The Ivory Thought: Essays on Al Purdy

Ingredients for Certain Poems by Al Purdy

Ingredients for Certain Poems by Al Purdy STEPHEN BROCKWELL WILD AMELIASBURGH GRAPES crushed by two hundred pounds of fifty-year-old Al wild Penticton yeast from apple boughs and vines from the old man's feet imparting more fragrant fruit than any brewer's yeast a poet might buy Roblin Lakewater with a hint ofmercury and fourstroke fuel unremarked like any minor hazard of the 19708 a carboy with a rubber stopper the sickness of poems sickness of scenery he will never say a word about Cachel, Roblin Mills,Belleville villages of recent early history strung together by water from the roots ofAlgonquin tamarack 9 10 I STEPHEN BROCKWELL to the leaves of Mont Royaloak substituting their names for a national mood that eludes all but the last rhetoric of lists the droning cadences of tavern cusses because a man said I am no man because this is not a country Ripe, subsidized Saskatchewanbarley malted in a union shop in Hamilton ten foot EastKentGoldings harvested by the rough hands of Scottish labour, compressed into a handful of aromatic pellets a sachet of dried yeast or a tablespoon of breadyeast from a kitchen jar some wort-filtering device—a sieve, a clean pair of drawers a misplaced stocking of Eurithe's a covered pail in the kitchen alcoholic tastes for forbidden women one can't use developed at great expense Montreal, Winnipeg, Vancouver cities careening into speech hammered together with iron on the anvil of the Shield through fields of maize and barley past coulees, cattailsand purple loosestrife homespun whatchamacallitsand invasive handles coiling themselves under the tongue symbionts infecting the language with the rare disease of an authentic voice the gift of a wife with a name even RocketRichard in his skates could have wrapped his laces and a song around the Rocketwould have found breath on the bench to sing Eurithe, seuls les tendres mots m'echappent parfois. Lisses sont ton nom et ta peau. Us ne m'echapperont pas. Ingredients for Certain Poems by Al Purdi/ i1 The fermented applejunk of Bordeauxgrape skins poured into hand-polished copper stills half a forest of oak split and kiln dried in a warehouse at Nevers, strapped into barrels by the Union of French Coopers a stone walled cellar under a dilapidated chateau where booze can age in the damp for years water from god knows what European tap or spring to dilute it for a simple bottle of imperfect glass a label chosen for claritynot elegance the strands of an existence outside the never finished sentences Pangnirtung, Galapagos, L'Anse aux Meadows habitations for exotica, sea fringes whispered together on a threadof air we learned to fly on with sandpiper, eider, monarch monikers no more strange than here for strange places where Medusa's children coil their thousand serpents turtles bask and dry their shells and the wapiti gather in vast numbers not to be named by us but to graze Fresh peat dried in the rare highland sun (at least one bog must entomb a mummified ancestor of clan Ross a patriarch who shambled out of the fog and stared up at Aldebaran muttering a Scots drinking song) Isle of Skyebarley threshed by a farmer with his eye on profit and a kickback bottle a hundred times more water than will make it to the cask water to steep the grain for germination water to soak the sweetness from the grist the strangeness of sediment from the last bottle pockets of the human swept into the mainstream 12 STEPHEN BROCKWELL Truva, Samarkand, Plains of Abraham sites of text and artifact, parchment and shard woven together by the burned black ink of scribes and presses, and the black blood ofblubbering heroes expiring on the sand It may be that until we write into our history the names of three thousand coolie railmakers (whose remains the crows and foxes scattered across the prairie) the words of this country will not find us the gift of a wife with a name even Bobby Clarke in his box could be inspired to eloquence by the boarding bully could be moved by tenderness of sound to sing Eurithe, for your name I drop my gloves not to inflict pain but to love ...