In a Springtime Instant: Selected Poems - Softcover

Milton Acorn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0889629218 ISBN 13: 9780889629219

Publisher: Mosaic Press, 2010

Synopsis

Milton Acorn remains one of the most important Canadian poets of the 20th century. This new volume solidifies Acorn's reputation and confirms his place in Canadian literature. As the editor James Deahl asserts in his introduction, Milton Acorn's poetry stands among the most challenging work produced during the last half of the twentieth century. His ability to see connections between a strange assortment of things is striking. And the reader is called up to be as agile as the poet in jumping from one idea to another. Acorn remains a conundrum for many. He was both a communist and a traditional conservative, not at different times, but at the same time. He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Prince Edward Island at the same time as the Rt Hon John Diefenbaker, former Prime Minister of Canada, received his. Acorn read deeply and widely, and in his personal library the poet had the complete works of George Grant and many volumes of the works of Stalin.

About this title

About the Author

James Deahl was Acorn's long-time friend, an accomplished poet, essayist and publisher in his own right.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

In a Springtime Instant

Selected Poems

By Milton Acorn

Mosaic Press

Copyright © 2012 Estate of Milton Acorn
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-88962-921-9

Contents

Foreword, by Terry Barker, 
Editor's Introduction, 
A Note on the Text, 
poems from In Love and Anger, 1956, 
poems from Against a League of Liars, 1960, 
poems from The Brain's the Target, 1960, 
poems from Jawbreakers, 1963, 
poems from I've Tasted My Blood: Poems 1956 to 1968, 1969, 
poems from More Poems for People, 1972, 
poems from The Island Means Minago, 1975, 
poems from Jackpine Sonnets, 1977, 
poem from Captain NealMacDougal & The Naked Goddess, 1982, 
poems from Dig Up My Heart: Selected Poems 1952-83, 1983, 
poems from Whiskey Jack, 1986, 
poem from A Stand of Jackpine, 1987, 
poems from The Uncollected Acorn: Poems 1950 – 1986, 1987, 
poem from I Shout Love and Other Poems, 1987, 
poems from Hundred Proof Earth, 1988, 
poems from To Hear the Faint Bells, 1996, 
poems from After the Eclipse, 2004, 
Bio note on Milton Acorn, 
Books by Milton Acorn, 

CHAPTER 1

    THE MINER'S WIFE

    The pit's above and down below the town,
    And every day the man I love goes down.
    It's not the pleasantest place to spend the day
    But he must go down to earn his pay.

    The pit's as black as night ... as black as death.
    It keeps on breathing out its coaley breath.
    Tho I eternally wash it's always there
    Until I'd give my soul for good clean air.

    But half my Johnny's life's down in that dirt,
    Where every step you go some man's been hurt.
    It's sure I am he'll be carried out some day,
    But he must go down to earn his pay.

    The coal's been there a hundred million years,
    Like sunshine hidden in a sepulcher.
    It's strange my Johnny works to bring it up
    Then comes out blacker than the devil's pup.

    The man I love is sunshine all himself;
    He makes this land but doesn't own its wealth.
    He's a working man ... and what's there more to say?
    So he must go down to earn his pay.


    REMEMBERING

    I saw the myriad glittering points of dew in spiders' mesh;
    and I thought of the trail of your fingers on my flesh.


    THIS IS THE HEART

    This is the heart that since the dawn of time
    has missed no beat, that struggled out of slime.
    There is no hypocrite, there is no knife
    can steal and own the promise of its life.

    These are the hands that make the world go round
    and make the very chains with which they're bound;
    but they shall raise, for all eternity,
    the cool and shining cities of the free.

    This is the brain that sees the planets rise
    in these and in pale planetary skies.
    Who can imagine it will bear the grey
    mad nonsense that is preached for truth today?

    This is the tongue reveals man to his mate;
    whose truth has always won the last debate:
    and it must sing the truth, or else it dies.
    Truth is its life ... the only death is lies.


    TO MY LITTLE SISTER ABOUT HER ILLNESS

    My little sister, you were the youngest.
    Till you were ten we used to call you "Baby",
    but then our mother put a stop to it
    for fear they'd name you "Babe".

    Yet you were always determined
    to sip life's sweetest, most ephemeral juices ...
    to sip them lightly, and with no abandon:
    so until now you've lived
    like a silver water-bug
    skating over the sun-blue lake of your youth.

    Know then, my little sister:
    that where black seas crash against riven rock
    their roaring drowns out neither life nor thought;
    that in the stronghold of endurance
    the coins of life are counted one by one;
    and sometimes in the pauses of the storm,
    when the sun strikes many-coloured on the battlements
    of new clouds rolling westward on their thunders
    a glory can strike you
    greater than a lightning bolt.


    ANNIE'S SON

    Weeks after her abortion,
    Clutches of bone
    (A thin nearly straight one,
    A rib cage, a spine)
    Came into the world-light.

    Last was the skull and
    Pelvis ... which she wore
    For a charm.


    THE CASE OF IVAN SONOVICH

    Let us now discuss that octopus
    Whose tentacles enter every bedroom,
    In tones of high moral seriousness;
    For profound indeed is the subject
    Of that conniving undermining Russian
    Called Ivan Sonovich.

    I say called, but was he actually
    Christened Ivan Sonovich? Only
    A few hint his existence, and
    Never blatantly utter his name.
    Yet behind each of our disasters
    Look for Ivan Sonovich.

    All over the world, when natives
    Stop speaking pidgin, peasants
    Cease to be picturesque, scientists
    Meddle in low things like politics,
    Can be detected the crafty hand
    Of Ivan Sonovich.

    And in our land, though workers
    Cackle at his mention, still
    Unions leave legitimate business
    To meddle in high things like politics.
    When such unwisdom is committed
    Beware, I say, of the never resting
    Ivan Sonovich.

    He is no ordinary mortal, never feels
    The press of doubt and circumstance.
    The sweating reviews between bedsheets,
    The considerations of opinion,
    Are foreign to the nature of
    The cold Ivan Sonovich.

    His schemers and noticers, like
    The little bird who always tells mother,
    Are there at all times and all places.
    Why you who question me
    Might be his sly agent, might
    Yourself in cunning disguise
    Be Ivan Sonovich.


    CYNICISM

    Notice the bums are little guys?
    Caps cocked sidewise,
    Too big,
    Faces brown-grey and wrinkled like a fig.
    Funny ... and little guys.

    Ever stand in a shape-up?
    An ape of a pusher puts his finger up,
    "Com'ere Joe."
    And "Joe" is usually big;
    Little men linger against the wall, then go.

    Even to look at one's a feast
    For your sense of virtue.
    "Why not work," you say, "'twon't hurt you."
    They get less sympathy than wingless flies.
    Funny ... all little guys.


    HUMMINGBIRD

    One day in a lifetime
    I saw one with wings
    a pipesmoke blur
    shaped like half a kiss
    and its raspberry-stone
    heart winked fast in
    a thumbnail of a breast.

    In that blink it
    was around a briar
    and out of sight, but
    I caught a flash
    of its brain
    where flowers swing
    udders of sweet cider;
    and we pass
    like thunderclouds,
    a danger ignored
    because it's too strong.


    "I WILL ARISE AND GO NOW"

    Let's borrow a tent and live on the North Shore
    Where the wind beats bluff from Labrador
    And summer flutters by at half mast,
    Cut the umbilical cord of the past
    While our out-of-work benefits last.

    The hungry? Let's not appease them.
    If they had the power
    They'd only make you paint to please them
    And me punctuate my poetry.
    Let's not mean, but be.

    Let's sign a ban-the-bomb petition
    To show we're intelligent
    Then let politics go to perdition,
    While you tell me and I'll tell you
    How sweet we are.

    I will read you Henry Miller
    And you'll wear your diaphragm.
    Selling out the future
    And owning no geiger counter,
    Let's take it on the lam.


    IRON MARRIAGE

    Iron to iron the molecules hold, determined to be dead;
    so take this flesh and lead it to an iron bed
    and with a graven claw
    draw on it the patterns of an iron law.

    To join, live all the moment, then let go;
    the flesh's way and meaning: to let grow
    has been the rule of love. Now it must be
    crusht and recast to iron eternity.

    But oh the flesh is no immortal thing,
    nor the vibrations of a song, and still they sing:
    yet let this priest
    whom public voices back unanimously
    perform the deed, so we
    and this gallimatiastic little accident
    laughing at the joke he's played
    may be acceptable
    in all dull company.


    LETTER TO MY REDHEADED SON

    Young maple leaves, copper with a delicate flush,
    are taut and hardly bent by the limb-twist breeze,
    and I'm penetrated by the delight that made you
    and makes fool poets call the spring green.

    A poet against a league of liars, I know
    you'll learn love and honesty from her
    who wouldn't learn scorn and left me.
    You'll learn, boy, to be as bitter as me
    against the men with counterfeit eyes,
    their graft and their words: "nigger";
    "people not like us" ... and "bastard".

    Fool poets call the spring green, but I
    a poet, know I can't give you to yourself
    — only what I know of myself: that
    nothing I've done, no poem, stand,
    thought or act of love, hasn't called for
    another, stronger deed, or I've lost it.


    PIT ACCIDENT

    "I liked him," said the small man
    with coal seaming his hard little hands,
    "because he never stood in your light."

    "It must've been a bad twinge,
    in the bone, not the muscle,
    that made him shift and lift his head,
    riding down to work, and
    that beam came too quick to blink at."

    "He never stood in your light, poor guy."
    He was pale, tough as a root at bedrock,
    but tears squeezed out on his ridged face
    and even the rain tasted of coaldust.


    AT EL CORTIJO

    At El Cortijo, with coffee
    tilting right and left
    in talk weird as alcohol,
    a little dark one backed
    into my knee, didn't
    look round ... just sat on it.

    No introduction! She took
    my femur for a public perch,
    and in that exhilarant
    fluctuation of conversation
    quivered
    like a kitten ready to bounce.

    I wrung myself with love
    for the finely wound nerve of her,
    balanced there,
    and the way loose hairs
    half twisted
    at her palpitating nape.

    Disturbed by my rude eye
    she twitched round to glare
    my grin into a grimace,
    then looked back
    but didn't budge
    her delicate handful of a bum.


    BELLE

    Younger, Belle was lonely, but now
    the men brandish forearms in her kitchen,
    shake themselves out with laughter.
    The wives, glad they're not at mischief,
    respect her jet black mane from a distance.

    Edwin with his glasses, his pipe,
    and freckled, spare-tipped fingers,
    she married at twenty-nine, had to,
    (everyone had to, but she
    claims that weakness like a certificate)
    hums to himself, makes
    the best cider in the settlement, hangs
    doors that open to one hooked finger,
    says four words in a day
    and two of them are "No Ma'am!"

    There's a contest of daughters
    and one son,
    born beside a mare munching clover.
    She bore it alone, and
    herself whacked it into life.


    CHARLOTTETOWN HARBOUR

    An old docker with gutted cheeks,
    time arrested in the used-up-knuckled hands
    crossed on his lap, sits
    in a spell of the glinting water.

    He dreams of times in the cider sunlight
    when masts stood up like stubble;
    but now a gull cries, lights,
    flounces its wings ornately, folds them,
    and the waves slop among the weed-grown piles.


    THE FIGHTS

    What an elusive target
    the brain is! Set up
    like a coconut on a flexible stem
    it has 101 evasions.
    A twisted nod slues a punch
    a thin gillette's width
    past a brain, or
    a rude brush-cut to the chin
    tucks one brain safe under another.
    Two of these targets are
    set up to be knocked down
    for 25 dollars or a million.

    In that TV picture in the parlor
    the men, who linked move to move
    in a chancy dance,
    are abstractions only.
    Come to ringside, with two
    experts in there! See
    each step or blow pivoted,
    balanced and sudden as gunfire.
    See muscles wriggle, shine
    in sweat like windshield rain.

    In stinking dancehalls, in
    the forums of small towns,
    punches are cheaper but
    still pieces of death.
    For the brain's the target
    with its hungers
    and code of honour. See
    in those stinking little towns,
    with long counts, swindling judges,
    how fury ends with the last gong.
    No matter who's the cheated one
    they hug like a girl and man.

    It's craft and
    the body rhythmic and terrible,
    the game of struggle.
    We need something of its nature
    but not this;
    for the brain's the target
    and round by round it's whittled
    till nothing's left of a man
    but a jerky bum, humming
    with a gentleness less than human.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from In a Springtime Instant by Milton Acorn. Copyright © 2012 Estate of Milton Acorn. Excerpted by permission of Mosaic Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Mosaic Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0889629218
• ISBN 13: 9780889629219
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 250
• Editor: James Deahl