Yesterdays

Sixty-two, sixty-three, I most remember As time W. C. Williams dies and we are Back from a hard two years in Guatemala Where the meager provision of being Schoolmaster for the kids of the patrones Of two coffee plantations has managed Neither a life nor money. Leslie dies in Horror of bank giving way as she and her Sister and their friends tunnel in to make A cubby. We live in an old cement brick Farmhouse already inside the city limits Of Albuquerque. Or that has all really Happened and we go to Vancouver where, Thanks to friends Warren and Ellen Tallman, I get a job teaching at the University of British Columbia. It’s all a curious dream, a rush To get out of the country before the sad Invasion of the Bay of Pigs, that bleak use Of power. One of my British colleagues Has converted the assets of himself and His wife to gold bullion and keeps the Ingots in a sturdy suitcase pushed under Their bed. I love the young, at least I Think I do, in their freshness, their attempt To find ways into Canada from the western Reaches. Otherwise the local country seems Like a faded Edwardian sitcom. A stunned Stoned woman runs one Saturday night up And down the floors of the Hydro Electric Building on Pender with the RCMP in hot Pursuit where otherwise we stood in long Patient lines, extending often several blocks Up the street. We were waiting to get our Hands stamped and to be given a 12 pack Of Molson’s. I think, I dream, I write the Final few chapters of The Island, the despairs Gathering at the end. I read Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing In America but am too uptight To enjoy his quiet, bright wit. Then that Summer there is the great Vancouver Poetry Festival, Allen comes back from India, Olson From Gloucester, beloved Robert Duncan From Stinson Beach. Denise reads “Hypocrite Women” to the Burnaby ladies and Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Margaret Avison are there Too along with a veritable host of the young. Then it’s autumn again. I’ve quit my job And we head back to Albuquerque And I teach again at the university, and Sometime just about then I must have Seen myself as others see or saw me, Even like in a mirror, but could not quite Accept either their reassuring friendship Or their equally locating anger. Selfish, Empty, I kept at it. Thirty-eight years later I seem to myself still much the same, Even if I am happier, I think, and older.