“Orion’s mission is to inform, inspire, and engage individuals and grassroots organizations in becoming a significant cultural force for healing nature and community.” Orion also understands that “cultural transformation cannot happen without personal transformation.” (Although, I would add that transformation and change is not as linear as this suggests—there is still mystery here.)

Why do I tell you all this? Well, because Orion is an advertising free, beautifully crafted, literary magazine devoted to bringing people and nature closer together—and therefore dedicated to bringing people closer together with people—and so worthy of support. This year, Orion is also celebrating its 30th anniversary. And at the bottom of the list is the happy fact that I had a small piece published in the January/February edition. Pick up a copy at your newsstand, or better, purchase a subscription.

Time, love, quarks, discrete math, other minds, healing touch, the efficacy of hugs;
that words, as Elie Wiesel says, in moments of grace can attain the quality of deeds;
that our deepest desire is to be each others joy;
that an inner void must not be leaped over but into;
that both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were necessary;
that you can love the earth and not love God, but you can’t love God without loving the earth;
that God with a cherry-bomb equals a big bang;
that mycelium will always remain mysterious;

 
that there is life on Gliese 581 C, and Harvey Pekar and Peter Popoff live there;
that the mind is not separate from the body, except perhaps for Benny Hinn, augurs and certain certified psychics;
that a sock prefers the single life;
that if scientists were mere sceptics we still wouldn’t know about the Copernican system of planetary movement;
that extraordinary claims do not immediately need extraordinary evidence;
that beauty is its own proof;
that if everything was verifiable life would cease to be;
that doubt is necessary and healthy but that the spirit of scepticism is a sickness;
that most things we hold as true are by way of other authorities;
that it was exalted certainty that sent the boxcars to Birkenau and not iffy disconsolate minds;
that to live without faith is impossible and to attempt it is a castration of life;
that there are more than a few fish swimming around with coins in their mouths;
that desire is triangular, and its nature is mimicry;
that a cultural obsession with sex is not a sign of social depravity but an indication of deep loneliness;
that if and when we humans become fully real we will no longer impose ourselves upon creation but see ourselves as one aspect;
that Gary Larson and Al Purdy are pure tellurians—and each in their own way;
that science is humble in theory but not so much in practise and that this is what it has in common with religion;
that faith needs a frame, and reason needs a trellis;
that we are not born with an existential void but develop it over time;
that the non-existence of God can be proven by symbolic logic;
that a formally valid argument can nevertheless be false; 
that the argument of infinite regression is absurd;
that the earth rests on the back of a turtle…and that there are turtles all the way down;
that positive universal claims and negative existential claims are not testable in all possible worlds;
that all ravens are black, except for one or two, maybe; 
that presuppositions are held viscerally and emotionally and half-consciously;
that God is a verb and not a noun and that existence is not a property;
that the word piffle can be appropriately applied to a plethora of propositions;
that when the Mayan Calendar is up, we’ll just switch to the Dan Brown Calendar;
that our deepest and dearest beliefs are not logically verifiable;
that miracle is still the best term to describe life’s origin;
that hope and mercy are stronger than hate and violence;
that Holderlin was shining in his wooden tower when he said, “But where danger is, grows the saving power also.”
That at the end, heralding a true beginning,
comes not the apocalypse but apocatastasis;
that instead of escalation toward extremes,
the possibility of universal hope, reconciliation and restoration.

(Along highway 37 on the way to Otium Sanctum)

It’s a life I’ve left behind, having grown up with it, having been on harvest crews, having worked for a dozen years as a grain buyer, I was once intimate with prairie harvests.

My harvests are of the garden variety these days. A tomato picked in the evening for breakfast with toast. A delight which suits.

But I confess to a blood connection with a ripening field of bearded barley—the twisting of a fist-full of oat straw to determine dampness, dry heads of wheat rubbed out in my hand, a kernel between my teeth to test the readiness, fat windrows of canola running around a dry slough, a stubble field, dirt on my face and chaff in my hair, a trail to a steel bin, an auger motor, the squeal of the v-belt, a hopper and shovel and hot September days lying still and dry through the night; a radio on the dash playing Credence Clearwater, the truck’s warm hood, the flashing lights on the combine, the timed race to catch it and the drive beside with a stream of durum hitting exactly one foot from the end-gate moving slow toward the cab; an all-night restaurant and a Tammy Wynette song coming from the kitchen, the smell of grease and fuel after breakfast, a fresh t-shirt and a new sun shining on a rust-red swath, the pick-up moving it to the cylinder-drum and concave, the rub bars hitting the great rope of wheat shattering stocks and heads, loosening a million kernels from their glumes, the separators shaking everything free, the grain dropping through and gathering, the combine’s flying tail batting straw an acre wide—and the dust, in warm still air, hanging forever.

Read Gary Snyder’s Three Worlds, Three Realms, Six Roads,
for inspiration, for the music, for a lark.
Consider chipping sparrows, wonder to fall like one.
Grow a beard, discover the colour white,
See how it matches the pale ball around your iris.
Stop in Chicago at Jake’s Pub, visit your dream of seeing Muddy Waters.
Try very hard not to squirm
While admitting to yourself all your bluesy dreams of fame.
Stop in Cleveland and loom over Lake Erie,
At the Hall, lift your arms in homage to rock and roll.
Listen to skies full of thunder,
Download 182 bird songs, catalogued by John Neville.
Read 30 Canadian poets.
Fall in love with Bronwen Wallace.
Try to feel undaunted reading E.J. Pratt’s bio.
See your three Benedictine vows topple like dominoes.
Watch a fat moon rise through aspen, check its position again at 3 AM.
Conclude that there are far too many engines on earth.

Forgive yourself for skimming the last half of Homer’s Iliad.
Marvel at the contrast between size and song of the house wren.
Hold a limp slate-coloured junco in your hand,
And wonder at its fall.
Take pictures of a grain elevator named Dog River.
Watch the Souris River flood from Weyburn, Saskatchewan to Minot, North Dakota.
In Fargo, be asked what Providence you are from.
Hike along Eden Road, in the Lowell mountains,
Meet a young woman who does not slap at mosquitoes,
Simply brushes them away. Consider your lifetime of serial killing.
Ponder the immense idiocy of the inchworm.
Or is it the practice of courage
to launch out anew up every blade of grass encountered?
Listen to jazz in Burlington, Vermont,
While drinking Speeder and Earls coffee.
Get lost in the tangle of roads around Eau Claire, Wisconsin,
Later, on CBC radio, you discover her native son and Emma, Forever Ago.
Lock eyes with a cow moose, and her calf,
Did you feel the sudden compression of air in that triangle?
Downtown Toronto, in an elevator, descend 22 floors with a body-builder,
Whose pectorals have climbed thick around his neck to his very eyelids,
Whose blink could snap you like a sprig.
Did you feel what happened to the air between you?
And how you couldn’t take your eyes off the numbers, scrolling down,
Interminably.
Ride the streetcar to Kensington Market.
And try to take in the full measure of Holderlen’s 40-year silence.
With your partner, search for an ice cream shop in Niagara-on-the-Lake
Where twenty-five years ago,
Among all those flavours, she laughed that you still chose maple walnut.
Well, you got confused. Didn’t you?
Become intimate with death while considering choice.
Be grateful for the big mercy,
That’s built from all the small ones.
Every evening after supper walk the treed lane with your wife,
Close the gate, and consider the vesper sparrow;
Remember how out of the 182, it sang that soft-throated evening song.
Pitch your tent beside the Yellowstone River Inn in Glendive, Montana,
Listen to old rockers dance through the night.
Walk along a ridge of the Badlands, see bison sleep in the sun.
Stand on the glass floor on top the CN tower with your daughter,
Pretend you’re falling.
Sample Steam Whistle lager with your daughter,
Pretend she’s without pain.
Listen to the great great grand daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorn
Talk of poetry, then give her a hug.
Go birding in deep morning mist, in Craftsbury, with David,
And hear the olive-sided flycatcher demand, "quick; three beers!"
Late at night, fourteen writers,
Shots of Tequila between three minute speed writing exercises.
        Can poetry come of this?
        Can Dada, can Zaum?
        Can transrational Haiku?
Pick wild strawberries in a ditch and eat them,
Then remember that the ditch was sprayed by the county.
Consider, without animosity, the night flowering catchfly.
Spend time thinking about the apocalyptic sayings of Jesus.
Be told your writing contains cliché— 
        —truth be known, you were fit to be tied. 
Discover again, that you are a Christian, captive, unable to escape,
Held by the terrible beauty of the beatitudes;
Oh but see how we are unable to endure correction, or misunderstanding,
Or grasp that having a Christian position goes against the gospel.
Camp at Moses Lake, New York, find a walking stick
You’ll take back to the providence of Alberta.
Crouch by a stream running into a St. Laurence estuary,
Wait for the goslings to cross, should they make up their minds.
Watch author Craig Childs gently remove a caterpillar from his shirt collar.
Be suddenly ashamed of killing a rattle snake, cutting off its tail,
Carrying it for years in the glove compartment of your car—
As a talisman.
Think of your work, wonder the placements, the passing of years.
Do not plan on going back refreshed, simply hope it happens.
See how much you miss the people.
Greet friends from years ago.
Eat Amish ice-cream in an Amish Village.
Catch the excitement from Deb,
Of spotting two pileated woodpeckers outside our cabin.
Come to believe in your ability to love all people,
But know intimately the failure of your attempts.
Be a guest at a Japanese tea ceremony, with Don, and his wood-fired kiln cups.
In Minnesota, talk to an old monk at the Collegeville Bookshop
Who knows Kathleen Norris; remember your Cloister Walk.
Wait for the sun to strike your eyes through netted poplar
As you lie in a cabin bed. 
Consider the promiscuity of gods, wonder their fall.
Know your own gnawing in the absence of God.
But see how God’s nearness can kill.
Two elderly ladies wearing period dress:
You solicit them for a picture, now smiling, standing between them,
Grab them tight and hear them feign shock.
Observe, over the course of three days,
The rise and fall of a white mushroom.
Commit to flames the dying limbs of a box elder.
Taste the sap of a green ash,
Wear that life on your lips for as long as it lasts.
Sadness while driving through Flint, Michigan and Buffalo, New York.
Walk the Mississippi as it runs between St. Paul and Minneapolis,
And falls over a receding limestone ledge.
See the sacred space where Chippewa once camped,
Down the street from a bar where Jethro Tull will play Friday night.
The thespian woman in line beside you comments that what the world needs
Is more clean men. You have just showered and put on a fresh shirt.
A friend says about your outhouse in the bush, that it’s nicest he’s experienced;
You believe that his comment has landed not far from life’s essence.
Play disc golf in a gale with your brothers and nephews;
Come to believe, always and only, in the power of a next turn.
Take that perfect comedic shot of wapiti mooning a ‘No Trespassing’ sign.
In Canmore, sink to your waist in wet snow, climbing to Turkey Falls.
Discover the origin of its name: the necessity to hike after a turkey dinner.
In a small car, drive 10,000 kilometers in one month.
Walk the top of the Capilano dam with Deb.
Ride the Queen of New Westminster from Tsawwassen to Swartz Bay,
Remember the sea and spray and when you could sail on three dollars.  
Watch coho and chinook breach the surface of a clear green river.
Drink NK’Mip Qwam Qwmt and smoke a Mamona Island Prince,
With your Sto:lo sister-in-law.
But remember you are not Che, with a Monte Cristo between your lips. 
Understand that the only thing thoroughly original about humans
Is our highly evolved mimetic abilities—what wonder, possibilities, what danger.
Worry, without much reason, about your children.
Know that this is only a form of deep love.
Tell the inquiring young barista at Kanata Coffee that you are writing poetry.
Now was that so hard?
Recognize that a poem, too, can be interminable.

I can sit here in stillness and listen to the leaves of aspen—and should the stirring reach further down—the leaves of hazelnut and dogwood, sing in shifting currents of air.

And I can hear dry grass riffled, and this years clover, horsetail and harebell suddenly shimmy together, and be fooled by a customary thought of squirrels, until a branch breaks and two brown shapes emerge on my trail and the three of us lock eyes—a triangle of trepidation, astonishment, and curiosity—a dangerous trinity of primordial desire…until the earth tilts by a degree and breaks the spell and the shapes spin and clear dead logs by mighty leaps and vanish in these trees.

Only then do I find that my feet have turned ungulate and have dug into the mat of loam and fallen twigs where ants carry bodies of insects aloft; and only then do I see the thick brown hair growing the length of my body and by degrees feel myself pitched forward and pressed down on four legs—pent and ready to spring.

And in an ecstatic burst I find myself flying through the door of the tent to race through the understory and join cow and calf in wild betrothal. And as I run I feel the air rush hot over a high shoulder hump and along wet flanks and feel the sweat run down a pendulous muzzle and over broad black nostrils, and down a massive neck to drop past a dewlap. By folds in time I am, and am not, within, and without, this great rufous shape. But already garlands of buffalo berry and chokecherry and wild rose caught in my flat antlers bare testament to an implacable vow.

And what if I had reached my wild-mate and her offspring? By necessity I would have joined them forever in the boreal forests, thickets, bogs and brule.

Occasionally I would visit a cabin, alone, and see her residents looking sadly through fall windows where last they saw my sculpturesque form stand in the fen. My choice now sealed away like a tick beneath my hide, I would stand there in a tawny-shaped fog of memory until at last the cabin would be empty and the visits would stop and I would know only the subtle change of pelage discerning the depth of snow to come, the rut running miles of veins, the hoarse bellows, the shedding and growing of monstrous palmate antlers.

In winter I would tramp down a circle and sit in silence through long nights. And perhaps on a crystal cold night I would dream the shape of a woman—which would be lost in the immediacy of ice forming beneath my belly. Then borne aloft by the breaking of a late dawn, I would rise by the heat in my blood, blood that knows the intimacy of diminishing days.

How close I was, and by what effort I returned to finish my tea and to break open the stub of this cigar and give the remaining leaf back to the warm ground beneath my bare feet.

SKY EAGLE

You fly, with sunset wings,
over the lemon balm,
over the mint and oregano,
over the curry plants and the first roses,
over the fireweed and wild stock.

The wind opens your wings.
I imagine you see everything:
the ghosts that rest in the clouds and
in the hemlocks by the Strait.

I imagine you know fog and sunlight,
and your cousin, the owl,
who arrives at dusk each evening,
to wait.

THESE SWEET PEAS

They bloom, even in the rain.
I find my Picasso mug, named “Heart”,
my mother’s gift.
And the cobalt blue bottle, a friend’s gift.
Then the green ginger jar,
the Florida Water glass bottle, unearthed
from a landfill, somewhere.
Summer on every sill.
What I remember. What I have forgotten.
This sweet bloom.

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.