Avison - Concrete and Wild Carrot

CONCRETE AND WILD CARROT MARGARET AVISON National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Avison, Margaret, 1918
Concrete and wild carrot / Margaret Avison Poems.
ISBN 1-894078-24-1 I. Title PS8501.V5C65 2002 C811.54 C2002-902871-X
PR9199.3.A92C65 2002 CopyrightMargaret Avison 2002. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for
the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book
Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP),
and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our
publishing program. The cover photograph was taken by Paul Best.
The photograph of the author was taken by Joan Eichner. Brick Books
Box 20081
431 Boler Road
London, Ontario
N6K 4G6
Canada www.brickbooks.ca Contents A sudden season has changed our world. Everybody is out to see, or bask, or with their kind to exuberate.

Everything is new. Trees that were only sticks into the overcast yesterday, are soft and full of catkins like newly shampooed children being readied for the party. Slender young saplings shine, all the tender leaves distinct, notes of music atremble for a chance musician strolling by to hear and play for everybody, on bikes or park benches or wandering along the way the city buses, dazed, wended their way anywhere on the odd quiet morning the European War was somehow ended; nobody felt like cavorting, singing, dancing, as their parents, 1918, in November, had. A muted celebration this sudden season. All but the oak. Rusty tatters left from far-off Augusts leafy towers and gables, the deeps and fullness, the amassing in gloom and shadow of greenness; now ruined arthritic knobs and wrenched limbs; next to nothing now covering his nakedness.

The new is going to last? These celebrants toss their curls and rollerblade past the question. It was not posed by the dour oaks, stolider even than the firs, their shabby winter wear refurbished at the tips, standing there woodenly under scrambling squirrels, a warm bath of sunshine, thunderstorm, by turns. Part of a celebration is to discover patience? and how painful hope can be? Alone, and mute stands dark, one huge oak tree. It must have been after a birthday; at Christmastime daylight hasnt the lambency I remember as part of the puzzling present somebody had given me: a scribbler, empty pages, but not for scribbling in. Instead of a pencil box there was a jellyglass set out, with water, and a brand-new paint brush. The paper was not pretty.

A pencil-point might in an upstroke accidentally jab a hole in it. But, painting it as I was told to, with only clear water, Behold! my whole being sang out, for see would not have been adequate. The pictures that emerged were outlines? I remember only the paper, and the wonder of it, and how each page was turning out to be a different picture. There were no colours, were there? In the analogy, there are glorious colours and, in some way that lacks equivalents, deepening colours, patterns that keep emerging, always more to anticipate. For that there is no other process. Locked in the picture is missing the quality of the analogy of morning light and the delighted holder of the paint-brush and who gave him the book, and where he found it.

Leaf on the shrub let the flow along the corridors of a breathing stem ease to a trickle. THE SHRUB: Look for no energy now. Youre letting in the cold! My stiffened fingers are icy. The leaf sighs and separates itself and wavers away. Prairie Poem
For George Grant To go from white-water rivers valleys or from the escarpment to live on the Saskatchewan prairie is choosing to find out that space calls, to a reshaping of person. This is above and beyond the going to, the choosing.

Reading in the open world of this writers geography of ideas is to look, staggered and overwhelmed by the ideas, almost lost in the panorama of the living, long-dead, to him present as friends, each lifted face featured for horizons. For holding close an everywhere of sky. The land, the books, can never swallow you, nor even the furry spring crocus here however small, at vanishing points. They say its wrong to push a parable. Figures of speech are still themselves responsible for their tendrils though these stray. Words have their life too, wont compact into a theorem.

Take the story of the Prodigal Son: an invisible third son is not mentioned, yet he had it all had prized it all wanted all of it for all so had himself to leave it, all. But this one is the only visible one. He tells the familys story, a simple tale but somehow unresolved so that its tendrils cling timelessly. Through his eyes we see pathos in their wanting something else. Fools gold restores a starvelings taste for a healthy meal of bread, at home; or, (the older brother) wanting something because deserving more than this dogged servitude? (Yet from the outset the mine, the portion that is mine had to be less than all.) All those were dear to the one who owns and gives and loves on. Lets go to the park where the dogs and children cluster and circle and run under the sombre old trees they are hanging on to their swarthing leaves while the young medallioned trees in the early sun are dancing among them.

The knapsacked students too hurtle, always too late, focused on there, blindingly swerving out of the now and here where children and dogs and a few rather shabby, slow old ones, straying, move across the owners, standing with loose leashes, intent on their day. The benched but sleepless mothers and nannies, watching, are quieted here, warmed and fed by the good old trees and the shining little ones. He smells of what? Its like wet coal-dust. He came very late: tangled brown hair, his face streaked, and bleary; no gloves, but (Merry Christmas) from a mission, twice blest a good warm coat that could go anywhere and had! now puckered, snagged, hem spread from sleeping out, and ripped around one leather elbow, and buttoned crooked. There were no other buttons now. He slept there in his pew.

The giver of his topcoat eerily watched, her widows desolation clearly inconsolable now (a pang like joy!), to see what she had seen on a fine, and steady man made come full circle on this ruined fellow. Still, he had his coat, and she, the echoing years. Ever see somebody hit bedrock
too messed up to
say so too hopeless a mess to get his chin
far enough off the ground to
even give in?
deadbeat? Know what thats like yourself? Now can you credit anyone figuring he had to steer his fair steady days and nights deliberately to some as yet (Im guessing) point of light beyond that abysmal (other peoples) living end? right down, past, the dead end to the worst? There wasnt a Lamb of God for the then lamb the wolf had torn. But there gleamed the point. Ever see a child in his highchair twisting with the urgency of now, not knowing how or what, only the pangs, the poignancy of Dont you seethat I need everythingright now? He hears help coming. Hope stills the moment.

Eagerness drums with heels and spoon in a blissful lurch towards all tomorrow. The one the radiance touched does see and smile there, in that kitchen. The point. When the shutters are down the outside work is pleasanter even when fingers out of the mitts go numb on the hammer; the boathouse whispered with ice-splinters and slush when I fetched the ladder. Well have to deal with the chimney before we can warm the place up inside, and then the cleaning out and sweeping up will be dirty jobs before its safe to light the kindling, inside. After the shutters are up lets build a fire out here: theres wood under the cottage; we can open the thermos and eat our lunch before we tackle the rest? Its pleasurable outside.