I wanted to celebrate my friend and mentor, George McWhirter, with a post on the Griffin Prize Facebook page. But the site limits the number of line returns to 100, and my tribute poem has too many to post there. SO … I’m posting it here and linking to it from the Griffin Prize Facebook page.

I should say that this is the title poem of my collection Thread of the Real, but it is, above all, a tribute to George.

Thread of the Real

(For George, who shared the path
through the dark wood)

Who’d have thought: setting out
from a gap in the seam
between foothills and plains,
a pinch of cocoonish
dust like me

might take wing

northwest and seaward, away
from Nixon’s nightbound America
and mine,
                    to settle
where vast sounds pour
their profundities into the folds
of B.C.?

Who’d have thought
I’d sleepwalk
into Canada’s wooded raininess,

there to be startled awake
by a stogie-puffing

Irish Taoist?

Who was it
who’d led me to believe
there was no magic anymore?

*

He’d tap my head
like a top hat,

pull a poem
up from underneath
the false bottom—

all ears
and whiskery
trepidation,
a feeble motor
manic in its nest
of fur—

and pronounce it
crafty as Bugs,
or mystical-whimsical
and soft-hearted
as Harvey.

The dark
and the spotlight
and the music, he’d say,

should amaze both
audience and illusionist,

surprise even jaded
backstage crews
and fellow tricksters

with realities
fresh and unforeseen.

*

The thread of the real
strings our words like beads
together, loops them
around our lover’s neck—
they kiss her when she walks.

Or say it’s a line of mindfulness
that curves between differently
grained materials, a strand
of cloudy glue squeezed clear
between inlays of rosewood
and blond bay laurel….

Should the thread break,
our words will scatter, turn up
amidst ruins ages hence,
where some bemused digger
may take them for sacred—
and they were.

Hold tight, George said,
to that thread. Follow the ravel
wherever it leads. And if,
in the end, you find that it’s real
only for you…well, then:
let that be enough.

*

Everything we cherish—

Ovid’s Tristia, Skelton’s
“Night Poem, Vancouver Island,”

bursts of asters shadowed
by a horizontal thrust
of crannied arbutus trunk,

even your fearsome glimpse
of cormorant Death,
standing post above the tidal flats,
“drying its shadow on the rocks below”—

is salvage;
as when, reaching

back through calendars
unleaving like Goldengrove,

through moon-haunted mists,

through lamp-glow folding
around your writing desk,
lighting the padded yellow sheets
of paper your soft-spun voice
stitched itself across,

back through complexities
and perplexities, back
through silence,
back through gab,

I touch

a pattern
of unlooked-for
generosity,

long-gone and yet
there still, and always:

deep-hearted pagan spirit
who unbewildered
my tongue,

you taught me to live
on whatever this world
provides—no matter how
high or how low.

And once, as if we’d spent
years together, walking
the Shankill Road of your youth,
you confided, “The old Greek
had it right. The way up
and the way down—

they’re the same. Y’see?
Savor the journey.”