Three Poems by Bruce Hunter

 

There is a Road

 

South of Firenze on the autostrada to Roma

there’s a turn to the east,

towards the soft hills of old Toscana

and her distant mountains.

The road rides through the treetops.

The vales drop below us.

opening south to Siena.

 

On the road from everywhere to everywhere,

as the poet Fabio says.

I have always travelled in my dreams.

And the dreams where I can see and hear everything.

The road that goes always homeward wherever I am.  

I found it again on the autostrada.

My eyes open up as they always do.

As when I drive towards Banff or Waterton,

or the North Island to Cathedral Grove.

In the Orkneys, on the ferry to Hoy

or the road along Loch Lomond,

I’m flying again like in my dreams.

I’ve been this way before,

But never before this way. 

 

And there’s an osteria

in a land where coffee is a small communion

And food a sacred offering. You are home, it says.

Travelling, to this place.

The maps tell you,

there’s a distant vale, where there’s a river.

 

Follow the strada bianca, the white road,

Alice our oste says,

to a castello in the olive groves.

My room in a hilltop tower under a tiled roof

opens onto the vineyards.

At the end of the strada bianca

where my soul waits for me.

A place I’ve never been but always known.

Riffs

 

As the trains grumble

and their passengers scramble,

the sax man’s hunched on a folding stool

in the Metro’s great marbled hall.

Hepcat in a pushed-back poor boy’s cap,

Busker’s badge pinned on his jacket.

The rippled brown forehead,

white bristle on his chin, 

blue eyes alert under grey eyebrows.

 

His open case reveals a few small coins,

as rushing riders ignore him.

Arthritic fingers cup his golden sax,

he no longer stands to play.

Always damp in the underground.

His head bowed mostly

But he rises sometimes,

sways and scuffs to Brubeck,

and drops a velvet “Take Five”

that I heard once at George’s Spaghetti House on Dundas

where I blew my first good paycheque

on bad rye and good jazz.

Moe Kaufman and Ed Bickert,

the old players and jazz joints gone.

A prairie boy, I couldn’t believe my big city luck.

This man is the last of his era,

and I’m still too shy to ask his name.

 

Thirty years since he played large,

streaming smoky riffs of Parker and Coltrane.

Insomniacs and dreamers, all of us,

floating in his cool blue bubbles of hot jazz

that lit the black silk sky,

where I courted my young love,

and spun a dance or two under the lamps,

all the possibilities of street and belief.

As he bopped his sanguine notes

electric at the corner of joy and poetry.

 

And our tight circle around him,

broke and in love at Bay and Bloor.

What else would we be.

Outside all the tony stores we’d never afford,

applauded and slipped him our meagre coins.

Now it all comes to this, settling what I owe.

I slip him a fin, then stop.

Empty my wallet into his hungry case.

 

And something approaching

a smile appears, but he’s wary still

as I fold my twenty dollar prayers.

And lay them softly in his hands, offerings.

While there’s still time

before the last train’s past,

to reconcile my young debts,

for the lines, riffs.

And loves I lived for.

Dark Water - anti-pastoral in the key of dystopia

 

Once a dangerous toxic landscape, Lynnview Ridge site to reopen as public park this fall, Calgary Herald, April 30, 2018.

        

Standing on the hill where once I roamed

above the river and the beaver dam we fished.

In Lynnwood overlooking the Ogden flats:

tidy rows of houses below.

Plumes of tall elms line the streets.

Behind me the school where I read Silent Spring.*

The year I turned thirteen.

And learned we’d been suckered.

Foreshadowing what came:

a time when no birds sang.

 

Behind me now a steel fence

like those around construction sites,

and the sign:  Keep Gate Locked at All Times.

The house where my sister lived, bulldozed.

Fifty years since I took the long road out

and I’m back.

 

The wide albino prairie gone,

the sloughs, cat tails too.

C.P.R’s Ogden Shops, Anthes Pipe,

and the C.I.L . Closed.

Gone with all the good jobs.

And the tank farms above the Esso refinery,

four blocks from my school,

flat topped caplets and Aspirin white  

with their spiral ladders, pills for the sickness.  

Once we loved you, Gasoline.

We couldn’t get enough of you.

 

Your fracking towers’ diamond lights,

all night flare offs hissing your names:

Esso, Husky, White Rose, and Turbo.  

All your aliases, your alibis, we swooned.

Our lips on the tailpipes of dawn.

We inhaled gallons of you,

sang your sweet ditties.

Never imagined you’d leave us, Valvoline.

The accelerator’s kick

unleashed a tiger in every tank.

Cars never too big, their narcotic fumes,

buxom chrome bumpers and soaring rocket ship fins.

Your appetite unsated like our lust.

 

You plied us with cheap cigarettes, towels,

dinnerware, at your roadside attractions

- whatever it took, to woo us.

That was the plan all along.

How could we have known:

 the white tanks on the hill

had no bottoms to seal them..

Grassy berms couldn’t contain you.

Bleeding carbon black water

from the deep Devonian Sea.

Ten kilometres straight down.

 

We trusted you even when the pipes ripped.

Seepage under the prairie’s glacial grout.

And a slippery sludge oozed across the hard pan.

We didn’t believe the trout we caught

when their belly tumours whispered

we’re ruined, in their dying gasps,

when they reeked of it, when it dripped

 

from the sandstone crags above the Bow River.

Liars, we scoffed. Who believes fishes?

All the silent springs.  After all,

we loved you too, Vaseline,

you salved our wounds , smoothed our hair.

I stand now, where once I stood,

 

On the poison ground, a spruce’s

blue feather pointing skyward.

Over there, elms weeping beside razed foundations,

- whole streets and the houses where we lived.

Where are they now, the gardeners,

the Franklin gulls that hovered?

Thirty-one million in lawsuits to reclaim the prairie.

Named without irony. Refinery Park.

 

Ogden is a metaphor.

For all the small towns, the little people.

What’s left when it’s gone.

Once we loved you, Gasoline.

On hot summer nights, those who still live here say

you can smell that damned ghost refinery.

And dark water rising.

 

* Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, released in 1962, started the global grassroots environmental movement and a monumental shift in consciousness. Carson warns unless there is a change, there will come a spring when no birds sing. 

 

Bruce Hunter was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and grew up in Ogden. His poems, stories and essays have appeared in over 80 publications in Canada, China, India, Italy, the U.K and the US. His newest book of poetry Galestro was published in spring 2023 by iQdB edizioni in Italy to wide critical acclaim. He wrote "Dark Water" during his time as Calgary Public Library’s Author in Residence in 2017 after a trip to his old neighbourhood with renowned literary historian Shaun Hunter (no relation).