The Sway of Otherwise

by David Helwig

66 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

David Helwig was a Canadian editor, essayist, memoirist, novelist, poet, short story writer and translator.

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

NIAGARA


Regularities of summer: the long daylight
illuminating the lake from the early dawn
to the slow coming on of twilight, late
and warm, the last steamer gone
below the horizon; or the cluster boats
on the sandbar each Wednesday afternoon
(half day closing), the men in summer shirts,
rods in their hands, lines tight with the strain
of rivermouth current, fishing for sport
the wall-eyed pickerel under the hot sun;
another day the black sandsucker might
appear, its tube engorging wet sand -
lyric passages on the lyric water -
poisoned, we learned, the fish gone, years later.

*

POETRY READING, in memory of Al Purdy


This little world: the words begin,
tables spattered with coffee
and metaphors, and I am here
like a salesman asleep on the wrong bus.

Across the night on another island
the tall poet lies in a white bed
among tall poems, sickening and mending,
the old determined brain and one clean lung.

The rain it raineth on the street outside,
cold wind blows in, and from two doors off,
a loud canned tenor is crying out
a loud canned passion on electric breath.

The women all are lovely as Helen was
in her little world, and their songs are almost true.
Old time recited its incomprehensible code,
backwards, and the poets grow young.

The faces of all the Helens shine
on the returning darkness as moths crumple
back to caterpillars, dry to eggs.
The one great lung is breathing us all.

*

VESPERS


The tedium which is a certain kind of joy
grows attenuated over the reaches of time
as langourous evenings offer us the sublime
onset of absence, the deserted beach, the way
it fades, though in the west the last trace of day
hangs luminescent, postpones the closing rhyme;
a ghostly dog brings the lost cattle home
to an ancient byre, one star in the emerald sky.

Like a final diminuendo that sustains
into silence and beyond, the ear unsure
what is heard from the world and what from within,
an echo of emptiness, the timeless reclaims
what we have called today, and we must endure
what will end and in ending what will begin.

*

POSTCARD


That old conceit, that heaven's a hotel:
you mount the stairs uneasily and find
an empty room which somehow comes to mind
as one you knew, bu then there was a smell
of not-quite-cleanliness lingering to tell
the history of others who'd reclined
in just this bed, one of them with refined
salacious ways . . . perhaps the place is hell.

Who once was here, and where they've got to now
is unexplained. You might recall them yet,
the names, but don't. It's a new kind of pain,
alone with almost absence, wondering how
you half remember what you half forget.
Outside the window is a sound like rain.

*

LATE AFTERNOON, for Joe


- might on the grass
stumble as pale beneath
the great tree
through bright gardens your dear face
- and now as
distant as hard north
gone, as south
the mild arc too will pass

the retinue
of our loves
about your
steps, set in you
for an ever, far off
or near or here

*

"HUMAN REMAINS IN LOUISIANA"


. . . and has come
apart, released
from its aim,
unrhymed by such force

that what was adored
i cryptic,
cracked dispatch, parsed
as cipher,

and what sky took, earth
awaits, as each one
bu faster, while the sheath
of air burns,

sundered code rains
an atrocious manna.