Howling Algiers

You were one of the children of forgotten Lou'sian:

stories never told until told to me:

black, white and brown, high yellow, Asian,

Chocktaw, Creek and Houmas,

sanctuary dwellers in warehouse Algiers,

when abandonment was a neighbourhood,

and you and your friends were

refugees of the atomic age, escapees

from decaying nuclear bonds,

abused, berated, shattered and bereft;

led across the Mississippi River

by a daemon genius for flight.

Some of you never returned, some did.

Only you and another know when it began, and yet,

for a time, one extended Summer of Love ago, you all lived as one

in the Naiad mysts of melancholic wharves.

You made your ways through boarded windows

past unpunched time-clocks; unturned calendars of working days:

you dragged tables, chairs, beds and blankets through the nights,

created a kitchen in candlelight no one passing ever saw;

learned to separate shadows from darkness, defying despair,

hunting dumpsters for reusables,

edibles for large pots, just enough for all;

everyone grateful, much of the time,

however little there was,

the lot of you sworn off stealing because theft

is unforgivable in America, as declared by the founders,

you and Leland, as a danger to Haven.

Otherwise, boys almost men sold themselves to uptown cadillacs

for cum-blown rides and buggery in rooms;

women... girls, escaped from ponytails and dolls,

were taken in every hole by hard men, or by lonely ones,

you who knew love and could face hate outside,

returned with food, medicines and sundries:

with scars and secrets sometimes shared,

long odds you all beat, beating time together

in a place you still call Havre, Bìfēnggǎng, Cheh Ah Pah, and Attuko,

Haven of Lou'sian's children.

Like Jimmy Little Rat, for whom no crack was too small,

stealth of shadows; diffidence of cats,

vanished into a sewer and never came back.

Like Linda the Red and Billy the Knife, took one another

as husband and wife then rode the junk train in their veins

til they had to be left where someone else could find them,

untraceable to the warehouse; while only those

who carried and spy boy'd for them cared that Linda and Billy were dead,

though a newsman who knew of Haven had word

slipped his way, of families in Slaughter, front pages there

of William Roberts III and his Creek wife, Linda Tuskineah

of lives before heroin.

And then there was Pedro,

claiming ancestry from an Amazon Riverboat gambler :

a kid you all thought lived in a time and place that never was: a headspace

that got him knifed for sleighting one five-card hand too many,

the reason you all thought he staggered down Patterson alone with a stiletto-opened back,

not yet seventeen; a headspace that left him dead on the Levee,

eyes open on the River of his dreams,

left by you kids for the cops, the only time he was ever caught.

The oldest of you was twenty, the youngest, twelve, Kitty,

tubercular, runaway from Slidell, carried by the child whores

on a board though hurricane debris, coughing black blood

to a roofless church, where wailing, unseeing, plaster-eyed nuns

received her like a sacrament; thereafter kept Haven in their prayer,

and Kitty. Seven years later, a newly frocked priest

gave up his collar for her good graces;

the two still work the hallucinatory streets,

lay missionaries to the offspring of Babylon Inc.

Children of forgotten Lou'sian, you scavenged yourselves

out of the abandoned wilderness, blew teliko winds

on brass fittings and pipes, drummed buckets and cans;

strummed strung-wire screwed onto resonators,

wailed joy and ache in a warehouse cellar,

while the working world ignored you, never heard you.

Down there was a miraculous dry hole,

cobble floors painted with your rage and redemptions,

resounding halls scrawled with your couplets and epitaphs;

jacknife-cut into ancient beams and timber posts,

carved into the clay brick walls, inner-mind reliefs of one another;

together in arrays, twos and threes; fours and others at once

loving, pleasing, despairing, in need of kindness;

cooking, cleaning, shedding family codes for personal reasons,

baggage busted open, remade under one rule:

Protect Haven and those who seek it!

chiseled onto the lintel over the cellar door.

Protect it, like Ginny, The Lupo did, daughter of a mafia don.

Ginny could talk her way out of anything but a run-in

with a wop-hating cracker from Gretna who beat her so badly

she spent months recovering in the care of those who knew her best

while the cracker went on with his business outside,

went on until Ginny could speak again, after which, he was found

with a bullet in his brain, hanging on a lamppost on Tolliss

near the Crescent City Bridge. Ginny was gone,

but came back to say goodbye, bringing food and blankets and wine

time after time. The Lupo never forgets her friends, and never will.

Friends like Saint Odile, the daughter of a Spiritual Church preacher from Thibodaux,

who had sex with anyone in the group if loneliness was breaking them,

til she got pregnant and carried the child full term,

gave birth to a son she named Jonah, born in a round heating duct

Jimmy Little Rat called The Whale,

although Saint Odile re-named it Birthplace

so that's what it was for other mothers.

Odile herself went home with Jonah,

left him for her father with the Ladies Auxiliary.

The rumour's always told, how she's a cook on oil platforms,

shipping out of Beaumont, Texas; there's another told,

that she keeps leaving kids for the Reverend,

'though no one knows why, 'several went asking;

only no one found her, until we did, and you met Jonah again,

realized his father was Leland, who co-founded Haven with you.

The other Summer of Love was for those who sought

Peace with flowers in their hair, while your summer of love

was lived full bore down Haven Lane

while wharves rotted, pilings reflected oil tanker streams of down river sheen;

and ocean going ships in brackish water and reeds,

where the coral snake rhyme came handy:

“Red and yellow, kill a fellow; red and black, friend of Jack.”

Your Summer of Love came before Jonah's father,

Leland, was lynched.

Leland whose only crime was doing his best

for those who needed him:

lynched for being black, for loving you, someone lighter,

you, Aurore, who never forgets, and who afterward walked the streets

because heroin almost took you the night Billy and Linda died,

when others who loved you got you home,

so time could reconcile you with your parents,

so you could find love again, eventually meet me,

which is when time and spirit

found a realm in which you could know Leland again,

if only in passing, a place and night

in which he saw you and you saw him, as did Jonah;

so now we all understand that death has no dominion

and Haven never ends.

For those of you still alive, the memories never die,

for those of you among the dead, you're still inside the living,

and for those of you whose minds broke, or silenced;

you too, are never forgotten,

remembered across decades,

the living yet hoping

to one day lead you all back

in the name of the one

who was hung on a tree,

in the name of Leland, the heart of Haven

still howling Algiers while the urban stars and our unborn generations

are given free passage and a berth

to the new heaven and earth.

In the town where I came of age

1.

In the town where I came of age within the landscape I still know as home,

granite, lakes and pines, I look out on a corner that knows me, though

some of its storefronts are several times removed from those I passed

in snowstorm, sunshine and heat, in the cavalcades of colour

as defined by the autumnal brochures of my youth.

The church hall of my theatrical past, and of the dances of my loneliness,

is there on the hill out the cafe window.

The bridge, over which I sometimes pondered plunging into, in my not

so wonderful life, begat contemplations of how long I would last

in the cold waters of the river's open ice, just down the street, just out of sight.

I am decades away from that almost man, the no longer boy; the broken child

making his inchoate way into a future of heartache he would not have survived

if the crystal snow had foretold his future: his fortune, glimpsed in the narrow waters

of the otherwise frozen river, would have ensured his death then and there.

Blessed are they who cannot see what is to come.

What is bearable in part, could never be borne as a whole.

Like fairy tale breadcrumbs left on a forest floor eaten by birds and rodents;

carried off by insects, and turned sodden with rain to disintegrate before the return,

the way home, has an innocence, a naivetè that makes hope possible,

so that, here in this cafe window, more than forty years on, the miracle of breadcrumbs

keeps marking the trail of my passage with the remaining innocence of my hope,

gladly carrying me beyond the forest, beyond the desert, beyond the salt plain and

the mountains, beyond the swamp, the rivers, the lakes, the pines:

a pilgrim's progress to a faith stripped of pride, prejudice, and jaundiced I;

a faith that consists of the distillations of love out of thin air and thick, the ever willing

ability to trust my heart more than my mind, with just enough vision

of what might be coming, to believe in every new starting again and every continuance,

every grace and insight, every collapsing centre of every expanding care

around every bend in this unforeseen road beyond this corner where I sit,

because outside the door, the last period that will one day punctuate

the conclusion of my long sentence has been known

since well before I arrived here

trailing breadcrumbs.

2.

It is no secret to me, that the boy inside never grew up,

no secret the teenager within, has an unrealistic idea of romance,

and dreams of ever more rarefied manifestations of devotion and service.

The young man I was never stood a chance of maturing in due season,

like this horde of teens and pre-teens in the diner, lining up to pay their bills:

the long haired girls in their riding boots and their perfect complexions,

the red-cheeked boys and their collective posing, too cool as a sum

to allow their insecurities to individualize: they are young and full

of their own fragile immortalities, but if seen as themselves, each alone,

they come apart at the seams into awkward anxieties, desperate to conform,

to fit in, and yet stand out.

They are the peers of my youth two generations later, like the ones

who thought me so much braver, so much more willing to go out on a limb,

as if I was not a damaged child making up constructive rebellions, not making it

up as I went. Despite what they thought, it wasn't confidence that made me other,

it was the secrets inside me, and no doubt, among these adolescents lining up

to pay for their lunches, there are a few a least partially like me, though the rest

are happily aging into the roles assigned them, with the provisos in their own minds,

that they will do it better, and so they should, but mostly won't, for all generations

are born to replace those that gave rise to them, unless now, in the coming age

of a rapidly changing climate, they alter the future in ways beyond all generations

that preceded them.

Some of these paying up and leaving this eatery, will die along the way,

have their names and dates etched into yearbooks; into the hearts and minds of their peers,

some lost, accidentally forgotten by best friends some drunken night, a night

of random choice remembered by the survivors forever, a choice that alters everything.

Others will perish in all the other sundry ways in which youth fails to become age,

because good fortune fails, because sickness or random occurrence or suicide

removes them from the stage.

It is humanity's lot to come and go, individually, and as a species.

There is only care and consideration, or their absence, to mark our passage,

the broken and the unbroken alike, we all end in the grave, or the ash urn or spread

on the winds, or lost at sea, or vanished into who knows where, though we each measure

our lives in love, or in its absence.

So let the young be naive, and the old be wise, let those whose innocence is taken

and those who retain some of the same all of their lives, remember:

we are creators and destroyers, we manufacture hope and despair, we grow families and friends

or fail to. So if you find yourselves, or your sons and your daughters, or those of others,

on the routine cusp of eternity, patiently - or impatiently - lined up to pay for their time here,

consider them with kindness, for we all carry a secret we don't always admit, to ourselves or others.

3.

In a place I lived only through high school and slightly beyond,

but where my family still lives, a place to which I have returned to

over the decades for holidays and visits, I study faces for evidence

of those I once knew, most of the names are gone, and familiarity

does not place many faces, however much some seem like ones

I once knew.

Humanity only has so many variations of features with which to work,

and so at best I recognize possible and probable former friends and acquaintances,

without knowing almost anyone, just those vaguely reminding me

of people I may have known, mistaken identities and assumptions,

the partial memories of a jumbled puzzle.

There are too many decades, there is too much absence, too little prequel to my original arrival

followed by comings and goings, too many elsewheres, too many possibilities that faces

could be known from some other place altogether, and that they too are visitors, tourists

in a tourist town with long or short associations to the place.

My family would know, my mother, my brother, my sister: they are my continuity,

the custodians of my old who's who.

I am, of course, sometimes remembered, since my face and hair and body shape

are all unchanged, and thus, to those who are from here; who once knew me,

I am a face in context. They know my name, though more often than not, I don't know theirs,

unless I once knew them well. Most names for me, are echoes of memories, resonance

without substance: re-introduction, at best, provides only memories for the next time we meet,

some have stories with anecdotal triggers, deep reverberations

that cause an eruption of recollection, either from personal connections, or from shared circumstances:

of the we were in it together variety, either events from my student council presidency,

or from the two neighbourhoods in which I lived, or the swimming hole,

or hockey and soccer teams, because there was a life here, some of which even I

remember better than others.

The landscape, the streetscape, the landmarks of my first arrival here

alter more slowly than the people, except when they don't. Buildings are demolished,

new ones built, even the granite shield is now subject to dynamiting developers,

so that, where once there were forests on rock outcroppings, ubiquitous malls

rubber stamped by town planners across the province like bacteria spreading their wastes

on agar agar plates, now decimate the character of localized places I knew,

eradicating idiosyncrasies of less formulaic ages.

The landscape, the streetscape, the landmarks also age like people, they grow old and die,

albeit more slowly, they deteriorate, collapse and disappear altogether, while nature stakes

it's own inexorable claims on every demense.

Humanity is mist on a lake turning to clouds, and one way or another

we are a species on the verge of oblivion or evolution, we are a process, not a stasis,

so that, here, in this place where I came of age among people

I rarely recognize anymore, the temporal shifts

reveal transformations as unfoldings, not into flatlines,

but into still other folds within the folds;

what is hidden for a time, can be seen in a heartbeat between breaths;

revealed and concealed as wavelengths of life's momentum.

Jan 8-10 2016 Huntsville/Elora

My Plastic Christmas Knight 1 & 2

1.

When I was nine, sick on Santa’s eve,

My mother & father & sister & brother

Came to my room to cheer me & sing carols.

They gave me a plastic molded knight

Mounted on a white horse & armed

With a lance & sword & shield. Two inches high.

I carried him with me out of childhood.

He lost his sword in a fall this morning,

Weaponless he nonetheless stands guard again.

2.

His helmet gone, his lance lost, his sheathed knife

long disappeared and his scabbard empty for years now, he

sits on his white horse - two of his legs gnawed off by

my dog, teeth marks sunk deep into his armour. His Grail

Quest still unfinished, he is propped up in the forest of

a house plant, encircled by a branch like a serpent grasping

its tail in its mouth. He stands, hobbled before a leaf bridge

within that mythic ring, like Lancelot drained of life by

his desire for Guinevere. Light, shafts through the curtains

in the study window & falls like a road on the far end of his bridge.

When next I notice him, one of my cats

has dug him out of the plant & he lies on his side, his horse

on top of him, his head turned to the garden out the window.

Like Merlin I assure my plastic Christmas knight that he can’t

just lie there and wait for the cats to pee on him, To prove

to him that he's not doomed to that fate, I move him to a sill

where a line of shells & stones & other shoreline debris

lie beneath a goblet of towering blue glass.

We came to this land as refugees...

We came to this land as refugees, in the days when territory was bought

from the Mississauga of Burlington Bay and the Grand - a river they called the Ouse:

a nation reduced by war, famine, and disease, a people

nearly lost to Yankee traders with booze.

We came as refugees of the Revolutionary War, came to a colony that was nothing more

than a British military encampment, filled with descendant Europeans, we came with

free Africans as well as fugitives and the enslaved;

we came with remnant First Nations,

allies-in-exile, loyal to covenants with the Crown, friendship chains

binding Turtle Island bloodlines to our common causes:

bloodlines from homelands seized by patriots,

dislocated from still-living loved-ones who stayed behind

on just established reserves, second-class citizens

in the newly created state of New York.

The Captain of the Confederate tribes, Joseph Brant, lost his home in the Mohawk Valley;

and when he found refuge, it was on land given to him on the north side of the mouth

of Burlington Bay, positioned there, by the military commander that governed from Niagara,

so that he and his local native, white and black allies, would defend the Dundas Road to

Fort York; the Governors Road to Brantford at the Grand.

We came to a Protectorate ruled by the marshal laws

of Lieutenants and Governors General, men who operated in the shadows of Magna Carta &

the Protestant Bill of Rights.

Descendant Europeans in the Canadas were, as well, survivors of religious wars,

men and women who indentured themselves to sail to a continent where some

were enslaved upon arrival.

We came as refugees to the just-establishing colony of Upper Canada

carved out of Quebec, which, before that, had been a single province held

since the defeat of the French on the Plains of Abraham: Canadien peasants

decimated during successive Franco-Indian-British wars.

Stranded together, we arrived as friends of those who had been tarred and feathered,

burnt down, and driven off for their allegiances to ancient oaths.

Black, white and red, as would have been said at the time,

found refuge here, grew old together in shell-shocked generations.

Having repulsed the invasion of 1812, Britain took refuge

from the madness of King George, his subjects suffering while the royal house

staggered into the regency of his degenerate heir: leaving colonial dreams tarnishing under

the greed and impolitic uses of power by those raised on localized privilege,

causing the grandchildren of former refugees to rebel in order to attain equalities

granted to their equals in Britain five years before.

The emerging Canadian nation

was subsequently enlarged by escapees of the Irish Famine; 
enlarged by continuous waves of peoples displaced by conflict and disease.

Diaspora's children,

we weave genetic strands into ancient pools of lost causes and survived flights,

valuing good neighbours and kind hosts.

We are bred to the bone of solution;

grow sinews of acceptance, and most of us, stand as one people,

willing to find something funny about whatever comes next.

Our community of remnants, armed with abundant goodwill, is prepared,

whenever refugee waves break on our shores,

whenever push comes to shove;

to comfort

those now grieving those left behind, those

now yearning for those still escaping.

We came to this sheltering land as refugees; and then,

we become the hope of those arriving after us.

Jerry Prager,

Elora November 29 2015

Working on the River

Sun warmed May

The day clear, blue but for trace clouds drifting; the river, beside me, shimmering,

soft breezes quiet. The still surface slips downstream to the spillway;

wet poplar fluff sweeps over. On the far bank

the old mortars of Little Folk's walls

draw me back to the mix in my boat.

The window seat of the Pub shows flowering stands of plants on the bank below: 
purples and greens, gold and straw, serene with the reflection of the iron bridge,

poplar fluff continues to the spillway, to where the water falls in arcs of translucence, sprays of dusk, veils before the shadowed spruce and cedar of the far, darkening bank.

Back to restoring the river wall of the old Magic Mountain,

the water sounds the spill, sluice and fall way, sounds the curvature of the cliffs

before the tooth of time; modulates frequencies of water

ranging from effervescent to boom.

Languid soundscape... disturbed by bridge workers,

by diamond-blade, and generated air.

There are agreements to be kept, promises to be maintained.

Natural rights to defend. Natural flaws to upend.

Work to be finished on the wall of the former Magic Mountain.

July evening

The wind moves the water like a mirage off the rental punt

docked on the village boardwalk, the bow, a fulcrum to fanning surface

rippling reflections of trees, stone walls and concrete embankments.

The Factory ruins are mirrored and moving before their makeover 
by the new lairds of the mill, their takeover unfolding in due season, 
like the slow pool before the sudden rush into arcing waters and explosive spray,
 mists and light and wet before the remaining trees of the future condo world 
get manicured out of existence.

Another Evening in July

The Grand is out the window, I, inside Ashanti writing languorous summer evening,

no trace of the wild river of two springs before, when rains and warm-spell melt
filled the wetlands of the upper tributaries with a gathering gravitas that drained down from the plateau of Osprey headwaters, overflowed the Luther Marsh to Lake Belwood, were delayed by the Shand Dam, raced the flats and ford before Fergus then over its falls downstream to the Bissell spillway and into the slipstream of Elora before hurtling down around the gorge beyond the Tooth of Time.

Run-off creeks had flooded meadows that spring; rains had filled the river outside the window where I still feel the surging spring of two years before, back when a tree trunk busted the concrete of the old spillway, after having first broken the large,

orange buoy chain, strung in front of between the old stone pillars that had once held

the span of the first true bridge in Elora, the span that had become the pedestrian bridge, after which it ceased to be a bridge, though the stone pillars still stand in the river; abutted with a concrete prow to face the upriver onslaught of hurtling trunks and branches, awaiting a new bridge, a re-purposing by villagers or by new money.

Sitting here in the cafe, I can't see where the water dropped beyond the Tooth of Time/Islet Rock into the lower mill pool and pothole below, into the cauldron

of the deepest bowl erupting water through the gorge, whirling torrent around

the karst faults and caverns, replenished out of unseen limestone fissures and tunnels,

a roiling nuanced momentum forced down the bed of the gorge, the tumbled, folded

and exploded run into, out of and around outcrops and stone erosion waves...

the Grand again that spring and the future

of what the new Lairds of Elora have in mind for us... nagging ...

*** *** ***

The building needs more work. The brick is soft above the foundation stone.

The history of the row of stores and shops can be read on its riverside wall,

a portion of which I have just repointed: the oddities of the organic growth of the row;

the gradual coming together as a whole, each distinct building from the front,

has a time line read in the actual sequence of stone work around back.

Idiosyncratic evidence, proof of which walls came first,

are found in the rising cornerstone lines of the buildings with worked corners,

revealing the rest as infill between the nearest corner

and the down river corner of the last building

by the public stairs from the boardwalk to the street.

Down there, the river pools pollution onto the small beach

below the village side of the old pedestrian bridge,

the bridge now gone, the original span across the Grand

for carts and horses, removed years ago.

Bob Robb says the sand of the river bank has a name: Ghetto Beach,

named for the abandoned, termite-eaten apartments in front of the cinema

still known by some as The Ghetto.

Elora's ghetto, Elora's gorge, the divide between those who have and those don't.

On Ghetto Beach, agricultural bloom decays with summer, a view that will be lost under the replaced bridge, no matter who builds it, or its character: the beach legends

will fade, and seasonal blooms vanish below the under-surface of the future span.

October

Money acts upon the landscape of the ancient karst,

begins with hammering limestone as if it were solid rock and not

ancient eroded coral beds bleeding water from the higher lands.

Money scraped away the trees: the death of a minor forest,

a bit player of woods dispatched in the second scene, not to be remembered,

not to be noticed, though voices of protest gather within ionic clouds

around The Tooth of Time, in memories of waters rising, forces growing

against the foundations of private spans and vistas.

Causes mature; autumn seasons a village receding water,

revealing designs of the new Lairds of Islet Rock;

laying them bare before the first snow falls

and the cold cash of consequence freezes the future

like a postcard of Wedding World bling and chi ching;

a wish-you-were-here-in-Fauxlora-with-us kind of thing,

placed in a shoebox and tied with a string.

The Grand River's people, those who populate its banks, those who publish its agendas, those who come and go and yet remain its people, all those who care and can.

will make a stand on The Tooth of Time, like its upriver prow, facing the brunt.

Even still, the river is rain on an ancient reef,

humanity is poplar fluff drifting into the spray of a spillway.

Life always overcomes, death is always reused.

Erosion of Belonging

We can already feel the detachment from place,

the displacement of home, the need to leave because of

a bond that cannot hold, a village that cannot survive the forces

being arrayed against it: the development schemes, the banality

that will soon encroach the natural beauty of the gorges and

their pastoral approaches, the creative community about to be overwhelmed

by the onslaught of exurban commuters and the monied superficialities of tourist traps.

It is never wise to make a last stand on a landscape of sinkholes.

Friendships will survive, though some are already dying on the vine,

others, still to come, are growing: there are regrets and warm memories,

but the going is already in motion, like a iceberg calving,

not yet fallen into the sea, a stately inevitability,

far enough off that we can downsize before packing,

the acceptance and sorrows within the erosion of belonging.

June 2 2015

Elora

The Last 7 Months of My 5th Decade

I have no sense of age, though I have memories of events now history,

I have no lack of youth, no lack of spontaneous passion, desire, attachment, folly.

I am kinder, wiser, gentler, but sometimes just as cruel and unthinking as ever I was.

I can see the different levels of maturity within myself and others, and yet

they do not correspond to calendar years, but to upbringing, hardship,

apology and forgiveness: I still blunder about the world, as weak as ever I was,

I still rage about the world, as torn by tyranny and suffering

as when I fought for student rights in the shadows of the 60s,

when the apathy of the 70s could still be stirred

with reminders of what had nearly been accomplished, what was still possible.

I am no less sensual or sexual or political or emotional, but no more rational, though

I am more spiritual. I still believe there is a well of hope so deep in me

that if I ever found a way to unleash its waters the thirsting world

would know hope forever. My despair I only once discovered was an aquifer

running beneath humanity and into which I would vanish like a drop

if I ever fell in. I want revolution, revelation and the evolution of the species.

Long ago, I chose love instead of wisdom, chose my heart at the expense

of my mind, and left a wake of ruin as I staggered from care to care, passion to passion,

lust to lust, shared suffering to shared suffering, a holy fool of yearning,

in the wilderness of redemption songs, on the outskirts of a justly shattered religion,

dancing before the covenant arc of my life, drunk or sober, stoned or straight,

burning my life in the refining fire of human limitation, an argent dream

consuming the river of human suffering beneath our corrupt societies,

always seeking the distillation of myself into something useful,

a javelin to be flung into the heart of the beast

that ravages humanity,

when all the love and life and yearning is said and done.