Words For A Friend In memory of Harold Town  (Photograph by John Reeves) On a sun-singing spring afternoon, a day scented with gutsy colours you’ve painted for decades or more, a spring day, yes, but cold, cold and mean enough for sidewalk ice, the damp wind elbows through your bushes outside and I see you and hear you panic in glances and words, panic the way the newly helpless do: you know you’ll be dead before you are well again. Still, we talk of painting, poems, women, music, the farm, and, as usual, everything else, then we verbally piss on a critic or two, and as I leave, and before you close the door, you say, “I love you, buddy,” and your artist hands are ruined from chemotherapy. Now another day, I bring you my poem written for your birthday and we sit to watch the trees you planted greening, greening into summer as you die. and you say, “I wouldn’t have worried as much,” and we conclude together that animals have souls while some men don’t. But you are dead and my heart speaks to your ashes, scattered where we, grown kids, rode your fire engine together, scattered smaller than dust. The sky today seems clouded with the sun and part of me is dust with you and part of me is born in my grief, but the wound of your dying hurts still too much because time takes time. Harold, you are dead but three weeks: would you believe that men have become even more lunatic? All we love is in danger forever and maybe what we need to save us won’t show. Yet in spite of this world, because of it, you painted what few, save you, could imagine. I loved your art and came to love you, my friend, its maker. Harold, on Bloor Street yesterday I watched a young woman, the kind we used to notice. There was something unreachably crazy in her waiting to happen and her skin whispered flesh like the lines you drew. Then I watched your thousand toy horses take over city hall at last and I wished like hell I could phone you and tell you all about it. (from the book 'Beside the Hemlock Garden') |
