The Sight of Day

        Can’t stand the sight of day is a claim I cannot make. At any gas station along the Trans-Canada or highway 3 west of Medicine Hat, “half-decent out there” / “gettin’ there” is conversation anyone can do. Not even the light industrial landscape of southern Alberta, with its canals and irrigation rigs and wires, can take away a day like this, +15 at times, highway dry.

Dry as a bone, I’d thought, pulling into the graveyard in my home town four hours ago. I have a photo from there, three sisters around the grave of a fourth, baby Jennifer Donna, as the headstone says. She’s buried near a pine tree up the south slope. Up on the flat, the newer graves—Jennifer died in 57—spread east as if about to re-occupy the town.

What I remember of the day she was buried is not being allowed to go out to the burial. The kids don’t need to be there, is the kind of thing dad would say. I don’t remember grief, just the pantlegs of the adults back at our house afterwards.

Beyond the graveyard and the CP mainline next to it, the old #1 highway crumbles along east-west, what pavement looks like left for forty years. Readers of that text called “To Be Opened In the Event of My Death” will know that I’ve asked for my ashes to be scattered along that stretch of ex-highway through Herbert forty years ago replaced by the four-lane south of town.

Well I’ve changed my mind. Plant me on the flat above Jennifer Donna. And come on out and say hello some March 15th years from now, there by the tracks and highway, when winter shows signs of letting go.

Nelson, BC

I lived in Nelson in '81-82, a student at David Thompson University Centre (DTUC), where my first three creative writing teachers were Fred Wah, Tom Wayman, and Dave McFadden. I felt lucky to be learning from them, and have remained so ever since. It's not much of a stretch to say that everything I do as a writer carries a grain of what I learned. Not just individually, Wah-Wayman-McFadden as a group made for a vital blend of approaches to pretty much everything. 
So, in Nelson on March 17 I plan to read poems from my first and last books (a span of thirty years) which shimmy with residue of my first three teachers. 
More on this later.

Anecdote of Feeling Miffed

“Please give us your Birthday so we can give you a present,” said the gateway to wifi at Broken Rack, 3806 Albert Street, Golden Mile Shopping Centre.

I asked the server if she was a manager. No, but she could take a message. Thanks, I’ll send a note, I said.

(I was on the verge: leave for a movie or stay to watch curling.

By the time Howard was left a double-raise double in the 2^nd which he didn’t come close to making, leaving Jacobs a draw for three,

I was staying. Wing Special and Caesar salad didn’t hurt.)

So this is the note to the Broken Rack, 3806 Albert Street,

Golden Mile Shopping Centre:

I know you want the best for your customers of Wifi Hotspot

and did not become successful by giving away your services but  

do you not see the moral stakes in withholding your gift of internet connection until we give something to you?

Nevertheless, I stayed, 3-1 Jacobs in the fourth, 4-1 through five.

We have choices. In other bars, wifi comes without condition. Are we to take our business elsewhere?

One Rebellion Amber on, my complaint would be finished if not for its righteousness, as Howard was finished, down 6-2 after seven

without hammer.

I was down to my last sentence: Just give.