AT THE REBECCA COHN AUDITORIUM
I am listening
I am listening to Al Purdy at the Rebecca Cohn
in underground sunlight
and you can tell that I am a sensitive man
And I notice that Purdy is a sensitive man too
as he reads a poem that says so
However jokily, I see it’s true
And he reads other poems as well
poems about beer and fights with his wife
and other things I understand
such as the
for I have been there
and I am a sensitive man
I have been to Pangnirtung
where I saw the ground willow
rooted stubbornly in its rocky bed
I have seen the delicate things
carved from serpentine by toothless old men
and I have seen noisy flowers
which I would bottle and press
as “small yellow shouts”
Okay, so those were poppies and saxifrage
and not “Arctic rhododendrons”
but the point is that I am a sensitive man
and what Al is saying, I dig
and I dig the big resonant voice
improbably emanating from that long lanky frame
topped by a mop of straight white hair
and I think to myself
Jeez, maybe I should write flower poems
But the North I know is not the same
as the place Purdy briefly toured in ‘65
There are more white people for instance
and more machines
and I am both of them
there is cable TV, cellphones
mansions on the hill over
Stone carvings get shipped by the planeload
from
on jets that thunder down Iqaluit’s 9000 paved feet
and those carvings are shaped
not by handmade tools
but with Dremels and sanders and drills
and when I go up to Al
at the end of the night
so he can sign the copy of his book I just bought
I see that he is a very tired old man
and I am sad
for at least one ivory thought
is about to grow cold
2 comments:
Impersonating Al Purdy at Weddings
What do we learn when we are young? What lasts?
There was the matter of a girl, and poetry;
and no mere romance, there was the necropsy of love,
and the semblance of motion. I was moving;
you would say, Brownian motion. She is gone now,
and the lesson is not what lasts, but what stays.
It is love. And I am a fool to look on passion as dated,
of its era; all poems pick their moments, you seem to say.
I would have her back, as I would have you back;
cloister me in attics, with thousands of pressed rhododendrons.
Sentence me to a life of pursuits and appetites;
let me bookend at least one woman’s desire,
let me be the doxology of one poor soul.
I am the curiosity at wedding receptions,
reciting Al Purdy to impatient glass-clinkers and soloists,
to men who rock their thighs in anticipation of the open bar.
There is an audience for poetry; people shock-clap,
the couple kisses, and I take my seat as a pining emissary.
That's a Purdy fine poem, Zach.
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