In Light of my Father

In the aftermath of my father's death before Christmas and
the memorial nearly two months later, I have begun to figure out
that there is a reconfiguration taking place in me, a realignment
of polarities.
The gravity well of his presence once defined
the positive and negative return posts in the ellipsis of my comings and
goings, the alternating currents of my personality and character
around which I would then make my many ways between the equally powerful
bi-polarities of my mother. She, still alive, like me and my brother and
sister have just begun to sense ourselves in his absence.
Dissociated,
because the resonance that came from him actually being here has been lost,
I cannot simply re-conceive him as memory or even spiritual presence, because
there is an absence now as real as he alive had been. What is left can be
traced by memory, or re-envisioned as eternal,but even then
the imagination has no cure for flesh and bones and blood reduced to ash.
Dad,
tangibly gone, however present he may still be, has left me searching for
him in spaces he once occupied, and in those places instead, I catch glimpses
of me as I was.
I disturb me.
I dissolve myself through ache, shades of my father's own darkness still
haunting corners of my psyche, like ghosts released as I disintegrate.
In the shadow of his death, they remain, lost children, ruins of selves, forgotten, freed now.
Left behind,
the broken me's are gathered up as my father becomes light, his shadow
only slowly no longer shading me from those lost selves, burning them into one, revealing me as I am, other, waiting to be born different into the circumstances and incoherencies I have lived with for so long.

Making It

The car sputtered & steamed up Highway 5 from the Third Line towards Clappisons Corners at Highway 6, rising westward up the long side of the escarpment to crest above Hamilton, I said the diesel injectors were clogged but it could be something worse, threatening us with a stalled engine while a torn heater hose bled coolant over the motor & vapourized into miasmas that wafted through the dashboard heater vents as we climbed. I sustained the fuel pressure & the core temperature rise through the ball of my foot as shoe & pedal fought for continuum, while beside me you held your hands in your head and tried not to break down before the car: we held chaos at bay even as the upward nudges of the heat gauge verged on eruption & the fuel stream squeezed molecule by molecule between the gap sustained as forward motion while my will and your prayers crested that long slope under mounting pressure, our breaths held until we thought we'd failed on 6 in the northward drive when sputter & steam & fume came to a stop in Puslinch, where I stood in the dark night beneath the one light in the hamlet and coaxed the baked coolant scented car back into life & we made it home, only united in relief once we had parked in our spot behind the row-houses on Grange.

Julie, No Longer Sixteen

The remembrance of quiet places in the heart where long ago love
still lingers in the warmth of strawberry blonde hair and the lithe desires
of gawky youth all brought to mind in the opening of an email.
And there you were, full blown into middle age like me, your life lived
in the thirty six years between high school and my response,
delicate history, cherished, even as the cruelty
of the past which arose from my inability to love you or anyone back then,
is as painful to me now as it was to you then - when I could do no more
than what I did, except now I'm allowed at last to say I was cruel because
I was damaged, and that I really did care except that I was so unable then.

These restorations of the heart's long sorrows dissolved through shared memory
are manna, gifts from love for love.

Selected Works book Launch

A collection of my poetry & prose will be launched on Monday Oct. 6 at the Alma Gallery at 133 Wyndham St. Guelph from 7-10. Since I didn't start out to be a mob writer, I wanted to publish some of my earlier works, & so have selected a volume's worth. Not that I expect them to sell as well as the Morgeti books, the poetry market being what it is. Still I'll be hosting a party, with improv music & other spoken word artists as well as reading from the book. Everyone is welcome. Being an odd sort of human being, I believe my poetry provides a window into who I really am. And don't worry, I am an accessible poet, so you will not be treated to an evening of obtuse reflections or intellectual abstractions. A good time will be had by all.

Selected Works, Volume One On Sale
Jerry Prager, author of Legends of the Morgeti vol 1 &2 has published selections of poetry and prose from three of his previously published books, his blog The Well Versed Heart and unpublished works. On Sale at Macondo Books, the Bookshelf, in Guelph and the Eden Mills Writers Fest.

Silence Come

The Gulf Islands & coasts flee before hungering hurricane winds
that curl in on themselves & spiral havoc that overwhelms leeward:
terror is natural, essential for human understanding.
The death prowl catspaws catastrophe out of the tropics northward,
disavowing temperate niceties, blowing categorical speeds
beyond proportion to the instant of landfall.
In the moment unleashed spirit meets sentience
the ground is shredded from its plant life;
the animals that were able to have already fled to higher ground,
the serpents were as wise.
Fresh waters fouled, riverbanks flushed of life;
oceanic solutions dissolve into lakes & swamps & become
miasmas of suffering.
And yet the still small voice was not in the storm,
nor in the torrent nor in the terror: but within each heart
where the code for survival was beaten out in the cause of coherency.
Within each soul there is a centre
that will or will not fail depending on providence.
The I that receives & the I that transmits
are a message mediated by the similarities & differences of their natures.
The hurricane may be a breath of the divine, but
the words that define its theological whys & wherefors
are human; they clamour to be heard above the aftermath opinions of others.
The Other is heard within, when night stills & wind wisps through willows away.

Double Haiku Limerick For Guelph Library 125

There was a writer,
Tom King, who wanted to rhyme
Library but di'n'...

He said, just nothing
rhymed with library; I thought...
brib'ry does, Tom King.