Live Encounters Poetry & Writing May 2026
Octavio Paz’s Dream, poems James Deahl.
Octavio Paz’s Dream
After lovemaking, we slept
in the river of night
listening to the songs
of the seven jade pendants
nestled between your breasts.
All the while, autumn
passed into winter,
snow filling the cedar’s boughs,
burying fallen maple leaves.
As dark currents caressed
our naked flesh,
we heard the seven languages
of water speak the seven words
which call forth the sacred:
that land of virginal light,
pure as the first snowfall
of December — a realm
free of human sin.
The river moved ever towards
its ocean, and we moved with it,
carried along on its journey.
Every current and eddy
was a word, precise as stone,
spoken in wonder.
When dawn graced
the water’s surface, we knew
the river in its flowing
had glimpsed the fields of glory.
Along The Appalachian Chain
With nice weather, in our Ford sedan we’d
roam the long spine of Appalachia
from Medix run, up in Elk County
near the Allegheny National Forest,
as far south as Preston and Tucker Counties
deep in West Virginia’s coal country.
Cousins lived in just about every
remote village and mill town, mountain laurel
and rhododendron blooming, the ridge tops
haunted by ghosts of chestnuts. But today,
seventy years later, not one spectre
remains. Chestnuts now live in memory’s
sweet chambers. Like all my aunts and uncles,
only my rememberings hold them dear.
My kin worked the coal mines, or on railroads,
or logged the hardwood forests; they raised
families wherever the Pennsylvania
or Baltimore & Ohio tracks went.
In isolated hamlets where the sun
refused to shine before eleven o’clock
they watched massive steam locomotives
haul coal and coke up steep grades a hundred
railcars at a time. They watched lives get used up
and saw friends and family laid away.
The Laurel Highlands endure all our comings
and goings. These mountains count the years
of our passing. I remember dead chestnuts
all along the Appalachian chain,
their bleached trunks proud among the living trees,
and coal barges on the Monongahela
making their slow journey to Pittsburgh.
The Dark Bell
Snow blankets our trees
as we embark upon another new year.
Even here in the city’s heart
as dusk comes down the avenue
the trees draw back from their houses.
A dark bell rings out
to fill the space the trees
relinquished,
every sound an echo
of other, distant sounds.
If you enter the coming night
the harbour will still be frozen,
the stars muffled
by thick clouds.
What you always think of
as your own body may not be
yours alone.
When you look up
the trees have completely vanished;
only the sound of the bell
remains
and its long sojourn.
The River
A river is searching for you
searching from Lake Huron
to Lake St. Clair
And on it goes, from St. Clair
southward to Lake Erie
always searching
calling your name
throughout the cool dark nights
through the mists
of an early autumn morning
Far below these fields
these fields of feed corn
of soybeans, layer upon layer
of bedrock — thick rock
no one ever visits —
lives on in its mineral silence
Yet even at this very hour
in its honeycomb of darkness
our bedrock prepares once again
for winter.
One Day
© 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-five books, his five most recent titles being: Releasing The Wisdom Of Stone; To Possess The Land: An Anthology Of Confederation Poetry; Four-Square Poems; Awareness; and The Confederation Poets: The Founding Of A Canadian Poetry, 1880 To The First World War. 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. 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.