Festival of Hope/ 7 July 2020
Patrick Lane (1939-2019), considered by most Canadian writers and critics to be one of Canada’s finest poets, was born in Nelson, BC. He grew up in the Kootenay and Okanagan regions of the BC Interior, primarily in Vernon. He came to Vancouver and co-founded a small press, Very Stone House with bill bissett and Seymour Mayne. He then travelled extensively throughout North and South America. He has worked at a variety of jobs from first aid man to carpenter, but has spent much of life as a writer, having produced 25 volumes of poetry, one memoir, one book of short fiction and one novel. He is also the father of 5 children and grandfather of 9. He has won major literary prize in Canada, including the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the Canadian Authors Association Award, the Dorothy Livesay Prize, British Columbia’s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction and the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence. His poetry and fiction have been widely anthologized and have been translated into many languages. He was named an officer of the Order of Canada in 2014 in honor of his vast and accomplished body of work.
Calgary City Jail
Today they took him away
and lonely in my cell I read the walls—
the names the thousand jagged scrawls
in slivers of words
in languages I don’t know.
And I think, he’s gone
and what the hell?
Yesterday he spent the hours
capturing roaches
in his cramped rachitic hand
and after supper
took a dented can
and smashed them all.
He laughed when I carved my name above my bed.
What does it matter? he said
they’ll only paint you over.
Elephants
The cracked cedar
bunkhouse hangs behind me like a grey pueblo
in the sundown where I sit
to carve an elephant
from a hunk of brown soap
for the Indian boy
who lives in the village a mile back
in the bush.
The alcoholic truck driver
and the cat-skinner sit beside
me with their eyes closed—
all of us waiting out the last hour
until we go back on the grade—
and I try to forget the forever
clank clank clank
across the grade
pounding stones and earth to powder
for hours in mosquito-darkness
of the endless cold mountain night.
The elephant takes form—
my knife caresses smooth soap
scaling off curls of brown
which the boy saves to take home
to his mother in the village.
Finished, I hand the carving to him
and he looks at the image of the great
beast for a long time
then sets it on dry cedar
and looks up at me:
What’s an elephant?
he asks me
so I tell him of the elephants
and their jungles—the story
of the elephant graveyard
which no one has ever found
and how the silent
animals of the rainforest
go away to die somewhere
in the distances
and he smiles at me
tells me of his father’s
graveyard where his people have been
buried for years. So far back
no one remembers when it started
and I ask him where the graveyard is
and he tells me it is gone
now where no one will ever find it
buried under the grade of the new
highway.
Wild Horses
Just to come once alone
to these wild horses
driving out of the high Rockies
raw legs heaving the hip-high snow.
Just once alone. Never to see
the men and their trucks.
Just once alone. Nothing moves
as the stallion with five free mares
rush into the guns. All dead.
Their eyes glaze with frost.
Ice bleeds in their nostrils
as the cable hauls them in.
Later, after the swearing
and the stamping of feet
we ride down into Golden:
Quit bitchin.
It’s a hard bloody life
and a long week
for three hundred bucks of meat.
That and the dull dead eyes
and the empty meadows.
Thinking is a lonely business
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