Civil Elegies: And Other Poems

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Civil Elegies: And Other Poems Page 4

by Dennis Lee

and it is a rash passer who does not see himself on the go half out of his

  mind with the need to fail and be hurt,

  for these were brave men and subtle women, spritely lovers

  who could not love themselves and it is

  hard that we have only

  one life for mostly we cannot command the courage outright to exist

  and the months slip by and still we have not started,

  and every year attaches itself behind and we have more to drag.

  Faced with the onus of living our civilisation, here, in this time,

  do we also single out leaders because they will

  dishonour us, because they will diminish us?

  And they act our hearts’ desire for always they are

  bulldozed by yankees, menaced by slant-eyed gooks and happily there is

  no hope that we might come to our own

  and live, with our claimed selves, at home in the difficult world.

  8

  I come to the square each time there is nothing and once, made calm again

  by the spare vertical glory of right proportions,

  watching the wind cut loose as it riffled the clouds on the skyline, framing

  the towers at noon,

  catching the newsboys’ raucous cry of race in the streets and the war and

  Confederation going,

  smelling the air, the interminable stink of production and transport and

  caught once more in the square’s great hush with the shoppers, hippies,

  brokers, children, old men dozing alone by the pool and waiting,

  feeling the pulse in the bodies jostling past me driving to climax and

  dollars and blood,

  making my cry here quick and obscure among many in transit — not as a

  lyric self in a skin but divided, spinning off many selves to attend each

  lethal yen as it passed me — thinking of

  death in the city, of others’ and also my own and of many born afterwards,

  I saw that we are to live in the calamitous division of the world

  with singleness of eye and there is

  nothing I would not give to be made whole.

  Hector de Saint-Denys-Garneau

  you came this way and made poems out of your body,

  out of the palpable void that opened

  between the bones of your spine — if you weren’t just

  making it up, you thought,

  and humbled yourself again.

  But your friends could only see that you were a genius,

  and humiliated by their nonchalance as they strolled through space, as if

  they belonged, as if their tickets had been accepted,

  you turned back and fingered the precious emptiness, feeling inside you

  the small incessant gush of the cardiac lesion.

  And often you left the room when the party was

  reaching its climax, and you had been foremost in repartee, Garneau

  and fell crouching upstairs in a sweat by the bed, sick with repentance and

  stammered out holy names,

  destroyed by what was quick and sexual in Montreal.

  But you lasted ten years more, in a suave vertigo

  assaying the void with your nerve-ends, watching your

  friendships go numb, your poems, nursing

  the adorable death of the Son in your own imperious cells, a man made

  empty for love of God, straining to be only

  an upright will in the desert, until at last the world’s hypnotic

  glitter was made single in the grace of renunciation.

  But the kids, and the calm, and the endless parade of lethal desirable things

  divide us as they pass by with clowns, the tawdry

  yammering goes on inside and it yanks us here and every

  whichway, we are on all fronts and forming

  new precious attachments and

  often they stun us till what is authentic is obliterated and heeding it or

  even locating it becomes one more hangup, all that great

  longing keeps banging back against the miscellaneous clobber of day to day.

  And by these distractions we are saved, for there is a barren route that the

  blood knows,

  and the obscure inklings of the implacable imagination declare it,

  lonely among bedclothes before the light on Tuesdays;

  and though I will not speak of where I have not been it is

  the graveyard of many for want of the lore of emptiness,

  which once was a sane thing, but now of those who begin

  their lonely inward procession I

  do not know a chastened handful who survive.

  Catatonic exemplar,

  cardiac, scrupulous, hagridden — you, Hector,

  our one patrician maker, mangled spirit,

  you went all out for fame and when you knew you would not survive in the

  world you turned to sainthood,

  and you beat down the thought for the pride and retreated to

  Sainte-Catherine, you watched your blood lap wide on the lake at sunset,

  thinking of John of the Cross, patron of void, thinking of Jesus,

  and you watched the ferns come shouldering up through your body, the

  brutal ferns in spring, it was all

  detachment you hoped, it was

  exquisite penetration, it was

  fear of life, the mark of Canada.

  And now across

  two decades and two nations de Saint-Denys-Garneau, my blessed stricken

  original, still haunted by the

  space between your ribs, maker and friend and comfortless, my

  lone heroic starter, out of my own wrong start I

  keep my distance and praise.

  The crowds gust through the square, the crowds and the refuse.

  The luminous towers preside.

  Of high detachment there are many counterfeits;

  the world is itself, though sundry.

  And I will not enter void till I come to myself

  nor silence the world till I learn its lovely syllables,

  the brimful square and the dusk and the war and the crowds in motion at

  evening, waiting to be construed

  for they are fragile, and the tongue must be sure.

  9

  Here, as I sit and watch, the rusty leaves hang taut with departure.

  The last few tourists pose by the Moore and snap their proof that they

  were also alive.

  And what if there is no regenerative absence?

  What if the void that compels us is only

  a mood gone absolute?

  We would have to live in the world.

  What if the dreary high-rise is nothing but

  banks of dreary high-rise, it does not

  release the spirit by fraying its attachment,

  for the excellent reason that there is no place else to go?

  We would have to live in it, making our lives on earth.

  Or else a man might go on day by day

  in love with emptiness, dismayed each time he meets

  good friends, fine buildings and grass in the acres of concrete, feeling the

  city’s erotic tug begin once more, perpetually

  splayed alive by the play of his bungled desires,

  though some do not salute the death of the body

  before they have tested its life, but crippled they summon together

  the fury from within, they tilt at

  empire, empire, lethal adversary;

  but I am one who came to

  idolatry, as in a season of God,

  taking my right to be from nothingness.

  Across the square the crisp leaves blow in gusts, tracing

  the wind’s indignant lift in corners,

  filling the empty pool.

  People plod past through the raw air, lost in the
ir overcoats.

  I hunch down close to my chest and eat smoke.

  But when the void became void I did

  let go, though derelict for months

  and I was easy, no longer held by its negative presence

  as I was earlier disabused of many things in the world

  including Canada, and came to know I still had access to them,

  and I promised to honour each one of my country’s failures of nerve and its

  sellouts.

  To rail and flail at a dying civilisation,

  to rage in imperial space, condemning

  soviet bombers, american bombers — to go on saying

  no to history is good.

  And yet a man does well to leave that game behind, and go and find

  some saner version of integrity,

  although he will not reach it where he longs to, in the

  vacant spaces of his mind — they are so

  occupied. Better however to try.

  But we are not allowed to enter God’s heaven, where it is all a

  drowsy beatitude, nor is God, the realm above our heads but

  must grow up on earth.

  Nor do we have recourse to void.

  For void is not a place, nor

  negation of a place.

  Void is not the high cessation of the lone self’s burden,

  crowned with the early nostalgias;

  nor is it rampant around the corner, endlessly possible.

  We enter void when void no longer exists.

  And best of all is finding a place to be

  in the early years of a better civilisation.

  For we are a conquered nation: sea to sea we bartered

  everything that counts, till we have

  nothing to lose but our forebears’ will to lose.

  Beautiful riddance!

  And some will make their choice and eat imperial meat.

  But many will come to themselves, for there is

  no third way at last and these will

  spend their lives at war, though not with

  guns, not yet — with motherwit and guts, sustained

  by bloody-minded reverence among the things which are,

  and the long will to be in Canada.

  The leaves, although they cling against the

  wind do not resist their time of dying.

  And I must learn to live it all again, depart again —

  the storm-wracked crossing, the nervous descent, the barren wintry land,

  and clearing a life in the place where I belong, re-entry

  to bare familiar streets, first sight of coffee mugs,

  reconnaissance of trees, of jobs done well or badly,

  flashes of workday people abusing their power,

  abusing their lives, hung up, sold out and

  feeling their lives wrenched out of whack

  by the steady brunt of the continental breakdown;

  finding a place among the ones who live

  on earth somehow, sustained in fits and starts

  by the deep ache and presence and sometimes the joy of what is.

  Freely out of its dignity the void must

  supplant itself. Like God like the soul it must

  surrender its ownness, like eternity it must

  re-instil itself in the texture of our being here.

  And though we have seen our most precious words

  Withdraw, like smudges of wind from a widening water-calm,

  though they will not be charged with presence again in our lifetime that is

  well, for now we have access to new nouns —

  as water, copout, tower, body, land.

  Earth, you nearest, allow me.

  Green of the earth and civil grey:

  within me, without me and moment by

  moment allow me for to

  be here is enough and earth you

  stranges, you nearest, be home.

  Notes

  Some of the references in Civil Elegies are highly local. The following notes should clarify them.

  1. — The Square: Nathan Phillips Square, a large plaza in front of Toronto’s New City Hall, at the junction of Queen and Bay Streets.

  — The Moore, the Archer: the abstract sculpture which Henry Moore created for the Square.

  — Revell: the Finnish architect who designed the New City Hall.

  — Chartier: in 1966 Paul Chartier tried to blow up the House of Commons in Ottawa.

  4. — Hector de Saint-Denys-Garneau (1912-1943): Quebec’s first modernist poet. There are phrases from his Journal in the fourth and eighth elegies.

  5. — The Golden Horseshoe: a name given to the megalopolis at the western end of Lake Ontario.

  — Paul Martin: the Secretary of External Affairs under Lester Pearson.

 

 

 


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