Thoughts on Leda and The Swan's

The Swan entered my awareness rising from the inner harbour near Molly Brant’s land: the deep thwup thwup thwup of its massive wings reverberating with the thrums of car, truck and motorcycle tires across the iron-grating of The Singing Bridge spanning the narrows where Cataraqui currents cross to the limestone ridge of Olympian Fort Henry where they enter the St. Lawrence River, a height from which lightning bolts once entered Leda, giving life to her offspring with Zeus, the jolt of imbalanced power romanticized by painters as love and as rape by others: forty or more such swans now on the inner harbour: some of passing for human, some passing for swans, some mixedup confusionists, others balanced between clarities of transcendent conception and the consequences of inescapable attraction, thunder storm scales of aftermath awareness becoming stillness.

The Trumpeters are now the life of the Inner Harbour party: they, the beaver, the muskrat and the sunning turtles that climb out of shallow island-worlds, are warmed into equations seemingly solved by the young, Great Blue Heron stalking frogs and fish along the shoreline to an audience of human observers.

Further out, a single Caspian Tern dives, head down, bright-beaked, folded wings framing it, shallow-fork tail-feather shifts altering the angle of split-second plunge. Successful or not, it gathers wind to climb back out of the water, rising then gliding, scanning for subsurface meals, wind and chance defining its hunt.

The reviving watercourse is Molly Brant’s dream coming to life as a vision of the planet’s atmosphere powered by ions mutating eons out of our breathing space-rock to heart beats of spiritus sapiens. The niche of our species is the niche of our divinity, a niche of an aspirational Earth breathing its own existence.

Mo and I first arrived last fall, moved into Kingston: walked Belle Park as finches flew about us among the vine-grappled oaks out by the Barriefield narrows; happy to have us in the woods of their flight through the vines pulling down mature trees, they flitted around us and limbs broken by wind-twist, landing on branches to dart off into the fractured and staggered hardwoods, bursting into the sun and back into shadows, turning us around while following their antics, catching views of the channel beyond: quick as ripples, they trace wind over water as a pair of Canada Geese slip back the way we came, the sparkled waves flickering.

On Belle Island last October, the upriver sailboat anchored the foreground of the causeway beds for the structural steel and concrete car-bridge spans-to-be, a gap reaching across the open channel from either side.

The work, re-started with spring, was that of ironworkers’ seen from the sandy shore. We studied the collapsed boathouse wharves across the nearer way, their rustic integrity fallen inward, sunken; mostly whole, supporting the view of certain-death by redevelopment, by the vines of power drawn like decision-making in warm sand with a naked foot washed by a wave: the weight of our bodies indenting heels, arches, pads and toes, a construction-free afternoon considering a quiet drift into the evening of our species. Waves and airs linger, serene: effervescence heals as we walk poplar stands through inland meadows, swans in coves either side of the widening point. The sussurations of long grasses stirring river breeze before our subsequent breaths.

Making for the marsh corner path, our route parallels the beaver ponds alongside the chain-link fence up the rising ground to where the creek ridge limestone banks fall towards us from the culvert at the closed road to Rideau St. The curtain-spread of cut links drape off pipe rails opening into old tannery paths now in the care of the Earth, the woods beyond filled with garbage dumped by those incapable of sorting the costs of bags emptied during walk-throughs among the abandoned campsites of the winter dispersed homeless; heaps strewn among the concrete-jutting, twisted iron-rods of the old foundations and red clay ruins of the tannin bath; dumps among grape vine tangles enroute through the blackened remains of trees set fire-to by mental health poor squatters with drug and alcohol problems, living on lousy food, fending for themselves for and against one another on land in need of its own healing, their only witnesses the beaver, squirrels, chipmunks and the wary deer long since fled.

Human paces have been slowed by variants-of-planetary-interest in whether to keep our species, or kill us off along with everything else in our niche; replace us with new symbiotic creatures, in our case, with ones possessing more genuine powers of common purpose than our own.

The twisting similarities and dissimilarities between what people create and what exists, play out of these toxic places: the turtles, now resting from caring for the chemical stew of the floor of the Inner Harbour, commune with the sun on the ribs and centre beams of the rusting hull of the disintegrated boat off the Cotton Mill; slip with dusk back into the mud of their mysteries: the offspring of divinities in constant metamorphosis.  

As treason next door

As treason next door unfurls the flags and symbols of fallen enemies;

recycled history plays itself out in halls swimming in the blood of historic agenda decay rates.

Back when business-was-usual, seeds were sown around the world to assist homegrown tyranny, 

a global mercenary takeover in process, gangster capitalists, the Grifter King and his court of

arms dealers and money lenders now floundering in daylight.

Nothing, from the first tweet to the last challenged ballot to the insurrection was unexpected, 

an end inevitable since the President first began to lie in the Oval Office without shame, 

allowed to continue as the republican media fed fantasies to their goats, 

Trump goading them to trample the sheeple in their demonic parody of Christianity.

Rupert Murdoch's ill-spirited print and broadcast agenda made all this inevitable,

sins of omission and commission aired and published like bait to which Donald's Jesusadis 

rose to his dark trumpeting, to his nihilist cynicism, entrancing them, ensuring they were

unable to see or feel the surrender of their doubts while entering his alternate reality,

denying every collision with all that is actual.

Many will deny him before the end: witnesses and enablers

of the vanities of the Grifter King, the greatest con in American history,  a man

without conscience. If nothing else, his place secured as the great manipulator,

will contain him in a madness far worse than that of old King George.

The fey enchanter of followers who believe him to be Jesus the Second come,

a Grifter King-sized Anti-Christ for all able to discern  his true character in a glance, his disciples

lost in the litany of lies fed to them by forgers of treason, by the adherents of slavery, 

by wannabe warriors of cultural and actual genocide, by underwriters 

of indentured servitude trade systems, overblown 

in the love of their manifest platitudes, and dismembered beatitudes.

As treason next door unfolds in competing strains of high noted spewtrails of breadcrumb news 

half-baked by sociopaths, the underbelly of the governed cannot help but slouch towards bedlam,

tracing the increments of classical republican decay, with orchestratrations by 

a cohort of  well-heeled, swamp creatures with red ties to the underbelly of gangster capitalists.

We have reached the endgame of The Republic's Platonic prophecy where

the degenerate pursuit of private property and profit gives rise

to popular tyranny, committed to the goal of suppresing the chaos of democratic neo-liberal 

boutique identity politics, a tyranny already unravelling more coinspiracies

while the warrior philosophers take the stage, desiring neither profit nor property 

for restoring the handwritten page that first constituted the Democratic Republic,

servers of sworn truths, not held by the Grifter King or his enablers.

The bewildered, the befuddled, the delusional and the defiant have now had their received reality

shoved back in their faces by shield wielding defenders of capitol, which is when their prayers of 

deliverance unraveled into the conspiracy of corrupt cops bent on opening chaos, getting 

one of their own killed by the brute force of gate crashers and one fire extinguisher wielding man 

gone mad, because reality wasn't yielding the way it should have been, given the promises made

by treasonous congressmen, truths they had been told turning into lies; the entire world watching 

the internal compasses of republicans run amok among the haywires.

Lost now in the triumph of the defeat that forever unites them, the insurrectionists 

celebrate their small victories while law enforcement tracks down the self-produced evidence

of their joy of breaking and entering, their selfies of smashing, of smearing their nation’s 

sacred spaces with feces during their ecstatic victories of delusion, laying bare their crimes,

petty and otherwise, even as the human instinct for turning on others to save ourselves

continues to betray them, each to each disloyal to self-evident truths discarded,

each having chosen but not yet ready to face having acted, some never will,

the parchments of their nation's sacred declarations, like words never written, replcaed by

QANON's  Babbling Tower of breadcrumbs caving in around their homes and jobs,

losing their podiums platform after platform along with those of their traitor-in-chief, 

collapsing suits playing out  the charade of their intentions; their prayers unanswered, 

the end not far off, betrayed by reality, by what they chose to disbelieve about what was actual; 

their love of the grifter who would be king, leading to the death spiral of their hopes 

on the wrong side of history; the gyre of a despair some may never understand,

holding them forever in place, forever unable to see how they seperated themselves 

from the sheeple they despise following the goatherd to hell.

The sands of the time for repentance and confession

are already shifting beneath the proud boys and girls of inglorious intent 

during the still unfolding days before the inauguration of their worst nightmares, 

the plot still unfolding as they go into withdrawal from the daily loss of the QAnon junk 

they shot into the veins of their movement, the hells of sobriety now theirs to endure

in the cold light of futures lost.

Wave Poem

 

The channel sky broken into long, rolling waves of white-capping peaks collapse into troughs of ever more facets of sky and sun; fold inward as liquid dimples of blue reflecting scud clouds glare light over erosion-resistant rocks streaming sub-surfaces of the shoreline through tumbling moult, a fluid, green shade of countless effervescences erupting as spray back onto the land, slipping out to collect the next row of incoming tumble, spattered gray rocks darkening with drying splash in the autumn rays of this endless cessation while the call of gulls and the murmurs of humans over coffee discussing cultural economics in the seats of the Juniper Cafe accompany the distant ferry as it stretches time towards Wolfe Island and back while I sip my own cup, staining this page with the ink of my own momentum observed.

Prologue from the Pandemic 1. It Began To Go Wrong

It began to go wrong when doubts were nursed into distrust

in all streams of information flow, media, fake facts,

spin out of control, whirling

the corruption of politics business of greed

decimating public good with ammoral sledges.

It began with local news destroyed by conglomerate agendas

of laissez-faire powers to distort truth, bury facts,

murder journalists, all of it financed by

a coin in the money laundry,

when the losers of the second world war

won the peace in 1984’s electioneering coup:

anyone with a working sense of distrust

doubts every word that spreads from the mouths of most powers.

In that spirit, the appearance of a new virus on a planet battered

by pillaging and indifference to the largest and smallest forms of life, ensured the news of a rapidly spreading disease was met with theories

of conspiracies unfolded by the world’s various, competing,

military-industrial complexes and their Officed servants and financiers: by a planetary coup of gangster capitalists,

by a China run by billionaires pretending to be communists; 

by an America run by billionaires pretending to believe in democracy through their Grifter King

who’s con agenda at odds with the personal health

of everyone on the planet, skews news to lie and facts

with no trace of common human or planetary good defenders in their circle

of bots and shills and gospel spoilers alert to opportunities to distort

truth across a wide array of bought and paid for sources,

which is how the emerging pandemic

made us all victims of our own false doubts fed to us

from fake news broadcast from all sides, street level

competing opportunisms, from those with criminal intent,

insisting on the return to work of the already abused and devalued, essential workers, who have forever

proved that they, not capital, are the means of production

the front line between humane humanity and capitalists.

The succubi rich continue to feed off the host

from the safety of their places in the shadows

while the virus unleashes unexpected depths of community

where ever it spreads, turning provincial privateers into agents of common good

 washing clean the contempt of old ways on TV, or not, we'll see.

Emergency Room Visit

A new layer of pandemic precaution greets me inside the sliding doors of the Fergus hospital. 

I have come because my right hand is inflamed with infection, leaving it hypersensitive from old, 

caustic, masonry burns compromised by cellular memories reacting to dust allergies disturbed during our slow, 

week by week move by car from our Elora apartment to our Owen Sound flat, my hands compromised

 by my initial over-zealous application of disinfectant in both homes

have left me now displaying the red, raw skin of my right hand to Health Alliance nurses 

probing my reasons for entering the hospital.

After freshly sanitizing as per their instructions, they wince in empathy as my stinging wounds 

are offered to them; the lava-like reds of flesh and dissolving skin-rock islands of molten mess 

vouchsafe my presence, but I also promise them that I have not traveled abroad or 

knowingly embraced anyone recently returned from elsewhere;

I admit my nose is runny but only when going out into the cold 

as I just did from my car to them and I have no fever, or dry cough,

what I have are burning hands now yellow with pus from the workings 

of a previously applied off-the-shelf anti-bacterial cream responding too slowly

 to stop the catastrophic spread to every nerve in my body so the guardian nurses 

allow me down the hall to Emergency, adorned in my new, accordion-fold mask, 

which I wear like an entry prize.

I expect to find the room full, but it’s almost empty, too many patients 

staying away from hospital hallways as vectors of death, but

I know from the radio that emergency rooms are among the safest places to be, 

nonetheless, none of the usual suspects are here: no cuts, bruises, breaks, gashes, 

slashed bits or internal ruptures have come; they must exist still in equal numbers, 

since they’re always here, but I take one of the many empty seats, as always by a window, 

half of all the seats in the room taped-off as not-to-be-sat-in; a social distancing measure

 against happenstance and misadventure, while an older man, stickered-defined as a Visitor, 

 gingerly pumps his own wrapped hand, gazing out the window into internal, displacing realities.

I am quickly registered and not long after taken by a nurse to inner sanctums of triage care, 

where I find myself once more trying to articulate who I am from the self-isolated depths 

of my own befuddled solitude, until I am diagnosed, outfitted with a prescription and 

sent on my way all the while aware that my last visit here was last summer after

I found blood in my urine while returning home from 

my mother’s last cancer treatment in Barrie.

The all-clears for both my mum and me were given separately last year, 

 but two and a half months ago, three weeks after her late-January birthday, 

her 88^th, she died of a recurrence that swept like a crawl understood only afterwards as quick 

back when Covid was still no more than news of Canadians trapped on a cruise ship 

just as the World Health Organization was declaring a pandemic.

In the aftermath of her death, international economies collapsed onto essential workers 

routinely under-valued though not in her eyes or mine; events now flow in dazed weeks                                           

while hopes for salvaging the living Earth through humane intercessions keep

hoving into and out of sight, nation after nation’s bipolar best and worst gathering momentum 

and she not here to cheer or decry any of it with me

in the days before my first Mother’s Day without her.

I leave the Fergus hospital distracted from the crawl of my subcutaneous itch by 

thoughts of mum gone, not there to phone while the next patient registering is an older woman, 

calling out questions to her daughter as my sister once answered our mother, 

knowing I will never know their outcome.

Human frailty shares itself: alienates complacency; existential kindness 

is offered and taken in glances, strangers greet in passing, often aware 

that our common causes are now redefining the possible, to the point 

that we can even imagine how the natural world might one day recover from us.

I Herded by the Virus LIne

Psalmists and prophets celebrate in verse;

use all mediums to assume a shepherd's voice.

Protective, warning, directive,

we stand and deliver where we are.

Poet's remove narratives, images, thoughts, and feelings

from people's hearts and minds and breath, 

transfuse us all with new ones by turning a phrase.

A dialogue of love in an age of pandemic and climate change 

broadcasts itself

throughout all isolated dominions of light; 

deep into the rockier ranges of lockdown fevers

where darkness swallows us alone, 

and where routine 

strains all relationships inside four walls multiplied 

by however many rooms we have, 

dividing us by rooms we have not,

penned as we already are with or without wine,  

or more than another for company,

food already at hand, or not,

eating together shareable in virtual communion,

help needs discovered and dealt with by performatives.

For poets to silence, 

the page is left with only what's been written,

living voice reduced to what's been said.

Not using all mediums to say what needs to be said now

leaves time unsung for others to have noted, or heeded.

The reverberations of words are resonance chambers for emanating hope and defiance.

Without access to this now's living Wurd; 

without some medium of exchange from voice to ear,

from pen to page, from type to print, 

or from ions received by our electronics across interwebs,

we cannot entrain our words to hear and eyes to see or

wills to find common livable futures.

Our ability to endure together the particular adversities that we

are each dealing with alone in all our nuanced and myriad ways, is what

ensures we can continue to develop the collective patterns of utterance and reception 

in which we will otherwise be lost to one another.

To Susan on the West Coast

Raped at gun point by a marine on leave, a rope around your neck,
led into a field, and let go... it was me you trusted...
as dysfunctional as I was, you came to see me in New Orleans
before we camped on Pensacola Beach out of season,
then went to Disney World and Daytona
and on to The Grand Ole Opry during your nation's 200th year.
I have no idea why me, why you thought I could help,
but you did, you who taught me to paddle, and got thrown out of camp
for sleeping with me on Treasure Island the summer after our travels,
before you moved out west, before you started over,
when you needed me most, even if I am writing about it now,
even as I also wrote about it in the sections of my novel that you
approved, sent me online to find the trial information to use, but there
is still some of us unsaid, between the prose descriptions of spring
fragrances, scents that words can never bring to mind the way a single
magnolia or azalea can do on a spring day, the way that forty years of
wilderness can be crossed in a wafting breeze, carrying with it the key
of how little I did for you back then, beyond finding you
a safe place to be in New Orleans, the Mississippi
rolling all your sorrows to the delta of your dreams
while I held your hand and took you for cafe au lait and beignets,
walked us home through the Garden District under live oak
draped with Spanish moss while you healed yourself
because the only gift I ever had was hope.