catherine Cora

Anthony Wilson poems

On Speaking to One Another from Different Rooms

Distorted and lingering, ‘Ant!, Dad!, Tats!’
grown interchangeable, explosive,
each sounding furious.
A search for keys in one room
nourishes fear of lateness in another.
From a kettle filled and boiling
to the weather, daily noise is damned
for drowning the needs of now!
My reply is weapon and filibuster,
deliberate sotto voce, below war level,
another trait of my father
I will never perfect:
I’m here, Can’t hear you, What is it?,
screaming inside ‘Who died?’
Because everything is not where we left it
history will revisit us tomorrow
at approximately the same time.
The door is almost closed
and we have not said our goodbyes yet.

by Anthony Wilson

Borderline
      for and after Lawrence Sail
      the sump-life of the place – Seamus Heaney

These are the flatlands
stitched between flood-plain and ditch,

everything provisional,
ooze and sluice.

The estuary looks walkable,
spines of red clay

rising from slate water
with flanks of weeping slip

which shimmer mother-of-pearl,
silver, molten.

A powerboat that was toy
bounces through its roar,

its wake slapping
the cledge, scattering wagtails.

The stranded barge
of The Turf breathes easy,

its spur both tongue
and poop-deck.

Beyond, a train
becomes its horn;

skeletal willows inch greener;
and an oarsman

pushes himself backwards
into the future.

(from Riddance)

WOODFORD

Alberta, Canda 2013

Elbow River in Flood

Bow River

Flying to Alberta, Canada in June to visit my parents and sisters, I had a number of people exclaim that they hoped I was not going to Calgary. A state of emergency had been declared in the city following historic flooding due to a record snowfall in the Rocky Mountains combined with an extremely rainy month of June. PHOTO 8 ELBOW RIVER IN FLOOD  I was indeed headed for Calgary, where my sister Mary lives in Lakeview, a district so unaffected by the flooding that TV filming of the disaster in the other Calgary districts of Bowness and Elbow Park looked like images of third world disasters from the opposite side of the world. PHOTO 9 BOW RIVER

The first two days of our time together, Mary and I obeyed the authorities injunctions to stay away (so that emergency crews were not hindered by traffic blocking their way to flooded areas). But on Wednesday June 27 we rode our bikes to a deserted downtown (power was out so most companies were closed). PHOTO 1 AND 2 - LORNA AND MARY WITH HEAD We were alone most of our time in the plaza where Mary's daughter Jennifer works, exploring the many angles to view the large “Head in Thought.” PHOTOS 3 AND 4 Crossing to the Elbow River bike path, we discovered a river swollen to many times its normal size (even though it had obviously gone down considerably as evidenced by the collapsed banks and by the debris left high in trees and on bridges. pHOTO 5 AND 6  A twisted and destroyed bike-and-pedestrian bridge was blocked by plywood and guarded by a policewoman, in case any one was as foolish as the canoeists who had launched into the flood-level Bow River and had to be rescued, prompting the mayor to exclaim that he had thought it unnecessary but would now declare that “the river is closed!” PHOTO 7 MARY AT BLOCKED OFF BIKE BRIDGE

Thursday Mary and I drove across the city to her friend Heidi's home in the Bowness district, concerned that Heidi and her daughter would be returning from Africa having learned of the flood only the night before when they regained Internet connections. PHOTO 10 MARY IN BOOTS We found Bowness streets muddy ...and parking at a premium, since city vehicles and people coming to help all needed spaces, and homeowners needed to keep access to mountains of debris hauled out from their homes if dump trucks were to be able to haul it away. PHOTO 11 SINK HOLE The normally quiet residential streets were as active as a festival although the people were in recovery attire - rubber boots, work gloves and with breathing masks over their mouths and noses.  Residents had been advised to put signs in their windows telling what they needed. PHOTO 21 YELLOW SIGN

At Heidi's we found a crowd – her co-workers, soccer team-mates and friends had hauled everything from her basement, spreading potentially salvageable items across the lawn and heaping non-salvageable trash into a mountain of muddy bulges in the driveway and edge of the street. PHOTOS 12 AND 13 HEIDI'S BACK YARD  Someone finished with the hose, so I coiled and carried the lengths around the house so that Mary and I could clean objects in the driveway and on the lawn – car carrier PHOTO 16 MARY WITH HOSE, mirrors from the bar, liquor bottles PHOTO 17 AND 18 and silver tea set  PHOTO 19 . Later, a couple from an unaffected district approached us to offer help and spent several hours with us, peeling photographs out of clay and washing them in buckets where the water quickly turned brown as the river.

pHOTO 14 MARY SWEEPING

We had barely started work when people in the street approached us, offering food. PHOTO 25 GRUB WAGON had brought a water bottle and several granola bars, but throughout our work, the “grub wagon” mother and child and many other adults and children from unscathed areas of the city brought bottles of cold water, fruit, cookies, sandwiches and muffins. Stations set up on street corners were laden with food, drink, work gloves, and masks, with porta-potties nearby. PHOTO 23 MARY AT FOOD STATION

Friday evening some young women came by inviting us to a neighborhood party where they would grill Calgary's famous sausage. Meandering down to check it out, we crossed the plank over the Moat, a ditch augmented to about 3 feet deep because of the flooding. PHOTO 26 DITCH  An apparently abandoned lot had been designated “the Moat” - with free beer, tables of food, a large banner across the entrance embellished with the image of a cowboy hat and the message “This is how we giddy-up.” PHOTO 28   PARTY   People climbed on a ladder to add their thoughts to the banner; others wrote on big poster paper tacked to the side of a building -

How have I made a difference today? “ Helping people, not just the cute girls”  PHOTO 24 ORANGE SHIRTS 

What was your favorite moment? “seeing people helping people” “seeing happy newlyweds toasting everyone in front of their flooded home' “knowing we are close now; we are community” “this is the first time in 6 years that I really feel Calgary is my home”  pHOTO 27 TOILET

What made you cry? “strangers coming to help us out” “orphans in Cambodia donating to help us”  pHOTO 20 TOYS COLORFUL

“seeing an elderly man pull a dry photograph from a flooded basement and finding it was of his wedding in World War II Germany”

 PHOTO 22 PINK SIGN

What gives you hope? “What we are going to build here!”

I Came to the Craft Late in Life

I came to the craft late in life
And wonder if the canon of my work
Is measured finite

Sijo Form

Sijo (/ˈʃiːdʒoʊ/; Korean pronunciation: [ɕidʑo]) is a Korean poetic form. Bucolic, metaphysical and cosmological themes are often explored.

The three lines average 14-16 syllables, for a total of 44-46:
theme (3, 4,4,4);
elaboration (3,4,4,4);
counter-theme (3,5) and completion (4,3).

Sijo may be narrative or thematic and introduces
a situation in line 1,
development in line 2,
and twist and conclusion in line 3.

The first half of the final line employs a “twist”: a surprise of meaning, sound, or other device.

Sijo is often more lyrical and personal than other East Asian poetic forms, and the final line can take a profound turn. Yet, “The conclusion of sijo is seldom epigrammatic or witty. A witty close to a sentence would have been foreign to the genius of stylized Korean diction in the great sijo periods. ”

Sijo, unlike some other East Asian poetic forms, frequently employs metaphors, puns, allusions and similar word play. Most poets follow these guidelines very closely although there are longer examples. An exemplar is this poem by Yun Seondo (1587–1671)

I would like my poems to be windows (Peter Scupham)

“I would like my poems to be windows, not mirrors. A window frames a scene which has its own strong and independent life; the personality of the poet both shapes that scene and is subordinate to it. The frame, however, is important. A window cuts a shape, and I am fascinated by structure, harmony, balance – all those qualities which give definition to the view which the window elects to show.” - Peter Scupham