1,160



This is the very first poem I ever wrote, and my first published poem. It appeared in the poetry section of the Newfoundland Herald, a tv guide, where my father submitted it. It was 1979, and I was living in my grandmother's house in southern New Brunswick with my mother and sister because my parents had separated.

I clearly remember the decision to write this poem. I remember the import of that moment, not just in retrospect, but as it was happening. It was a very deliberate and conscious act, as if until that moment, poetry was just one of an infinite number of possibilities swirling formlessly around me until I called it out of the void. I remember being very quiet and focused and excited. I knew three things. One, I was going to write a poem. Two, my poem would not be a rhyming poem. Three, it was going to please my father, a poet.

I'm not sure why I chose artist Gerry Squires as the subject of my first composition, or why that particular image of the lighthouse he used to keep on the Ferryland Downs, where we visited and where I played with his daughters years before. Maybe it was a bit of foreshadowing or alchemy. Maybe I was unconsciously drawing down some of the qualities in Gerry, as a person and as an artist, that I would later come to identify with.

Gerry is a painter and sculptor in whom spirituality and mysticism seem to co-habitate very naturally with his art. He is not religious himself, but I think of him as belonging to the tribe of priests. That archetype is very strong in him. It is in me and my father too, but Dad's was a house divided against itself. Both men grew up in very fundamentalist expressions of Christianity, but Gerry's must have been filtered through a softer lens, or he is by nature more elastic. He gets the connective-- relagare--aspect of religion; the relating between heaven and earth. Somewhere along the line that ligament had been torn in my father.

Or maybe I analyze too much. Maybe it was simply a nine-year old's nostalgia and longing for a sleep where the grown ups kept watch and the ship sailed on through the night unwrecked.

Who knows where any of the poems come from.

It is Wednesday, and I have a vast, glorious, expanse of uninterrupted time in which to write, and a nearly full pot of coffee.

I have so much more I want to say about that first poem, and about the tangling and untangling of my poetry with my father's life, "through dooms of love." And about spirit and art. And about the manuscript I am gestating.

But I have 1,159 more days, so some of it can wait.