretwork of fallen deodar cedar needles. They make a script of seemingly immense complexity, but like the characters on the stone they have no meaning beyond their presence. I sit down and quietly look upon the new garden. As I sit there a woman passes on the street, looks in, and admires what I have done. How long did it take you to build this? she asks. I look at her and say, Sixty-two years.
I began this book in the confusions of clouds and rain. I could ask the old question Job asked, “Hath the rain a father? Or who hath begotten the drops of dew?” I don’t know the answer, but I have stood beside the apple tree in my garden and lifted my face into the rain and felt its many small hands on my skin. Perhaps it is enough just to know that. Perhaps it is enough to stand there with Lorna and praise the rain and our lives together. And perhaps it is enough to know I have now begun a life. There are years to come.
Spring beckons. The snowdrops are in blossom and all the other bulbs have pushed their green nipples out of the earth. They too will flower soon. There were three bees in the ivy today. Lorna and I were in the garden when we saw them. We both said, Look, look at the bees!
It is a cold and cloudy day. It is raining.
As I write this, a tiny spider lilts across my computer screen. It pays no attention to my cursor as it pushes its way to the end of the line:
PLANTS
Crimson Queen “Laceleaf” maple – Acer palmatum dissectum
Dust lichen – Lepraria
Fairyslipper – Calypso bulbosa
Frog pelt – Peltigera neopolydactyla<
br />
Great northern aster – Aster modestus
Thimbleberry – Rubus parviflorus
Winter rose – Helleborus argutifolius
ANIMALS, BIRDS, AND INSECTS
Burrowing wolf spider – Geolycosa spp.
Golden-crowned kinglet – Regulus satrapa
Marbled orb-weaver spider – Araneus marmoreus
Red ant – Formica spp.
Ruby-crowned kinglet – Regulus calendula
BOOKS BY PATRICK LANE
POETRY
Letters from the Savage Mind
Separations
On the Street
Hiway 401 Rhapsody
The Sun Has Begun to Eat the Mountain
Passing into Storm
Beware the Months of Fire
Unborn Things: South American Poems
Albino Pheasants
Poems: New & Selected
No Longer Two People (with Lorna Crozier)
The Measure
Old Mother
Woman in the Dust
A Linen Crow, a Caftan Magpie
Milford & Me
Winter
Mortal Remains
Too Spare, Too Fierce
Selected Poems 1977–1997
The Bare Plum of Winter Rain
Go Leaving Strange
FICTION
How Do You Spell Beautiful?
NONFICTION
Breathing Fire (with Lorna Crozier)
Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast (with Lorna Crozier)
Breathing Fire II (with Lorna Crozier)
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