Edward Nixon’s Blog

Thank you. Public life is a rough gig. You took it on and no one can gainsay that.

But sir you have too often grabbed a PR defeat from what ought to have been a policy victory. You too often promised too much and delivered explanations instead of the elegant solution. I support transit expansion. I support green roofs. I support using the powers of the City of Toronto Act (thank you Premier McGuinty) to creatively benefit the city. So we should have little argument. Still if the new taxing powers were indeed necessary you ought to have gone from ward to ward to make the case. You ought to have worked with developers to sell the green roof program (yes photo ops and sector-friendly announcements do matter).

And where are the things we could do but have not done: our own appeals board for Committee of Adjustment matters (one less round of OMB appeals). Where is our push for inclusive zoning, tax increment financing et al to engage the private sector comprehensively in city-building. Vancouver has created schools, parks, and cultural facilities on its downtown waterfront through the application of clear and consistent rules and incentives. Of course the planning act is different here, and yes the lament of the OMB, but indeed much more could be done.

Union Station is finally getting it’s re-do. But 6 years. Six years went by as marble crumbled.

If things on the Waterfront are indeed moving (and they are) they could have used a focused consistent nudging that it seems you have not provided; instead there has been micro-management and duplication of effort that has too often slowed things down.

Green bins that are filled with toxic mysteries that cannot make good compost; a problem one things could have been solved with attention to the file and an unequivocal directive to staff to fix it.

Yes TEDCO has been replaced by Invest Toronto and Build Toronto but surely that was a first-term item.

I’ll be more charitable in another post. But in thinking ahead to the 2010 contest I’d say to all contenders remember that buses need to run on time, the potholes need to be fixed, the parks need to be safe, and the fountains need to work. We need innovative programs and policies. We need transit expansion However, it must be built on a solid, sustainable plan that rolls out measurable achievements in every year. We need to have a mayor who commits to equal opportunity for all but also one who will be strategically deft and tactically flexible.

We need to be once again the City That Works and be a City That Shines.

It’s late. It’s early. It’s time to lie. Down. Dark pasture. The night is gone to words already spoken.

How stupid. How flush with hope. How optimistic. But no one gets better. Jung suggests something akin to a religious conversion but lies are arranged to please; be it plug-in modules, talk of sallying forth, it’s all rusty with incontinence.

I won’t say that I am the cause of your wild, mad pain. No not in this level of incarnation, no matter our quantum tangle.

One sentence. Another cut of sensible plot: look two people, call them regular: I think she’s squinting. He’s ready to lie down on the damp sand right there. A wind without a name is mixing parts of Lake Ontario, parts of landfill, parts of sand and parts of every skin husk, dust mote, and in this case, parts of his/her longing into a single force. She’s deflecting with a hungry smile.

If I were to say ’spring’ it would call up the ‘final storm‘ so I won’t. And there’s the knowing that this cold won’t give up easily 14 Celsius or not.

Unable to be clever. Hasty in the possible. Just checking items off a list. That wild surmise summed up and sold. It’s copy my boy (sound of an old man’s acid chuckle) not some holy writ.

It isn’t this insistence on form and final things like the little dot before it all falls away to silence it isn’t this flat beer nor this hash stain on my French cuff and in no way is it this unused condom, you gone, unreal as the breakfast we won’t have.

My fabled ruin in the mind, words damn sweet words, appear as if they were readymade; dare one consume them?

An unexpected recollection of Good Friday: With Marianne in the early ‘90 at the 3-hour service at St. James Cathedral. The congregation shouting: “crucify him, crucify him!” An alien custom bred in the bone. She the recent convert stood dumb. Raised one, doubts and all, I smiled at their fierce abandon.

Sæternesdæg. Satharn. Saturday. Disathairne. dydd Sadwrn. Sadorn. Shanivar. A lading list of nominal sounds all packed and ready to be loaded for the voyage.

Quiet day. Walking Yonge Street. The city can still seem deliciously alien.

A second spring. Toronto. This human density. All the green blossoms set against the grey pavement.

Prepare for the end. Having proofed, mapped, sorted, counted, scheduled, reviewed, reported, debated, and presented.

Night. Consolations unavailable. Home at last from the twists and turns of verse.

Woke up comforted by doubt. The precise punctuation of certain moments..

Later on then. It was later. Much later I think. Well, after that. No. Is that how you recall it? Odd. I was sure. But of course it might just be that it was otherwise.

The thoughts of strangers. The thoughts of friends. Precambrian fossils . . . . The newest thing held for a moment before it’s named. From here to Orion. Next door, right there. I remember stars in the lake. Swimming in a black sky.

I’d say something about sun. Maybe fabulate about the light. What was remarkable? Easy old poetry.

Helen came over uninvited, bringing flowers and brandishing ultimatums, such as: Marry me or you are my enemy & I hate you. She left in threats.

Vacuum broke. Mopped snapped. Pine needles from seven years ago. Christmas Tree. Dust architecture of fascinating plasticity was observed in some regions. Led Zeppelin, U2 and The Pretenders were added to the mix. I grow old.

Reading the broadsheet. Considering taking action. This afternoon.

There’s no reckoning how one missed the point between absolute zero and the consequence of sin, precisely how that door could have been opened, a dragon killed, and how one might have had the freedom of her countryside. The goddamn magic mountain was won and none worried that that queen had taken routes various from bed to bed.

But of course I’d never liked Love in the Time of Cholera or pretending that overcooked roast was delicious, so it’s me at the local with a narrow bourbon, some overbearing IT geek explaining liberalism, as I try to talk about her by pretending she’s recent, the news, they like news in this bar but the geek’s not listening to my parts of speech

If it were easy. If it made sense. If there was something that would work. She said. I said. Then quiet. Entangled orbits. No way in or out of the gravity path. (Right now one can hear the murmur of a lecture about free will in a distant classroom.) But I am shifting in and out of time, as I act in the day-to-day, knowing less & less. All that talk. Dead flowers.

Later than it seems, unlikely to bend to my will, forces will not be subdued, being here attending to leaf rustle under jackhammer.

All the ways that are new . . . all the ways I am sick from saying yes I’ll just go over there and get close; jump on in, “once more with feeling.”

Oh to be the seventh caller and know it was a Monteverdi riff tucked in there under a blues disguise in that song by that long-ago group of indolent pranksters masquerading as psychedelic hipsters. And to win.

Awake with a raw if muted revulsion at the thought of her wandering away, as I’m in from a patio-night roundabout of Aristotle, Plato, Newton, Cromwell, the Glorious Revolution, Jacobins, Napoleon, Gramsci, “English-speaking Justice,” and the difference between reform and revolution.

Sensible. We are all going to be sensible. Patient. Attend to cracks. Investigate subtle deviations with calm determination. Focused. Intensity restrained by phlegmatic forbearance. The fun we’ll have.

Walking home from Ottawa & Newfoundland. Poetry will do that. It was close pain to be proximate to her beauty. Glad I didn’t tell her.

Pissed off. Calm. Categorized. But also terrified. It never stops. Strange molecular agglomerations secrete counter-civilizations in the corners of storage closets. Old dirt gets all phoenix on you as you prune. Knowing it’s for the best does nothing to alleviate the textual dread: bank statements, purchase orders, 4th revisions, failed poems, and letters, when people wrote them.

Memoir scrap: “It was not long after the divorce that he noticed the change. Nights that followed the separation had been fluorescent with promise, a recurring of festival second-adolescence through till dawn. Since the papers arrived, signed and witnessed, there had been a slow falling back into some preexisting state of ennui. What had tasted new became stale. He realized it could go on like this for an indefinite period.”

There are patterns he’s sure as he gets from margin to main subject. There are patterns she knows as she goes from foreground to edge. He paints what he cannot write. She writes when colours fail.

“Later when we looked back there he was eating strawberries from her hand. Later when we looked back there she was wiping red flesh off his mouth.”

If any one of us just spoke over the humming. If any one of us had asked for whom the white noise. If any one of us had proposed we were human.

Wherefore profanity’s Emory Cloth caress,
you’d never like me
for more than about a day,
rough in the chat and soft in the sack
like me, too many poems (and this is one)
ache to tell you something:
the peaches are rotting,
the dock is lose of its pilings,
the veranda is collapsing into the lake;
so be warned (there is enough fact to go ‘round).

We agreed on your jet tresses,
us sweat-spent in your tawny quarters,
as I thought of The Alexandria Quartet
the island, the inventions of summer,
Clea in some colonial bedroom
but there’s not one truth in this passel
of wonder for an author,
a temporally correct racist, sexist, imperial European,
a writer of some renown,
punctured by Sappho’s j’accuse,
Durrell, a favourite of my high school crew.

Later in ever-correcting circles
some of us swapped him out for Ondaatje
but the tug of the tale remained,
like the taste of you ten years on,
a desert of ground cardamom
a forest of drenched cedar,
the sour burn of Salal berries on my tongue.

For Liz who is 24!

the sky is losing blue
my head is red-wine hammer & tong
images are ordinary today
but have a plangent majesty
this is silly stuff
but the branches desperate for breeze
waggle in the heat push
as fingers stall
a stickiness in the compositional sway
from QWERTY to G H J K and a lofty L
automatic ad hoc ordering
of this dappling now
itching at getting this, this spit
this cluck in the throat
this rumpling music of plastic clicks
this me here framed as an I
as writer triangulated
in the slippy now
an almost then
with frumpy summer trees
in bleaching twilight
as this sun falls
away from the frame of warehouse
glinting windows blackening
humid headstrong
me typing twilight

I am failing at this
backwards
it is failing me
yes
just a flower growing in a garden

me all petal patterned
light punched

yes I am failing to get affirmation from the roses
and the rhododendrons  are lying about me

I am failing
to get you here between crimson and persimmon
failing to show you something clean

there is dirt everywhere

this will never be finished

the weeds refuse to agree
spirals buckle
the labyrinth leaks
the garden has secrets
that no one tends

failure is in the soil
tucked under my nails

past the parking lot and the helpful signs
there is tangle and breaking apart
river surging thru all those jazz notes
some nicely dressed people noticing

their blacktop manners succumbing to bush
needing a field guide to say the names
the tree, gnarled and wide, easy with the sky
it’s long-ago siblings lost to mast and beam

a hiker stops as if to count into the bark
trace back lost centuries of working
cutting, sweat making the valley human
mistakes were made, this one missed

the path knows our feet too well
red, magenta, purple, punch up from mud
working around our cleat-marks
our kind invasions of this valley

the brain needs a forest
but gets the schematic tapestry of woodlot
and dammed-up river run
the under-spiced taste of semi-wild
something they plan in the ministry
a couple of rumpled suits and a murder of maps
you have the brochure, its sensitive typesetting

but the hungry tissue seeks it’s wrong turn
to make the path from steps not imagined
to breath purple flower, think sumac
join the nurse log’s green-shoot seminar
witness thumbnail empires rising
fueled by leaf mulch and wood-rot
cedar tang on the tongue commands
this brain needs to get lost!

for Rob Welch

once there was a man
so it was said by reliable sources
and he walked, mostly through
the city at night, safe within streetlamp loom
his adventures could be measured
by the number of alleys traversed
but that was not important
he had subjects and objects in his hands
like golden balls orbiting a juggler’s flashy arc
he had tricks in his pockets for dangerous times
but they were tucked in, unused
like the air raid sirens that never blared

once there was this man
wandering from bar to bar as if alive
to every nuance and angle of smart chatter
as if he was planning to grift something of value
and knowing he was guilty kept thought close
not trusting the dim smudges that once were stars
not ready to pick a joint, get regular
concede that it was Guinness, he often drank
movement was the thing
entering or departing would suffice
no need for character, plot nor explanatory footnote
just a pint and a shot, and yes her, there, in that corner

once there was that man
who ate darkness in last hours
had a history for every block
knowledge of what this place used to be
had the pack of matches,
had known the owner
knew no need to make it art
and call it done
happy with the sharp tap of whiskey on the lip
the tobacco gust outside the door
her well-performed smile
it’s tangible distance from the moon

Always make sure you tell your friends exactly what is wrong with them and make sure you are precise – exactitude counts.

Never apologize. No really don’t do this. Never say you’re sorry, mea culpa, fucked up, did it wrong, in error, it was me, I did it, I am so very sorry. Don’t ever let this happen to you.

Eat with your mouth open in a café with a new date, while crunching on about how your immediate past girl/boy/whatever friend completely stole it all with a smile and no matter how much, swallow the oyster now, he/she/it was a bitch of course they were a such a good fuck but you know, slosh down the wine now, you had it, well you’d really had it.

Fall in love with an ideal. With guileless devotion construct facsimiles of dreams. Dress these in the living flesh of an obtainable subject. Ask said subject out. Assuming a positive response, date said subject. Tell subject all your best stories. Tell subject how they entangle you in desires so rare and sordid you’d not want anything more. Let said subject smile upon you as you reflect back his/her own finely turned imaginings. Let this porcelain world be. Count forward three months. Note the exit signs. Prepare to be pushed or, if you have done your best work, prepare to jump.

Attend poetry readings and sign up for the open mic and regale a trapped audience with rhyming couplets on the topic of ‘how you hate your mother’, ‘what you ate for lunch’ ‘how racism is bad’, ‘how we should all just get along’ – you get the idea – but even better, for the ultra-double-good-super-saucy-plus-plus read your diary, just read from a page of your diary, in all its quotidian, unedited, self-involved glory.  That’s best. That’s almost a guarantee.

theory of yesterday

Turning     turn to known
we ate from copper bowls
beside a river thick with salmon

he could have told me
the words that were cuts in the log
bear or wolf
we all come from the clam
teased out by a raven