Pale Blue Cover (by George Bowering)
Pale Blue Cover (by George Bowering)
Original Text
Changing on the Fly: The Best Lyric Poems of George Bowering (Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2004).
This poem
is reproduced on the Griffin Prize Web Site (from a volume on the 2005 Canadian Shortlist).
1In the middle of the night Matt would fly to Vancouver so
2 he could take a walk on the sea wall the next day, then
3 go home.
4Wouldn’t tell anyone, no telephone call, just run a scene
5 through his peculiar Ontario head, no snow on that
6 beach.
7No one can imagine Matt teaching religion at McMaster,
8 Matt eyeing math in a Bay Street shop window.
9Here’s the man expecting every book to be break-
10 through to best seller Toronto, Spanish doctors
11 couldn’t even do it.
12English patients could do it, Spanish doctors, get out of
13 town. Spanish girls, you can forget it.
14Matt was planning to write a hundred novels, line them up
15 like matched jewelry, strike a shovel into the heart of
16 bony Canada.
17Mix a metaphor, wrestle a fish in a northern river, propel
18 prose like nobody’s business, business had nothing to
19 do with it.
20In the middle of the day Cohen was a wry anglo saxon
21 typing on a rocky farm, two thousand words before
22 supper.
23Remain wry, people like me catch you lost in thought down
24 there at the other end of the table, face turned to the
25 corner with imagination in it.
26We remind ourselves of this undreamable sephardic rock
27 agriculturalist, shovel bouncing off some kind of
28 precambrian anapest.
29He really thought he could get across Canada, get over the
30 twentieth century, pick the whole country up and turn
31 it over.
32No one will ever know what he was thinking on the red-eye,
33 patriot satyr grin on his lip.
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire
RPO Edition
2011