Category: Lines from Saskatoon and Montreal

by Gord Sellar

great forests, filled with
boreal loneliness. voices
speak there but no words

old, reeling green gods
great boughs lash windswept storm song
roots drink drumming rain

snow falls; reaching deep
roots curl against bedrock: still
nude bough strives for sun

– 1997, Saskatoon

by Gord Sellar

1. Sextant

Dreamt last night of Matteo Ricci.
Dreamt he was on the sunnier side
of the Great Wall, that dragon of bricks
with all those bones in its guts
eating a won-ton soup from a
gleaming porcelain bowl. Hard to believe:
I know. This Italian had strode into the Ming
Court, business as usual, probably
the same year Shaxper agonised himself
into moving that paltry distance down to Londontown.
He stood in the modern ultraviolet
sunlight, serious-faced. He kind of looked
like me, crossed with Gary Oldman.

Ultra-Jesuit, too, he wore Confucian garb,
save the shoes, a pair of dated
penny-loafers. He slurped at the last, and grinned
at me, and gestured off to the side,
out of the way of blinking flashes from
the new wave of pre-Olympic tourist
cameras. We went then secretly
into a small room in the wall, and he
showed me his sextant, leering.

“N’inquiete pas,” he suggested, and repeated
in Italian, then tried English: “We have
tons of time, my friend,” he grinned,
stroking the face of the map on the wall,
and humming softly to himself.

“Cathay will split like fruit, and we will get
at the core, brush the seeds with our own hands.”
His fingertips brushed the straits of Taiwan,
his other hand pressed against southerly Hainan.
His sextant was no good,
not even the tangent screw
could achieve anything
at that point. It was daytime.
And all the maps in the world won’t get you
anywhere near the trembling peaks of Taishan.

2. N.B.

Hsi Lien tells me her stint in Hong Kong and Kowloon
was, wait for it, dis-orienting. You can hear the trap set,
ba-dum-dum, as she raises one eyebrow
above a delicate epicanthic fold, Canton piquant.
We spent hours in shopping malls, discussing Mao Zedong
in the context of ostensible poetry, and puzzling
together definitions of democracy, and guzzling
mead, and the correlation between cognizance and doom.

We spoke of how the Chinese saw the moon,
rabbit-adorned. Strange irony, that afternoon
scrambling after the name of that Quebecois doctor,
only for her to remember it rhymed with “bathroom”.

3. Meat Rabbits

are a staple agricultural product of the region
of Guangdong; the place abounds in meat
rabbits, dead Jesuits, strange signs and sequined miracles,
I discover.

It’s weird, the things people will pay you to edit.

Guangdong sky full of shining crosses, village men
swearing they saw the ghost of Matteo Ricci wander past
the graves on Sunday morning last. Cannons, muskets,
sextants, all risen like the important dead, imported to
proselytize loudly with voices; somehow this doesn’t move me.

More moving by far, the fleeing Ming court
headed southward from Beijing, Helena
(the Emperor’s mother’s Christian name)
penning ideogrammatic prayers to Mary
and Christ for the restoration of rightness
on Earth by heaven; begging the Pope
for prayers and heavenly warriors.

More moving by far to read of Scholar Wang Zheng,
otherwise great man, unfortunate convert by words
of a Jesuit but still refused to cast his concubine
out, swearing to the Lord of Heaven, Christ, that he’d
not touch her again, but retain her with dignity,
rather than sell or murder her.

More moving by far, the imperial roll of all that weight:
the collapsing world of the Ming world smashing directly
down around Scholar Wang Zheng, snuffing out the sun
in him, whose concubine, not his wife, found the wound,
of his suicide. More moving, by far, that wrinkle
in the page, the reassuring itch of abandoned faith.

4. Taishan and the Night Bus

I’ve earned my right to talk at Taishan, on
a dozen buses like this one, coughing polite
and wondering if they think the pink bows in
their black hair is really hao kan. You can tell
a girl from the Old Country by how she picks
the colors of the ribbons tied in her hair.

I’ve sat on trains where the whispers clatter
from the skin of the windows, rattling along
through the arched hollow of the tunnel at night;
heard them asking, “Where is that one going?”

You’d think I’d have come to Taishan already,
picked my way to the top and yelled out some word
memorized from whomever else yells it first.
Climbed up, and found whatever people find there,
and then climbed straight back down, with drooping
mustaches white from age and wisdom and stuff.

But I only ever have gotten as far as Badai-ling,
gazed fished-eyed out all the rockiness and the quiet
that the wall ensealed, my arm leaning on ideogram
graffittoes, the voices of hawkers and braying camels
ready to be mounted for a photograph, you! you!
Walls are marvelous things, lasting forever,
monuments to the past. I yawn, raise my Pentax up.

– 2000-2007, Montreal; Iksan, Jeonju, & Bucheon, South Korea

---

This poem was published in Diet Soap #3 (2009), which may or may not still be available as a free PDF here.

(Homage to Pindar; Prayer to Battus)
by Gord Sellar

come away, unclean lovers of pure things, while we have time:
soil-bright glistening to rotten feet; I can’t breathe without

you. ocean depths, murk filled with fat
luminous stars, burning salt-fire, frigid grey breath.

glory is thirst. sleep eternal, mouldering god
braided into the middle root of (y)our city

it was pulsating, sighing flesh(earth)
that drew us here, naked of fathers, alone; one eagle feather.

above him twine lust, curved melons, voices(arrows)
music, entwined all and pressing like sex

droplets of light borne in bone-dark jars
to awaken the new-kissed soil

— Saskatoon, 1997

---

This poem was published while I was living in Saskatoon, in a chapbook titled Odin Swings (1997).

In a course, much later, I was urged to rework this material into a more narrative vein, and this was what I came up with:

An Ocean, History

Murk, frigid, full of voices and salt-flames:
Men in rows, barren, and naked of fathers,
Cross darkness, history, rowing fleshbone frames.
Eagle songs, and ocean smoke; who bothers
To recall? But carrying such bone-dark, naked ghosts
Wrapped in sacred bundles between frigid bones.
And through our minds’ wide paving stones, dark hosts
Sing down to him who in ice-bright soil moans;
The founder, whose buried voice crawls from no throat
To now and to us drowned in filth. And for his folk
Libya was far as Andromeda. Set out,
Cleanse now, wash in strange waters, thus he spoke.
But otherwise engaged, our ships unbuilt;
our civilization nestling into the silt.

— Montreal, 1999

Still later, I produced this:

A Diaspora

Always, for us, is a bounded time—a hundred
thousand years is the length of our always.
And always, we’ve felt it pushing beneath the surface
of the mind, deep in the underworld of instinct.

the wavering world, horizon stippled with watery light
beneath the surface burns the fiery salt, the voices and
memories of history itself, frigid and barren: the igneous
ocean is distilled and solidified into a passage-way.

It feels sometimes as if the oceans were emptied out.

and the men set out, murk beneath them, their voices
carrying sacred songs of history: stories of a single feather
and bearing the world in bone-dark jars; blood wrapping
hoary bundles of truth, hidden among bones and hungers.

rowing fleshbone frames, were these the boys who feared
the night? who fled to mothers and nurses when sun slept?
these men, long ago lost in the trudge of always, demigods
they were not. they shuddered on seeing the gloom beneath.

Imagine being lost, tethered by knowledge
alone to the infinity of stars in their shifting places;
lost in the world with only the secret language
of sky, voiced quiet when the others sleep.
Imagine navigating the world by skylit darknesses;
then imagine your world left far behind.

carrying strange ghosts, naked and rapacious spirits starved
for blood, for promises and betrayals. the seas were filled with
the eyes of the dead; diverting roads across the dark water,
they steered the course of the world as fully as the stars above.

minds in those days were paved with wide heavy stones,
and beneath, churning, bound in glittering ice-bright soil,
a voice crept up from a corpse, cracking the foundation
because the founder, the father of the city, feared loss.

Death, we acknowledge, will create such hunger.

how far was it to Libya, or home? months, perhaps years
if fate, as it often lusts to, betrayed them. yet they
set out. they knew that the only atonement to death is
searching for anything. and they, at least, dared to set out.

What we must learn is that a petty utopia
is no more than a diaspora from history:
no matter what we do, we cannot drive
the yearning from us; always, that urge to be lost.

— Montreal, 1999

Somehow, I still prefer the first version, however.

by Gord Sellar

I.
Dress nimbly; move with dignities through these halls.
Rise when you please, even when the sun has fallen;
I would give you all I have, my beloved Sovereigns–
I would fail to dream of regicides, even given provocation,
And naked in the streets, I would think you philosophes.

Every thing is gauzed in a webwork of gold:
Come now, take my hand and I will guide you.
There are flutes, heavy drums and silver horns
Brought out to please you, and all the children here
Have fretted themselves like viols, so that now
They shimmer a sightly music, faces to be read
And red with delight, for your sake, yours alone.

II.
What I see when I shut my eyes is an army of cellists
sawing endlessly, mathematical menuets
and other courtly dances that spin in the form
of electrons, hidden in the drowse of wires
that gird the planet. Pavana lachrymae:

digits. Only numbers. Beautiful, sacred;
counting off the balances of the world,
such as angels once were called to do.
A calculus of agreements, waivers, shipments,
in this language resembling that of lovers.

Wealth begets wealth. And so we endless sweep,
invisible whorling courtly currents so that
nobody is known by name or face. I can’t
find you, if I ever need to I will be
in such a predicament: why are the gods invisible?

III.
Our bodies titillate, don’t they, when we go
to the lengths that have been specified here, before us?

Hunger. It is the one true zeitgeist, now.
The country filled with yawning ulcers.

Nothing fills it, although it can be hidden
from view. And we are engineered desolations.

If there are still angels, what do they sing about?
Profanities? The wages of our endeavours?

I hope sincerely that they have lost their sight,
and if there’s a God, that blindness has struck the poor thing.

Last night I went out once again, and I
bought something that I didn’t know I needed.

IV.
I once wanted to be a Thoreau myself,
drop out and say farewell forever to
this world I found myself in. But it won’t
change a thing, conversing with the birds,
or resolving to myself that I’ll know beans.

The husbandry is one thing, I agree.
But scavenging and sleeping in the wild
tears nothing down, it is not made even
of words. And sharing in the hunger that we’ve made
is cosmetic. Because we always must return.

There is some thing that calls us, maybe because
it’s always been there, since our first recall?
Because there is a truth to luxury? Or because
we know that it is part of us already?
That history must dance until it stops?

V.
That’s right. The world is a concubine. Cram it in.

I suspect the scent will linger for a long time.

Incalculable, the unwritten verdicts that wait
at the other end of history. They will speak of us,
but I have no idea what they’ll say. I hope
that they harbour pity and maybe feel
of the kind of shock that children show, discovering
that some people are born into the world blind
and realizing that this means they cannot see.

---

Trauerspeil was published in Headlight Anthology, Volume 4 (2001).

The Trauerspiel is a type of allegorical tragic drama which was popular in Germany during (at least) the 17th and 18th centuries. It is normally a five-act play dealing with the pomp and power of a ruler, who, though the forces of history and the actions of himself and others, moves from lavish and glorious spectacle, comical interludes and supernatural experiences toward the recognition of the role of Fate in the transience of the earthly flourishing of all passionate and powerful rulers. The monarch’s rule—not subject to human judgment but only to that of the invisible forces that placed the ruler in power —declines toward the end of the drama until the ruler’s life and glory are simultaneously snuffed out, like a candle, by the will of Fate.