Appellation d'origine controlée
Waters Remembered begins with a catalogue of streams Taddle Creek, Garrison Creek, Burke Brook, Castle Frank Brook, etc. All buried watercourses in Toronto.
It is not quite an epic catalogue. Their mention is a lyric impulse to anchor the poem in place.
This beginning tying name to place suffers a displacement when it comes to portraits. The subject is not named by a kind of divergent ekphrasis. "Royal Street Diamond" begins as a description of a bronze bull created by Joe Fafard and poised outside the Mira Godard Gallery in Yorkville and then the poem turns to the speaker's companion, a friend "who is losing memory and language". The poem is full of details and apt anecdote that allow me to identify its subject. And I ponder why his name isn't invoked.
He points to the anatomically correctHe was a professor of English and an admirer of pretty boys from way back. The creator of Stonyground, a very special farm garden on the Bruce.
scrotum dangling between the bull's sturdy
back legs, giggles, waves his hands and says
needs something … at his neck … He reaches
for words and finds them: a sign … waiting
for the girls! We laugh and walk on past
high-end clothing shops. His words flow now
remembering his cousin's dairy barn smelling
of straw and shit, its din of bawling calves.
But I understand the poet's reticence. This is not a poem for. It is a poem about.
But naming is important for the the full presence of the genius of the place to carry on. Our friend's name is Douglas (never Doug) Chambers. He has since that walk with Maureen Scott Harris lost more of his memories and has less of his exquisite mastery of language to work with. He still giggles on occasion.
Maureen Scott Harris Waters Remembered
And so for day 1879
04.02.2012
