I like the ribald poems of sloggers and shufflers, their sweeping hands and glint-eyes, the meat still in their teeth as they tell it loud. I like swaggering poems—poems that have a pack of Players rolled up under the short-sleeve of a white t-shirt. I like bawdy, libidinous poems, flowing flowering Song of Solomon poems; I like a full-lipped-Flaubert of a poem. And I like the balanced elegance of a plaited poem; a filigree of Frost. I like the surprise poem—the one that at the end of a perfect day happily pushes you in the pool; and I love the one that steals you away to a slow river with broad grassy banks, and lets you lie there and breathe. Such permission in a poem is like roughed-in plumbing—all you need to do is choose your tub, fill and bathe. I like poems that are unsure of themselves; a teacher will say these are weak and deficient poems, but I like them because they are so much like people. I like a carefully-wrapped poem, and inside something turquoise and without purpose—something you’ve always wanted but would never buy for yourself. I like care-less poems, poems that sleep-in, then leave you notes under your windshield wiper while you’re in church—telling you when and where to meet them. I love a free-verse small epiphany poem—like a friend skipping class that hangs outside of your schoolroom window madly waving her arms and grinning, waiting for you to notice her, and the clear sky behind. I also like the ones that take you seriously, respect your mind and your time—and if not your time, at least your mind. I don’t like freighted teleological poems or big cosmic ontological poems. They are like model rockets—all decals and plastic—that topple over in a minor gust, spark and fizzle and spin in circles on the pavement. I don’t like poems that tousle you, because I hated being tousled, and even hate the word tousle. And I don’t like hail-fellow-well-met cowboy poems, although I’ll admit to smiling through a few. At the same time, I don’t like elevated poems, pointy  poems, God-bless-’em poems, poems that talk too much and don’t listen or look—those kind don’t have ears, which means they can’t have a heart. I don’t care for poems that support a thesis, unless the poem came before the thesis was conceived, in which case it can be brilliant and beautiful. But I do like poems that spitball you, chase you and chide you with their slant rhymes and bumpy meter and screwy trochee—and you sit there and take it because they’re saying something important. But the poem that breaks me open, the one that hurts without doing me harm, oh, give me this; give me your signet, your sonnet, your elegy or epic, and I’ll climb, kneel, open my hands, eat the host and drink the wine; trust me, I’d wait through any black night with you.

We’re having a condo Christmas this year, son Justin is home from the misty coast; Daughter Teryl (who just finished her bachelor of science) and entrepreneurial Jordan, Musical son Mark and Blackbird Amanda will be ’round about; Deb, my wife, (who just got a job as staff manager of the Spady Centre) will be around as well:); a few weeks ago we spent a fine weekend with son Lucas and Jamie and granddaughter Madison (“motored to Saskatoon” as Julia Y. would have so aptly wrote it up in Local Happenings in the Yorkton Enterprise); as for eldest son Michael, we’ll be Skyping him in from Japan. (Awhile back we "Skyped" in a hockey game with him—the hockey game, that Olympic one—not long ago we Skyed an entire game of Monopoly with Justin, just a matter of getting the camera angles right. But he took too much pleasure in the win…so we’re wondering about the camera angles.)

But on this Christmas eve, dear reader, I’m finding that the older I get the more I want to plant myself in earth and family and friends. I’m pining for dirt in my ears and creased smiles over mashed potatoes and thinking that the closer I get to the microbial mass of humus and the hug of a sister or brother or mother the nearer I sidle to something eternal.

And the closer I get to that still point, the more I know I rely on ties. The immediate ones like Christmas with kids, New Year’s with friends. And the looser ones of memory—memories of you, to the memories of jokes my late Dad used to tell down at the Springside Sask. lumberyard like: Fellow comes in, says to the lumberyard guy, "I need some four-by-twos." "You mean two-by-fours?" The man says, "Ah, let me check," and goes back to the pick-up truck, his buddies roll down the window and they confer a while. He returns and says, "Yeah, I meant two-by-fours." Alright. How long do you need them?" The man thinks for a bit and says, "I’d better go check." After conferring again, he returns and says, "A long time. We’re gonna build a house." And that would crack ‘em all up.

These ties of matter and memory do matter. So thank you dear friends. And thank you to anyone and everyone who reads and/or responds. Know that my embracing thoughts are on their way and even now are arriving under your doors and settling upon your Christmas trees.

And on this eve of yet-another-Christmas for we ripe ones, and on this eve of a still-new Christmas for you suppler ones, have a wonderful Christmas.

After all, and for us all, ripe or supple, Christmas still signals the Incarnational mystery of "God with us"; the beauty and fragility of earth and family; the hope and sign of friendship and everlasting peace; and the wonder of resurrection, through the birth of baby.

May you all, dear friends and family, celebrate well and celebrate hearty, and have many fishes and loaves left over.

That was the season of lice and scabies and gallon jugs of Benzo-benzoate. And it was the season of a large landlord standing on my feet outside a pub on Government St. telling me I had a week to get him the rent or he’d "do something worse." He was a junkie and unpredictable.

Winter had moved in and it was rainy and I was broke, as we all were, and so it was back, once again, to Port Alberni for a few (Mac and Blo) lumber-mill pay cheques.

The months and years of no-fixed-address had been piling up and all around I sensed things were winding down, preparing to break up. Like there was a ledge somewhere down river and you could hear the water whitening as it fell over rock shelves but you couldn’t tell how far down, or on which bend you should start to back paddle.

It was a year or so after we were kicked off Hornby Island—banned for a year for building a raft out of driftwood, setting it on fire and swimming it out into bay then swimming back and watching the beauty of the thing burn into the horizon. A flaming eye in the night, fixed back on us, pinning us to the beach.

Well, we had taken too much for granted. Like we were the only ones living on the Island. The first or last tribe. And I had fallen for it all. The beach, the salt, the oysters cracking open in a fire and eaten off the shell, the arbutus trees—their skin as sensual as the legs of Tina Turner—the turn of the tide like a seeking heart, the small store with the screen door a short hike away, the communal come-and-go.

That time was too spiritual to last anyway. It was too basic. Too Huck-Finn-human. I mean we built a driftwood hut, called it a house, and why not, it had two rooms and a big open door you hardly had to duck under to get in.

For a while there was a nudist family—a couple with two daughters—that camped on the beach just the other side of a rivulet that ran throughout the summer; and Joe, who wasn’t paired up, was always going over to the rill playing with the running water, then finally making excuses to go over and visit. One evening he just stripped naked and went and joined them by their fire—sat there on a log grinning. From where we were, we could see his teeth shinning in the orange-yellow light.

The morning after the raft-fire, police came and tore down our house and escorted us off the island. Ferries from Hornby to Denman Island and on to Buckley Bay, they saw us all the way to the main island.

Nobody said it but it seemed to mark the end of a beginning. Still we hiked, walked and rode, and landed on Salt Spring, flirted with other gulf islands; always finding ourselves in Victoria and then in Port Alberni when things got too bare-bone.

But the frays came, edges showed and life slowly became serious. People left, moved, found paths that lead far away. There was a time on Hornby that I thought it possible to live out a life entirely untethered—but for that sustaining bay. Silly. And yet here, writing this in the innocence of pre-dawn, I think; and why not?

Winter waits. The soil of summer-fallow waits, bulbs wait, bamboo is excellent at waiting, geese wait until the time is right. Beavers don’t abide waiting, but orb weavers don’t seem to mind. They spin and wait as long as it takes. The earth spins too, waiting its equinox.

But light bulbs, street lights, clocks, little chips in computers, never wait and will never care to wait. And we use them and anything else we can think of to train the waiting out of our lives.

The world of commerce is bent on bringing patience to an end. Industry and commerce keep company with the future. Corporations race each other to see how far they can project themselves into the future, or how much of it they can drag into the present, which destroys both.

There is madness here that we’ve normalized. Because life, our second womb, is about waiting. Waiting, not like Estrogon and Vladimir, but waiting without excessive effort in acceptance of a serial now. Impatience has nothing to do with waiting.

Advent is the season of expectation. It’s a storied rendezvous with a knowing midwife. A time for rekindled waiting—should we see to turn this to our soul’s advancement. 

And in Advent, we wait in a commemorative way, for the birth of Jesus. As people of the paschal mystery we are always anticipating some kind of birth and some kind of resurrection. And so we wait as one waits for dawn.

I can’t see it yet but soon east will grow orange. Behind the berm of buildings across the North Saskatchewan high on the bank, the trees will turn skeletal as light strengthens behind them.

It’s early November and the windows are showing streaks of cold.

Through the smudged glass is the night’s outline of a spruce tree, and beyond, a blackout of tangled bush.

In two hours the dawn will arrive to remove a cuticle moon and some scattered stars.

I sit bundled in layers of clothes, in front of an electric heater, on an old couch, and pray that I never take this beauty for granted; pray that the beauty I see will find a home within, toward which I will rise and repeatedly respond.

For my gratitude is the ragged kind, my words, forgetful. But this—until there’s a newer day—is still what I bring to offer the penetrating silence.

And as the closing season creeps in and I increasingly feel like an Arctic aven; I pray that while I breath I would yet bloom—under the snow if need be.

But beyond this, how much has really changed?  Fear is still ratcheted up; security is still and ever our god, as trust erodes; and violence in all its forms is further entrenched, even as its effectiveness steadily vanishes. Normal has simply gotten worse.

Seems to me that to believe that everything has changed is to ignore the ubiquity of our old disease and its symptoms, there for all to see. To believe that everything has changed, that 9-11 somehow exposed our nationalistic innocence and vulnerability is just another way the age-old lie of sacrificial violence is maintained.

Think back to the ensuing days of 9-11. Were we not all caught up? Suddenly we were all patriots. A phrase that echoed through the western world’s networks was, "We are all Americans now." And suddenly the churches were full—most every church flying an American flag. A spontaneous and unholy impression of unanimity. With our ersatz kinship and goodness suddenly rediscovered, we hastily sought a target for our now justified outrage. No questioning the declaration of vengeance issued by the American president from behind a church pulpit. No reflection beyond retaliation, only a question of how soon.

In this kind of collective unrest blame finds its target; the target’s guilt obvious by virtue of it being targeted, and so excluded; and the death and destruction of distant neighbourhoods or nations, neatly vindicated.

What can descend like dew in this confusion? Can artists, poets, and writers, regardless of faith, put flesh on the bleaching bones of peace and liberation?

This is a time for the dew of beauty to descend. A time like so many other times. And yet, a heightened and urgent time, if only for the stark and burgeoning fact that there are no other solutions than mercy and nonviolence. (A mercy modelled and lived out best, to my mind, by Jesus.)

The way of mercy and nonviolence is all we have left. It was only and always what we had left, but we were taken in by the lie of sacrificial violence, co-opted by a culture based on death. If not growing mercy, and precipitous nonviolence, as remote as this appears, what remains, is apocalyptic violence—the escalation to extreme forms of reciprocal reprisals.

Yet, in the midst of this long shot are outbreaks of truth and compassion, humanizing moments, emerging groups of non-possessed people. So here’s a call to the artists and artisans to become the new anchors of real change.

There are eight windows in this room, nine with the skylight.
So when you are lying in bed and a storm moves at midnight,
and lightning rides through the trees rinsing leaves white,
you may think of the apocalypse, or, you may think
you are drinking at the shinning river of God’s pleasure.

And when the spider webs on the ceiling flash
fat with light, and walls blaze magnesium bright,
you may think of Thor and the rage of a hundred weathered gods.
Or you may think of a fountain of light that showers bodies with love.

And at that illumination you may be struck dead with regret,
for every failed encounter and opportunity ignored,
and every untried possibility and each barbed word.

Or, you may be pulled above the covers by silken strings,
lifted by a sudden flood of forgiveness to sail the weave
of a silver web and emerge at the delta of all creation,
where history is reconciled and time redeemed.

And when the storm passes and all your thoughts
collapse like thunder upon your weighted world;
you may be wiser for the courtship of excess,
but more grateful that your restive self
can return to the flux of day.

The streets are dim but the  eastern
face of the CN Tower is glowing yellow.
Black steel towers cast province-long
shadows—a liminal benediction.
I am in a hallowed space untouched by the worries
of east coast fishermen, prairie farmers, west coast loggers.
Here the dress designers are gaining international traction,
the downtown bicycle exchange program is gaining adherents,
the cigarette ends and beer cans are vacuumed up at dawn,
and the CBC sits squat and toad-righteous upon a paved lily pad.
Its logo, a confusion of happy-faces, looks up and down
for news that can be counted on for quick cloning,
because the real future is in the race to carry
news, faster, farther, in higher definition,
without the drag of reflection.

 
She emerges suddenly from the concrete flutes
beneath the glass and tensile-steel mushroom.
Impossibly high, white-winged to my naked eye,
she falls into the grey-blue, then unfolding,
spins above the boom-cranes, a centrifuge, 
her tail a tiller, her wings rudders.
Then gaining lift from the rigging of warm air
she banks and curls away, floats toward
the harbour front where musicians sleep,
and the slow water of Lake Ontario
runs its millennial path,
before microwave and rebar,
beyond the frailty of politics;
to spring my mind free from the cages
around the shrunken trunks of these trees.