On Thursday morning I woke up still feeling like I had a headache from food poisoning. As is usually the case when I feel that way it went away during song practice. I had a slice of ham for lunch and I didn’t feel food poisoned and so unless I’d built up immunity to the strain it must have been the old cheese that had given me food poisoning.

I received an email that provided a link to a letter telling me that I’d been awarded the Noah Meltz grant. The problem is though that the award was only for $334. That’s what I would normally get back as a refund for my expenses after the rest of the grant has paid for my course fees. In the fall I received over $1200 from Noah Meltz to pay for the first half of my school year. I can usually expect at least that much for the winter term. If I can’t get a larger grant then I can’t pay for my courses and I may have to drop out of university.

            I tried to take a siesta in the afternoon but I was so worried about the grant that I couldn’t sleep. I tried to call Financial Services at U of T but since today is the last of the month my phone service is suspended. I couldn’t go to Freedom Mobile to pay for my March phone service because I haven’t gone to the bank and only planned on taking out some money on the way home after class tonight.

            I printed five copies each of my poems, “Memo to the Heart of Insecurity”, “May Basket”, and “Dancing Signature” to get ready for the Master Poetry Class tonight.

            I had daylight for my entire ride to Victoria College and so I didn’t have to use my flashers. A lot of the previous storm had melted and salted down but there was still a lot of dirty slush.

            Albert mentioned extreme unction, the Catholic rite of anointing the dying with oil, because Ernest Christopher Dowson had written a poem about it and because it had an example of rime riche, which he’d been discussing with Matthew. Rhyming “rise” with “brise” would be a rich rhyme. Usually more identical sounds like pear and pair. In the poem in question the rime riche is “sense” and “Innocence”.

            Albert had our group meet in his office again and it was our turn to have him sit in for a round of poems. The problem was that neither Vivian nor Blythe had been there the week before and for some reason they were not able to send the attachments of their poems to me by email. So Albert had to print up copies of their poems for me and the others, which took at least twenty minutes. I gave them copies of mine but none of us were able to give any extensive critiques since we hadn’t had time to sit down and think about them.

            Since Albert only planned to sit with us for one poem each, I read “Sugar”:

Mysterious women

offering not to unravel

but to amplify

the mystery of life

Mysterious women

offering not to unravel

the mystery

for a price

Parkdale is covered with webbing

torn wisps of it float down the street

through a ghost town that aint even haunted

like some soft, smoky, sad tumbleweed

It hangs like half hooked volleyball nets

It’s strung between street signs and walls

It’s caught in the trees like the skeletons

of kites that were long ago lost

All over explode these thin blossoms

like mandalas of silvery web

and inside these gossamer fishnets

are the spirits of slow struggling men

who’ve hung like some half finished dart game

cut short by the end of the world

so long they’ve forgotten their own names

and just mumble the name of some girl

I myself came and sat down at this bench

but found out a little too late

it was woven by some spidery wench

for whose bite I am destined to wait.

            Albert said that the poem has a great use of assonance. He told me that the last stanza is potentially wonderful because of the sudden move to solid rhyming. His main problem though was with the word “wench”. He said that compared with the other more modern words in the poem, “wench” is too antiquaited. He pointed out that “mandalas” is okay, even though it’s old, because it’s still used by hip intellectuals. He added that he’s also bothered by “spidery” but he likes “bite” and “destined”

            After Albert left Margaryta asked me if I live in Parkdale but added that it would be very strange if I didn’t since I write so much about it. She said she and her parents lived at Queen and Roncesvalles for their first five years in Canada.

            We looked at my poem, “Parkdale”:

Parkdale where the world converges

and almost every ethnicity lives and does business

Tibetan restaurants and temples

West Indian shops where the roti is delicious

 

Graced each day by ladies from all of the lands

by hipster colonists, artists and the abandoned mad

There are liquor store and food bank line-ups,

anti-psychotics and narcotics in empty pockets

I watch the channel changing from day to night

Out come drunks and addicts that I’ve seen for years

the sloppy relaxed and the spastic uptight

with collapsing knees and jerking shoulder gears

Though nymphs no more solicit on my corner

the police still torture sirens in their cars

drunks from the suburbs step over the homeless

on their way to lock themselves in gentrified bars

Parkdale is dying

dying in my arms

but at the funeral viewing

it still has charm

From here on Queen Street

above the CoffeeTime

the village converges with me

as I say goodbye.

            Margaryta pointed out that the phrase “where the world converges” renders it unnecessary to say “every ethnicity” in the next line.

            Vivian liked my lines: “drunks from the suburbs step over the homeless / on their way to lock themselves in gentrified bars …”

            Blythe liked “abandoned mad” and “There are liquor store and food bank line-ups / anti-psychotics and narcotics in empty pockets …”

            Of my poem “Petal and Thorn Collage on Skin”:

It’s like an orgy of world cinema

and Hollywood got married

and the honeymoon takes place

in Parkdale.

Transparent curtains of web

are spun by cold guts of fate

while I tear through the sets

they separate

From Neo-nazi nightmares

to calypso paradises

From hookers from everywhere

to African goddesses

From turned up watered down taverns

to all flavours of mail-order brides

From convulsing crack puppets dancing

to trendy infanticides

Parkdale’s full of surprises

with each scene I’m barging in on

but it’s always perfect timing

in my cinematic opinion

            Margaryta pointed out that in the last line my adjective “cinematic” would imply that my opinion was like a movie. That’s clearly not what I meant so I’ll have to find something else.

            Blythe gave me back my poems from two weeks before and said, “Wave in the Air” was her favourite of all my poems. Of the two haibun she liked “Tailor Made Haibun” the best.

            As I was getting ready to leave I heard Ashley, Matthew and Jenna talk about all having decided to write poems about sex for next week as a challenge because Matthew had declared that it’s awkward to write poems about sex.

            I stopped at Freshco on the way home.

            I had a slice of ham for dinner with a potato and some gravy and watched an episode of Rawhide.

            In this story the trail drive is about to cross an area surrounded by farmland but they are confident they can get the herd through without going on anyone’s land. A group of farmers led by a former Union officer named Eli ride out to meet the drovers and warn them that if they trample a single plant of their crops they will begin opening fire on their cattle. Later there is a thunderstorm and the drovers’ horses get spooked. They stampede and charge down a narrow ravine where a farmer named Ken is working. There is no chance for him to get out of the way and he is trampled to death. Ken’s wife Millie wants revenge and she manipulates Eli’s love for her to make him punish the drovers. He wants the drover most responsible to be hanged. Gil steps forward and says that it was his fault because he is the trail boss. But Jesus the horse wrangler comes to claim responsibility. They are about to hang Jesus when Gil offers a military argument that Eli understands and agrees with and so Gil replaces Jesus under the tree. In the end Eli’s sister finally convinces Millie that she’s being selfish and that Ken’s death was an accident. She runs up at the last minute to convince Eli to not go through with it. Another voice of reason through all of this is Eli’s friend Cort.

            Eli was played by Canadian actor Leslie Neilson, famous for the Naked Gun movies.

            Millie was played by Kathleen Crowley.

            Cort was played by Martin Landau.