Live Encounters Poetry & Writing February 2025
Autumn River, poems by James Deahl.
The Poplar By The Autumn River
true art is but the expression of our love of nature.
– Henry David Thoreau
The young poplar growing from a crevice
amid boulders where the river cuts south
must have deep roots
to cling to this harsh environment.
Few plants could grow here;
the heat every August, and ice
all the long winter, make life precarious.
Still, a seed came, took root,
and survived. Canada geese and mallards
breed gloriously, and they depart
before December locks our world
in its prison of frost.
It’s difficult to understand how life
persists in this remorseless land.
One might almost think this is a river
in the Orkneys, it seems so remote
from comfort. Today the season hangs
on the edge of autumn
for the earliest wild plums have draped
themselves in their October costumes,
foretelling the gales of November.
In this kingdom of stone
any life is a blessing: this lone poplar,
that clump of ragged yellow thistle.
On the path from the river
one final mountain rose, bruised by wind
and rain, red as a widow’s kiss,
speaks darkly of love.
Widow
The copper beech on Christmas Day becomes
the Widow’s hand, fingers reaching to comb
cold air, each leaf still clinging’s a golden
ring that, when spun by winter’s storms, plays
its own unique rhapsody, displays its thirst
for a resurrection to the green world.
Winter’s solstice just past, I walk among
the vanished crows, the withered yellow fists
of autumn’s roses. Dusk’s silence arrives
like a lover’s letter, postmarked so long
ago its sender has forgotten his
very words, cannot recall his own name.
In these drift-swept fields, some people hunger
for forgiveness, others pray for solace
while the sun, reversing on its journey,
heralds slowly brightening days. Across this
frozen land, only the Widow matters,
her unbound white hair free upon the wind.
Listening To Brahms
As Dusk Claims The Prairie
Piano Quartet Number 1 in G Minor
To the west a salmon sky
cottonwoods pose darkly against;
they have forsaken half their leaves
and sing laments to autumn’s chill
and the wind.
Just a boy, I first heard Brahms
seventy years ago in another country;
now night seeps through the wheatfields
like a brook of forgetfulness.
No one remembers where this brook goes.
Why must the music of November
be eternally dusk?
Darkness arises from reedbeds,
the corners of abandoned barns:
these are realms our sun never reaches.
How does Brahms summon music
from a world of silence?
Only the courageous dare open
those hidden chambers of the heart
where night and dawn are redeemed.
The Bare Plum
Germain Park, 2024
Mid-November and the plum
stands naked against the thin sun.
Sometimes a blue jay will perch
where fruit once hung in purple light.
Sometimes winter rains will paint
grey branches black by late afternoon.
Today’s chill wind scatters
fallen leaves where lovers once walked.
Like the endless winter sky
the bench where they sat is empty.
Les feuilles mortes
In memoriam: Jacques Prévert
February 4, 1900 – April 11, 1977
This scalding blaze of maples
suddenly blown red
against the towering green sweep
of the cottonwoods
brings bitter and sweet memories
of a love long dead.
How quickly October’s winds strip
these eastern hardwoods!
October was your favourite month
and group of comrades,
and here the month comes ‘round again.
It’s only anguish
can grant beauty her true virtue.
I read your Paroles
once more on this autumn morning
forty years since death
claimed you like hard frosts will surely
claim these last green leaves.
Could a summer romance survive
when this season’s cold
withers all the flowers of youth
and deadly winter lurks?
Let’s summon the Red October
of your young manhood;
our memories of lost causes will
renew beauty’s hope.
Reading Nature At Wawanosh
a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
During these dog days of summer
the trees stand deep in their heat;
no breeze, not a bird sings.
It almost seems like
time has paused, perhaps forever
at this quiet afternoon.
The dry creekbed retains
barely enough moisture
to prevent its moss from going brown,
and that only where trees shade
the stones and fallen branches.
Having walked until I’m tired
I read Emerson by the pond
where a heron fishes silently.
No man was so strict
with himself, so rigid:
a life of little joy, too much doubt —
the Montaigne of Concord
without the humour.
As afternoon advances
a few frogs revive
where the reeds thin.
Soon shadows begin to move
among the trees,
stealthy as a cat burglar.
The sun disappears into the west
taking its fire with it.
I put my book aside
and listen;
later the crickets
will emerge from their black houses
to fill the wild grass
with August’s incantation.
Coming Down Stairs
for Felix Girard, age 1 month
My first and only memory:
Parsons, West Virginia,
Ulysses coming down stairs
surrounded by mountains
still brimming with coal,
a black sonata filling
our hot August days.
I was five that summer,
always excited for a road-trip
in our black 1950 Ford sedan,
the car that would be lost
amid the mud and debris
of the Turtle Creek flood.
Later that autumn I’d learn
of age and death
like dark red leaves torn from
the outspread arms of a black gum
falling, falling deep into
our tupelo night, like an old man
reaching for his grandson.
Ulysses passing through
the rest home, passing
through the tunnel of shadows:
a flicker in my young life.
What will little Felix retain,
if anything, of my life
once I embrace the litany
of night? I will never visit
Hiorra again, never hear
winds pass through the hemlock
Ulysses planted, never watch
his cornfield return to forest.
Somehow I live in the shadow
of an audacious man
I scarcely knew,
his love enfolding my heart,
while his mountains became mine,
his death my life.
© James Deahl
James Deahl was born in Pittsburgh in 1945; he moved to Canada in 1970, and is the author or editor of over thirty books, his four most recent titles being: Four-Square Poems; Awareness; The Confederation Poets: The Founding Of A Canadian Poetry, 1880 To The First World War; and Earth’s Signature. He is the editor of Tamaracks: Canadian poetry for the 21st century; In A Springtime Instant: The Selected Poems of Milton Acorn, 1950 – 1986; and Adder’s-tongues: A Choice of Norma West Linder’s Poems, 1969 – 2011. To Possess The Land: An Anthology of Confederation Poetry, the companion volume to The confederation Poets, will be published later this year. A cycle of his poems is the focus of the American television documentary Under the Watchful Eye. Deahl is the father of three daughters, Sarah, Simone, and Shona, and the grandfather of Scot and Felix. He lives in Sarnia, Ontario.