Some excerpts from David's recent books...

Hay Day Canticle
The Fly in Autumn
The Village of Sliding Time
The Education of Mr. Whippoorwill: A Country Boyhood
Crows Do Not Have Retirement
How I Joined Humanity at Last

from HAY DAY CANTICLE
(Leaf Press, 2010)

Yes, I told myself, sing, sing, the way my father
sang working with his crops, his fields, his tools
his cap pushed back, as if nothing could bother

his pleasure in feeling his muscles, only fools
would find an indoor life—he often said, smiling—
where each man had to obey someone else’s rules

from THE FLY IN AUTUMN
(Harbour Publishing, 2009)

The Fly in Autumn

Yes, the light
———once more
——————comes down
—————————————at last

through clouds
to warm my blue ass
here on the yet green nettle leaf, summer
near the bear plop, and we the species
best at finding dung, in this end light
or in the glow of an early planet

And even so, my wings
carry me, and what thinness
upon which to rely

Eight short excerpts from THE VILLAGE OF SLIDING TIME
(Harbour Publishing, 2006)

—I married the skinny girl
and our kids ran free as chickens
one of them, the second boy
moving along the ditches for days
trapping muskrat and living on
chokecherries and bulrushes
sleeping by a little fire of sticks
wrapped in his jacket, and we hardly noticed
he was gone until he returned
as someone else, burnt and smoky
his sisters silenced by the strides he took
to reach the pump, the way he drank
from the barn well, his hands
a mesh of little nicks and cuts
where the cries of the animals
had entered him

—

bunch of young boys and
one smart one
climb through the window
into the school
cut up the flag in the
dark of the room
that had snared
too much of their clear light
pulled at the secret shelves
of the lady teacher
and found soft stuff there
but no money
no secret letters
the strap

—

grasshoppers overhead
sweat, snow, dung, white sky
ice in the trough, ticks on a dog
forks in a heap
thud of dirt on a box
and my mind layering
slow, fast, then stopped
by the skyful of Orion’s
belt of jewels
so plainly strewn
and long used for
making children gape
and grope toward
what can’t be touched

—

and above him
the always swaying poplars
wind and wood
framing for him
the deer family
out of the bush and staring
their tawny sides
dappled in saskatoon light
one two three they flew
over the top wire and gone
turning this way and that
through trees as if they knew
a path he could never find
though he’d look

—

a city looker
has never seen such dirt
grimed around the knuckles
the nails ribbed, cuticles
ripped far from polish
yet every child
loves the touch
at the end of the day
from the hand
that wrings the rooster’s neck, reaches in
for the wet heart, the gizzard
tossed to gulping dogs, kidneys kept back
for a husband’s sweetheart stew

—

mothers with the job
of holding broken parts
the way my aunt
kept Harvey upstairs
who never went
to school, his limbs
bent, a spider’s
when you crush it
not yet dead
lived in bed
not often
in the living room
unless carried, an acrid smell
his eyes bright

—

here in Irantown, mid-Lonsdale
the bakery, baklava
the barber
$12 a cut and the lesson
in history free, once
a math teacher
at a college in Tehran
he speaks fondly, loudly
grammatically incorrectly
of his life there, his wife here
his baby colicky
the hair of other men
their cowlicks and misery
his wild eye, his gold chains

—

here and there a bachelor
without books
lived in the kitchen
one broken couch
in the dark, the last visitor
a census-taker
his own sister never coming
now she’d got away
into one of the towns
stepping stones to the city
she’s going everyday
to the Bamboo Garden
for a feed of fries

from THE EDUCATION OF MR. WHIPPOORWILL:
A COUNTRY BOYHOOD
(Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 2002)

How my dad selects which pig to kill I don't know. They've all been fed the same mixture of chopped oats and water, along with slop from the house—potato peels, corn cobs, carrot tops, wash water—and they all complain so noisily at the trough you would think we hadn't just fed them that morning. They all look the same to me, not like the cows with their differences of brown and white and personality. One pig might be a little bigger than another, but they all have that same rounded back, those floppy ears we have to check for sunburn, that wrinkled snout that's capable of eating almost anything. I know, because once I saw them corner an old hen.

One day Fritz comes with his big truck. He's a gentle man with thick white hair and a calmness that must come from hauling so many animals to the meat packers: calves, cows, steers, an occasional horse, now pigs. I've seen him pushing a calf, twisting its tail until its eyes bulge and it shits wildly, its hooves slipping on the slimy truck deck. Pigs are easier to move, more likely to run up the ramp together. As the circle of men in the pen grows tighter and the pigs' squeals louder, one pig makes a dash up the ramp. Soon the others follow, the gate in the back of the truck is dropped, and they're on their way.

Each pig gets a whack from Fritz's hammer, a stamp that tells him which farmer this pig belongs to when he pulls into the auction. Dad's sure he's only raising A-grade pigs, and when he finds out later that one of them was sold as B-grade, he gets mad, saying something to himself I can't make out. But it's too late, the pigs are gone.

Except for the one he's chosen for us. He waits for a cool fall day when the flies have died. He prepares early in the morning, hauling buckets of water heated on the kitchen stove and dumping them into a big barrel. The barrel sits on stones, where he makes a fire and gets the water scalding hot. He crawls up into the loft of the old pig barn and attaches a pulley to the centre beam. Then he goes into the house where he sharpens his German knives and loads the .22. We don't kill a pig every fall, so this is a special occasion. It has some of the same excitement as my birthday.

When he calls the pig over to the trough, I think there might be a moment when he hesitates. Or perhaps it's not hesitation so much as prayer; I don't know. Then he reaches over the fence and scratches the pig's ears and shoots it between the eyes. It drops without a sound, back legs kicking. My dad's over the fence into the pen. He sticks his knife-the long cutting knife from the kitchen-into its neck, but even though the pig is flabby with fat, the hide is tough. He has to force the blade until blood finally spurts onto the mud. It doesn't take long for the legs to stop moving. The eyes half close.

Often a neighbour comes to help. He and Dad drag the pig over to the beam. My dad cuts the skin at the back of the legs and slips the hooks from a singletree under the tough tendons. Everyone pulls on the rope to lift the pig into the air, but my dad pulls hardest. Slowly we raise the pig off the ground, its hind feet spread by the singletree jammed under its tendons, its nose still dripping blood onto the stones of the barnyard.

The dogs are circling now. We chase them away, but the smell of blood draws them back. Dad pulls the pig higher, then lowers it into the barrel of hot water, then pulls it out again. Once more it goes in, head first, again and again until the heat softens the hair and scaly dirt on its skin. The neighbour has a different idea.

"Alfie, just burn the hair off," he says, trying to convince Dad to singe the pig's skin with a torch. But Dad says the meat tastes bad then, smoky in the wrong way. Finally the men begin scraping at the hide. I know this isn't like shaving, but I can't help but think of it when I see my dad later in the week at the mirror, scraping his neck with the razor.

Once the pig is clean, clean like it's not been since the day it was born, Dad kicks a large tub into place beneath the dangling head. He unfolds his good knife, reaches up to make the first cut. He starts at the top, near the tail, in the underbelly where the skin looks soft. Slowly he opens the pig, cuts out the anus, and pulls gently at the intestines, cutting away the gristle that sticks to the sides and back of the cavity. He's careful not to cut the bulging tubes because he doesn't want shit on his hands or on the meat. Out come the bladder, kidneys, liver, steaming in the cool air; the lumpy stomach, and some bright green part Dad tells me is where the bile comes from. Then the rubbery pink lungs, the dark red heart, the veins, bits and pieces I don't recognize. All of it drops down into the tub, the many tones surprising me. I had thought our insides were all one colour, like blood, maybe, or darkness.

We can rest, now that the animal's turned from itself into something else. Cut into pieces, stored in the freezer, this is not the animal we watched being born, the one we laughed at it when it ran, the one we faithfully fed and fed. We hang the chunks of bacon in the smoke house. Only oak bark will provide the right kind of smoke. We don't have oak fence posts of our own, but we strip bark from those of a neighbour. The loss of bark doesn't weaken the posts, and perhaps my dad asks the neighbour first. When the oak is burning, we smother the flames with sawdust and the place fills with smoke. We keep that smoke going for weeks. Soon I'll be able to cut off strips with my jackknife, chewing on the rich flavoured meat as I go about my winter chores.

We use as much of the pig as we can, but we're not like the really poor families who blow up the bladder for a ball. And I'm glad we no longer use Grandma's recipe for a pig's-feet meal. It's hard not to remember where those feet have been. Sometimes Mum boils the fat on the stove, rendering, she calls it, adding lye and letting the mix harden.

It's this soap she uses in the wringer washer when Dad comes from cleaning the pig barn. Pig shit and straw have been trampled into a thick mat he can lift only by working it with his two-pronged pick, slowly loosening and rolling it back toward him like a rank carpet. It's a hard job, and he's in the pen for hours. When he comes to the house, Mum says: "Don't come in here smelling like that." He takes off his shit-smelling clothes in the porch, not far from where the pig's head is waiting for Mum to cut the meat out of its jowls for head cheese, its tiny dead eyes watching my father undress.

from CROWS DO NOT HAVE RETIREMENT
(Harbour Publishing, 2001)

Crows Do Not Have Retirement

"There are no words to capture the infinite depth of crowiness
in the crow's flight."
Ted Hughes, Winter Pollen

Crows do not have retirement
homes to go to when finally
their wings break down

No one takes them in
with a sigh and says
sit here for a bit

while I bring you
a cup of raw worm
to help keep your head

swivelling, on the lookout
for fledglings or the dead,
the eagle making you

flock and dive
that white untouchable pate
No one guides them gently

into their last years,
takes account of their
final movements or hears

their calls, their stout beaks
opening without sound
as if thirsting,

their inky heads against
the starchy white linen,
constant television nearby

They fold up in the curb
in the August heat,
the sheen gone from wings

they no longer lift
out of the heap
no other crow will touch

nor even admit,
passing by without
an exploratory peck

leaving their own kind
to gulls, rats, worms, the municipality
To keep the black

ideal of ravenousness
alive, they hop and lift off
and cruise past windows

where old men catch their flash
and are sent off dreaming
of their own unequalled speed and grace

the guns they once held
in their long arms and the damage
they shook from the air

from HOW I JOINED HUMANITY AT LAST
(Harbour Publishing, 1998)

Function of the Individual

The function of the individual
he realizes as he travels through town
is to provide the lightning strike
to matter.
What God once did in beautiful
biblical illustrations
he now must do.
The waterfront, for instance,
must be charged up, revved higher
until, incandescent, it shimmers and soothes
the men and women
who stumble mornings
out of the Seabus
and into time.

Loathsome are some of those bodies.
But he sees them now
as uncharged lumps
unable to grip
the time they have in this
configuration of weary mouth and heavy plunging step.
Up the escalator he rides with them
careful not to stand in front
of those who wander
with their demons.
The cruise ship out the window
has arrived at dawn
and now from its white sides
happy angels watch and watch
and are ignored in turn.

All travellers move time
aside as they go, and as they pass by
it changes, collects, leaps ahead again
so each travels through
what has been shucked off
and waits patiently
for the lightning eye to burn it up
to the cloudy thin-cloudy sky seen in the sea,
in the harbour's oil and white wave.