If

If life should take my legs, my happy legs,
As better men than I have had to bear,
I'd still know how to pray, I'd not despair.
The current that has long hummed through my bones
Would nonetheless be faithful, and its sparks
Would keep their spinning parley in its place.
I'd not be lonely, and no less unemployed
And yet from time to time I'd recollect
The freedom that two legs give every soul
And all the rocks and crannies explored.
This thinking makes me very glad again
To be, to be, so simply ordinary.

February 22, 1978

Lent it is, and the prospects raise my wonder

Why, Lord, is the landscape black

These streets feel not sun but storms.

I do not like the look of houses

Always, in my strolls about;

Trees are faithful, flowers sometimes

But homes, with people in, or out,

Have sometimes too much devil in them

Hearths of heathen war with grace

The doors, which could not know I'm knocking

Slam with thunder in my face.

When all my songs are over,

Mother of minstrels, mother of men

Just let me rest my head on your heart again

You know I didn't do too well

But the fault was sure not yours

You would have given everything

If they'd opened up their doors.

Emily Carr

Emily Carr, I finally love you

Laughing bear has played his trick

At last I saw your list of wonders

A friend's persistence won the day.

I loved the stories but the painting

Long ago awoke no flame

Now I see the doors to open

And will tremble at your name.

Sorry for the long palaver

I don't know why I could not see

The coast in your eyes long in mine

But Laughing Bear has growled at me

His gentle back aglow with lessons

I laugh myself to take my place

Perhaps if I should be so lucky

You will lead me to his face.

Silvered Wings

Once I saw a flash of snipe

Or perhaps some other shore bird

A hundred, closely bunched

Race across a tide flat through the air.

Suddenly, as if by signal

Turned they wingward at the sun

And I saw a sheet of silver

Flashing earthward, catching me transfixed

Only God could give that signal

Thought I then and through the years recalled

The vision present, then the door

Swinging shut.

At times the vision of the seen

Was far too bright;

And the pain of beauty passing

Closed my heart, blustered shut

By the harsh cries of a half believing world.

Yet the hidden vaults were not forgot

And often open to my view;

Quite by surprise I would be caught

My soul would then fly up

And fall in silent tears.

Where hid that beauty?

Not in woman's eyes or in my books

And if in the forest why was it so secret

Not automatic yielding to my quest?

Something in their presence leaves me stammering

For the Beauty where I can rest eternal be.

Kootenai

For Tim Lander

I roamed around the world to find

A place to give me peace of mind

But I ain't found anything as kind

As my home in the Kootenai mountains

Kootenai mountains strong and high.

Going back home to the Kootenays

Going to get my soul untied

I've been down in the city too long

I think my brains are getting fried.

Hang out my thumb on the old freeway

Flagged a truck in Manning Park

Make it through Osoyoos

Before the sky got dark.

Had to hang around in Greenwood

Met a poet in a bar

Back seat on a motor bike

Froze my jaw by Castlegar.

But I'm back home by the lake shore

And my friends all know I'm home

Hang Vancouver on the clothesline

Next time I'll go by phone.

Lent March 9, 1975

Lent it is, and silver March insists

In this month of memories of spring

That I set out to settle things within

And sort the thoughts that penance proper brings.

Lent it is and silver March returns,

And spring is breaking up the hills of snow.

The sun is growing stronger day by day

And I am thinking stronger as I know.

The time has come when all the hills and streams

Though they have been my friends and will again,

Deny me now and turn my feet away.

The time has come for me to challenge time

To make her stand in one surrendered place.

She must deliver up the treasure stored

She holds the mirror where I can paint my face.

And paint I must, my world can wait no more

My destiny has raised me up that other shore.

Do not decry my youth; my silent tongue

Knew not the words that summoned youthful fame.

If I wrote nothing more than common chat,

Give neither me, nor God, nor fate, the blame.

Navigators March 10/81

What they really seek, these navigators,

Is forever another horizon.

Our gentle God made earth to meet the sky,

And likewise sea, so we might search

The constant dream, and instantly

Discover our own destiny: that's death,

The singing shudder of the body at the soul.

Like mountain ridges on swooping plain,

The rise of the forest crown against the sky:

Where they meet our vision.

What they really seek, these navigators,

Is forever another horizon. Where the 

Mountain meets the sky, on a swooping plain

Stops against the clouds, or ocean's tide.

The Coming of the Dawn

You came by and you knew my name

Trees in the forest fell in flame

Time, it stopped, and tides refused to run.

Mountains crumbled into dust

Towers fell in rings of rust

Wine in all my tumblers turned to blood.

Chorus

Don't go out in the dark tonight

Don't go out in the pale moonlight

Talk with me till we see the dawn

All outside is dark and wild

The devil's hunting down a child

Stay here till the rising of the sun.

First I wept, then I moaned

A fire was burning in my bones

I wondered if I'd have it to be kind

I saw the tears you tried to hide

I felt the pain you kept inside

I knew I'd have to open up my mind.

Chorus

I heard the wolves howl on your trail

I saw the knives and my blood ran pale

I sharpened up my swords and I threw the gauge

I kissed your eyes with a brother's care

I washed your feet and dried your hair

I barred the door against their howls of rage.

Chorus

 Now you're fed and warm with wine

The firelight has eased your mind

You think you'll go into the night again,

But don't you hear that howling outside

They'd love to get this tiger's hide

And I'd have to guide you through the wind and the rain.

Chorus

Cherry Valley Summer

Prince Edward county summer

Small boys roam the fields of hay

My days full of ease and wonder

Old farmers smiling as we play.

Every split rail fence a border

Every field an undiscovered land

A hickory tree a ship beneath my orders

Chasing pirates was my Queen's command.

Out Among the Raspberries

A poet crowding forty muses on old age

But this one does not worry his aging loves,

His grandfather's image in the garden rows

Speaks the peace of the advancing years,

Each passing sun was but a step to final rest

Old slouch hat and holey sweater,

Gumboots and hands wrinkles

And always a voice leveled against tomfoolery.

He went so quietly into that good night

He talked to me, in peace, before he went.

Towards a Permanent Hold on the Resurrection or: Inverse/Adverse April May 1977

All poets die.

You'd better know this

As you, if you, search their ways;

Their labyrinthine passages

Might not seem worthwhile for following

Into darkness you would rather doubt

And death.

All poets die,

If they're real, I mean, of course.

There is a kind of verse

- Fifty cents a card, in the drugstore -

Written by someone who never was alive.

But that's not poetry,

And what was not alive can never die.

Real poetry is death.

Sister, angel, brother

Death:

To all ambition

To all haste

To all error

To all waste

To all but All and Nothing,

Death.

An every day funeral

Of something in the heart / Of something in the eyes

That blinds the eyes / That blinds the heart

And you can bet your sweet oblivion,

And all the ways you have of getting it,

That poetry will kill that too.

Eve, you know, sprung out

From Adam's ribs,

Is just the symbol;

The poet comes bone grey

From the ribs collapsed on Calvary

Do not come to poetry for comfort.

All poets die;

Do not come to poetry for ecstasy.

Do not rob the rights of fishing streams,

Or baseball fields,

Or churches still as stone.

Don't banquet, damn you,

Where dry bread and lashes

Leaping in the night

Might help you in your blindness

Find the missing dawn.

All poets die,

Especially on the eve of discovery,

Assassinated by the grim realization

That nothing, especially their intuitions,

Is really new.

If the poet finds anything new

He has to throw it away,

Because of all old things

Poetry is oldest.

Whatever is new, therefore, and so on,

Is not in any way poetry.

It might be physics, or even psychology,

But it is not poetry.

All poets die,

And kiss the grave that swallows them.

Oh lovely grave, oh welcome earth

Wherein the poet, discovering the point of worms

Knows a needed rest from men.

All poets die.

Their bodies sink like water to the rock.

Their bodies flow like rivers to the sea.

Their minds dissolve and all their words

Are honoured, like the fish they might have been,

Had God not ordered otherwise.

All poets die:

That is the lesson.

Poetry is death.

Poetry is death.

Poetry is death.

Death is poetry.