It was in that free zone where many Cobourgers enjoyed their first kiss, met their sweethearts, had their first drink, or toke, first fuck, first … Yet the park and beach invites older lovers, hand in hand, bare feet, cool waves licking their ankles. Remembering make out pit-stops south of The Breakers.
All of this inspired many of my early poems which were eventually to find their way into my first book of poetry, Walking On The Greenhouse Roof, or in assorted Canadian literary journals. After a 20 year hiatus, I began to write poetry again, and publish. Several of the new poems also found some resonance in the Cobourg of my past & present.
Unexpectedly, my email listserv has continually expanded and continues to do so. This is heartening for a native son of Cobourg. In keeping with the warm reception I have received from many, it occurred to me to assemble several poems/writing of mine that reference to Cobourg directly, or have their context in Cobourg. So please read and enjoy, forward to others you think might enjoy. It's a lengthy read. It gets better as you scroll down. The earliest poems are at top and they display an adolescent mind at work. The scroll will take you to more recent material.
I believe my poetry and writing will engage you. Unlike the dreck and drag, the monstrosity and mediocrity that pollutes the pages of the local media, I have the self-confidence (arrogance if you wish) to make such a bald-faced assertion. Oh, and I present the actual writing into the public domain to support my assertion.
===================================
COBOURG BEACH
The rorschach clouds
drift past the moon
slow as rush hour traffic
on the Gardiner Expressway.
Wind waved poplar leaves
makes twinkling stars
of half-hidden street lights.
The trees hisssss
with the menace of a tangle of snakes
In the distance,
seducing my eyes,
is a lonely
winking harbour light
flirting
with
disaster.
=======================================
OLD MAN IN THE PARK
In shy Victoria Park
where the only life left
in decaying October
are dead leaves littering
rusting lawns
and a lone old man
sitting on a despondent bench.
With an old tweed cap
from the Salvation Army
resting like a bad habit
on his wrinkled head
he sits meditating memories
across the horizon
across writhing Lake Ontario.
Watching from the street
I wish like a child
to sit on the lap
of that magnificent old man
with white whiskers
like thinly spread frosting
on his history-worn face
and to listen to the stories
I have heard that old men tell.
=========================================
VICTORIA PARK COLLAGE
The foghorn moans like a taken virgin
I'm here, sitting on a bench, facing Rochester
wondering where that old man is I saw here last year
the one with ragged pockets containing tales like lint and dust
Serpently the fog stealths up the beach
The cacophony of kids tumbling into each other
bounce off blue-bell waves into trees
like a happy plague of bees
Hey Bobby: Bobby!
Mom! Mom! Billy just...
Mom! Mom!
Look at me mom!
MOM!! LOOK!!
The fog was as harmless as Sandburg made it
I should have remembered
From the waterworks to the coal-coated piers,
like beads on a necklace, lovers stroll the shoreline
murmuring private psalms,
eyes happy as laughter from children on swings
The foghorn moans like a taken virgin
Then there are the hippies, stoned, scattered
like autumn leaves on the green-wave hills.
The wind is perched
waiting in the trees
to ambush unaware children
The lighthouse like a messiah draped in a toga of white-washed metal
stands gathering waves around its concrete knees
The gulls are parables surfing the crests of breeze
Along the shore waves curl around splinters of sun
casting them before the feet of passing lovers
The foghorn moans like a taken virgin
=========================================
PRAYER FOR MY FATHER
When I saw you father
lying in your coffin
still
like tall grass the wind has forsaken
I began to understand stars and distance
I knew your hands noble with leather
would never drop again upon my shoulders
and I understood caverns
memories dripping like stalactites
the echoes continual reminders
I knew your eyes made from playing and labour
would never wet with shared pride
and I understood waves
how suddenly they rise
tumble into noise for no reason
(But we give them reasons anyway)
I knew your voice rough from war and depression
soft with compassion from love and children
would never sound
and I understood
silence
that ears can be useless
deafness a blessing
Each time I looked into the night sky
my eyes adopted the orphans of tiny light
and my thoughts cradled their solitude
I had done this father
but I have learned today that distance
did not dullen their brightness
that I need no reasons
Tomorrow I shall leave them
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . alone
==========================================
ELEGY FOR MY MOTHER
Reta May Keeler (01/11/1912 - 01/24/2004)
In your beginning was the blood and the breath,
the sharp inhalation of the carnal chaos of life.
Born 6 lb., 6 oz. in the pubescence of a century
of unprecedented carnage and creativity,
the state marked the occasion with certificate 12‑05‑037696.
In the unelectric world,
devoid of devices of diversion,
you flourished in family
and began your career
pushing placenta and parenthood
onto the open palm of life.
And so you earned
your Bachelor of Mom,
graduating into grandchildren
for the Masters of Mom,
but the world wasn't finished
with your dissertation of lineage
and great grandchildren won you
the Doctorate of Motherhood
My trees are not yet barren
because it is September,
but for you, my mother,
a cold wind swept down
with January ferocity,
liberating your soul
for post‑graduate work with the angels.
Your spirit is a kite tethered with umbilical love
and gentle unto the good days,
memories like random breezes tug
-- what is the wind but a woman
loving us with caressing directions.
Your life straddled two millennia.
Your children born in peacetime
bracketed the world's worst war;
so I enjoyed your memories
of the pre‑tek world,
of the pre‑penicillin world;
from pre‑flight to post‑lunar landings,
your life was grounded
graceful as a backyard garden.
I regularly visited to mine your memories,
plucking nuggets of ageless gossip.
On the weekend of your death
I meant to ask you about your first kiss
but you replied with your last three diminishing breaths,
like the ellipsed ending of a love long life sentence...
Defiant of Death Certificate 422‑372‑045
you will remain an unfinished poem
carried into the interstellar future
on the crest of code of dna,
forever in a state of becoming...
==========================================
THEY LOVE YOU BECAUSE
They love you because
you are Sister of the Sun
You are one their eyes
cannot look upon
though they risk in vain
desperate and quick attempts
They love you because
you are Daughter of the Day
They cannot hold you
though they move within
your invisible embrace
They know when you are with them
because you live
between dawn and dusk
They love you because
you are Angel of the Evening
They love you though they know
they cannot possess you
because your lover is Night
and he awes all mouths mute
because he is bearer of confidence
to the hands of lovers
They love you because
they know you will always return
to open their eyes with benedictions
You are Mistress of the Morning
======================================
FOR THE MASTER, W.S.
I am young
. . . . . . . . . . . right-now-young
that age my blood
does push-ups
to exhaustion
in female fingers.
I know the lines
you writ
understanding
I need not heed them
for I am those lines;
the bursting boy
collecting kisses
the occasional
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . thorn;
the running male
arms full
of known and secret
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . charms.
Bill, I salute you
and your keen eye
which surface never
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . fooled.
Were you here
a breast for you
a celebration of flesh
and all that moves it.
==================================
COMMUNICATING
I sometimes wish
it weren't so hard
to tell someone
that summer is gone,
that I could speak
a million words
in a gesture
the same way that I
tell my mistress
I love her
and that she is beautiful
etcetera, etcetera, etcetera
by a caress on the breast
or slap on the ass;
or by sitting silent
on the edge of a garden
the flowers would grow
and bloom. (Not that they
would not have, had I not
been there, but that they did)
How much more socialistic
my life would be
with this added comfort;
content as a cow's udder.
=====================================
I AM MINISTER OF THE FIELDS
I am minister of the fields
singing the hymns of the winds
shivering the ungrazed grass.
I am parishioner of the night
humming prayers in the light
of the nebular stained glass.
I am adorer of the groves
dancing the dance of the gods
down the silent aisles of fruit.
I am choirboy of the woods
mellow-making the old limbs
of an ancient tree like a lute.
I am singer of the soft-sunned
soil and of a dimpled pond
over which a cloud proudly walks.
I am poet of the pastures
plucking wheat in my leisure
writing bibles with their stalks.
===================================
THE POLITICS OF SPRING
The Peoples Republic of Poetry was inspired during a short‑lived love affair with a dipoemat's beautiful daughter.
Delina, may your cheeks be trilliums and sanctioned by the Provincial Government of Poetry. Where you touch me a wound bursts forth like a spring blossom. My body is a filing cabinet of fanatic nerves. My eyes martyr themselves on your cheeks. My hands are the heretics of distance. My arms are the legislation of love. You are the rose I am a thorn on. I am a peasant in the dynasty of your eyes. You are a guest in my wilderness of love. What if I wrote; "You and I, as simple as that, for what is more perfect than that which is truly simple?”
It was a spring affair.
In spring the snow disperses like a mob of resentful rioters. In fields there are wounds in the snow where grass bleeds green, where grass is an awakening eye. In spring the snow goes a. w. o. l. In spring the sun leads a successful guerrilla movement or coup d'etat. In spring there’s an insurrection of grass and love. All winter our flesh was ignorant of the sedition of sunlight. No one ever votes spring into power. Is spring a totalitarian imperialist? Are robins infiltrated foreign agents sabotaging snowmobile trails, encouraging Green Power? Spring is a tolerant state because it permits equal opportunity to all colours. Winter is a one‑colour regime. Perhaps we all love spring because it allows civil rights to the tulips, to the lilacs, to the exuberant blossoms with wide-ons gluttoning sunshine and busy bees lathered in flower-cum. The sun is prosecutor and executioner of snow. The sun casts an unanimous verdict and ignores all appeals. April showers are the mourner's tears after winter has been hung from the gallows of warmth. Summer is the sun's gift of appeasement for the questionable use of coercive force to eliminate snow. (The government recessed to attend a coroner's inquest involving the sunlight‑poisoning of winter) Fall is a word that speaks for itself.
This was the state of the affair that became the affairs of state of mind in the imagine nation of the Peoples Republic of Poetry.
If a poet wore the premier of something, what might that something be? Would it be a nation of obedient poetry lovers? Would the national militia consist of mighty tulips armed with colour and sunshine? Would the national anthem be a long joyful sigh after love? Would the Union of Pollen Producers go on strike demanding higher rates of sunlight and more elaborate fringe benefits such as lighter showers and heavier dew? Would this cause an imagine national crisis? Would the Creative Intelligence Anarchy report that the Insect Pollen Transportation Organization had been infiltrated by dissident outside agitators such as breezes? Would the Federal Bureau of Inspiration be called in to conduct a thorough inspiration? Would the constitution enshrine the Prime Policy of Poetry Proselytization and Prolifteration? What would be foreign policy? Would we accept only immigrants carrying passport dreams? Then what about the refugees from Grief and defectors from Despair? Would we send out ambassadors to collect the neglected? Would we establish dipoematic relations with Pain, negotiate for a ceasefire and settle for shorter durations? Will we pick and chose our enemies at the drop of a poem and come charging, singing the Battle Hymn of the Poetic?
====================================
LOCAL POET FESSES TO FICTIONIt was July, 1960; Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins had just released ‘Summertime’ on the same day the Woolsworth counter in Greensboro, North Carolina became the site of a sit-in that sparked the civil rights movement in the USA. The Sixties were on. Meanwhile, on a quiet summer day, the Peterborough Examiner, on their dedicated Lakeshore News page, carried a human interest story about some good ole Cobourg boys.
Way back then, long before men walked on the moon, the concept of re-cycling meant getting back up on your bike after an elbow-bleeding spill. Environmentalism was an undeveloped theology. The motive was money, tax-free income. Everyone understood the rules.So let’s do some math. The boys earned $8.80. Returning an empty pop bottle netted $0.02 each. That comes to 440 empty bottles. That works out to 110 bottles per boy. That meant 110 bottles per bike -- no indication of a wagon being pulled. Quite a feat with only paper bags. I’ll wager you’re beginning to suspect something.
I know some of you pre-pensioners are thinking to yourselves; well, what about the nickel-worth jumbo bottles? In terms of bulk these bottles would replace two of the regular size. The nickelers were less likely than regular bottles to survive the toss from a moving car. The nickelers fail to undermine the story.
How many bottles would fit in a large grocery bag? 10? 15?. Hmmmm. That would be several bags per bike. Would all those paper bags fit on a bike, even if the bike has a newspaper-sized jumbo front basket? Can’t hang paper bags from the handle bars. So how was this feat accomplished? Are you beginning to smell, as N.A.S.A. puts it, the post-nutritive disposal substance?
The reporter failed to dig deeply, and ran with the story. I was just a kid, more like The Beaver than Eddie Haskel. The story had intrinsic uplift. Four good boys use their energies to clean up drive-by trash to make money. That is a sunshine moment, and the men and women of our good community should be aware of what our lads are doing. Perhaps other boys looking for fast cash, will cover the Baltimore to Cobourg route, or the Grafton to Cobourg route. The power of suggestion and fine example.
The following day, the other three boys were telling me about their parental interrogations, mostly pertaining around the issues of “What did you do with the money?” “Why didn’t you tell us?” “I didn’t know you would do a fool thing as to go to Port Hope and back, all on a dangerous stretch of highway. You coulda got yourself killed.”
Yep, I did a lotta splainin' that day. I did quite well, I thought to myself, for my first fiction performance. So, this is my coming out. 48 years later. I dread telling this now to the local news media; mostly because of the poetential for hammy headlines: LOCAL POET FESSES TO FICTION. I recall the exhilaration when I saw my lies published in rock solid print.
The first and foremost Law of Lies is: Remember Everything! No problem, here is the newspaper clipping attesting to all the details of the incident – exhibit #123. It’s quite the peculiar power that media have, to turn fiction to fact by mere publication. Their worthy credibility fuelled the power of authentification.
And there I was, starting off my uber-career as a media liar at the very time I entered the world as a full-blown hormone under restraining orders set down by the theological totalitarianism of the day. Elvis made a public spectacle of displaying his hormones, so the trickle down theory only served to agitate an already raging storm, and the screaming response of girls was well-noted. How do you tell your parents that it’s like holding back a herd of wild stallions with harness made of dental floss?
So, just to make a turbulent situation worse, I plunge into white water rapids – I meet a girl on my Peterborough Examiner paper delivery route. I was Norman Rockwelled. I was skinny-girled. I had just turned 13; she was a whole year older. She was just as my mother described her -- "a sweet young thing".
She was the first house on my paper route, and every day she opened the door in full bloom, pollen clutter and all. It took an hour to deliver that one newspaper, delivery done when dad called her to dinner, then I went on to late-delivery everyone on my route. I only noticed that I was riding on the softest tires of silk, wondering when it would be okay to ask her over to my place to see my model car collection -- and what girl wouldn‘t want to see that?
A few weeks later I was called to carpet by the newspaper boss. Irate subscribers were complaining about late delivery. It was ‘suggested’ that I do my delivery route in reverse, and make the house of the girl the last visited. I kept to this for a few weeks.
The courtship continued. It’s difficult to be a hero when one is not qualified. So when Monday’s delivery brought me to her doorstep, she asks, “So what did you do on your weekend?” It was easy to answer that toss-away. Fiction. “Oh me and the boys biked to Port Hope and back collecting bottles and made a lot of loot. Want some licorice?”
I could see the story dazzled her. Not only was I brave for going the distance on a dangerous stretch of highway, but demonstrated the get-er-done gumption to bring his sweetheart a bouquet of licorice sticks. Of course girls know that boys lie. And I know this also. I’m a boy. I lie. Girls collaborate with enticements. Girls are the enticing on the cake.
The next day I tell my story at the Peterborough Examiner office. Yep, they responded well to it. The next day, a reporter asks me some questions about the story. I give him details, pulled $8.80 right out of a hat. And with that, fiction became fact, and the next day I brought it to my girl as substantiation of my lie.
I quickly learned that the employment opportunities for liars is quite restricted. Free lance liars seem to have unpleasant visitations once in a while. Men lie to women, but sometimes this has the unfortunate consequence of acquiring a sentence to marriage, followed with perpetual parole conditions.
But under cover of poet, I could lie through my dentures to my heart’s content. One did not need a certificate in advanced bs to be a poet. Besides, I got the goil. I still got her. So lying to the news media had a lifetime effect on me. I saw that there was a future in this for me. Because Bonnie is the fire I always wanted to play with.
==========================================
THE FORENSICS OF FUCK (Case 42-2005)
All that remained
of last night’s turbulence
of sensuality in the sand
was the bowl of her buttocks
braced where his knees
dimpled the sand
with impressionist energy
Excerpt from Witness Statement #1:
“…her incence-ual body
curled like smoke around his body.”
They were the treasure
pirates of love left behind.
Beach sand permits no tracks
no trail of arrival or departure;
it’s as if the imagination
merely touched down
for a pirouette of pleasure,
ephemeral as a passing breeze
Excerpt from Witness Statement #2
“At first it sounded like an assault
but I saw the moonlight splatter off their skin
from the thrusts, the thrusts, oh yes, the thrusts
I realized it was an assault on the sensuous.”
At the water’s edge portions of poetry were urined in sand,
(Daughter of the Day, Angel of the Evening)
Complicit waves threw themselves onto the text
an attempted cover-up
washing out verbs and other conjunctive evidence
Excerpt from Witness Statement #1
“This part of the shoreline
is so exclusive the beach
selects the waves that stroke it.”
Hair strands
like italicized exclamation points
reflecting splinters of morning sun
were silked on the nearby chickory,
tangled in grass patches.
hair strewn like a wild dream
of gut rock and Janis Joplin
Excerpt of Witness Statement #3
“They exploded into ecstasy,
vowels vaporizing into skin air.”
==========================================
STONED IN COBOURG, AGAIN
2008 I occupied space
on Pizza Palace patio across from
Cobourg District Collegiate Institute, West
where 1966 I occupied space
in my grade 12 history class
chin cupped in hand
like a soft boiled egg
and nothing on the blackboard
worth deflecting my interest
away from the house fly
frantic for escape
out the window,
she sneaked up on me,
the teacher, I mean,
ambushed my pre occupation
“Well, Wally, it seems you’re not with us.
Are you stoned on something?”
“Excuse me ma’m, I’m NOT on drugs;
I’m on poetry.”
So . . .
against the advice of Guidance Counsellors
I failed to graduate
preferring the business
of trafficking in poetry
fool time
permanent.
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