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Issue
31 March 2006
contents
Copyright © 2006 William J. Gibson
main
page
New Poems
The End of March
Mr. Worth
Photos
Working on the Water
Snow isn't always white
Poems from 1998
Grosse
Île by William Gibson :
the poems:
Coming Out of Becker's
Simple Game
Where River Meets Lake
The Honourary Uncle
Voice Print
Target Texas
9 Holes at Dusk
Cottage Walk
Radio Voices
Glen Columb Kille
Afternoon Dig
Shiloh
Grosse Île
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Grosse Île
is an island in the St. Lawrence River downstream
from Ville de Quebec. It has had a fascinating history including biological
weapons research during World War II (anthrax), but less alarmingly, it
was the quarrantine immigration station for Quebec. In other words, it
was Canada's Ellis Island. Actually Ellis Island was America's Grosse
Île. Irish and other immigrants entered Canada at this point at
the time of the Potato Famine, 1848. It continued to be used as an immigration
depot into the 20th century. Today you can visit the island, Parks Canada
manages the island. It is a moving experience to tour the site.
Coming
out of Becker’s
by William J. Gibson
It was Saturday morning,
sun crossing the parking lot
of the strip mall at Eglinton
and Bayview. Talbot Park
in the distance, a green gash after the traffic.
Street lights and the tall fence
of the baseball diamond
holding back.
McDonald’s the fortified
block holding down the SE corner.
Sausage McMuffin with egg.
How could anyone take it
without the egg.
I had the Globe and Star
under my arm and milk.
She was tall and slender
in a cloth coat, metal
glasses, an old lady.
I stepped between her
and her friend, a shorter,
stouter version. But not too stout.
She said, “I can’t trust myself.
Not after the second stroke.”
Simple Game
fresh from the dryer
the old flannel shirt, the blue one
hugs me
take the warm, clean sheets
up to the bedroom
when the cat lies on the bottom sheet
I float the top sheet over him
he flips to his back
four feet up
like tent poles
suddenly we are in Africa
he is a lion
I am a giant
the old simple game
Where River Meets Lake
Urge of lightning holds me down.
between rolled up river
rocks, smooth, hard, flecked, small, bruised, never angry,
full of old grays
and cold water shock
sure tightening, folding down
from words, edge of my tongue
and your closed lids
a plunge, slippery stones
carving the blue flown water’s skin
showing light
how to fumble,
where to trip,
mark it as an easing down,
ten minutes behind dropped sun, night
sputtering what we don’t want to hear,
under shore pines,
behind your shoulders,
my hands rest there
The Honourary Uncle
I watched him hold his sleeping daughter
knowing that he has failed to help the gas erupt
and that like a small comic device
the sweet angel doll
will burp
awake
and yell
thus removing sleep from his wife
the mother
who has gone to sleep
in the next room
at 2 in the afternoon
in her effort to avoid becoming
a female grizzly bear
the other three children
and their four cousins
wild Irish cousins
are taking turns travelling
from kitchen through living room
to porch at high speed
like elephants escaped from the circus
trumpeting and using their trunks
closing doors as if stress testing them for the manufacturer
and I sit speaking softly to this Dad performing my role
of agnostic saint as he called me
in the parking lot of the church
after the sweet angel doll’s baptism
drinking in the richness of family life
an old bachelor poet talking to the
younger, but only slightly younger
married poet, of literary-ness
and other wild notions of the universe
it is a scene that Max Sennett or Fellini
could not do justice to
a simple summer day pumped full
of life and life and life and life and life.
Voice Print
I have said things that would make
a French Foreign Legionaire blanch.
Words have jumped from the black side of my mind
at the speed of regret plus 1
pulling teeth out by the roots
and I have smiled saying them.
That is when the devil stretches with pure joy
waiting to guffaw when I stop cool and lunge
to pull back the venom as if it were a chicken feather
a floating maple key, an old woman’s crippled hands
working the remote control of the TV at four AM.
I have had a genius for the verbal hand grenade.
All that sick tar spewed out, all out, I am all out.
I have come back to where I began
forming words with my lips and tongue and teeth.
Tapping them out letter by letter
simple words, carefree words.
Verbal rolls of red carpeting welcoming
like a baby learning to say the names
of new things
one after another.
Target, Texas
In the mall store, Target,
think about it,
I ask the clerk where are the gloves.
He leads me to the hardware section
and the work gloves.
I wonder if they even carry “winter” gloves.
But I find them. One small rack.
Two styles, Maybe twenty pairs.
And about 6 black “watch caps”.
I am from an alien climate.
In a few days I will head north
into the snows of November.
Something in me wants to
turn south and west
to reach Laredo
and to roll all the way
to Terra Del Fuego
for the cold summer there
then back.
I will fold back
the new year
by going to the Klondike.
I need to pan in the ice cold river.
This fever I have must
be for gold.
9 Holes At Dusk
With two holes left
they asked me if I wanted to join them.
The light was going quickly,
we’d be a sixsome. I said yes.
They let me hit first.
I flew a 3 wood over the gully
to the right of the sand trap.
It had been hot the way July can be hot.
There was a breeze.
The sun had dropped to take some heat with it
but we were all still sweating.
The one happy talker kidded with me when
my chip shot rimmed the cup.
He looked thin and extremely fit.
We stood together on the last tee waiting
for one of his friends to hit.
He grinned and said, “If I could only get rid of this hook.”
Suddenly the smell of booze sweating out of him
was a like a dark heavy hand over my mouth.
This guy is an alcoholic I thought.
After his friend sliced it hard
deep into the rough, he called out,
“You’re not lost. It’s okay, you’re all right there.
We can find that.”
He started walking fast into the rough.
The sun was gone. We beat the brush with our clubs to prove we weren’t
lost.
The mosquitoes drove us in.
As I changed shoes at the side of my car
I watched him open another beer from the cooler in his trunk.
He snapped the cap and drained it at one go.
When I started my car and shifted
I looked back he was laughing and had his second going.
When I crested the first hill
I found the sun, the last searing edge of it.
I snapped down the visor. I’d seen enough.
Cottage Walk
We walked outside in the dark
up the driveway carrying flashlights.
“There aren’t any mosquitoes, tonight.”
“It’s the wind keeping them down, Mom,” I said.
The branches near the streetlamp
smashed at the wires and the pole.
The clouds were gone. The stars were out
a field of them like white bugs lost on water.
A car came down the road
its headlights pointing over the last slope.
She stepped over close
to the row of cedars,
to hide from the car.
She was wearing pyjamas and a blue housecoat.
The car turned the curve and rolled past.
No dust flew up. The morning rain had held on.
“What time are you going to leave in the morning,” she asked.
“Five thirty,” I said. “ It’ll be alright.”
“Well, there shouldn’t be any fog. Not if this wind keeps up.”
She stopped and looked up.
“Look at all those stars. Isn’t that beautiful?
You can’t see that in the city.”
The branches near the street lamp
smashed at the wires and the pole.
Like they were crazy. Like they were trying to stop
the city light from coming out so far
so near to the dark water bay.
Radio Voices
It is on the concession road five miles from the cottage
that I feel her.
“Hello, Mom.”
Many nights I would drive up
turn in the dark driveway.
Knock on the door.
She would unlock it
and I would see her in her wheelchair.
Unload the car crunching on snow
or on leaves
or with the accompaniment of mosquitoes.
That personal private aria of the country.
She would be back in her bedroom
with her cat
once again listening to the radio talk show
on WBZ Boston. The ionosphere bouncing it to her.
The storm and sunspots lowering and lifting the static
till it sounded like bacon frying.
Still rolling forward through the night alone
playing her night game.
Radio voices breaking the quiet.
Although I was there.
Many nights I was not.
Now I unlock the door
and the kitchen is empty
I turn on the lights
There is no radio sound.
Glen Columb Kille
Co. Donegal
Atlantic Ocean
the real thing washing
playfully
at the sand
between the taller headland and this one
I rest on the wildflowers and the grass
my back against a goodly rock
the wind
must blow all the time
here
straight in
I could lie here a thousand hours
without speaking
just looking straight west
to my Canadian life
days like waves
my eyes losing
the shine of the sun
on each and every
on
the
way
to here
Afternoon Dig
Uncovering old envelopes and folded letters,
note paper carrying many, many words,
pages handled and recreased,
stuffed in desk drawer,
lost as bookmarks,
bundled.
Rereading
the cares of old
friends, collected each
time on a table top, tipped
out in ink, with thought and ear
straining, pulling all the meaning away.
What are we telling when we write these
accounts of daily duties, moments
of extremity, complication and
completion, tussles with
our darlings, our
dreams.
Answering
the call for story.
We are the hero. Thrilled
with the singularity of our stuff,
we draw out the poison, retrieve
the jewels, and turn out all right after all.
Shiloh Military Park
National Cemetery
I stand on the brick path above Pittsburg Landing
my idiotic baseball cap stuck in my back pocket
looking at the white stones creamy white stones
arranged in straight lines and curved lines on the grass
Grey squirrel incapable of marching
leaps over a taller cube head stone
Earlier I watched the blue black shine of the crows
in the heat of the open Peach Orchard
where the bullets shredded the blossoms
filled the air with warm snow
Under this white spattered green blanket the dead sleep
I reach down and touch the warm grass
They are like the teeth
fallen out of an old giant’s mouth
who once was angry once roared once cried
Grosse Île
We are guided through the Reception Hall,
lose the sound of the St. Lawrence River.
Gape at the baggage cages,
the immigrants’ luggage and clothing
packed on these
for disinfection
in the steam and sulphur
boilers.
Our guide explains why the shower stalls
have wire mesh roofs.
To keep the people from climbing out.
I look inside the galvanized grey casing
and stare at the shower tube and the three
wrap-around shower pipes
and I step back.
Later we walk down the trail
to the Irish cemetery
from 1847,
the famine year,
the big death year.
There is still one building from then.
One old cover shed still there.
Later I read how the government debated
the costs of sheds to cover the immigrants,
to get them out of the tents and the open air.
Not enough money for milk and bread.
For medical supplies.
The doctors and nurses, the nuns and priests
falling sick, dying.
How the St. Lawrence was full of ships
anchored, waiting with their sick, and dying
with their dead lying in the bunks of the crowded
stinking lower decks.
Where family members were too frightened.
To touch their own dead, for burial.
I read the list of those who died.
Unknown Dutch man
Unknown Irish child
There was one William Gibson,
Captain of a ship out of Liverpool,
his ship with sick and dead
in 1847.
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