A typewriter clacking away at dawn. A bit more work has been done on the A-frame, including the addition of this typer. Milt is sitting at it, punching away at the keys. He grins as he knocks out the last line, then reads what he’s got aloud. As he does, Al stumbles in, tired and grumpy. Milt doesn’t notice him.
Milt: “Smoke and in a blue halo let a poem grow
Of winter and sky blue as laughter
Tinting immaculate snow,
The crows fasting on their pine pulpits
And all the other birds gone, except
On a white tablecloth of snow,
The chickadees, happy and fat as a chuckle”¶¶¶¶
Beat.
Hm.
Al crosses to make coffee.
Al: Put that in the shitter when you’re done, I want to wipe my ass with it.
Milt: (turning to see him) C’mon, now!
Al: “White tablecloth of snow”?
Milt: I’m not settled on it.
Al: You’re wasting good paper.
Milt: You’re wasting good air.
Al: It doesn’t scan.
Milt: It does!
Al: Not well.
Milt: Enter Alfred Purdy, arbiter of prosody.
Al: (examining the typewriter) You’re killing the ribbon.
Milt: It’s seven lines!
Al: You’re giving the ribbon bad taste. You’re training it to write bullshit. Before you know it, it’ll type George Bowering poems all by itself.
Milt: You’re some kind of misery this morning.
Al: I used to wake up to the birds chirping, Milt. I used to wake up to the gentle scraping of deer rubbing their antlers on the trees. But for the last month I wake up to either your snoring or your goddamn soliloquizing, both of which drag the nails half out the walls in either demonic percussion or masturbatory vociferation. The only reason I get out of bed half the time is the overwhelming urge to murder you in cold blood where you stand.
Do you want eggs?
Milt: Yes, please.
Al goes to the icebox to get eggs.
Al: If you want, you can set places. Just put the “tablecloth of snow” down so we don’t sully the wood.
Milt: You’re an asshole.
Milt starts clearing the table to set it for breakfast.
And you’re too clever for your own good, you know that? That’s what stops you from being a great poet.
Al: And here I thought it was the lack of great poems.
Milt: That, too.
Beat.
Al: I don’t mean it needs to scan, iambically or anything—I don’t mean meter.
Milt: You don’t?
Al: The musicality and the syntax are at war with each other. The images are both common and improbable: “blue as laughter,” “fat as a chuckle.” You use “snow” twice in seven lines.
Milt: But what you said was it didn’t scan.
Al: The heart doesn’t scan, Milt. What I mean is the journey. I mean . . . I mean where are you in this? The “crows fasting on pine pulpits,” that’s the edge of you, the surface . . . but even that is fleeting. It doesn’t scan because it isn’t honest.
Beat. Milt sets the table. Al cooks. All is quiet. Then:
Milt: Live with me on Earth among red berries and the
bluebirds
And leafy young twigs whispering
Within such little spaces, between such floors of green,
such figures in the clouds
That two of us could fill our lives with delicate wanting:
Where stars past the spruce copse mingle with fireflies
Or the dayscape flings a thousand tones of light back at the sun—
Be any one of the colours of an Earth lover;
Walk with me and sometimes cover your shadow with mine.*****
Beat. Al smiles. Inside, he is beaming with pride and jealousy, but he puts a lid on it.
Al: You should write that one down.
Milt: (smiling) I’ll remember it. I remember the good ones.
He’s happier now, almost dancing as he sets the table.
How are you doing those eggs?
Al: Poached.
Milt: You’re a sadist.
Al: What, in the name of all that is holy, is wrong with poached eggs now?
Milt: Hallmark of the upper class.
Al: Eggs are not classist!
Milt: Eggs are fundamentally classist. And poached? Poached!
Milt pulls on his cigar revolutionarily.
Al: Poached eggs are bourgeois?
Milt: I want a working man’s egg. I want an over easy egg.
Al: Christ’s sake . . .
Milt: It goes:
Milt gestures the levels with his hand, going from bottom to top:
Over easy.
Sunny side up.
Scrambled.
Al: I should never have asked.
Milt: Hard boiled.
Omelette—
Al: What kind of omelette?
Milt: Every kind of omelette.
Al: Does that include a frittata?
Milt: That’s not a real thing.
Al: What?
Milt: You’re making stuff up to get a rise out of me.
Al: A frittata is an open-faced omelette.
Milt: Sounds lazy.
Al: It’s Italian.
Milt: Where was I?
Al: Omelette.
Milt: Omelette.
Soft boiled.
Then poached.
Al: You don’t think you’re attaching too much importance to eggs?
Milt: You don’t think you’re attaching too little?
Al: What about a quiche? Or a soufflé?
Milt: Quit making things up, Al.
Al: A quiche is . . . you know what, never mind. It’d be wasted on you, anyway.
Beat.
Who’s that about?
Milt shoots him a look.
“Live with me on Earth.”
Milt grumbles.
Milt: Nobody. Doesn’t matter.
Al: Sure it matters.
Milt: Does it make it a better poem if you know? If she’s real, even? You know better than that. We are neither biographers or verisimilitude artists. We’re poets. Is “The Second Coming” a better poem knowing it’s about Yeats becoming a father and not the Anglo–Irish war?
Al: What are you on about, now?
Milt: You don’t know this?
Good old Billy Butler never wanted kids. His whole life he was dead against it. You can’t blame him, looking at the world. But then he marries Georgie. He’d been seduced into this whole mysticism thing, spirits and seances . . . and Georgie, she’s a medium. She’s got powers, right? She knows he doesn’t want kids, but thinks to herself, “Fuck it, I can convince him.”
Al: Sounds familiar.
Milt: So Georgie starts having these “visions,” yah? She tells Bill it’s come to her in a dream that they are destined to have a child. The universe, or whatever, has deemed it so. Our boy Yeats balks at this, but Georgie doubles down. She says, “Our child will be the rebirth of the Messiah.”
The second coming of Christ.
And because Bill believes her and all that spooky bullshit, he relents. Georgie gets pregnant, and as the child grows inside her, so does fear inside him. What if this child really is the Messiah? Or what if it’s not? What if it’s the Devil? Or, worse, what if it isn’t either? What if he’s been bamboozled? The poem ends with:
“ . . . now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”†††††
That’s what “The Second Coming” is about.
Beat.
Is it also about the Irish War of Independence? Sure, why not.
Al: And you’re asking does it make it a better poem, knowing that? Of course it does! Significantly better!
Milt: Ah shit, maybe it does. I don’t know, I never liked that poem.
Al: So who’s the woman?
Milt: Mind your goddamn business. Where are my eggs?
Al serves up the eggs. Coffee, too. They sit at the table and eat, ruminating and drinking coffee in gulps.
Al: Is it Angie? The . . . what was she, the nurse?
Milt: These are over medium.
Al: Not Rita from the post office.
Milt: I like ’em runnier than this.
Al: You know who fancies you? Gwen MacEwen. She was at that Contact Press reading.
Milt: (evasive) There were lots of people there.
Al: Her and Eurithe had a little tête-à-tête about you. She said you two met outside, prior to the reading.
Milt: The trick is you gotta let the whites fully set, and you seal the yolk in but you don’t fully cook it.
Al: (in mock confidence) Eurithe said . . . that Gwen said . . . that you were very charming.
Milt: (despite himself) She did?
Milt coughs.
Al: Oh yes. Very charming. So the question is: Who was she talking to? Because that doesn’t sound like you.
Milt: Are you yanking my chain?
Al: Remind me where sunny side up falls on Acorn’s Hierarchy of Eggs.
Milt: (dismissively) Right after over easy.
A breath.
Did she really say that?
Al: Why after over easy? What makes them more bourgeois than—
Milt: (getting mad) Sunny side up has a degree of fashion to it, an aesthetic versus a utilitarian appeal. Now shut the fuck up and tell me what she said.
Al: (innocently) Who?
Milt: I will beat you to death with your own feet, Alfred Purdy.
Al: I just remembered something.
Brief pause.
The hydro is going in tomorrow and I still have to put the pole up.
Al gets up and throws his boots on.
Milt: You do this just to make me angry. I know you do.
Al: I got a foot down digging the hole for it and I hit limestone.
He digs something out of a burlap bag by the door.
So I went to Doug’s in town and got something to take care of it.
He unravels a stick of dynamite and holds it up so Milt can see.
Milt: What’s that?
Al: Dynamite! Catch!
He throws it to Milt, who dives for cover instead of catching it. The stick bounces behind the table.
Milt: What the hell are you doing?!
Al goes to retrieve the dynamite and waves it at Milt jokingly.
Al: Oh it’s fine. Doug said it’s harmless so long as you don’t light the fuse.
Milt: Stop holding it so close to the stove.
Al is, in fact, dangerously close to the stove. He waves it around the fire like a fool kid with firecrackers.
Al: What, like this? Don’t do this? Is this not safe?
Al laughs. Milt steams.
Milt: You oughta be careful with that stuff.
Al: I suppose I just put it in the hole, light the fuse, and take shelter? Is that how it works?
Milt: How should I know?
Al: Well, you worked around explosives in the war. You’ve got some limited experience with depth charges. Figured it’s a transferable skill.
Milt: The bulk of what I know about explosives is that you have to remember to cover your ears, and I learned that the hard way.
Al salutes, heading out the door, throwing the dynamite up in the air and catching it like a baton, over and over.
Al: Cover your ears. Got it. You wanna come watch?
Milt: No thank you.
Al is gone. Milt clears the dishes. As he does, he remembers and recites.
“Live with me on Earth under the invisible daylight moon
Both its face and its shadow gone but it’s still there;
Tide-rise and tide-fall, obedience which is not obedience
but just what it is:
Where thoughts and actions appropriate to a man
Rise amid the welter of winter storms
—the storms of his words, the grey nul-calm
of his winter mind—
Where the pages of a book by Irving Layton
Or any other poet who has forgotten
Flutter—unlike a butterfly tethered with a thread.”‡‡‡‡‡
Al comes back in. Milt shuts up.
That’s the quietest dynamite on the market.
Al: It didn’t work.
Milt: Whadd’ya mean it didn’t work?
Al: I threw her in, took shelter, plugged my ears . . . no kablam. I thought maybe I just plugged my ears really well and—I don’t know—missed it? You didn’t hear anything?
Milt: Not a peep.
Al: That’s disconcerting.
Milt: Did you look in the hole?
Al: I didn’t want to blow my face off. Will you go look?
Milt: So I can blow my face off?
Al: It’s less of a loss for you.
Milt shoots him a look.
Fine. I’ll go look.
Al goes back outside. A moment. Then, from off:
It’s just sitting there.
Milt: Did the fuse go out?
Al: The fuse is gone!
Short pause.
Should I grab it? Reach in and grab it?
Milt: I don’t know.
Al: I’d rather not.
Al comes back inside.
This was a bad idea from the start, if I’m honest.
Milt: The fuse probably just fizzed out before it hit the blasting cap. So there’s still a little bit of fuse left . . . just not enough to light it ourselves and get out with all our fingers.
Al: Problematic.
Milt: We could fill the hole with newspaper and light that on fire . . . then that will light the remainder of the fuse and . . .
Al: Kablam.
Milt: Kablam.
They nod and each grab some newspaper, twisting them into sticks as before.
Al: I’m beginning to see why mastery of fire was so important to paleolithic man. It really does come in handy.
They twist newspaper in relative silence. Milt sets one sheet aside. Al raises an eyebrow.
Milt: Crossword.
Al nods. They twist more.
Al: You should ask her out. When you get back to Toronto.
Milt: Who?
Al: “Who.” Audrey Hepburn. Who do you think?
Milt: Gwen?
Al nods. Milt wrings his hands, an anxious trait since his youth. That and being punched in the face.
She’s half my age.
Al: Doesn’t stop the rich guys. Why should it stop you?
Milt: I don’t know.
Al: I’ve known you three years now, Milt. I’ve never seen you with anyone longer than an evening. You’re always lumbering around in that godawful coat—have you ever washed that coat?—with your cigars and your declarations. You write bullshit poetry about nature and, sometimes, exceptional poetry that is so restrained in its pursuit of love. No, restrained is wrong. Afraid. Afraid of even speaking the word aloud. Apologizing for loving or needing love. You scream about every other goddamn thing, but you whisper about love.
Eurithe thinks you’re ashamed. Ashamed of needing . . . thinking it’s some sort of weakness. But I don’t think you are. I think if you could bear to admit it you might be ashamed, but you can’t even do that. You’re scared. Terrified. Of so much, of life, undeniably of love.
And we don’t talk about it, men don’t. Women think we gather in our hovels and drool and sneer and compare trading cards of our past conquests. Most of us are just so goddamn scared of getting it wrong. All that posturing is solely to convince the world that we have some fucking clue of what anything is.
Milt: I’m not scared. Okay? You don’t know a goddamn thing.
Al: Sure. Yah, I’m—I probably don’t. You’re right.
Beat.
Milt: When I was a kid, I used to get into fights. All the time, every day. After school, I’d take a shortcut home through the Irish neighbourhood—the working-class neighbourhood—and it wouldn’t take long for one of those boys to want to teach me a lesson. I had middle-class blood, and they wanted to spill it. And I let them. Maybe as an act of political activism, but probably not. If I was out somewhere and nobody wanted to beat me up, I made ’em. I’d go find the biggest kid I could, tap him on the shoulder, and then whack him one. Some feeble punch is all it would take, and all I could honestly muster. Then they’d be on me, punching and kicking until I went down, and even after I was down, until someone pulled them off. Next day, I’d do it all over again.
Never won a fight in my life. Honestly never really tried. Wasn’t about that.
Getting hit . . . it was the only way . . .
He trails off, not really knowing what to say or how to say it.
I had a sister, a younger sister, and . . . when she was feeling scared or lonely or . . . not even a reason . . . I’d see her go to my folks, or anyone—her friends, school friends—she’d go and she’d . . . she’d ask ’em for a hug. She’d tug on a hem or a sleeve, and then she’d just open her arms real wide and close her eyes and wait for it. Imagine that. She’d get swept up in someone’s arms and squeezed tight, then they’d set her down, rub her back or smooth her hair out . . . send her on her way. Imagine that.
Beat. He twists the end off a cigar stub and lights it.
No one could figure out why I kept getting into fights I had no intention of winning.
I’m telling you, Al. Nobody even asked.
He goes quiet. That’s enough for now.
Al nods. He wants more than anything in the world to hug his friend. He wants to gather Milt Acorn in his arms and squeeze him tight, then rub his back or smooth his hair out. He wants to tell him that he understands. That he, too, got into fights he knew he would lose, just to get hit. He wants to tell him that he’s not alone and he’s not a freak and everything’s going to be okay. He wants to tell Milt that he loves him and that he is a king. So Al lights a cigarette. And he doesn’t say or do any of those things. He simply doesn’t know how. None of us do.
Al: This should be enough.
Al takes an armload of twisted newspapers outside and puts them in the hole. He throws his lit cigarette in after them, then rushes back inside and closes the door.
Cover your ears, soldier.
Milt is frozen. He just stares at Al and the closed door, and the knowledge of an explosive about to detonate creates a short circuit in his brain.
Cover your ears, Milt!
Milt!
Goddammit.
Al rushes to Milt, kneels beside him and covers the other man’s ears for him. Milt doesn’t move. He just closes his eyes.
The dynamite goes off with a resounding crack. A few small stones and dirt hit the walls of the A-frame. Milt’s body jerks up like he’s been hit by lightning. His eyes open, but they are panicked and unseeing. He tries to run, to get away, but Al holds him down. He wraps his arms around Milt’s body as it tries to escape what it thinks must be war.
Hey! Hey.
Shh.
Hey. It’s okay. It’s okay.
You’re okay.
Milt eventually stops fighting. There are tears in his eyes. His breathing is laboured and short. They lie on the floor like this, a straight-jacket embrace. Milt seeing nothing, Al finally seeing everything.
“If birds look into the window odd beings
look back and birds must stay birds.
If dogs gaze upwards at yellow oblongs
of warmth, bark for admittance
to hot caves high above the street,
among the things with queer fur,
the dogs are turned to dogs, and longing
wags its tail and returns invisible.
Clouds must be clouds always, even if
they’ve not decided what to be at all,
and trees trees, stones stones, unnoticed,
the magic power of anything is gone.
But sometimes when the moonlight disappears,
with you in bed and nodding half awake,
I have not known exactly who you were,
and choked and could not speak your name . . . ”§§§§§
Milt finally calms down. He just sort of slumps forward, and Al releases him. They stay there, on the floor, swaying in time with the cabin walls as they bow in the wind.