15 Ways To Visit Your Lover

1. Present yourself at Administration
        and tell them who you are
        and whom you wish to see;

2. Report to Security,
        get searched for drugs;

3. Take your visitor’s pass
        to the first locked door
        and show it to the guard;

4. Take ten steps to the next door;

5. Show your visitor’s pass to the
        second guard; proceed

6. into the room. Find your lover.

7. The psychiatric orderlies
        all dress alike;

8. The patients, in states of dress
        or undress, are all different.

9. Keep in mind that everyone
        in the common room
        has been violent in the past
        and could be again
        at any time

10. including the orderlies.

11. Kiss. Hold hands. Talk about
        everything, except
        what happens here.

12. Pledge undying love;
        mention marriage
        when things are better,
        always when things are better.

13. Leave the institution
        and sit in the parking lot
        until the grief passes ‒

14. perhaps half an hour.

15. Start car and drive home.

James Deahl

The New Canadian Poets

            for Dennis Lee

1.

Today is my sixty-seventh birthday
and I’m reading
The New Canadian Poets: 1970 – 1985,
itself twenty-seven years old.
The poets included in this anthology
are of my own generation,
and half-a-dozen are long-standing friends.

2.

I recently bought this book
for fifty cents
in Sylvan, Ontario.
The last person to read it was
Jessica Oosterhuis.
All I know of Jessica
is that her family came from Holland
and she was a student in room 210,
Lord Dorchester Secondary School.

3.

I’ve known Dennis Lee
for thirty years,
and know him to be a superb
editor and critic.
But I fail at relating
any of the comments made in his
thirty-three page Introduction
to either me
or my poetry friends.

4.

The fault is, doubtless, mine.

5.

The back of the book states:
“Till now it has been impossible
to assess the latest generation as a whole.
The introduction by Dennis Lee stands
as a major essay on the new poetry.”
But I still cannot assess
even my own poetry.

6.

This anthology appears to have
hardly been read at all,
its pages are so pristine.
The only poem annotated by any reader
(Dutch girl Jessica?) is “The Mighty Buck,
the Immigrant Fuck, and Melting Pot Luck”
by Ray Filip.
Ray was born in Germany
and reportedly looks like everyman,
but this is not
one of his better pieces.

7.

Dennis dedicates his book to
“a published poet who is not
represented here, but
who will catch fire the week
this anthology goes to press.”
I think he means me.

James Deahl

The Widow’s Voice

            . . . el tiempo se escapa
        y con voz de viuda me llama
        desde los bosques olvidados.
                              ‒ Pablo Neruda

America’s 1950’s innocence has evaporated,
a self-willed fantasy of progress
relegated, like some embarrassing older relative,
perhaps funny aunt Ida, or a drunken grandfather,
to memory’s attic: to cobwebs and dust.
But this patch of woodland north of Lake Erie
remains as it was before the Ojibwa,
before white settlers felled forests for farms.
It’s a relic, standing among level fields
of fodder corn or sugar beets.

Here time is only now; generations
of trees sprout, mature, rot, and topple,
changing and unchanging, century by century.
Mandaumin, where trains stopped years ago,
where a library once stood,
where Christians used to worship.
All vanished; hardly colouring our eternal present.
Ancestors destroyed, nature’s forgotten realm survives:
soil too damp or too rocky
remains inviolate within its circle of solitude.

This is the land’s widow. She summons passersby
with a voice seldom heard, seldom understood.
To be born anew, a new year opens ‒
between spring and summer, trilliums
spread their white cloth between trunks
that rise straight to Heaven.
In these overlooked woods that never suffered
the pain of the plough, pools of rainwater
gather all the stones of the sky,
every tree speaking the language of limestone.

NOTE:
            . . . el tiempo se escapa
        y con voz de viuda me llama
        desde los bosques olvidados.

‒ quoted from Pablo Neruda’s poem “La piel del abedul”
from his collection Jardín de invierno, 1986

can be translated:

            . . . time escapes
        and with a widow’s voice calls me
        from the forgotten woods.

James Deahl

Wet Harvest

All through red October
a prairie rain fell;
when Hallowe’en came
the crops remained in the field.
Winter wheat, sugar beets,
acres of stout fodder corn
wait in the wind.

The house dog stays in the house;
the barn cat in her barn.
Thick loam clings to boots,
to giant tractor tires.
Even yellow and purple rutabagas
remain hidden. Only their tops show.
And the corn stands witness to more rain.

Some say the farms
will return to marshland.
Some say the harvest will be lost.
Now in early November
farmers sit on porches
watching rain turn to snow
their wooden barns black
against a world of white.

James Deahl