all inclusive

i'd like to take the package
a job
pay for my work
hired not fired
because i'm brown
stability
to keep my kids warm
let them run while their air
is still pure
before they learn the anger
the rejection, the betrayal
holiday pay
kindness
to dance with my girls
on a hot evening
in a hot place where
beaches smile

ganesh

if a rock fell on me
i wouldn't be too surprised

i have found elephant
footprints on my journeys
the quiet kafuffle of a cosmic joke
played at my expense

i have heard
the crunching and chewing
of cashew nuts
i have been your night's entertainment

you are right
i deserve it
never take pictures
of elephants in india

PREFACE
This is my last book. Sam Solecki is the editor, and now seems a good time to thank him, for that and many other reasons. And to thank Eurithe for many many reasons. I said to her a moment ago, "What does it feel like to live with someone who writes poems most of his life and yours?"
She said, "To me it feels normal. I can't compare it with anything else. It was a life."

Sure it was a life. But can't I wring even a modest superlative out of her like: "Al, it was wonderful! I loved every minute of it!" Couldn't she lie a little just to make me happy? I tell you, it's maddening to live with a woman who always has to tell the truth, as if it hurts her in the esophagus or eardrum or in her instep to exaggerate just a wee bit. I tell her shut up then, I got this very important document to write, outlining my Philosophy and World View of the Hereafter.

So I'm left alone to talk with a bunch of ghosts, at least people I can't see, potential readers, past readers, people who can't stand my stuff (no, they can't read anyway). But there are a few, I guess. And now I have a subject. I've reached age 80, and I started to write at 13. Now I hafta make an embarrassed confession: I feel the same way Eurithe does: I can't compare our lives with any others. (But I hate women who're always right like that.)

It was a life, she said. And I thought it was a pretty good one. We did what we wanted to do, went where we wanted to go. I wrote the way I liked, and kidded myself some of it was pretty good. We were broke - and I mean nearly penniless - a few times in earlier days. A few times, for god's sake? Nearly always. There were periods when I was so depressed I felt like suicide -: having failed at everything I tried to do. But we pulled out of it, with some difficulty. And those periods I called "The Bad Times" seem to me now something like Triumph. "Don't you think so, dear?"

"They were horrible. You should have committed suicide."
What are ya gonna do with a woman like that?
Anyway, yes, it was a life. I wouldn't have wanted any other.

Al Purdy
Sidney, BC / Ameliasburg, Ontario 1999

Purdy's Last Poem: "Both Her Gates East and West"
Wanderings in Canada in the century
before the Millennium . . .

This is where I came to
when my body left its body
and my spirit stayed
in its spirit home

Beside the seething Fundy waters
my friend sleeps
and wrote this message for me
"I'll wait for you in the west
Till your sun comes down for its setting"
That grand summer in Newfoundland
when we feasted on wild raspberries
bakeapples Screech and salmon
walked four miles in the rain
(you blamed me for) to L'Anse aux Meadows
where Helge Ingstad and Anne Stine
were digging up Leif the Lucky's ruins
talked to them an hour
while I watched the Viking ship
and horned heads leaping ashore
reflected in Ingstad's blue eyes
On Baffin Island
north of summer and summer
comes again with every flower
a river where I slept a moment's hour
to dream and plucked white blossoms
and sent them searching for you
from that island of lost memory
are the flowers still searching?
Quebec was summer in Montreal
Cùte des Neiges and St. Joseph's
with Brother Andre's heart
pickled in alcohol
where I climbed the steps in winter
"the lame and the halt and the blind"
climbed in summer
in search of Brother Andre's miracle
and threw away their crutches
On a green island in Ontario
I learned about being human
built a house and found the woman
and we shall be there forever
building a house that is never finished
Camped by the South Saskatchewan
all day we listened to voices
we heard inside ourselves
the river like a blue bracelet
where the Metis fought their last battle
Dumont Letendre and old Ouellette
their ghosts came to us in sleep
as white mist moved over our bodies
the river flowed into the sky
In the Alberta prairie badlands
camped by the vanished Bearpaw Sea
in Dinosaur Provincial Park
after the campground closed in fall
we wander NO TRESPASSING badlands
- the white light suddenly changes
to brown sepia twilight
we're 75 million years back in time
beasts like bad dreams ramp around us
with bodies we can see through
transparent in the sepia sun
and Canada becomes a very old country
the Rocky Mountains fold themselves upward
giants rising slowly
and we are children again
Through the Crow's Nest mountains
at age 17
the freight train a black caterpillar
climbing climbing climbing
vertebrae chattering up the mountains
red coal cinders blackening my face
riding the high catwalks riding the empties
like bugs like dwarfs like boys pretending
they're men halfway high as the mountains go
below us valleys bathed in sunlight
glowing enchanted valleys
and I came to believe we were beloved there
beloved in a land fortunate of itself
beneath black cinders on our faces
we glowed in turn from the soul's well-being
while I tried to explain myself to myself
the simple earth and sky-searching mountains
were things I never could explain
Flying north and following the Mackenzie
River long after the Scots explorer
endless forest then endless empty land
we seemed to hang between earth and sky
then a monster hand with a hundred fingers
spreading itself over the river delta
and a permafrost town still Canada
the Beaufort Sea beyond
where the world was blue forever

- comes the millennium into our brief lives

I suppose it's like a kid growing up
to see the parts of your own country
like a jigsaw that suddenly comes together
and turns into a complete picture
you've touched nearly all the parts
you've become a certain kind of adult
and the ordinary places become endearments
that slip into your mind and grow there
and you change into what you already are
in a country you can wear like an old overcoat
Joseph's coat of many colours

The millennium really makes little difference
except as a kind of unsubtle reminder of
the puzzle that is yourself and always changing
the country that you wandered like a stranger
but stranger no longer
yourself become undeniable to yourself
wearing the lakes and rivers towns and cities
a country that no man can comprehend
Joseph's coat turned inside out
now indistinguishable from your own innards
- a country that no man may comprehend
asking the same questions as in ages past
time measurable by the tick-tock of millenniums
and if by chance we are not alone
some traveller on another planet
may catch a glimpse of us sometimes
looking outward into the night sky

Blue Himalayan Poppies
The stems, in their happiness, wave goodbye,
a dart-pattern of spear grass caught
against the black dog's ankle.
Seeds and their smallness; the way they
ride toward the future always.
Such hope makes unlikely light
from the most distant stars possible.
Later in the day they'll drop
into the warm earth.
I never guessed you
would have crossed some great distance
to settle everywhere
in my arms.
*
How was I to know
this, briefly, like the touch
of smallest fingers, after
a long winter and the
Chinese New Year. End
of the Year of the Dog,
beginning of the Year
of the Pig. Does it matter?
Maybe not, except summer now,
full of your small self on my shoulders
and how the sun
catches in sea-spray,
rocks below and the edge moving
further off.
*
This morning
I read the poems my friend sent:
postmarks from Izmir and Parma.
Sometimes I think this house,
the mortgage--my god there's a
station wagon in the driveway--
even you, sometimes I think, even you....
I am jealous of languages I don't understand,
mosques with roofs like round fruit.
The seeds of fruit that can't grow
unless a bird digests them,
sprouted like second spines.
The planet revolves under our feet,
around the sun, around
the centre of the centre,
as in the living room
I hold you tight and spin
to the sound of Billie Holiday.
*
Most seeds are lifted by wind.
This afternoon I blew
white dandelions across the yard.
There are days meant for us
when the light is trying to tell us something.
Even the blue Himalayan poppy,
which blooms once perfectly before dying,
is showing off.
I talk in your mouth
and you open bird-like
to swallow words.
This is my pleasure.
You like round ones best:
igloo, overalls, loop, moon, shoe.
There is nothing in this milky world
as small as your breath.
*
Do you know coconuts
migrate by water to new beaches?
They collapse on the dunes after
all that time of waves
passing them hand to hand.
To live in a place like this you must first
imagine it.
Already I am sad for anything
you missed while you were here.
But I walk with you until you sleep.
Somewhere is a beach, a palm
and high in its branches a bird,
red feathers declaring
I am here.

Lombard Street
He says yes to the long drive knowing
there will be fights with the brother,
threats from the father,
the mother's silence and bad navigation
through complex American freeways.
Yes to Alcatraz, trolley cars,
someone he wishes he could be momentarily
skateboarding down a steep incline
toward the low and distant bay,
Chinatown, and Fisherman's Wharf.
Yes to dinner at the Hilton
with its palate-cleansing sorbets between courses.
Yes to Lombard Street, the most
twisted street in the world,
the family car climbing and
this small boy outlined in the rear window,
his balloon an empty word bubble in the frame--
some cartoon character who forgot
what he was about to say.
Yes to the evening drive
across the Golden Gate Bridge,
as the city closes its slow eyes.
Yes to the next day and drive home again,
to the next year when his voice broke,
and to first sex sweet in the attic of the cabin.
Yes to doing it again in the morning,
then to the few women in his life
who taught him what he knows.
Yes to the birth of his child,

to the house and jewelled yard around it.
Yes to the dog.
And now he's well into it,
there's no turning back.
Around another hairpin climbing steadily
beyond the silence surrounding
the dog's inevitable end,
so yes even to the death of his parents and
yes to being there each time.
Yes to all the routes that sent him
corkscrewing forever up like an aria.
Yes to watching his daughter
back the car down the driveway
graduating highschool. Then yes to
old age and to senior's discounts at Sears.
Yes to memory and forgetting,
the decline of his body,
to those who check on him on weekends,
and to the someone who pushes him
out to the park in a wheelchair.
Yes to light and dark and closing,
and Lombard Street's hedges and red bougainvillaea.