Reading at 4:00 A.M.

I. The Poets

(a)

I read Walcott’s Omeros, chapter six. Helen chats with her friends down near to the sea wall. She don’t like when the tourist foreigners put their hands on her ass and so she tell the cashier he could keep the fucking job. Is just a stupid waitress work, is all! Only she now must find something to do like how she pregnant and don’t know for who. For me her tale is poetry more than “love songs fading over a firefly sea.” (chapter eleven). If ocean hill and sky can’t hold this odyssey, what chance a page? I set aside the book to search my face for prudent lines to whisper to Helen.

(b)

I read a poem, “Mint,” about a tuft of fine-leaved crimp-edged aromatic stalks in Seamus Heaney’s yard. We had one too on the way down the slope to the back gate. Nobody planted it; it was just there from the beginning, so for all I know it’s maybe standing still, its slender waist not a whit bigger, growing its spicy grow. It’s a fine poem. I see what Heaney says and magic don’t come much in verse these days except in songs from worlds where minstrels tune their notes for bread because don’t mind how much rain fall, the dirt, like Miss Lou says, is tough, and nothing grows to feed our souls enough.

(c)

I read Larkin’s “This Be the Verse.” Tough poem. It says your parents fuck you up. They do. It says that they don’t mean to. I’m less sure that absence of malevolence is true in every case. It says that they were fucked up in their turn by parents who wore oldstyle hats and coats, outfits I’m sure that made them neither less nor more effective passers-on of grief! It says, “Man hands on misery to man . . .” Present enough, but no, this passing on “it deepens like a coastal shelf.” (Perhaps we’d best look up our topographic terms?) To sound the image and the ocean floor requires resonance. The same thing holds for agony.

(d)

The day you left the air broke into splinters

—from poem for Marlene Green in Dionne Brand’s Inventory

If you think you’re indispensable, consider, when you pull out your fist, what happens to water.

—Proverb

I read Inventory, page sixty-one. A fist won’t make an empty space in water when the hand immersed comes out unless that hand belongs to someone quick enough to break the air in shards: the elements are subject then. Marlene’s in blue in a new house on her birthday. That time I read at Harbourfront, she sent to say: “I’m sorry that I’m sick. I would have loved to hear you read.” I told her, “Anytime you wish, just send to tell me and I’ll bring my poems and come.” We read for her that last birthday, my poet friend and me. Now she prophetic with a pen parts water on page sixty-one to show the space a fist can make.

II. The World Wide Web

(a)

I read that animals can’t fool themselves. They know when they have fouled their habitats. They know inside their breasts and blood and wings— all animals that is but human beings. It’s only us the smartest of the lot who sit inside this slowly heating pot like frogs saying the temperature’s the same. Spring chickens spinning in a stewing sludge, we sit and peck our corn and do not budge; we wriggle in our excrement and crow our disavowal choosing not to know. Ah, Pope, I’ve stole your pen and plainly spoke, which they like not, in rhythm and in rhyme, so they’ll not hearken—till there’s no more time.

(b)

I read at night I should make sure it’s deep and darkest black in places where I sleep. That way my cells can conjure melanin. It darkens skin and spares us from...