Sibelius Park

I

Walking north from his other lives in a fine rain

      through the high-rise pavilion on Walmer
lost in the vague turbulence he harbours

      Rochdale Anansi how many
      routine wipeouts has he performed since he was born?

and mostly himself;

drifting north to the three-storey

turrets & gables, the squiggles and
arches and baleful asymmetric glare of the houses he loves

Toronto gothic

walking north in the fine rain, going home through the late afternoon
he comes to Sibelius Park.

Across that green expanse he sees
    the cars parked close, every second licence yankee, he thinks of
the war and the young men dodging, his wife inside

with her counsel, her second thoughts
                        and the children, needing more than they can give;

and behind him, five blocks south, his other lives
in rainy limbo till tomorrow

Rochdale, yes Anansi
the fine iconic books, sheepish errata
     shitwork in a cold basement, moody
triumphs of the mind
                   hassling printers hassling banks
and the grim dudgeon with friends — men with

deep combative egos, ridden men, they cannot sit still, they go on
                      brooding on Mao on Gandhi

and they cannot resolve their lives but together they make up

            emblems of a unified civilization,
     the fine iconic books;

                                             he is rooted in books & in
that other place, where icons come alive among the faulty
              heroes & copouts, groping for some new tension of
         mind and life, casting the type in their own
              warm flesh
                                hassling builders hassling banks

and he is constantly coming and going away, appalled by the force of
            wishful affirmations, he thinks of the war, he

hears himself 10 years ago affirming his faith in Christ
        in the lockers, still half-clasped in pads & a furtive
                            virgin still, flailing the

lukewarm school with rumours of God, gunning for psychic opponents
though he could not hit his father and what broke at last was the

       holiness; and he can’t go back there any more
without hearing the livelong flourish

         of Christ in his mouth, always he tasted His funny
taste in every arraignment but it was himself he was burying.

And the same struggle goes on and when

  he drinks too much, or cannot sleep for his body’s
      jaundiced repose he can scarcely read a word he wrote,

  though the words are just but his work has
      the funny taste and his life pulls back and snickers when he begins.

And then Sibelius Park!

    The grass is wet, it
gleams, across the park’s wide

    vista the lanes of ornamental
shrub come breathing and the sun is filling the
         rinsed air till the green goes luminous and it does it

                     does, it comes clear.

II

Supper is over, I sit

holed up in my study. I have no
answers again and I do not trust the

simplicities, nor Sibelius Park;
                                 I am not to be trusted with them.

But I rest in one thing. The play of

dusk and atmospherics, the beautiful rites of
synthaesthesia, are not to be believed;

but that grisly counter-presence, the warfare in the lockers, myself
against myself, the years of desperate affirmation and the dank

manholes of ego which stink when they
come free at last

— the seamy underside of every stiff
iconic self — which are hard which are welcome

are no more real than that unreal man who stood and took them in;
are no more real than the fake epiphanies,
                               though they ache to bring them down.

For they are all given, they are not

to be believed but constantly
they are being

given, moment by moment, the icons and what they
suppress, here and

here and though they are not real
they have their own real presence, like a mirror in the grass and in the

bodies we live in we are
acceptable.

There is nothing to be afraid of.