Civil Elegies: And Other Poems (5 page)

And best of all is finding a place to be
in the early years of a better civilisation.
For we are a conquered nation: sea to sea we bartered
everything that counts, till we have
nothing to lose but our forebears' will to lose.
Beautiful riddance!
And some will make their choice and eat imperial meat.
But many will come to themselves, for there is
no third way at last and these will
spend their lives at war, though not with
guns, not yet — with motherwit and guts, sustained
by bloody-minded reverence among the things which are,
and the long will to be in Canada.

The leaves, although they cling against the
wind do not resist their time of dying.
And I must learn to live it all again, depart again —
the storm-wracked crossing, the nervous descent, the barren wintry land,
and clearing a life in the place where I belong, re-entry
to bare familiar streets, first sight of coffee mugs,
reconnaissance of trees, of jobs done well or badly,
flashes of workday people abusing their power,
abusing their lives, hung up, sold out and
feeling their lives wrenched out of whack
by the steady brunt of the continental breakdown;
finding a place among the ones who live
on earth somehow, sustained in fits and starts
by the deep ache and presence and sometimes the joy of what is.

Freely out of its dignity the void must
supplant itself. Like God like the soul it must
surrender its ownness, like eternity it must
re-instil itself in the texture of our being here.
And though we have seen our most precious words
Withdraw, like smudges of wind from a widening water-calm,
though they will not be charged with presence again in our lifetime that is
well, for now we have access to new nouns —
as water, copout, tower, body, land.

Earth, you nearest, allow me.
Green of the earth and civil grey:
within me, without me and moment by
moment allow me for to
be here is enough and earth you
stranges, you nearest, be home.

Some of the references in
Civil Elegies
are highly local. The following notes should clarify them.

1. — The Square: Nathan Phillips Square, a large plaza in front of Toronto's New City Hall, at the junction of Queen and Bay Streets.

— The Moore, the Archer: the abstract sculpture which Henry Moore created for the Square.

— Revell: the Finnish architect who designed the New City Hall.

— Chartier: in 1966 Paul Chartier tried to blow up the House of Commons in Ottawa.

4. — Hector de Saint-Denys-Garneau (1912-1943): Quebec's first modernist poet. There are phrases from his
Journal
in the fourth and eighth elegies.

5. — The Golden Horseshoe: a name given to the megalopolis at the western end of Lake Ontario.

— Paul Martin: the Secretary of External Affairs under Lester Pearson.