Listening to Bruce Cockburn’s latest Bone on Bone this morning – a good album – and there’s a song called 3 Al Purdys about a guy on a street corner trying to hawk the rendition of three Purdy poems for 20 dollars.

I have not read any of Canadian Al Purdy’s poems before but searched out and have done so this morning, some quite Bukowski-like, but this one about being older, loss and remembering is less stylised in that way. The allusion to the ‘a still pool in the forest’ is poignant. Have just ordered his collection To Paris Never Again.

Listening to Myself

see myself staggering through deep snow
lugging blocks of wood yesterday
an old man
almost falling from bodily weakness
— look down on myself from above
then front and both sides
white hair — wrinkled face and hands
it’s really not very surprising
that love spoken by my voice
should be when I am listening
ridiculous
yet there it is
a foolish old man with brain on fire
stumbling through the snow

— the loss of love
that comes to mean more
than the love itself
and how explain that?
— a still pool in the forest
that has ceased to reflect anything
except the past
— remains a sort of half-love
that is akin to kindness
and I am angry remembering
remembering the song of flesh
to flesh and bone to bone
the loss is better