Al Purdy  

Born at Wooler, Ontario Dec. 30, 1918 – died in B.C. April 21, 2000

 My friend Marguerite McColl’s first teaching school was Wooler Public. I wonder, if Al attended Wooler did she teach him? But then I wondered if Al had any connection to Purdy, Ontario, near Combermere?

In fact Al Purdy attended school in Trenton and then Albert College, perhaps, at that time affiliated with the University of Toronto.

 I taught Jr. K – grade 12 my entire career North of Belleville, in the Bancroft area. This was one poem on my curriculum – for obvious reasons. By the way, in the early 70’s I taught one of the first, if not THE first, Co-ed Health course in Hastings County.

The Country North of Belleville

Bush land scrub land –

              Cashel Township and Wollaston

Elzevir McClure and Dungannon

green lands of Weslemkoon Lake

where a man might have some

              opinion of what beauty

is and none deny him

                                    for miles –

Yet this is the country of defeat

where Sisyphus rolls a big stone

year after year up the ancient hills

picknicking glaciers have left strewn

with centuries’ rubble

                                    backbreaking days

                                    in the sun and rain

when realization seeps slow in the mind

without grandeur or self-deception in

                                    noble struggle

of being a fool –

A country of quiescence and still distance

a lean land

              not like the fat south

with inches of black soil on

              earth’s round belly –

And where the farms are

              it’s as if a man stuck

both thumbs in the stony earth and pulled

                                    it apart

                                    to make room

enough between the trees

for a wife

              and maybe some cows and

              room for some

of the more easily kept illusions –

And where the farms have gone back

to forest

              are only soft outlines

              shadowy differences –

Old fences drift vaguely among the trees

              a pile of moss-covered stones

gathered for some ghost purpose

has lost meaning under the meaningless sky

              – they are like cities under water

and the undulating green waves of time

              are laid on them –

This is the country of our defeat

              and yet

during the fall plowing a man

might stop and stand in a brown valley of the furrows

              and shade his eyes to watch for the same

              red patch mixed with gold

              that appears on the same

              spot in the hills

              year after year

              and grow old

plowing and plowing a ten-acre field until

the convolutions run parallel with his own brain –

And this is a country where the young

                                    leave quickly

unwilling to know what their fathers knew

or think the words their mothers do not say –

Herschel Monteagle and Faraday

lakeland rockland and hill country

a little adjacent to where the world is

a little north of where the cities are and

sometime

we may go back there

                                    to the country of our defeat

Wollaston Elzevir and Dungannon

and Weslemkoon lake land

where the high townships of Cashel

                                    McClure and Marmora once were –

But it’s been a long time since

and we must enquire the way

              of strangers –

Copyright (c) Al Purdy. From Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy, Harbour Publishing www.harbourpublishing.com.