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.

125 years in Westminster Woods

The roomful of word workers honoured by librarians awake the urge for phrases woven to meet 

an anniversary need: official utterances to the assembled before letting humans loose among bookrows; our conversations breathed across Dewey-decimal spines: covers and pages and shelves absorbing decibels of burble that rise and fall between bebop and slide-show; soundtracked between 

clattered coffee and tea cups, clinked wine glasses and cheese plates captured by camera-shuttering sequences archiving random annunciations, taping proofs we each were once living voices in Guelph 

celebrating a century and a quarter of institutional existence one night one night, the most recent page 

of a thousand imperatives turned into being by long ago lending librariian believers: a public good,

individually accessed, become tales of adults and their children later turned in aging large-print readers, lifelong borrowers remembering imagined-elsewheres; realms entered in book-learned histories altering us in our own memories, words, images and momentum still self-defining us, imaginative and factual accounts now years of reading, reaffirming litanies of  words, laughters sadness and mercies perfect-bound inside each of us share as inspired imaginings; the miracle of collected volumes, papers and magazines

accessible to everyone, tonight recorded on tape, an anniversary of hours, gathered  to vanish down comfortable ways home through the dark of Westminster Woods.

Reading Through Walls

At the reading of Legends 2, currents ran through the room,
empowered with possible outbursts of anger and outrage
over the broaching of old sorrows and shames, laying bare
the need for care, forcing the depths of intentions and
expectations to the surface, and around which
we gingerly trod in the aftermath
with feet too large among the hurts
and family prides, feeling our way forward
through questions and answers, first as a group
and then one by one as individuals lingered
to find a way to say something, anything
about buried rage and grief from long ago,
pains so very near, yet still unable to circumvent
omerta silence, which was wound like a wall around
some of those there, leaving only nuances
for the heart to decipher.

Legends of the Morgeti; Volume Two

is now available at the Bookshelf Guelph.

Democracy American-style

The pack is turning,
the wolves in the donkey skin
see the elephant's weakness now,

Bush will be unlinked from Cheney
threatened with impeachment
if he wars on Iran,
and Cheney will fall
because Dem backroom pols
now realize McCain must
defend Cheney or break
the elephant's back

and thus stumble to the pack.

My mother is also

My mother is also something of a nutbar...

an experiment to those in the mental health industry
to be tagged and studied and drugged into sense,

she is also an aging wild thing from rural Ontario,
a force of life-hungry wonder walking and busing
and making her way through Northern Muskoka
arthritic knees barely slowing her down
come granite or pine rise.

She laughs and cries and calls damnation down on the dour
and the lifeless living the dull devoid,
a whirlwind hospital visitor and friend
of the broken and the downward-spiraling
outcasts of all systems.

She will abide any suffering but
having to listen to bullshit from those
who know best, because she always knows better:
she wants to live until she's 150
because living never ceases to amaze her
and because those who think they know best
live half-lives of decay
that just get in her way.

With her purse and her bag in hand,
she hobbles about, squeezing life out of pennies
as she has for decades, dissecting
the politics of poverty around her
with the same communist analysis she
learned off my father in the 1950's,
bastards, she says, and bastards they are.

She laughs like a crazy lady, infectious
and effusive, like laughter was meant
for tearing light out of darkness;
meant to be flung into misery
like a rope to those floundering
in the long sadness of loss.

They have broken my mother,
but she will not stop living,
she will go gently into many things,
but she was born on the banks
of the Mad River, and loves
its wildness;
though grief consume the land
she will wade into the water,
she will rejoice
and damn the bastards
and she will guard the broken
until she falls.