The Fall

 And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” ²³ So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. - Genesis 3

It’s Thanksgiving Day for Canadians and usually on this day, I go for a long run, feel the cold and death of everything out there and also share a poem I wrote when very young - Thanksgiving Day.

It’s a poem about many things but primarily about my early days living rough, no electricity, little food, freezing cold north of Canada. About those days and the lessons it taught me about life, cruel life. In a word - the fall.

The fall season is a symbol for suffering and death. And in these crazy times, it sits on the tip of my tongue, every day I think of how decrepit man-unkind can be, how violent and evil. But its grist for my mill - I’m here as a poet to make sure we are ashamed for the things we do and also, that which is possible and we do not.

We busied picking up the broken dishes. After some silence, little Alosha asked, “Why do things fall?”
I replied, “Why if things didn’t fall, nothing could ever exist or be true.”

I made a quip this week to a friend that the secret knowledge we all must aspire to get - that knowledge of the garden of Eden - is the knowledge of circles. All the answers are hidden in understanding circles. Godel, one of the few geniuses ever, was completely onto something. Nothing can be resolved. We fall inorder to get up. We get up inorder to fall. The rest is polemics.

The theme of entropy - how all things fade and go from perfection to imperfect and the fall season itself, are dominant in my poetry. Much like Auden - please read his own Autumn Song. Perhaps it’s because I’m the melancholic type, perhaps I just like my coffee black. It is what it is. I’m drawn to the fact that we are lost souls, exiled from paradise and the bountiful garden and condemned to struggle, suffer and die. Early or late but condemned. Northrop Frye taught me to look deeply at this … he’s someone I’d ask anyone serious of becoming a poet, to read and reread and read.

But alas, the fall, Thanksgiving itself, Yom Kippur, the many harvest festivals the world over - they also ask us to be grateful for the little we’ve got. I’ll focus on that message. Despair and self-pity never got anyone a step closer to grace or to benificence.

So I hold both thoughts in me - the truth of the evil in the world and the blessings of life that support my steps forward. Let us be grateful for what we’ve got and build on that. The evil never tires so nor should we.

To end, one of the many fall poems I’ve written over the years.

This one too, about my farmboy youth and Mr. Sparling up the road, near Baxter’s General Store, Highway 65, Kenabeek, about 20 miles from anywhere. I’d visit him as a kid and this pretty much is what happened. My own style and way of “counting my blessings”.

I’ll add, to end, it’s a poem that now re-reading it, borrows from Layton’s - The Bull Calf (mentioned in the poem).

P.S. The video I produced features many themes related to “fall” - words, collocations, associations. Hope you enoy it.

Go Ask A Poet

It was a cold fall farm morning
the kind where
you see everyone’s last breath,
the cow in the barn
pulled up from the straw
by the nose,
the steam rising up and disappearing
god knows where.

I was 9 or 10 years old
enthralled by Mr. Sparling’s
Popeye like forearms and dark beard
watching as he
put a bullet into the cow,
the cow just standing there
screaming, screaming
like cows scream.

Mr. Sparling slowly walking over to
the barn door
like this wasn’t the first time
nor the last,
walking back with an axe
in his right hand
then lifting it and smacking it
backside up into
the cow’s forehead,
the cow kneeling down and
with a few more Viking style whacks
rolling over silent .

Now many years and many deaths later
thinking of this
of Layton’s bull calf too
thinking of
my own time and space
and that
there are no winners.

Go ask Cesar.
Go ask Marilyn.
Go ask a card dealer.
Go ask a grave digger.
Go ask a good poet.

Tonight when I watch
the news
the body bags, the car wrecks,
the heavy eye shadow
on the newscaster,
when I watch all that
like Li Po
I’ll drink my wine
and laugh from the belly
and dream of
pink row boats
in the sky.