Day 5: Yes, I needed one pear tree. No, it didn’t stop at that. I have become fascinated with the history, symbolism, various root stocks, and nomenclature of the beasts.
The French adore their pears, the English their apples and ciders, the Japanese have their own fruit, and old Ontario farm yards are unearthing surprisingly neglected histories surrounding the interrupted arduous journey of Canadian apples. Thankfully, I am not the only one smitten with stories of pippins (“pip of a fruit”) and their stories are written about in all kinds of places, but most importantly in the actions of dedicated breeders who are at last salvaging these nearly lost heritage plants. This spring, I will have planted pears, apples, cherries, plums, quince, plumcots, grapes for the table & pies, and grapes fermented for my goblet.
Thirty-three fruits, to succor my heart and tongue.
In the bitterest of early winter, after my father died, with all the emotional tumult of a death in an already torn apart family, one death crashing into another, one of my first defiant and angry acts of rampage against the victory of death, was to take as much limb death out of the orchard as I possibly could. There was death everywhere, both in my family, and all over the farm. In the freezing December cold up a ladder with a hack saw in hand, tears streaming down my cheeks, loud rage hitting the skies and sorrow flushed over my cheeks, perched in the place that meant most to my father, I wrote this poem in honour of my dear brilliant unhappy cousin Glen Allen, who has since killed himself.
Another Glen
I am taking death out of the yard
it sounds like birds in the trees
I heard a falcon once
playing like
Glen Gould
or at least
out of his own centre
like another Glen
I heard my daughter studying
the descant of Latin
her test the day
she was dead tired
a long gone language
brought straight to her
from her entire mouth and family
and by not naming living geniuses
– history gone by the wayside
you can’t imagine
she was feeling
that her 17th candle burned like this
droning that memory it had the exuberance
to charm something
off you and Caesar alike
And you can’t imagine what it feels like
to be Bach on the pretty keys
to pretend this lopping procedure is schooled
still on a Baroque tinkling
worship, its devolution of dénouement
of the same intricacy as the poem
that follows the poem
I wrote months before
just after the death of my father
just after he sang Broadway musicals from his oxygen mask
his death bed and before my will
had changed
come alive knowing he had failed
to call for the nurse on time, failed
with dynamic
to utter a thing
To careen for a year
over the anger this man spread
you can imagine Christmas morning
opening a heart attack
you can imagine we all went along
continued all openings and containment
his direction
all wrappings the point of unnaming
any thing he did
the thing we did
was to leave our reference to the hospital staff
business announced over P.A.
non information but
Dr. So and So to Intensive Care
running carts past the lone blood limb
institutional hum
leaving burial under officious dismissal
standing ignorant at a visitor lounge threshold
as an entire filial relationship
can be institutionalized
encapsulated
in an evening gesture
all of us not knowing
what the man who could face down a three year old
had on his silent tongue had
to keep from
the man who could scream to dawn air
Latin reaming classics
over a dead tongue of prey
I sing a lullaby from a limb
and hope to get sleep
like a genius
hope that the practice
of centurions
will give me flight
over dead keys
Garden Canada 