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Included below are current works in progress by Patrick Lane: three poems: FOR AL PITTMAN, FOR EARLE BIRNEY and FOR ANNE SZUMAGALSKI.
Patrick Lane contributes a new poem, short story, article or journalistic piece to this page regularly. For permission inquiries, click here.
FOR AL PITTMAN
Dear Al:
With you Newfoundlanders everything came down to the sea
except your father's boat. It ended up in a field
Rotting in the sun long after he died, you sitting
In the wheelhouse with your bottle, staring across the withered
Summer grass, both of us drunk. You told me
Through tears of the outports and the years. What I remember
Is the withering of it all, that boat pulled out of the water, the hull dry,
The cabin windows broken. You tried to turn the wheel
But it was frozen by the sun. It was rusted out. It was like you
To be running rough water on the land, the right tears
In the wrong place. All those years. We could both find a metaphor
In all that now, or I could, now you're gone. The last time I saw you
You were huddled over your drink in the bar
In Corner Brook and couldn't be moved by words.
There were too many echoes. I thought of all
The other poets I saw die with their hands clenched
Around a glass or puking booze and blood into a toilet bowl;
Echoes of my own terror, the bottles as empty as the years.
Christ, we went back a long way. I think it was 66 we met,
You in Montreal, and me the first time in the East. Did we fight?
Probably. You Newfies were always troublesome, proud and vulnerable,
With your gift for the insult of love, the tenderness of hate. I thought your
Wife a pretty one and likely made a pass at her. Those days I wasn't
Much good for anything but trouble, and poetry. I felt it was the same with you.
The many times together, the dawn you locked yourself out of our house
In Regina and got lost in the alley as you searched for a cigarette butt
To light. That you were naked but for your underwear made little sense
To the neighbour who guided you back. You passed out on a lawn chair.
When I found you hours later you were sunburned to a salmon. I think it was
The only time your skin was ever touched by the sky. Jesus, Al, I loved you
And I couldn't bear your dying, the steady day and nightness of it.
I was dying too, but that doesn't mean much now. I'm still dying,
Just more slowly. We were always drunk together Al. Always,
With Nowlan or Newlove or Acorn, or whoever happened
To be around, strangers like ourselves. I remember guiding
You off the stage in Vancouver. The audience was laughing at you,
Your jokes and stories. I knew you were dying up there,
That you'd got lost and couldn't find your way back.
I put my arm around you and you whispered in my ear,
Thank Christ, and then you asked, Where are we?
I still don't have an answer. Some questions leave me reeling.
Maybe where we were was in a boat in a dry field far from the sea.
Maybe that was the best we had together. If I close my lids
I can see you in the red light the sun makes of my eyes. You're up there
At the wheel with a good sea and a fair wind. Someone's laughing,
Your father, me, and we're heading in to harbour, the last light falling
Across a Canada far to the west, and there's a life to be led on the waters,
In a dry field, with no one to hurt us, and tears enough to go around.
FOR EARLE BIRNEY
Dear Earle,
It was words like skree that got me,
Pika, grizzly, words I'd never seen before in poems,
The Rockies, lands I'd walked and mountains that were not
A problem, mine or yours, until you told me so, the otter rocks
Then changed, and what I knew was what I'd lost, childhood
And the wilderness both foreign lands where I had to learn
There was a trance called men. Or maybe just a man.
There was that party at Livesay's house when you made a pass
At my wife. You weren't the first and wouldn't be the last.
I hardly noticed, my life already moving past her
Into what I didn't know. You wrote me back in 62 and told me
To keep writing. I was up north, a First-Aid-Man in a nowhere
Milltown, nursing the dregs of cheap whiskey, tapping out
Poems about bears at burning barrels, a cougar at the door,
A man with his hand cut off, ordinary things in the tired nights
When my children slept and my wife had given up on me. Strange
How I thought you were already dead, but that's how it was
Back then, the only poets I knew long gone, their ghosts
Looking down off Westminster Bridge, words from another
Country. You said, no man sees where the trout lie now.
I missed the first two lines. It took years for me to find the lady.
These lines, long and wandering, are how I knew you. It was
A different kind of slowness, the break in things taking forever
To happen. I remember sitting in Lionel's room and listening
To you talk about Trotsky when you were his secretary. History
Was always just around the corner with you. I am my own clown,
You said, and now I think I understand, for every clown
Has a sad face under the mask. That's why they frighten us so
When we're still young enough to believe that nothing
Can save us from the dark myth that can't be severed
No matter our trying. I think that's why we make a past
From ourselves. When we're far away the only truths we have
Are inhuman. It's funny, Earle, how much you mattered then.
I never thought I learned from you, yet tonight I read,€ El Greco:
Espolio, and think I got my carpenter poem from you. Lines
Live in poets. You wait long enough and every thing you've read
Gets said again. The father of a poem is what you write. Still,
With the creek outside my trailer door purling, the wind
In the fir trees, and me a little tired staring down at the river
David Thompson never saw, the one Simon Fraser named for him,
I hear the black bear rummaging among the burned pork chop
Bones, the green bread crusts, the rotting bits of food in the ashes,
And think how near a few words can take us to another time.
I stopped reading you back in the early Seventies. I'd grown tired
Of local masters. I think it was the old contempt for
What is known. I needed an imagined master, not the one I knew.
That's where the quest began, I guess, that looking everywhere else
For what I'd already found. In this early book of yours
I read today, some student's written under, The Road to Nijmegen,
War memorials are synechdoche for people. Yeah, I know
It's spelled wrong, and the poem isn't about war memorials anyway,
Yet I know my father's friend was burned alive in his tank near the end
On the salient in Holland. Maybe that's it, I don't know. Like
Most letters to the dead, this one's gone too long. Like the lines,
It's wandering. It was words that started me.
There's no easy end to them,
Pika, grizzly,
Otter,
Ice.
FOR ANNE SZUMAGALSKI
Dear Anne:
In the bar at Fort Qu'Appelle we danced
Country and Western, the beat a couple of Cree or Sioux guitars
With a white man on the drums. The beer glasses rattled
On the tables while Hank Snow rose from his grave to sing
Our hearts. You were so huge, your dewlapped flesh
White mountains in that lake-locked cut of land
Down from the old asylum where plains poetry began.
You floated cross the floor. The farmers and cowboys gaped
As you twirled light as a red fox angel, your dip and weave
As much invention as my own imagining. I loved you best
In my arms out there, your smile the wicked grin of the bad
Little girl you were. I used to dream of being buried
In your flesh. I always asked why you never wrote of the war.
You nursed the bone-wracks from the concentration camps
When you were still a girl. It's a century ago now.
You took the first workshop I ever gave in 76 in Saskatoon.
I remember saying there was a problem with your poem
About a girl being born from a fox. The middle was all wrong.
You argued with me, your eyes telling me you'd wanted
Praise, not blame. I'd never heard of you. Then you sent me your book,
Woman Reading in Bath. I read it all that winter.
You were a poet. But you never did get that fox poem
Right. The next spring on The Sunshine Coast
I sat under my old cedar tree down by the tumbled stones.
She was the one I prayed to when I left that marriage. Old Cedar Mother.
The man who bought the land cut her down. I think grief
Rises from neglect, the wish to save a part of the life you leave.
I never wanted to save you, but I still grieve for that tree.
She was always there for me.
The strangest part of you was your desire for acolytes.
You loved their loving you, their admiration, and more,
Their hopefulness. Like the ghosts that summer. You
Came late to Fort Qu'Appelle. How you hated missing the dead.
Your daughter, Kate, and I called up a ghost from the oujia board.
I thought I was going to die but the ghost didn't want me.
It wanted Gertrude instead. You arrived two days late
And the story wasn't you. How you wanted it to be.
I'd just come back from China, tired and spent,
Full of temples and tragedy. I needed ghosts that year.
I don't know where I'm going here. There was a misery in you,
A shard of ego stuck in your bright eyes. I always thought
You went wrong when you started searching for a place
That would acknowledge you. Post-Modernism never was
Your bag. I loved your first poems best, your garden too
And your loneliness. England never left you and the past
Was a burden you carried like a bag-lady carries rags,
Your books a grab-bag almost memory. But story was
The thing you trusted least. Your lyrics thought too much.
You were like the fat girl who organizes everyone,
The games, the order of the dance, who stands where and why.
All impresario, I could see you with a baton as you rapped it
On the podium to remind the third violin he'd got it wrong
Again. But, O, Anne, how you danced! Nelson's fleet never had
A flagship great as you. You always caught the lightest breeze
In your huge sails. Up on your toes you'd cross the floor
Like the tiniest angel, the one who stood first on the holy pin
And danced all heaven to her perch. I think your body
Took the life you should've had. A prima ballerina lived in you.
And that sounds like your poems were something less
And that's not true. Like the cowboy songs Hank Snow wrote
That weren't meant for cattle drives, your poems kept trying.
It's all a matter of tone, the way you spoke your world,
not what you said but how you said it rearranged.
Mostly I remember the time of the ghosts at Fort Qu'Appelle,
You and I walking down by the lake and you telling me
Of the war years, the men who died in your hands,
Your Polish man, the eccentric little girl who had no friends
But the ones she imagined. They were who you wrote for.
There's room for everyone on the head of a pin. Just come, you said.
I did and that's how I danced you, red fox angel, you.
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