Literary
For William Carlos Williams by Louis Dudek
You want your truths told of you—
those wavery lines!
Each pencil mark's a fiddlehead
unfolding to an island of wild fern,
O hell, did you have to do it
now, Bill
when we were just getting
the whiplash of your New Measure, crack
of the words in the sun, over the woman eating
plums, over the burning greens?
When we were getting the hang of it, to your glory,
and bringing the baskets home,
stuff you planted in your Earlier and Later
Collected Poems
praising the world
and talking to the cabman
about “Pound and economics” so many beginnings
Those forceps, stethoscopes (the way to their hearts)
and medical books you could never keep up with
—thrown away, finished?
Isn't it (death) stupid? That all a man is,
those immediate moments
you tried to cling to, should be thought “ephemeral”?
Death is a liar, Bill Williams Don't think for a minute
that we believe him It's all the same
It's as you said, every minute of it, here, now, real and forever.
What the Snake Brings to the World by Lorna Crozier
Without the snake
there'd be no letter S
No forked tongue and toil,
no pain and no sin. No wonder
the snake's without shoulders.
What could bear such a weight!
The snake's responsible for everything
that slides and hisses, that moves
without feet or legs. The wind for example.
The sea in its long sweeps to shore and out again.
The snake has done some good, then.
Even sin to the ordinary man
brings its pleasures. And without
the letter S traced belly-wise
outside the gates of Eden
we'd have to live
with the singular of everything:
sparrow, ear, heartbeat,
mercy, truth.
Africadian Experience by George Elliott Clarke
(For Frederick Ward)
To howl in the night because of smoked rum wounding the heart;
To be so stubbornly crooked, your alphabet develops rickets;
To check into the Sally Ann—and come out brain-dead, but spiffy;
To smell the sewer anger of politicians washed up by dirty votes;
To feel your skin burning under vampire kisses meant for someone else;
To trash the ballyhooed verses of the original, A-1, Africville poets;
To carry the Atlantic into Montreal in epic suitcases with Harlem accents;
To segregate black and white bones at the behest of discriminating worms;
To mix voodoo alcohol and explosive loneliness in unsafe bars;
To case the Louvre with raw, North Preston gluttony in your eyes;
To let vitamin deficiencies cripple beauty queens in their beds;
To dream of Halifax and its collapsing houses of 1917
(Blizzard and fire in ten thousand living rooms in one day);
To stagger a dirt road that leads to an exploded piano and bad sermons;
To plumb a well that taps rice wine springing up from China;
To okay the miracle of a split length of wood supporting a clothesline;
To cakewalk into prison as if you were parading into Heaven;
To recognize Beauty when you see it and to not be afraid.
