Freddie Huculak
She's gone now the old Embassy Hotel. She used to sit on
the curve that dipped down into Port Dalhousie where we'd
go to sit and watch girls on the antique carousel and smoke
and drink and talk about cars and women and fights we'd
seen and he'd tell me about life on the boats and how the
St. Lawrence came to smell of everything that ever went to float
on her and how if you listened hard enough you could hear
those tales leaned over the rail in the fog come mornings
aiming for port. He told a good joke, too. He'd laugh like a
bastard and slap me on the back and pull me into it so that I
laughed too even though I didn't always understand what he
meant. I was just an under-aged kid slinging beer for seamen
for eighty bucks a week and living upstairs in a shitty room
beneath his, and hell, I needed heroes so bad back then that
a rough old tar was a blessing even if he was prone to two-
week speed benders and I had to talk him down sometimes
or get him out from under the bed when the paranoia drove
him into hiding and feed him soup and crackers and roll him
smokes and watch him while he shook when the turkey hit all
hard and fast. Still, he watched out for me. He'd bowleg into
the tavern, slap me on the back, and make a show for the big
boys that I knew somebody too tough to fuck with, then grab
a couple drafts and sit beside the shuffleboard to wait for a
game. He was a rough old bird. When I went to jail that first
time for fighting he said I only bought the time because I
won and if push came to shove in there to “eat mutton, say
nuttin'.” He'd done a few stretches himself a few years back so
my twelve days were nothing but he was waiting when I came
back with a yellow ribbon wrapped around the doorknob to
my room and he laughed like hell when I saw it and then he
bought me a beer. “You're bigger than this,” he said. “You got
more in you.” I nodded even though I didn't understand what
he meant or saw in me and when I left there to chase summer
across Canada in a beat-up car I bought for a hundred
bucks
he stood and watched and waved until I disappeared around
the curve. No one had ever waved goodbye before and I had
to hold tight to the wheel and set my chin to the country
and drive and drive and drive until the bruised feeling waned
into something grey and manageable. Almost forty years later
I think I understand. Bards sometimes sit in crummy rooms
scoffing a six pack and a hoagie, smoking roll-yer-owns and
waiting for the man to come with dreams in a baggie, betting
horses and drowning in old mariner tales. It's not all just
about glory and the shiny people who make it to the top.
What makes this country tick for kids like I was then are guys
like Huk, tough as hell and scrambling for a dollar, taking
love on the installment plan, givin' 'er the best they can and
letting young guys know they got better in them because
they learned somehow to see contrast through the gloom.
Well Huk, I got 'er now. Pass it on the best you can because
what you know is what you know, and you're a richer man
for seein' what you seen and a port in the fog is still a port.
If you're gone now and cold and reaching out for one last
beer, my guess is that you'll make it . . .
Tin Roof
I heard Fats Waller play one night
when the rain beat upon the slatted tin roof
of a cabin set against the rib of bush
somewhere beyond what I'd come to know as time
a wobbly candle flame
set the hornet's nest in the corner into motion
it danced in the magic of that night
that flame, that piano
and I fell in love with the 1920s
the simplicity of line and time and metre
and how it fit with rain
beating on a tin roof
a thousand tiny heartbeats like mine
surrendered to lonely
there are dreams that come to men as I was then
nomadic, transient, rootless, afraid perhaps
that time was like the road
always in front of you and never truly here
those dreams were visions and the quest of them
was what lifted a thumb to waggle and hook at cars
bearing hard for Winnipeg, Swift Current
then the foothills and the mountains tumbling down
to wide expanse of ocean
that was itself a dream dropped beyond the horizon
that itself was never really here
dreams of how the warmth of skin might feel
beneath a calloused palm
the cleft and cliff and scarp of bone
and hair and the smell of living
riding on each softly exhaled breath
in time suspended
and dreams of talk
the syllables of truth spilled off lips and tongue and teeth
to fill the air between us like clouds
roiling and turning and tumbling
with the energy of souls who have just discovered
that freedom rings best on turns of phrase that say
“I see you here” and “stay”
and dreams of lawns and things
the idle clutter that sits like islands in the stream of our living
redolent with history and song
like Waller's piano against the dark and the tattoo of rain
on that tin roof in the bush so far removed
from the light that breaks over things you've built
by hand
and heart
and hope
and dreams of time held in the hand
inspected with the gaping look of wonder
that you see on children's faces
when they become surprised by the ordinary
and dreams of sound and smell
the taste of things like the lilt of fresh baked bread
and the spot of skin just behind the ear
that holds within it the taste of many things
like faith and home and love
and the sound of spirits dancing in the ripple of curtains
in a window overlooking a yard
where flowers bloom in pots
where we dirtied our fingers and joined the earth to us again
I heard Fats Waller play as the rain pelted down
against an old tin roof and didn't know
that I dreamed of you
I can't hear that old piano now
without a sense of loss and celebration for this man
who found his way to you
down the road that led to the line in the sky
that led in course to the ocean
of our dreams come true
right here, right now, this room
where the feel of your skin against my palm
pulses like a simple line in a simple time and simple metre
like rain on the tin roof of my soul
Scars
The back of my head is pocked and marred
with scars I mostly don't remember getting
one time I fell in a drunken haze
against rocks along the Bow River
and opened myself severely
no stitches though, that would have been weak
and two-fisted gulpers as I was then
had no time for namby-pamby baby things
like doctors, anesthetic or thread pulled taut
in a seam to stem the flow of blood
I wear my hair short these days
and new barbers comment on the bare field
of it beneath the hair like a landing strip for pain
“musta been a whack” they say
and me in not so subtle denial have been
known to say “yeah, but chicks dig it”
the truth is
that I don't know that they do
bad boys create their own mythologies
in order to cope with frailty and failings
as though faulty legends and tall tales could replace
the truth of things in matters of the heart
Paul Bunyan outranks Tiny Tim
in our minds only and women get that
and it's the measure of our lack
that buffoons as I was didn't
I do now
but of course, I'm far more sensitive at fifty-five
than I was at twenty-three and time has a way
of bringing you to your knees
at the shrine of your own undoing
hell, even outlaws learn to cry if they listen
to themselves long enough
and there are a lot of cellblocks with tear stained pillows
clenched in tattooed fists
anyone or anything I ever fought
was only me in disguise
I get that now just as I've learned
that reaching out takes a lot more guts
than pushing away
and tall tales are better saved for firesides
when hurt's involved
there are scars from knives and bats and fists
that create a map of everywhere I fell
without knowing that I did
and there are scars from falling on broken bottles
careless work with tools and simple
drunken buffoonery that I eased with lies
because the truth was so embarrassing
my skin is broken territory
and my heart went along for the ride
but I've learned to see my scars as something
far more telling than the fables and tall tales
I created just to manage having been an idiot
more than a handful of times over time
because stitches and the billboards of bare spots
only mark the places I deserted myself
in my search for rest
outlaws in their hideouts dream
of a gentle touch and curtains
far more often
than they give away
Grammar Lesson
There's a silence words
leave in their wake
once they're spoken
that's the true punctuation
of our lives
like
when I said “I love you”
the full colon stop
made my heart ache
until you continued
the phrase and said
dash
“I love you too”
period
Voyageurs
for Anne Doucette and Michael Findlay
Dvorak wrote the “Serenade for Strings”
in just twelve days and trudging through
the snow drifts along the bluffs above
the North Saskatchewan River with Saskatoon
huffing its breath across the frozen fling
of it in the valley, the violas sashay
in waltz time through the headphones
and I tuck my chin closer to my chest
and walk in counterpoint to the edge
and gaze in rapt wonder at the skill of
this Czech composer and the hand of Creator
at work together in the same morning
twinkling with frost
the river current buckled ice and sent
shards of it upward hard into a January
sky pale blue as a sled dog's eye
and the ice crystals in the air wink
in the sun like spirits dancing
so that Dvorak's masterpiece becomes
a divertimento to the history that clings
to the banks of this river and there's
something in the caesura that harkens
to a voyageur's song perhaps when
this river bore stout-hearted strangers
into places where only the Cree
and the buffalo could last the bitter
snap of the Long Snow Moons
and starvation was the only verb
in a language built on nouns
crows hop across the drifts
like eighth notes and the larghetto
when it eases in as wistful as a
prayer for home becomes the idea
that we're all voyageurs really
paddling relentlessly for points beyond
what we've come to know of ourselves
and time and the places we occupy
so that history whether it comes
in a serenade, a fugue, a chanson
or a chant sung with drums
made of deer hide becomes
the same song eventually and rivers
like this contain it
hold it, shape it to us
so it rides loose and easy
on our shoulders
Dvorak wrote the “Serenade” in 1875
and turning to the city now
marching to the beat of the teeth
of the wind that churns upward
suddenly out of the valley
Saskatoon becomes the everywhere
of my experience and I ride the current of it
to the resolution of the theme