The bewildering thing about grief, for me, is how difficult it makes the world to navigate. Home itself becomes foreign territory, though everything around you is familiar. For some time, none of the things I loved – trees, music, the novels of P. G. Wodehouse – had had any meaning, as if all of them had flaws through which darkness came. So, it really was a relief when Professor Bruno asked me to accompany him through Southern Ontario and a relief that I wanted to be around others again, wanted to see past my shrunken world.
We’d leave Toronto on the twentieth and in the days that followed the professor hoped to visit Whitchurch-Stouffville, Concord, Nobleton, Coulson’s Hill, Feversham: places where he’d arranged to meet people who’d known John Skennen, places where John Skennen had been seen, places that were important to Skennen’s poetry. I packed pants, shirts, underwear, and a mustard-coloured jacket. I thought of my mother, as I took the things she always reminded me to take: toothpaste, a toothbrush, and deodorant. I also brought my pencils, a sharpener, a kneaded eraser, and a sketchbook in which I planned to draw some of the plants I saw on our way.
Professor Bruno was surprised by my drawings.
– I had no idea you were a Leonardo, Alfie! I welcome the noble intrusions of Art!
– But I’m not an artist, I said.
It’s something else that compels me to draw. I’ve been doing it since I was ten. Twenty-three years. I could not imagine a life without pencils, pens, inks, erasers, and sketches.
My mother used to say
– The world doesn’t exist until you draw it, Alfie!
She was only teasing, but she was right, in a way. I feel as if the books I’ve filled with drawings are my journals. They hold my life and memories. The past rushes back whenever I open one of my sketchbooks. I remember where I was, the sensations I felt, the mood I was in – all at a glance. My first drawing was of a four-leaf clover I saw in the schoolyard at Davisville. The clover, which I’d heard brought good luck, was a kind of ‘mixed signal.’ I found it just before John Smith punched me in the face and I punched him back. Then again, John and I have been close friends since Grade 6, a year after I drew the clover. I’m not a mystical person, but I think of it this way: I’m drawn to flowers, herbs, and weeds, some of which I draw over and over. I feel a connection to them and, in drawing them, I allow them the place in my life they were meant to have. On the other hand, my love for plants is fairly straightforward, too. I’m attracted to their lines and curves, their structure and colour, their complex simplicity. These were the things that inspired my studies in botany, for which I’ve never had even a moment’s regret.
Before we left, I bought the McClelland & Stewart edition of John Skennen’s collected poems. I thought it might be helpful to Professor Bruno if I knew at least a little about Skennen’s work. I was surprised by what I found. There were any number of love poems, some of them difficult for me to read without thinking about Anne. And there were more philosophical poems, some of which you could call light. But, overall, the poetry was gloomier than I’d expected. I couldn’t see Professor Bruno in it. Of course, this could be because the first poem I read, the one that made the deepest impression, ‘Rabbit and the Rabbits,’ was from what the professor called Skennen’s ‘melancholy period,’ just before he stopped publishing. In fact, it was the last poem in his final collection:
Strange to see struggle but not what’s struggled with –
wire round your throat, head caught like a wintry
birth. White as your mother’s haunches, bloody specks
when the rifle butt breaks your neck – a careless
wind busy sweeping. Trees in rumpled linens.
We who’ve killed you talk rosemary and onions
while somewhere underground your family scarpers,
running from the lumpish beings above.
Scarpering still, they’re carrying their jitters
through my nights – along narrows, around dungeon
corners – whiskering my dreams, their endless warrens,
coming on like regret, vicious and remorseless –
quick, quicker than memory in some respects.
Caught but uncatchable, they rise unpredictably –
digging up strange lands, hard soil, dark pitch.
The poem was well done, I guess, but I felt like I understood why he’d abandoned poetry: Skennen’s talent hadn’t brought him much happiness at all.
– Ah! said Professor Bruno. Now, there you’re wrong, Alfie! To begin with, the object of poetry isn’t the happiness or sadness of the poet. Artists do what they do because they’re compelled. It’s therapy that makes the patient feel much worse before it makes them feel better. If they ever manage to feel better at all! But the other thing to remember, Alfie, is that the psyche wants what it wants. You and I, untalented mortals as we are, live for sunshine. We live for the light! But the true Artist is different. For all we know, darkness may have been what Skennen needed. It may have been the very thing to bring him relief. Then again, it’s damned hard to tell with poets. I’ve met my fair share, Alfie, and I wonder if any of them can distinguish between happy and unhappy.
The first town we visited was Whitchurch-Stouffville. We left early Monday morning, sun up and bright, the sky a light blue, the land its late-summer self: hot but forgiving. I’ve always loved driving in Southern Ontario, and as, that first day, we’d planned to visit two towns that are close to each other – Whitchurch-Stouffville and Concord – we were not pressed for time. I avoided the highways (the 400s) and drove instead along country roads (38, 29, etc.) that go up and down and take you past farm fields, villages, and towns.
So many things made our setting out pleasant: the smell of the land, the way cows or horses will sometimes stare at you as you pass, the farmhouses that look like broken old faces. Then, too, Professor Bruno seemed to know everything about every inch of countryside. As we drove, it was like the past and the present intertwined. He’d point out this place where, for instance, a farmer’s cow had drowned in a pool of oil (1865) or that one where a bishop had taken a tumble down a hill (1903) which thereafter was known as Collar Bone Mound.
I loved the professor’s stories, but then, I find it comforting to know that others have been somewhere before me. I’m not a Speke or a Bartram, not an intrepid explorer. But I do have a sense of adventure. I like to imagine I’m seeing things that those before me missed. I cherish little details. I’ve always been this way. My father, Doctor of Divinity as he was, liked to say that paying attention is a way of being devout. God had taken the trouble to put a spur on the ant’s tibia. It was right to notice and admire His delicate work.
– Why, my mother used to say, are you giving your son excuses to be idle?
But we never considered attention idleness, my father and I, and it seemed to me, as I travelled with Professor Bruno, that the stories he told, coming as they did from paying attention – listening, not looking – were proof of devoutness, and I took great pleasure in them.
– I love hearing the old stories, I said.
– Yes, Professor Bruno said, it’s good to remember that a place is more than earth and ground. It’s all that earth and ground make possible! All the stories and imaginings. Goethe says: ‘Wer den Dichter will verstehen muss in Dichters Lande gehen!’ If you want to understand the poet, you’ve got to go to the poet’s country. He’s not wrong, not wrong at all! But I say if you want to understand a country, then you’ve got to go to the poets and artists, to the ones who refashion the world and make it live for their fellows. And where do these poets draw their inspiration? From earth, ground, stories, dreams, language, and history. That’s what a place is, Alfie. It feeds off us while we feed off it. It’s a bit of a paradox, you know, like context giving context to a context, but there you have it.
I’m sure the