"Elegy for Richard"
In which I confess to sometimes thinking about my own poems
Elegy for Richard Around the reservoir the banks rewild Like a fire sheared them bare, and not Excavation under blade and bucket. Almost accurate, the way the earth, Thick with milkweed and thistle, wild rye, Follows an overpitched slope down to the water. A tendriled mesh of roots holds it in place And stops the topsoil from slipping down To sink beneath the surface and become The cold, dark sediment it was before We dug it up and shaped it in a vessel. Down below blackbirds trill the tasseled Grasses standing shin-deep in the shallows And a heron stalks the shapes that flicker Through the crystal eye of its own shadow. The water's low. It's August. One must wonder What it would be like to live without This irritable reaching after figures Trying to apprehend the exact moment The humming alchemy of dew and golden Sunlight turns to lead in a leggy stem. In the darkest day's darkest hour I'll be dreaming still of ample August And the fear I felt, rounding the bend By the woodlot where the twisted willow Splits the treelike into here and there, All the fields adrift with swaying spines Bent under bloom and butterfly, bees Bobbing on the burden of their engines, Heavy as the ivory efferevescence Doubling over the yarrow: intricate lobes Dense as clustered ventricles, the blue Embroidery of lung, the lopsided Plexus of the liver, and the looming Bank of thunderheads about to break And knock the laden blossoms from their tethers. In memoriam Richard Sanger (1960–2022)
Even more scandalously, I sometimes like them. I like two-thirds of this one and may one day do something about the twelve lines I’m unhappy with, but the good people at Literary Review of Canada published this version last September and I am in little state to worry about it today.1 Or perhaps I have ascended to some higher plane of poem-making, an existence in which I am less prone to poke at the soft spots in favour of a general acceptance that all poems have their shortcomings, and the mind that can’t accept that doesn’t make a lot of poems. Ask me how I know. (Please don’t ask me.)
I wrote this poem for the late Richard Sanger, with whom I had the pleasure to work on his last collection, Way to Go (Biblioasis, 2023). It was published posthumously, which Richard knew would likely be the case while we were working, and I remember how inspiring I found his patience about this fact. By that point I’d seen the publishing industry rush enough books to press for one reason or another, few of them matters of life and death. That he remained more committed to making the best poems he could make than to whatever personal edification or pleasure he might take from seeing them published was rare, and inspiring. I admired him very much. Here in the uncertainty of my own illness, his conviction about how a poet lives—how a poet dies—is even more profoundly moving to me.
I don’t much care for opining about my own work insofar as intent or, ack, interpretation, but in the spirit of engaging with all of the poems I share in this newsletter, a bit of context. At Richard’s memorial, speaker after speaker got up and remarked on his humour and playfulness and irrepressible verve, but I noted how a handful of remarks—mine included—commented on the seriousness with which he regarded poetry, in both his teaching and his own work. A young woman who’d been his student remembered being advised to set a draft in blank verse, and that it had unlocked an entirely new dimension in her writing, and so, for both of them, this one is blank verse as well: five beats per line, which alternate between rising—the iambic da DUM—and falling—trochaic: DA dum—rhythms. I didn’t undertake the last part consciously, but I’d hazard that my ear was appreciating the tension between fear and acceptance: the pounding of the fearful heart, the gentle acquiescence of the resting.
Poetry belongs to its public, so A Momentary Stay will always be free. If you’d like to support this project, you can send a one-time tip or a recurring donation on Ko-fi.
Alternatively! There’s nothing I like more than hearing that a poem you read here did something for you, or that you forwarded it to a friend or read it out loud to someone you love: I can’t trade that for coffee, but it also keeps me going.
My second chemo treatment was Tuesday. So far, aside from fatigue and brain fog, so good.
Excellent poem. Just wondering whether you've got a typo in the penultimate line: "about *to* break"?
After reading this post a couple of times, I realized I was reading it not as poem plus commentary but as poem and commentary making a larger poem, which I found moving. The lines and paragraphs all seemed to be climbing together to the last beautiful phrases—“the pounding of the fearful heart, the gentle acquiescence of the resting”—which felt like a summation and a clearing.