THE CROSSING PLACE: TRANSTROMER VIA GARBAREK

In 1984 Jan Garbarek released a record called It's OK to listen to the gray voice, whose title I recognised as a line from a Tomas Transtromer poem. I'd been reading Transtromer for a long time, and I had already written poetry inspired by various jazz tunes, including some by Garbarek and Eberhard Weber. Listening to this music prompted a couple of poems, a second-generation pass-the-parcel regeneration. I find they're closer to the music than to the original poem, though not a shade on either, but I am pleased I can still find echoes of music and poetry in them.

I wrote this poem in July 1986. As it happened, the next summer I met Garbarek and Weber on a flight to Oslo for the Bislett Games, and I got them to sign a chapbook of mine called Mucho Mojo which I happened to be carrying, and which included a poem written after a tune by Weber. I sent the two Transtromer/Garbarek poems to him ('just put Jan Garbarek, Oslo,' he told me. 'That's all the address you'll need') but I heard no more.

Now Tomas Transtromer has died. I'll likely write more on him soon, but for now I'll share one of those poems. 'The Crossing Place' was published in Hollands Maandblad in 1988, and in The Windhorse Review (Yarmouth, Nova Scotia) in 1993. I was intending it to be the title poem of a short collection...


THE CROSSING PLACE

Empty borders extend
All the way into the center of the night
I could be
Driving a heap through downtown Bridgeport
At 3am snow falling & wipers
Rocking me to sleep. I know
If I sleep now, with this image in my mind
I will have dreams, & I may never wake
Again. They may take
Me across the ocean which divides me
From myself, never again be there
On the other side, where you were
Waking, sleeping, peacefully where
Falling snow makes a blanket, sparkling
Then melting, to keep us warm.

SEA JOURNEY: A TWISTED SONNET

I came across the manuscript of this poem the other day; I don't recall when I wrote it, but it was published in Tokyo almost exactly twenty years ago, in a nice magazine called Printed Matter. It probably originated in the early 1980s, and was written out around 1990--I was trying to put together a sequence called Jazz Suite in those days, and this one was written around a Chick Corea tune as performed by the Gary Burton quintet on his Passengers album, which was released in 1977. This was the quartet with Pat Metheny, Steve Swallow, Dan Gottlieb, and the wonderful Eberhard Weber added as a second bass player. It's a beautiful tune, and Weber's pulsing bass lines really make it work. You can hear it here.

I've redone it considerably from the published version; we change in twenty years and time does things to our perceptions and how we express them; I think it's closer to the flow of the music now, and the bent-up sonnet is clearer now....

SEA JOURNEY

(Chick Corea/Gary Burton)

This is something different from what we knew

Was true, when we stared across the narrows

Between our pillows & found ourselves lost

In wonder when storm tossed thoughts inside find

Faces we had just caressed, & whether we'd dare

To share our guesses. Trying to trace form

Mirrored in moving water, each impulse there

In the shifting spaces of our lonely minds,

Where waves crashed & broke, short of the places

We thought we'd choose. Where we might share storms

Or lose. Might hold each other & not get soaked

By tears. Then your voice rose, like foam from wave,

Saying why do we roam with the water near

If staying dry is what we really crave?

SURROUNDS (Montreal 1976): A Poem

I wrote this in Wiesbaden, Germany in April 1982, thinking about the lost but recent past . It was published in 1986 in Gil Ott's great magazine Paper Air (Philadelphia) and in 1993 in Tidepool (Hamilton, Ontario). I lived in Montreal from the summer of 1975 through December 1976, and oddly, from the first moment, whenever someone asked me where I was 'from' I would immediately reply 'Montreal'. 

 

SURROUNDS
                        (Montreal, 1976)

Outside, the whole mountain rises in silence.
Aimed at the East End, the cross shines on,
Sequined and secure. Below, only a few faces
Will remember to look up. I am climbing
The wooden stairs to the overlook while
The city glows, but does not burn.
Small pieces of the sky fall all around me.
A long time after I've reached the panorama,
I stare at heaven being patched with clouds.

MIDNIGHT SWIM: A POEM

I was thinking about a poem I had written that mentioned Magnolia, a dog named after JJ Cale's song. I couldn't find it in my files, but I came across this one, intended for a collection called Signal Rock, loosely about my beaches, but which has yet to be collected.

I wrote this in Oslo, in June of 1982. I was there to cover the Bislett Games and the Dream Mile; that may be the trip I met Jan Garbarek and Eberhard Weber. The poem was published by Rialto, in Norwich, in 1985, and the following year in the US, in Gil Ott's lovely magazine Paper Air, from Philadelphia. The photo comes from the website Ossipee Lake Webcam, which stuns me time and again with photos taken from the same location...

MIDNIGHT SWIM

Coming out of the water when the moon has gone
behind the clouds, the phosphorescence in
the ocean disappears. Shale splinters
& cuts my fingers as they grab a hold;
water runs off me like a peeling skin.
I dry myself in the sand, but it sticks
to my hands. The moon returns. I pull
the remains of a sweater over my head.
The wool is moist; the weather's changed,
the water is starting to move.
When my breath comes back I begin
To rearrange the sand, as if I had never
been there. Behind the rocks it stretches
for miles, in every direction but one.
A long way to go before I've got it right.
The tide, moving out, covers nothing up.