 'This poem was sparked by Wayne Johnston's 'The Colony of Unrequited Dreams,' a fictionalized life of Newfoundland's first premier, Joey Smallwood; the first chapters take place at my old grammar school. The poem wrote itself quickly, joyous at finally being
released.' - Ken McCullough |
for John and Jim McCullough and in memory of Jack and Ted Withers
St. John's Newfoundland, 1949-1955
Cousin Jack perched on Temperance Street
which, if you weren't (temperate), and stumbled
you'd tumble to an oily harbor grave. Their house
on a slant and their back garden
space for five or six to sit and sing or speculate.
Their doors were painted the colors of the circus.
Jack drove a Morris Minor
parked somewhere flat above their alley.
Seagulls skreeled in heavy air of the codfish catch.
Jack was a terrier,
with the crinkly eyes of all my mother's kin.
His dory stashed in a grotto of the harbor.
In spring, he'd putt-putt us out the Narrows
to look down icebergs--their ghost cetacean bodies
sighed and seethed over onto their backs. Took us fishing
inland, up pine-needled mooseroads where
every flycast brought a leaping, running rainbow
I was too afraid to knock unconscious. The
smell of trout, his pipe, coffee in his thermos
and Sunday news on the radio from Antigonish
or crazy reels from baymen run amuck in Ottawa.
In those days, coal incensed the air and quirky sailors
took their smokes from Players' cavalier square boxes.
We'd wait 'til they'd toss their butts then gather 'em
in our Walter Raleigh tins for later beneath the steps
of the movie house--where Olivier moped in shadow
and Ophelia sang as she floated down the stream.
Fortified with day-old crullers
we wee curmudgeons congregated there to swap
our views of Miss Lilly's cantilevered Maidenform
or what it was like to be Christine Jorgenson, or to
feel up a sunglassed Princess Margaret on the Riviera.
A dime would get you in the picture show, and a dime would buy
a G.I. Joe or Straight Arrow or Green Hornet.
G.I. Joe, a minor league pitcher from East Turncoat, Tennessee
who could ricochet a grenade off three trees, three cave walls and into
a Korean machine gun emplacement… but beware!--
in the next month's issue, the "Yellow Peril" swept over the hill
in unending waves of gray padded coats, two-toed shoes
and threatening dentition.
In the light, I inhaled road appled sunny macadam,
girls with rosy cheeks and button eyes
who flashed white cotton panties jumping rope
who breakfasted on white bread and molasses
'til their teeth turned black by the age of twelve.
In my pocket, ha' pennies polished smooth
each one worth five sticks of licorice.
I remember passing boys on the road
one fateful day, holding up their string of trout
for us to appreciate, and my mother stopped the Nash
to chat. Their smiles and muscled trout
ignited the afternoon. But the next day
a grainy photo of one of them, Ignatius Crotty,
struck by a hit-and-run and rendered
in the words of our babysitter Alma,
Salvation Army Major, "simple."
I feared the orphanage we played in basketball
because it was Catholic and I was not.
As I left the coal-heated gym
on my way to take a leak down darkwood tunnels
I thought a priest would kidnap me,
brainwash me into "The Faith."--
the years would reveal my instincts had some basis.
And once a year, Portuguese in parti-colored shirts
swam swarthy arm-in-arm down Water St.,
watering the cobbles with their ample manhoods.
Our world was simple then, a heartbeat
which, once a week, in the woods, revealed
a lichened horse's skull we thought a dinosaur.
Always the echoes of a horse-drawn hearse.
clomping from the Cathedral.
It was a time before spandex, before Prozac, before indoor baseball
when every potato mound
was fertilized with codfish heads.
As the one American in my school
I responded to the taunts, then
slunk my wounds through coal-dust streets
with ripped patch on my school blazer,
to be spanked at home for fighting.
In spring, there were walking races--
attenuated men, Flemish Jesuses,
angling in from the outports
white handkerchiefs knotted at the corners
to keep the pale sun from their tonsures.
Two worlds, two parks: Bannerman, sedate, Victorian;
Bowering, where families picnicked
and every man with a fag on his lip
and a chip on his pint-sized shoulder.
Up hills where forts were hidden
in the heat of summer, were mongrels digging rats
midst prickers holding tart pale globes of gooseberries
rabbits napped in rafts of elfhedge
ornamented with exploding blueberries
the faint taste of faerie dust on currant bushes
and then the miniature succulent sacred hearts of strawberries.
In autumn, pencil cases, tepid milk in thermoses
and fields of solid mud behind board fences
where young boys booted up against each other.
Ships hooted lonely in the harbor.
The R.C.M.P., red-coated colossuses
stood and saluted us on the way to our painting classes.
From sources unbeknownst
a bottle of cod liver oil for every snot-nosed angel.
And sprinkled with vinegar, fish and chips
on yesterday's news seasoned the evening.
In winter, snow concealed the telephone poles
and we made labyrinths
collapsed by dogs and younger brothers.
Sleigh races on the ice of Quidi Vidi
and tales of when the ice gave way.
In the stores, there were seal paper weights, seal
cutlets, coats and tea cosies
which no one in that third world could afford.
But everyone owned Coronation teacups.
In coves, tumescent eels would graze your legs,
and once a year, caplin swarmed your ankles.
In every barren, albino moose
yellow as nicotine.
The smell of trout and woodsmoke
permeated tweed
and caribou velvet
was graphite on your fingers.
I watched and listened, tasted everything,
in the Land Where Potholes Were Invented.
Three times, from Signal Hill, I saw the Spirit
move from sea above to sea below.
And when we left, fog held us back a week--
finally airborne, to the States of my adolescence.
I was never meant to be a gentleman--
a bayman forever, by choice, by predilection.
The names keep calling me: Garnish,
Come-by-Chance, Bay L'Argent
Gaff Topsail, Fogo, the Exploits River
Witless Bay, Virgin Arm
Leading Tickle, Pouch Cove, Heart's Content….