My response to the League of Canadian Poets comment about the violence in Patrick Lane's poetry:
Yes, much violence:
…the bright burnt
hole in an eye
that has looked too
long at the sun.
Something at the
end of the mind
cries out.
…what is wild is
lost behind closed eyes:
albino birds, pale
sisters, succubi.
That the man
walking beside me
had a boot full of
blood was nothing more
than the end of
day. A man who had opened
his body with an
axe.
…the kind of blood
he knew as a child when
the dull, crazed
silence of his own hands
tore a wall to
pieces because it was morning
and there was
nothing else to do but destroy.
****
Coincidentally, a
poem I am working on bears similarity. I spent a night asleep as the captain stayed awake all night in a hurricane, with an axe, ready to cut the lines to the Hakai Pass dock. The fish boat was so large it could have ripped out the entire dock and its structure:
I can't remember a thing: Revisiting Hakai Pass
I can't remember a thing about our lives before this morning.
We left our city at night and return at night.
* Anne Michaels.
I can't remember a thing: Revisiting Hakai Pass
I can't remember a thing about our lives before this morning.
We left our city at night and return at night.
* Anne Michaels.
I
can’t remember a thing: captain holding his axe
all
the black night while I sleep baby-unaware-slumber
that
makes a parent silent before what he fears to lose.
Small
in my crib, narrow cabin in sluicing fish packer
deck.
The weather channel zeros in from safety.
Bulging
black pushes aside my captain all night, while
I
dream West Beach, dripping-face wolf drool me
to
meat. The Kermode I never dream, only black
leather
ocean, water drops scattering until sea sucks
them
home. Lullaby end is fingers on a forehead, moss-
strangled
trees a blade forgot, now decadent, as loggers
say,
meaning old men with beards, strands they pull
and
stare through tables, no search for meaning
in
wolf’s throat-back howl they’d otherwise call
language.
Can the wolf hear me listening? His teeth-
bared
language from his vocal gramophone fills my
blind
ear. In forest bent like grass I am still asleep,
against
the wooden shelf edge meant to keep my body
from
hitting deck in smacking sea. I dream Hartley
Bay
snow on a Silent Night dock. My captain’s
aboriginals
sent us into night with the most important
food
group: cinnamon buns, I kept from my captain
in
a hurricane. He’s awake in the black, eye on lines
he
may have to cleave, engine dieseling like insurance.
Our
hundred-ton fish packer could rip the entire dock,
set
adrift a continent of other beings: old men trees
wind
has bled for decades. I dream a green millennium,
the
wolf with his eyes, where sea lions drop through
purple
fringe morning, tons on either side of my
Boston
Whaler skiff, cold ocean surrounding me,
as
it does an iceberg – a python no thing ever
notices.
I dream a Grumman Goose, my starboard
window
leans my face into green that is black
and
also blue, depending on what the captain
reveals
to my eyes. I dream my hands, the dead
bloated
meat they become, eaten by pins that
are
coho teeth, backs of hands wound in 30-pound
test,
Daiwa, Okuma, filaments of man come all
the
way from China. And then our morning: I
wake,
black axe in my hand, to cut the dinghy free.
Conflicted
sea south of Cape Calvert – a death we
now
have to face – a mighty boot against the dash,
my
Asic runner against a beam in sea that has no
need
of us. Outflow wind against in-coming sea
slaps
waves ten feet above our eyes. Not thinking
Lincoln,
lilac bent over my fence, not my captain.
Ribs
jolt my guts each time we hit. There’s no
point
being afraid, that may just kill us.
