Psyche's Night Journey, July 2018

 

2012

1.

 

From the bottom of a garbage can in the kitchen

honeybees fly out as a great black cloud,

I ran to the living room and then closed myself in the sun porch.

A dog, with a black face, joined me.

“They stung my face,” he complains.

Others join us and somehow we get rid of the bees.

Meanwhile, someone is sitting on the stairs outside by a pool in the garden.

  

2.

 

There are three of us sky diving,

holding hands forming a circle.

We are not falling, instead

we are ascending the sky.

As we rise higher, the physical body  

feels not only healed, but ecstatic

in freedom from earth and an aging body:

I did not want to return to the life

I am living, I did not want to return

to the old life. I weep as I feel the joy of freedom.

 

3.

 

Former Prime Minister Chretien tells me

he’ll do what he can for us

to hang onto the building,

but there are other people who want it.

Also he wants me to lose weight, improve my health.

 

4.

 

In a basement, flooded with two or three feet of water,

big shits like loaves of bread

float in the water and I try to break them into slices

with a paddle so that when my wife arrives,

walking in the water, she won’t step on the shit.

I try to stuff the shit down a drain

 

5.

 

My son tells me he wants me as a “friend”.

I reply, “I am your father, not a friend;

a father is better; I love you as a father,

a friend is less than a father.”

  

6.

 

The key is broken to the old Volkswagen,

but it still starts the car. Returning home,

the car’s gear shift comes off in my hand and trying to repair it,

I crawl into the car’s body and discover the car is a wooden vessel,

a web of slats covered with plywood, almost paper thin

for lightness. I arrive at Oxford Avenue where I grew up;

at the front door a man’s corpse covered with a white sheet

sits in an upright position. When I return that evening he is gone

and I am relieved: But who was this corpse?

Someone I have forgotten or never knew,

the white sheet a shroud, like a body

found in the frozen north—one of Franklin’s crew—

preserved by the cold, lips pulled back in the permanent

grin of the dead, like a wolf’s bared yellow teeth.

 

7. Five Black Horses

 

It was a demonstration of something, the severed

horse’s head on a chair and the four black horses

standing facing the audience. Behind the middle horse

a man took a hammer and drove a bolt

into the horse’s neck; at first, the horse stood as before,

we were all calm, including the horses,

and then the animal fell to the floor.

The others were to follow.

 

8.

 

I am told my father has just died.

He was alive all the years

I thought he was dead.

For fifty years I grieved

and regretted his death.

Now, again, I have missed him.

 

9.

 

A cat has been a nuisance,

the landlord next door is dealing with it.

He has a big knife and has cut off the cat’s paws,

and then cut further up the leg.

Someone holds the cat for him.

He may even have skinned the cat,

and planned to keep it alive to suffer.

We are in his car and I am pleading with him

to kill the cat, pleading kill the cat, end his suffering.

His daughter is also pleading with him to kill the cat,

“Daddy, please kill the cat. Please, please kill the cat.”

 

10.

 

I am walking along a street of ice and snow.

I stop and pay for a newspaper with tokens from the casino.

Then I am in a dentist’s office full of Americans,

all smiling and young, each in a separate cubicle.

The dentists in their white jackets

are all eager to work, they ignore  

a small black dog trying to get into the building.

I open a door for the dog and a stag is there,

I try to hold him back, but he’s large

and incredibly strong as he breaks through the door.

Now he’s in the building, in the hallway, in the room.

 

11.

 

A man is trying to get into a house

through an attic window,

the attic full of old furniture,

paintings, books, and old cardboard boxes

with writing in black felt pen on them.

Two children run down the stairs

to escape this man standing on a ladder

at the attic window. Outside, in a barren field,

 two other men lean over a dead animal,

behind them are cattle they killed

covered with six inches of soil;

“oh no,” they say when a grey horse,

they thought dead, rises up on its front legs.

 

Poetry as place, history, soul

I wrote these notes before a reading at the Visual Arts Center in Westmount, QC, on 17 October 2017:

Poets aren't nomads, we all come from somewhere; and this "somewhere" is our psychic center, our home, the place we identify with, the place where we have a history. Personally, place is very important to me—I think it is essential in poetry—and I identify with Montreal, the home of my family since we moved here 180 years ago. Everywhere I go in this city I find something that expresses my soul, my inner being, the place of my ancestors and my family. That is why I say I am a Montreal poet, for nowhere else I have been is home as much as Montreal is home. So, not only is poetry an expression of location but it is also a place of history, of what happened in the past, of names, places, dates, events; that is to say it is a place of psyche, of the soul.

Lane behind Girouard Avenue.

Lane behind Girouard Avenue.

Lane behind Girouard Avenue.

Looking towards Girouard Park, one street west of Girouard.

A few years ago when they renovated 2226 Girouard, my grandmother's home from 1925 to 1965, they didn't put in a new door (as seen above) that leads to the basement. 

Looking up at the back porch of my grandmother's flat on Girouard. 

Poetry Must be Authentic to Psyche

In addition to all of the important qualities a poet must have—talent, intelligence, and a passion, an obsession, or a compulsion to write—a poet’s work must also be authentic to psyche.

There is an expression of our psyche in everything we do including writing poetry. Great poetry is always authentic to psyche, that is, it is an expression of the psychology, of the soul, of the depth of perception of the poet.

All poets face the question of whether or not they will censor what they write, this is something a poet must decide each time he or she sits down to write if there are any doubts about the writing. We need to ask ourselves, “If I censor what I write am I being authentic to psyche?” We don’t have to write everything that crosses our mind, but most of the time we need to be true to ourselves in our writing.

All poets go through years of apprenticeship to learn how to write poetry, the lyf so short,

the craft so long to lerne. There is also the necessity to be aware of the “insecurity of art”, that being creative, writing poetry, requires an attitude of insecurity, not thinking you know all the answers. There is also the important quality of investing in our writing an authenticity to the psychic content. Without this authenticity, I don’t feel that poetry has much, or any, significance.

What does it mean to be authentic to psyche? Poetry that is authentic to psyche is poetry that people anywhere, at any time, will respond to; they will find this poetry consistent with their own vision of life, or find their vision enlarged by poetry. Readers can identity poetry that is authentic to psyche because they resonate to these poems that speak directly to their soul; it is the reader’s soul that identifies the authenticity of these poems that speak the truth of life, of existence, to the reader.

To be authentic to psyche is to be aware of a mythic quality in poetry. This removes poetry from the merely personal and quotidian to an impersonal and universal context while still relying on the details of the personal and quotidian. Being authentic to psyche is to write poetry that represents the archetypal dimension of psyche. “Real” poetry is always authentic to psyche, it contains psychic content; that is, there is the presence of archetypes, symbolism, metaphor, and so on.

 All poetry requires emotional content, we need to be moved by the poem, if not greatly moved, or moved to an epiphany, then at least “touched” by the poem so that the poem says something to us. These are poems that we spend a lifetime pondering, they unfold for us the complexity and beauty of life, they reveal a deeper truth about life that we can refer to again and again as we get older. In this context, I think of Shelley’s “Ozymandias”, Yeats’ “The Second Coming”, T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, and so on in many other poems. For instance, Williams Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience”, Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, the poems of William Wordsworth and John Keats. I think also of D.H. Laurence’s poems and the poems of William Carlos Williams. The work of David Ignatow, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath also speak to an authenticity of psyche. Melville’s Moby Dick is not poetry but it is authentic to psyche. A good anthology of poetry is invaluable in this sense; every young person should be given a good anthology of English poetry. I grew up reading Palgrave’s The Golden Treasury and I still enjoy reading the poems in this book. These poems I’ve mentioned here, and so many others, are deeply moving and one of the reasons for this is that they are authentic to psyche. In this the unconscious is opened and changed, our psyche is spoken to, and our existence is reflected upon.

Dream Journeys: The Journey Home

4) Bleak House

This will always be Bleak House to me,
Dickensian in its silence and shame.
A place where
I retreated
to a second floor room
and lay low,
as animals do when
they are being stalked.

What binds us to
our silent jailors?
They are shadows or a mirror
cracked diagonally, held
in its wooden frame by dust
and the weight of glass shards
wedged together. A single breath
or movement would disturb
this broken mirror,
send it crashing to the floor.

But these relationships survive;
none of us want to end the complex
arrangement of shards of mirror
resting on broken mirror;
we are dependent
on each other
to maintain the hope
that one day
we might find love.
We stay afraid and alone,
become liars, dissemblers;
even if we escape Bleak House
we still have our secret name,
written in invisible ink,
in a passport: Castrato,
Benedict Arnold, Fools’ Pope.

Dream Journeys: The Journey Home

2) Visiting Great Aunt Edna

I return to Girouard Avenue
to visit Great Aunt Edna,
the only one of three elderly sisters
still alive and residing
at Grandmother’s flat.
She was Grandmother’s
youngest sister, a Sweeney
who married a Taylor
and lived only blocks
from where I now live,
with her husband Bert,
and Howard, their son,
who had some grievance
against his parents
and moved far away
from Montreal because of it.

But first the car’s gear shift
comes off in my hand
and trying to repair it,
I crawl into the car’s body
to screw the gear shift
back in place,
and discover the car
is a wooden vessel,
a web of slats
covered with plywood,
almost paper thin
for lightness.

We arrive at the Girouard Avenue 

flat to find garbage cans
by the curb. Aunt Edna
is not home. Inside there is
a third story staircase
I didn’t know existed;
it has windows facing the street.
The rooms off the stairs
are bright with natural light.
I wonder if they are heated
in winter or if sunlight
is enough to heat these rooms.
There is no sign of anyone here,
how quiet and serene
to walk through these empty rooms,
where three old ladies lived
and now only one remains.