Poems from Rivard Street
by Benjamin Oldham
"...from near, from far, from everywhere, the crowd would come, and its multitudinous voice, contained on one side by the mountain, on the other by the ring of factories, would rise toward the distant stars. And the stars would be the only spectators to this inconceivable propensity of man for his sustaining joy."—Gabrielle Roy, The Tin Flute
Somewhere already
in your mind you know
a place like this,
a city below the hill.
The air is thin
to breathe in such a place,
to dream, to shout
unheard to mortal gods
you feel
the aspirations of life
hung wet and heavy
from the cold fog
that rolls down the hill
and mingles with smoke,
aspirations like
damp coughs
and hissing fires
that will not light,
aspirations like dreams
that die in the night.
But that is not the story
of a complete people.
To live asleep in such a place,
to sleep awake,
to watch the lights
that glitter on the hill
as unmistakable as stars,
that is the condition
that whets the aspiration,
sharpens the living edge,
burns brighter than
any wet match or lighter
struck in a storm,
hand or not
around the flame—
the one condition
that bargains with you
in your mind:
the kind of mortal god
that you would be
in the city above the hill.
How can I see this world
and not get carried away
by the grace of it all?
For every two lovers, say,
breaking up
on some park bench,
not a bad public place
to break the news,
I remember that,
the bench really feeling
bad about the whole thing—
there are two friends
making up
on some heart to heart,
side by side
on a long walk
after an even longer freezing out
and some sucking in of pride
at the end there
that really saved it,
I remember that too.
Grace, I say,
and grace when I can see it
lifting off the rooftops
like mist in the dawn,
lifting me with it,
and up here
the doves are taking tufts
of every friend and lover’s hair
from the park benches
and the heart to hearts,
pecking at each other’s beaks
with little kisses
like the ones
the lovers missed
but the friends found again,
and oh, one has my keys
I keep leaving in the front door
for someone to take
right off Rivard Street,
a crime of passing by
I would have suffered by now
if not for grace,
grace I say,
to carry me away!
The bare trees now
like the exposed ribs of the city.
No red organs
pressed against bones,
wrapped in the fingers
of tendons—
I look right through
these starved ribs
at stark buildings I forgot
were there in the distance.
The heart has retreated
into the walls and left behind
an empty landscape.
What can I do?
Open one door,
open one window,
and the heart finds one more
to close itself within.
I have to draw it out,
like a wounded animal,
and even then
it takes time to fill the ribs again:
a heart in the chest,
with lungs to breathe
and an appetite in the stomach.
Still, I do not understand
why the heart leaves.
Do I take too much of
the cool air on summer nights,
out until the sunrise,
or eat too much, or drink
too lugubriously on the rooftops?
Perhaps the heart is strangled
by the very ribs it fills
until it can no longer bear
to be among them.
Whatever it is,
I don’t mean to say much
but that I can
feel my ribs again.
It all began with the wind,
and the two of us
in a swirling tunnel of it,
flinging model planes
into the drafts
rising up the hills
and off the fields
when we were young.
It was all before a time
when the wind first rose
enough to carry us
to land apart
from one another:
me, in the north,
you, in the south.
Only when the wind was fair
did it trade us back again.
And so it was for a time.
West you went,
restlessly into the world,
then east over the sea
as I thought you would.
And finding there
that the world is wide,
you found too
that a life is made
in the thin space
that surrounds us,
the thin space
that catches the wind.
And now,
now the wind is fair,
it has brought you back to me
and caught you
in a rock by the sea
that will not let you go.
The wind is fair now,
and it is settling,
as are you.
Now we can watch your plane
slip into the draft
above the field we know,
in the thin space
around the gliding wings,
and hear only the wind
on the hillside
of this wide world of ours,
rising and settling
and rising again
as it always has
since it all began.