My unpublished archives are really works in progess so I will be writing, revising, and adding to the poems posted here. There was a time when I was loathe to show anyone a poem before I was completely satisfied with it, but age has taught me that no words are written in a social vacuum. I now look forward to sharing this process with you.
A DAY ON EARTH
There was a sign on the outskirts of the city I lived in when I was a kid. It said strangers
are just friends you haven't met and for me, maybe eight, nine years old it was a little
glimpse of infinity. Sort of like the guy on the Quaker Oats box holding a smaller guy on
the Quaker Oats box and on and on.
I've had to think hard about a lot of things the last few years and one of those things has
been about the nature of friendship; both having friends and being one. I felt those
thoughts were worthy of a poem and I am pleased to dedicate this poem to my friends. To
those I have already met, I hold you in my heart more than you know and to those I have
not yet met; I am eager to meet you.
Also, I have had the great fortune of growing up in a large family and yes we are blood kin but I believe we are also friends. This poem is written to all of you.
My Friends:
I study waves now. In the gray dawn.
During the blinding heat of the afternoon.
In the cool of the evening I study the waves.
They are all different. Each and every wave
is different and not like any other. Not once.
In all the oceans and through all time not one
wave has been like another. Like snowflakes.
Like people. At the far horizon the sea cuts
the sky. A new wave rolls in hissing at the
shore like a cat. I study each one, separately
and with care. I have never seen them
before. Not once.
I have studied many things. I am
a student. I hope to always be one.
I have studied but not in order: lust,
madness, generations, chaos, poems,
dirty books, consequences, the lines of my hand,
the great northern plains, time travel. I study
long and hard all my fucking life and what
does it get me? A life I would not trade
for any other. I study despair. It is part
of my job. I study joy and exultation.
I would there be more of the latter but I
understand. I studied carefully and with
a kind of miraculous attention the history
of a landscape. Me, a hipster duffus, rapt
at the sight of the Sweet Grass Hills,
the Hand Hills, Cypress Hills, the Bears Paw
Mountains and best and saddest of all, Paha
Sapa, the Black Hills where an effigy of four
Indian killing presidents is carved into
sacred stone. Clearly I must return to the
plains where these mountains rise as
randomly as chance but for now, each
moment, I study strange bird song, new music.
I try not to worry about scorpions and
hurricanes. I speak a kind of pidgin that
seems to serve. I believe it to be the language
of good will.
It is full dawn now. The day is
already warm and soon, hot. The
village has been awake for hours, since
gray dawn and in the dawn a cacophony
of rooster call and response and bird song.
The air is filled with the songs of strange
beautiful birds. The house where I live is on
a canal and at the back is a lane connecting
the barrios to the village centre. In the
dawn the people walk or ride bikes to the shops
and cafes where they work. Handsome people. Graceful. Just now three boys are chasing
a chicken down the road. They run like
they could run all day. The fishermen have
put their boats in the water and are off
for their morning's work. I can live here.
I am living here. I am alive another day
on earth.
Or this paradise. I have just turned eighteen
and had recently quit high school to begin
my education. I had heard about a bookstore
downtown and I set out on one of those journeys
that last a lifetime. I went into the store and the
waves crashing on the beach these years later
remind me I am fortunate that I had for so many
years a place on earth. I called him, my friend
and mentor of more than twenty five years, on the
phone last evening, the connection not clear
across thousands of miles but clear as a bell
was the sound of friendship, as always. I
walked into his bookstore and recognized it,
I knew it would be my home for the next
twenty five years and so it has been.
I am in another place now. I am in a place
three thousand miles from the place of my
heart. I must be daft to love the great plains
as much as I do, probably as cold as a social
worker's smile by now I imagine. In the early
dawn light I watched brilliantly coloured dragon
flies mating and strangely it has made me long for
the place of my heart. A paradise found made
me long for a paradise lost. A small bookshop
on the high plains and my friend, George.
A mutual friend of ours, another
story, knew somehow the bookstore was
going to be my anchor in the world and
that George would be the captain of our
leaky craft and that all the books in the
shop would be my companions forever and that
by staying in one place I could
travel around
the world and through all time. Without even speaking to me about it our mutual friend
spoke to George suggesting I would be good
for the store; that my passion for reading
could be infectious. A few days later,
unsuspectingly I stopped by the store and George asked if I would like to work there.
I grabbed a broom and started sweeping. I am
in another place now, three thousand miles
from home, far from the place of my heart. I am living in Barra de Navidad, Jalisco, Mexico and I am nowhere at home. But I was. For many years
my home was a small bookshop in a small city
on the plains and later we moved the shop
to a small town at the edge of the plains
where the mountains guarded our our backs
like gunfighters. The places of my heart.
A small city on the northern plains
and a bookshop in a small prairie
town. I am in paradise now, miles
from home. Nowhere at home.
Murdoch in Barra de Navidad, Jalisco, Mexico
I first bought a book from George
in 1971 (during that first visit, during those
exciting times) and through the next few years
I studied books and wrote poems
and made awkward young man love to the
beautiful girlfriends I never felt I deserved
but I was honoured by their presence in
my life and tried to honour their own.
Five years went by and I didn't notice
I was giving myself a beautiful education
and, sadly, I didn't notice I was a beautiful
man with a tender heart - I just ran
and ran through my life, joyous and fearful.
There is a time on the canal where I am living
when everything seems to come alive. An
iguana larger than a dog suns itself
on the seawall, indigo throat
throbbing. Small black crows come
in to raid the chaff I have laid out
for the chicken. Small fish strike the
surface of the water and are in turn
struck by gulls and by pelicans as
graceful in the air as they are
gangly on the ground. Perfectly beautiful
tiny yellow and black birds dart
to the papaya tree in the yard, drink
deeply from the fruit with a wary
eye on my cat. Man o' war birds the shape
of pterodactyls circle sedately above
us like gods. Just now I used the corner
of my notebook to kill a scorpion crawling
toward me. Some days, maybe most days
I feel like that fucking scorpion has
always been coming toward me. There
is always some kind of scorpion crawling
toward us, no matter what our paradise.
Charles. You have to remember that I
was a young hick, a rube, didn't know
Charles Dickens from Monica Dickens. But
I was a guesting young man walking across
town on Sunday afternoons to watch a
Shakespeare on film series, each Tuesday
walking downtown to see a play
filmed by the American Film Institute.
Every day browsing in the second hand
bookstores and every day learning, learning.
In Charles' apartment there was a
universe - film, photography, dance, history,
poetry - for a young man trying to
reach out and not be a hillbilly anymore
it was like entering a shrine - there
in the corner was James Joyce's walking
stick, on the wall a framed letter from Carl
Sandburg thanking Charles for the
inspiration for a poem, recordings of
plains Indian chants and songs made
while he was working with Frances
Densmore and on and on. A paradise.
It was Charles who spoke to George and
said Murdoch should work in your shop.
It was Charles who taught me how
to type a manuscript, cook elaborate
dinners. It was Charles who taught
me to trust my own education, my love
of knowledge. It was Charles who got
me my first job teaching at the
art college. Before I left for my
interview I said Charles I can't do
this, for chrissakes, I don't even
have a high school diploma. Charles
said you can do it because you have
something to teach. He later went
away to another city and I never
saw him again but I never forgot,
never will.
The process of my education remains
to this day, in the argot of those earlier
times, a gas. Twenty years ago
I was living in Toronto, living on pogie
and going every day to the Toronto Research
Library or the Royal Ontario Museum,
studying, studying like a novice monk.
Back to back I read the Iliad
and the Odyssey and often I walked
the streets in the rosy fingered dawn. The
learning. My private eccentric education
from my childhood to this day has been
exultant, radical, joyous.
I guess it is time to tell
you more about George because
he has been and remains the source
of my education; he is my mentor, my friend,
my brother. What can I say. He is
intelligent, humanistic, stubborn,
funny, has terrible table manners, and
no one in the world has had a greater
influence on my life. My friend, my
brother: George. He got married a few
years ago. It didn't work out, more on this
later and I was driving to the wedding
with my Brigitte, more on this later
and I started telling George stories and was
laughing so hard I had to pull off
the highway. I remember the clouds that
night were dark and angry. Maybe we
both should have known better. It was like there
was a scorpion crawling toward us.
Both George and I were rubes in our
early days, rubes born among rubes unto
a thousand generations and only marginally
lucky enough and smart enough to make a break
from our upbringing into a world more
of our choosing. Yes, rubes we
were born and rubes we shall be on the
day of our dying but we each of us, unknown
to the other, chose books and ideas and
beauty and blah blah
blah and it also happened that we were
nice guys trying to swing a deal with
an implacable world. George's
deal was he would make a bookshop, a
place of beauty, knowledge, joy. My deal
was more ephemeral - I would make poems
and we each of us and together have given
up to the world oru gifts as best we could.
You see, I have learned and probably too late
that life is not an abstraction.
Life is not an idea, it is not a poem.
It is money and taxes and visits to
the doctor and getting enough exercise
and not smoking a zillion cigarettes
and not drinking all the vodka in
the world. Life is practical. Life is
not waking up one day and
deciding to make poems so beautiful
that angels would tremble, poems so beautiful
that all the babies in the world would
sleep happily in their mothers' arms, poems
so beautiful that I would not have to
live life in the real world. I believed
it so much that for twenty five years,
a third of our allotment I lived in a
world of my own choosing, a beautiful
funy chaotic world and I thought it real.
Now, here I am, in this paradise, this
tiny village on the southwest coast of
Mexico. I am forty four years old, crinkly
faced from a zillion smokes, red faced
from all the vodka in the world and
I relaize that no poem in the world
can save me. George always knew that
life was paper work and taxes and
all of that and I thought it was poetry
and dancing. I danced through
life for twenty five years and
then the real world, the one that
everyone else knows, came home to
me. I woke up, three thousand miles
from the place of my heart and felt
I was nowhere at home. I love my poems
but they are not the world. George
knew this but I did not. I thought
poems would build safe houses, end
wars, feed babies. I thought poems
would stop my pain. I was wrong.
I have been terribly wrong and now
red faced and wrinkled and drunken
I must confront the world as it is,
not as I imagined. But I must tell
you, I would not change a thing if I could
live it all again. In spite of many things
I believe I am a fortunate son. I am alive
another day on earth.
Think of the times. The setting sun
last night backlit the clouds and for a
brief moment you could see the curve of
the earth reflected under the roiling pink dome
of the sky. In my memory that is how
those times seems to me. A brief shining
moment when everything seemed possible and
we could dare to dream and so I did.
I dreamed a quarter century of magic
and dance and it all came ture. I must
tell you I would not change a thing.
Except perhaps, the world.
It is full dawn now and time
for me to begin my work. I will
patrol the village greeting people I have
come to know and being greeted. I will
learn new words, in many languages. I will
study the movement of palm trees and bird
flight. There are many waves to study, each
a story and by each I am reminded. Each
wave reminds me I am alive this day. We
are each of us like each wave. A story. I am
in a paradise now and each day reminds me
of all the paradises I have had and all I have
lost. Paradises found, lost and remembered.
I remember this. Part of me will always be
the child I was and I know some people and
maybe most have lost the beautiful child
they were and maybe they call it maturity, the not remembering but I think it would be too sad to not be and to not remember the child
I was. Yes, I learn by studying but mostly
I learn by remembering. Like this. The other
day I watched a man in the central plaza
sweep up with an ancient broom crimson
flowers on the sidewalk. Later it rained and
more blossoms fell. When the rain stopped the
man came and swept again. A quietly beautiful moment in paradise
I will never forget.
All of our stories take a lifetime
to be told. I have always wanted
to tell my story so I learned to write
poems, brief urgent stories told beautifully.
All of our stories take a lifetime to
be told. Our actions, beliefs,
our fictions. I am still alive to live
my story and to tell
it. And so it grows
beyond telling. To this journey, to this paradise. Beyond telling, yes clearly, but my attempt here and always is to tell that
which cannot be told and so I learned
the language of poems. These brief
urgent stories of our lives; the
stories
we can scarcely tell, but must.
From the moment I wrote my first
poem in 1971 my life path was clear.
I would make poems and he stuff of poems
is all our stories so I have learned as
much as I could and I have lived as
much as I could and I have tried to
tell the storeis we have beyond telling.
You are my friends, those of you who
are reading this and I love you and
miss you; there in paradise far
from you. But I must tell you and
you must know that the journey I
began years ago was difficult and
more so than I knew. I have grown
tired too soon, old too young and
so I must tell you my story, my
brief urgent story - a poem, while I can.
This paradise. I am twenty years
old working as a groundsman at an
upscale condo place. I am raking leaves
beneath a ground floor balcony and
a guy whose appearance you could only
call distinguished came out and asked
what was the paperback I had in my
back pocket. Without speaking I held
up a tattered copy of Leaves of Grass
and without speaking he gestured me
over the balcony and I entered his
library which I guessed contained ten
thousand books. He pointed at one
of the shelves and here was Whitman
studies, maybe a hundred and fifty volumes
like I could not imagine and so began
another friendship. Another
journey. Another paradise.
Murdoch, aged 25
I was a hurt young man. I duked
it out of my childhood as best I
could and I dragged a grief
around with me I didn't even
know I had. But you must remember that
(and you other old vets of that botched
revolution do I am sure) our personal
stories blended into the political one,
even the historical one. For me those years
say from 1968 through to about '73
were like watching the kids surfing
in the bay here - just catch the
wave and ride it. Root
hog or die. I was a hurt young man
and tender hearted but the times swept
us up, each of us and flung
us together randomly, often beautifully.
All of it lived to a music, beautiful
to this day. We lived and we lived.
George Parry at his Bookstore in Cochrane, Alberta
George will survive. He is
ultimately as
sturdy as the castles in the Wales of his
ancestors. He will continue to sell books and
ideas and his particular brand of independence
that has always bordered on insurrection and
rebellion. I took to his teaching, his rebellious
knowledge, like I was born to it and I see
in hindshight I was. George, more pragmatic
than I am will survive. Me, I'm not so sure.
Murdoch, circa 1995
People wiser than I am have told me
if I want to change the world it
meant I really want to change myself.
Also that if I pine for the great
times of a long ago world I am
denying the world as it is, as it must
be. Si, claro. But I know what I
know and I say what I say. If
those times permitted a young rube
to dream and if later, many years
later the dream became bitter so be it.
We cannot tell all our stories, they
are too much, too long, too complex.
But por favor, permit me to try to
tell you something of those twenty-five years.
Paradise lost, found and remembered.
I was seventeen when I wrote my first poem.
Big deal. Who the fuck cares. The poems
since then have not entered much into
the public consciousness, they have not
changed the world. But they changed
mine. I entered the world of poems and language and history rather like the gringos here
in this paradise enter the ocean. Nervous,
tentative. Think of me, riding
a tide of the Zeitgeist, awash n the
waves of the world and trying to get
it down, make it beautiful. Think of it
for a moment. I often do. The young
man I was reaching for a pen and
a notebook sayng here is how I
enter the world, my citizenship in
this world, my small gift will
be poems. If one is gong to make
mistakes and we all do, I think we should
err on the side of the angels.
It seems to me, these years later that
deciding to make poems was an
attempt to heal pain. You see I came
of age during the last gasp of the sixties,
formed n that crucible but the like so
many of us seemingly abandoned. The
age changed and many of us, certainly
me, and I suspect, George, felt we could
not. We had been defined and liberated
by an historical moment and subsequent
changes felt lke betrayal so we hung
to a moment, a brief speck of time
and tried to make it real, make
it permanent, make it a gift to
the world. It was paradise and many
of us could not bear to see it lost.
I know that sixties survivors are mostly
unbearable - Woodstock blah blah blah, we ended the war in Vietnam yaddi yadd
yaddi. Our taste in literature sucked, visual art worse, film worst of all. But we made great music and we danced in a brief
shining moment around the world and if
one was fortunate, it was a tiny revolution that could last many years. Fuck you
if you were there and quit. Fuck you.
And fuck you if you weren't there
and feel qualified to sneer. You are
not. We made the mistakes we made
and individually we made the same
mistakes everyone makes, si claro.
But if those times unleashed a few
hundred thousand dreamers into the
world... fuck you.
So George made a bookstore, a hip little
corner of the city where ideas grew like
mushrooms in the dark and remember we were
way off at the edge of the world and
the music came a little late and the ideas
came a little late but George my man, stubborn
little prck that he is made his store a centre
for whaatever it was you needed to know.
And he hired my pink ass for many of those
years and between us we made a little
revolution. Me and my poems that nobody
reads and George in his bookstore out
on the edge of the owrld, we made a
tiny little revolution and fuck you.
George stories. Pinche Cabrone. One time
a beautiful woman came up the stairs
and went off into the bowels of
the store which was many small rooms in an
old house. George was standing beside
me when she came up to the cash register
carrying several copies of a book of my
poems. George stomped back down
the stairs and wouldn't speak
to me for days. Especially after I had had
sex with her in the bookstore, in George's
house, on hs couch, in his bed. George
stories. You must remember when I tell his
stories, I tell my own.
Almost everything conspires when one
is born to the working class to beat
the genius out of us. The legal system,
the media, the chicken shit education we
receive, our bad teeth, bad accents, bad
diets. Certainly if you're not very bright
it is bad enough: We are the most quick to be
arrested, convicted, to do time, to be
drafted. It seems lke this beautiful world
of ours has always been having a party
but only those to the manor born
get invited. This might not be the greatest
poem in the world so you wll just have
to take what I am going to tell you
on faith. I believe that George and
I are possessed by genius.
I believe his small chaotic bookstore
on the northern plains and my tender
hearted poems are a gift to the world
not commensurate to that which
we have received. So fuck you.
We have both raised ourselves beyond
our expectations and I think beyond our
times. Yes we are sixties anachronisms
and yes in the business of life, the doing
of it, we don't cut it. And perhaps life is
the getting done of it and not the
dreaming of it, I don't know and I suspect
none of us do. But if the dreaming of
life as it should be is the measure of
lives lived, then George and I have
lived incredibly well. We dreamed
good dreams and in our way made them
as real as we could. George more practical
than I will survive. Me, I'm not so sure.
Almost everything conspires when one
is born to the working class to beat
the genius out of us. The legal system,
the media, the chicken shit education we
receive, our bad teeth, bad accents, bad
diets. Certainly if you're not very bright
it is bad enough: We are the most quick to be
arrested, convicted, to do time, to be
drafted. It seems lke this beautiful world
of ours has always been having a party
but only those to the manor born
get invited. This might not be the greatest
poem in the world so you wll just have
to take what I am going to tell you
on faith. I believe that George and
I are possessed by genius.
I believe his small chaotic bookstore
on the northern plains and my tender
hearted poems are a gift to the world
not commensurate to that which
we have received. So fuck you.
We have both raised ourselves beyond
our expectations and I think beyond our
times. Yes we are sixties anachronisms
and yes in the business of life, the doing
of it, we don't cut it. And perhaps life is
the getting done of it and not the
dreaming of it, I don't know and I suspect
none of us do. But if the dreaming of
life as it should be is the measure of
lives lived, then George and I have
lived incredibly well. We dreamed
good dreams and in our way made them
as real as we could. George more practical
than I will survive. Me, I'm not so sure.
For a while three of us campaneros
lived in a small funky cottage beside the
booksore. Our dear friend Rajab, a Bengazzi
street urchin who also raised himself beyond any
expectation, George and myself. It was the
early seventies, we were all single, no one
knew about aids, we all worked hard in
the bookstore all day and played hard all
night. George was in love or lust
or whatevere with a beautiful real estate
agent who was married to a guy bigger
than our house. She used to come by the
storey, buy a book, flirt with George, drive
me and Raj crazy. One evening I closed
up the store, maybe about seven in the
evening and went to the cottage. Raj
was watching some news. George for some
reason was lyng on the couch and looking
seriously fucked up. Shirt unbuttoned, barefoot
and kind of thrashing around like he
was listening to strange music no one
else could hear. Listen, I'm the last person on
earth to be judgmental about someone
else's party plans, I just assumed
George had dived inot the scotch
a tad early so I watched the news
with Raj and didn't pay much attention
to our thrashing George other than
to notice that occasionally he
would offer up a lucid comment about
the news we were watching or to ask
a question about how the day had gone. Strange.
Usually when one is that far gone into
the abyss of liquor there is no returning
for brief sound bytes of reality. But
you never knew with George. Still don't.
But over the ocurse of the evening, a story
emerged from our barefoot friend, rolling
around on the couch that finally had
Raj and I laughing like to piss ourselves
and George is getting seriously more
angry because he is big time in a ditch
he ahd dug himself but Raj and I were not
sympathetic to anyone else's ditch and
as it comae out that George had finally
done the beautiful deed with the realtor
we cheered but George s sayng no you
don't understand a few days earlier I was
standing in line at a cafeteria and
the woman n front of me says lets
get out of here and by now Raj and
I are whooping with laughter and George
is getting more angry trying to make
us understand that the woman from
the cafeteria he had the nooner
with phoned him the day after
he had closed the deal with the
realtor to tell him he had the
clap and then an hour later his
other frolic of the week phoned
to say that she and her husband
who suspected strongly that George had
been knowing his wife biblically were
to come by the next mornng to have
George convince this guy as big
as a house that he had not had
the conjugal visit. By this time Rajab
and I are crying we are laughing
so hard and George is ready to pitch
us into a river and Raj and I come
up with a plan we think is foolproof.
All prose and poems Copyright by Murdoch Burnett, 2013