Lion's Head Magazine

No. 9, Fall 2011

IN THIS ISSUE

Marty Gervais

Alan Pearson

Robert Markland Smith

David W. McFadden

Raymond Fraser

Thomas F. Pawlick

Robert Hawkes

Shari Andrews

Stewart Donovan

Raymond Gordy

Michael Pacey

Max Layton

Bernell MacDonald

Notes on Contributors

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MARTY GERVAIS

Resistance

The bookshop owner believed
I was blind
I stood in the shop
struggling to make out
the words of De Gaulle’s memoirs
reading them in French
I was maybe 14
I had just come from
the optometrist
and the drops in my eyes
continued to plague my sight
I was reading about
the Resistance
and De Gaulle’s old mentor Marshal Petain
reading about betrayal
the decision to save
the old war hero
who was condemned to death
the decision to exile him
to a windswept island
in the Bay of Biscay
The man in the bookshop
asked if there was a problem
because I held the book
so close to my eyes
I liked the idea
that he believed I was blind
though I never said
anything to suggest this
I went on reading
shaking my head
in modest denials
making him feel sorry for me
I remember this now
as I sit in this café
in the Latin Quarter in Paris
and read that someone
has discovered
one street in France
still named after Petain
in Tremblois
near the Belgian border
the last town bearing
the old war hero’s appellation
soon to be renamed

Rue de la Belle‑Croix
A year ago another town
removed a painting of Petain
from the town hall
I think about the man
called “conquerer of Verdun”
his last days
on the Atlantic coast
a spare two‑room bunker
his wife daily walking
from a nearby hotel
to sit and share a meal
and the roll and groan
of the Atlantic just beyond
I remember reading about
his coffin being dug up
and driven across the
country to Paris
where it was later
found in a garage
and now the modest sign
for Rue Petain marking a street
a mere 600 feet in length
is being taken down
sixty years after his death
I wonder about the man
whose final request was
a bottle of water
from Lourdes

(11‑06‑27 6:45 A.M.)

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

ALAN PEARSON

The Go-between

The season of blitzes had begun
it was also a season of blackouts
and we had just begun to get used to the sirens.
On one of the more frightful nights
the rain came down in torrents.

Mother gave me money for the tram|
the big yellow tram
that squealed on steel wheels
as it ran back and forth across Sheffield.

It carried munition workers
to and from the factories
– the night shift.
And there was little room for me.

In the damp tram, where I was protected
in my tightly belted mac,
I held a precious letter.

On this rainy night I was a pony express.
Destination: the central post office.
I must not miss the post, nor lose the letter
my mother had scribbled to her lover.
So badly was the envelope stuck
I could see the words inside;
I had never read words with so much fear.
I was not too young at 10
to understand a double-cross.

At the downtown post office I fled the tram.
Breathless, I arrived at my destination;
my errand of betrayal brought me up
to the howling mouth of the letter box.
I pushed the letter unsplashed by rain
on its way.

Dear Bill, Ignore the last letter, Albert
made me do it. Will explain later.
Meet me at Reece's on Saturday at 2 pm
Love, Carrie...

There was time now to think about
my father in his RAF uniform,
still sitting in the crowded railway carriage.
He'd left this morning to return to camp.

And there was time, too, to think
About that other letter,
the one he'd made her write to Bill.

I stood at the stop waiting for a tram
to take me home.
And all the long wait the rain didn’t stop,
it kept falling in torrents.
And of course there was a war going on.

________________

The Mystery

Each day she walked past the house
with a cane and a rolling gait
every step a torment as she climbed
up the hill.
A year ago a truck had crushed
her legs, torn flesh
and shattered bone.

She couldn't help it the way that she walked
she rolled from the left to the right;
her poor old spine cracking all the time
like the mast of a yacht gone awry.
The pain ran along those taut tendons
like streak lightning, that you could tell.

The Citizens Aid or some such
found her a house at the top of the hill
And she brought a man to share it
A jovial old cove, just like herself
with a limp and a cane and – as well –
a beard and a cowboy hat: his special style.

No romance here, just pals
who'd known each other some decades ago.
He with a soft laugh, warm baritone;
she with a snap like a fox.
For some funny reason they walked Indian file
up the hill as they shouted to each other
back and forth.
In summer they gardened as well as they could
And daily they stumped downhill to the mall.
Who knows what went on in the still of the night.

Together they traversed that hill by my house.
She with a walker and then the two canes.
He with a baritone laugh you could love
she with a snap like a fox.
She was the braver of the two
Her afflictions quite bad, you could see.

For a year her face was a map of pain.
And for a year the Citizens Aid
kept an eye on them both.
They sent her a nurse with the cheeriest of ways
to come in a Honda and see all was well.

Then later, much later, the garden lay limp.
What happened, said the neighbours,
where was the cowboy
the one with the baritone laugh
and the gal who could snap like a fox.

And where had she gone,
the nurse with the Honda and cheeriest of ways?
And what of the garden they'd tended so well?
All gone on that summer's day
when I happened to pass
that house on the hill.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

ROBERT MARKLAND SMITH

The Train to Nowhere

I saw a subway going nowhere, full of friends and relatives who had passed away, Francos and Stalins arguing vehemently, although I couldn’t make out what they were saying, as the train went further and further down the tracks into oblivion, at least from here. As Albert Einstein says, our perception of time and space is relative to our point of view, and I could no longer see these dead people but I certainly went on hearing them in my head, in my heart and in little objects like symbols of them lying about the house, covered in yellow autumn leaves, dusty photographs for instance and home videos about the dead, about those who preceded us and made the same mistakes as us many times before. Partial stop. Pause. This subway was going deeper and deeper into the darkness of the subway tunnels, and we mentioned these dead people less and less often. Most of them died without making any noise, in a hospital ward, with a mask over their face, with tubes attached to their arms, nurses milling about unawares that one of these patients had made his getaway, committing the sin of jailbreak, leaving the rest of us prisoners of time and space very much connected to the seasons of our blindness and ignorance. Oh look, there goes a passenger of the subway, flying over the moon. The clouds of time swallowed him up quickly, didn’t they? Meanwhile, newborns and teenagers launched off bravely into the fray, unconscious to a degree of the heartaches and broken limbs that awaited them as they boarded the subway into death. And by the time you have buried half your friends and most your family, you are all busted up and relieved to be leaving this place. Amen.

(October 15, 2011)

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DAVID W. MCFADDEN

Abnormal Brain Sonnet

My head is on the other side of the room
while I sit here with a book in my hand
(What Remains by Christa Wolf -- it's good!).
All of a sudden I can't read a word of it.
Where my head used to be there's a cloud.
What the heck, I think to myself. What gives?
I look around and all of a sudden I see it
sitting on a mat on the floor by the door.

Thank God I found it. I couldn't live without it.
That'd be even worse than losing my wallet.
It returned to me as soon as I found it.
I didn't even have to go and get it.
But it took its time floating back and re-
positioning itself perfectly on my neck.

(June 6/09)

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

RAYMOND FRASER

Practical People I've Known

I was wondering if I know any practical people...
Well, I do...
There's Fred
who timed his marriage, moved it ahead
(from when his fiancee wished it)
to beat the deadline for his income tax
claiming his wife for the year past
as a dependant
yes, there's Fred
who proudly said
he rejoiced when his first child was born
a year later to the day
beating the deadline again
for another tax break!

And Merle
there's Merle
after telling me his little girl
had been run over on the street and killed
said it happened New Year's Day
as luck would have it
one day into the new year
enabling him to claim her
for the full year that year as a dependant
(when she'd only been there for half a day!)

(October 2011)

________________

The Bridge

Wrestling with her on the bridge
keeping the muzzle pointed skywards
never expecting this...
I'd kissed her like old times
before she drew the gun
screaming hitting at me
as I took it from her
and suddenly going over the rail
gripping me tight
taking me with her

It's funny it wasn't like falling
but like flying backwards into the wind
hanging onto her by her sweater
the fabric stretching
trying to draw her to me
against the current of the wind
her screams horrible screeches from her
she knew we were falling and how far
nothing but concrete down there
my mind on the gun she'd taken from her purse
a little revolver meaning to shoot me

Hers was a rough savage kiss

(October 2011)

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THOMAS F. PAWLICK

Vacuum

Why does a man in space,
suited white against the sucking cold,
grip his air cord hard?
Pasted like paper against the India black,
blotting a billion tiny points of heat,
why does Flash Gordon float
in the dangling dark that never answers,
never speaks,
whose surface membranes
never,
never,
never tear?
Why not

cut the cord?

________________

Prehistoric

Sometime past it was.
Poor Mrs. Justice,
the wet club mosses stood
like rubber thumbs.
Running up the corky trunks
pursued by buzzing meganeurons,
without a bailiff, the whole circus
ran and grumbled, jumpy as hell.
Big-bodied bugs bumped and
slipped among the gymnosperms,
sigillariae, lepidodendrons,
the lot. Huge ferns fondling
the dank air, rustling their
three-foot fingers. The atmosphere
rolled off in beads – big tropic
drops – splat! all over the slithering
florifaunae. The damp, delicate
lady in her robes, seed pods popping
at her feet, weighed the baby lizards
as they hatched, scuffing their leathery
shells. Rude? Mister, they slid off
the scales and bit her legs.
She had no statute to cover it.
Oh, those creepy, crawly things!
It was too much, too many
scratchy feet. Lush,
it was, all green and coupling.
She screamed, and it ran on
without her. That's where it started,
by the Book, that's what it was.
It just ran on--and here we are
with one end of it still growing
like a rampant train. With all
those slithery feet, now,
could it be any different?

________________

Ultra Brite

What name should you give it?
What rhyme
for the list of crimes?
A claw age,
an age of gouged eyes,
of smoke
and deep pits,
furtive,
dying in dark corners,
peering, suspicious,
sifting the ashes
of hacked limbs
and hiding in holes.
Drugged,
drunk,
through a thousand tubes
it screams:
"This is the age
of Ultra Brite,
the toothpaste
that keeps your smile
whiter than white!"

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

ROBERT HAWKES

Unknown Cousin

Sometimes
Grand Lake freezes over
and the sun abruptly falls
into the forest
and I hear you
skating homeward
from the Service
as you often did
the few Sundays
of your youth.

Soon you glide
into our cove,
your breath
a cone of silver
in the moonlight.

Your head is dancing
With the brown eyes
Of your girlfriend,
The sermon based
On Matthew 13:10,
And the bravos
Of the village
As you outskated
All contenders
in the impromptu race.

There is no other way

I can explain
how you who grew
to manhood
on the lake
forgot about
the spring
that never freezes
over.

________________

Sentinels
(Inspired by "The Watchers"
Of Peter von Tiesenhausen)

Though scorched by the flames
that blackened most of the Earth,
the Watchers are able to sense
the Atlantic glinting before them.

At their core they remain
able to hear however faintly
the voice of their guide
over eons of being:

Be patient for new life will come
out of the waters lying before you.
Welcome it when it appears
and allow it to flourish.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

SHARI ANDREWS

Unbutton My Skin
(After "Woman in Black (1882)" by Mary Cassatt)

Beads of sweat form on the artist’s brow
as she unbuttons my skin:
my brokenness, crumpled and damp,
a lace handkerchief in my hands
grief, a bun twisted tightly on top of my head,
let down only at night,
a tangle of sobs against my pillow.


I am a bird realizing the window is made of glass.
I cannot pass through that dazzling pane.

Brush strokes,
great sweeps of paint.
The vertical seams, the fitted waist,
the high collar of my dress binds and plates my body
the way my child asleep in the next room
is the brilliance
at the edges of the blind before I rise.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

STEWART DONOVAN

An Old Professor Dies at Home

He looked like Ricky Nelson in his youth,
such high-born features of privilege; Indian of course,
not aboriginal. But told the seminar how the London
school bus driver called him snowball. I show my Maliseet
wife his yearbook photo: “He looks like uncle Bucky.”
All that high literacy, Cambridge, the mighty stick of
class, just so many broken cricket bats. In the wake of
sixties radicals and revolt, he promoted Shakespeare, Sidney
and Spenser—Spenser! He should have championed
Fanon, Walcott and C.L.R. James, great radical and cricket
lover rolled in one. Did he read Ondaatje or see himself
in the pages of Naipaul? All that lousy politics amid such fine
prose. He became a Catholic and like my mother died
by inches of diabetes: bloated amputee suffering in silent
isolation, the image of Brando, not as Kurtz but Brando,
in the lower limits of age and the upper reaches of the Mekong.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

RAYMOND GORDY

The Passion of "Les Gens" in the Parish of St John Baptist

You see them every day in dirt
Even on Sunday in dirt
And you ask as you walk the street
That afternoon, drunk
What will become of you.

You ask – but the spectacle
Exhausts any answer you might find.

The women, stunning when young
Soon undo themselves, clinging
One to another, their children like parcels.

And the street is full of garbage.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

MICHAEL PACEY

Burnt Church

Redcoats swarmed into town. Finding
houses, gardens abandoned--
torched them, one by one. Finally
yellow flames blackened the white church.
Colonel Murray scoffed, as the soul
of the place ascended as smoke--
“Their Holy Ghost smells sweet”.

Rebuilt, baptized with a badge
of sacrilege-- the name spreads like
a stain across the bay-- now there’s
Burnt Church, and Burnt Church Point,
Burnt Church Road, Burnt Church River.

Drifting like smoke
across burnt church Earth.
________________

Painters

Piebald, thin as ladders, perpetually
light-headed (the many years
of inhaling solvents); men of surfaces,
of bristled allegiances:
varsol versus turpentine,
heat-gun or scraper.
Each has his way of making paint
adhere to wood. Prone to squabbles--
best left to work alone, or in uneasy pairs.


A wife who left long ago.

The fickleness of paint.

Their nemesis: troops of students
who roll into town each summer
brandishing spray-guns,
slapping on paint with 20-foot rollers;
discussing the weekend
during long breaks beneath the trees.

A painter never takes vacations;
wherever he’d go, he’d see
drips, flakes, jaded pigment:
a world in need of one more coat.

His holidays are rain.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

MAX LAYTON

For the Future to Begin

When the rapture comes
That Acadian teenage girl
Will be so disappointed

See how she walks across
Mabou beach here in Cape Breton

Ass undulating
Thigh muscles smooth and taut
Tummy flat with just a hint
In her lower abdomen
Of the womb she's carrying
And the two Fallopian tubes
Waiting on either side
With outstretched arms

For one of those boys running
Suddenly around like a bunch
Of French Revolutionaries
With their heads cut off


Waiting for the future to begin
________________

On the Skyline Trail

When the rapture comes you discover
You've been on the Skyline Trail

Boring mostly
The path straight and narrow
Grey gravel
Wedged between hackmatacks
Broken occasionally
By a spectacular view

Or a sudden panic

The crack of a branch
In the underbrush
Could be a startled moose
About to charge
Or a pack of coyotes
About to attack
As happened to that girl
A few years back

The cautionary tales of those
Who have gone before

It is forbidden to step off the path

Nevertheless you turn to admire
A mushroom or a feathered fern

Or drink from a mountain brook

Or you take a chance and walk a ways
In what is obviously an animal's tracks

Mostly you just plod along

Wondering how long the path is
Before you reach the end
Where you've been promised a vision
So stunning

It will take your breath away

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

BERNELL MACDONALD

license to kill

the hunter who just
argued with me that
he has the right to tramp
my land
came this close
to blowing my head off

it was in his contorted face
his trigger-finger
his profanities

and i know
that if his permit had
Human on it
instead of Small Game

id be a dead duck
________________

goodbye stranger

flesh or thought?

what tells us what
we have or not?

imaginary girlfriend –
song unsung
(real as the imagination
from which you sprung) –

goodbye stranger

whats real and unreal
sometimes fuse

and its what we dont have
thats the hardest to lose

________________

Oh Yeah?

my wife always said
id drink myself to death

but here i am
drunk at her grave
drinking to her health


**************************

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

SHARI ANDREWS' most recent book of poetry is Walking the Sky, Oberon Press. "Unbutton Her Skin" is from a book-length manuscript that explores female identity.

STEWART DONOVAN'S latest collection of poems, From Ingonish Out: New and Selected Poems, will be released by Breton Books for Christmas.

RAYMOND FRASER is a native of Chatham, NB, currently living in Fredericton. His latest books are Repentance Vale (novel, 2011) and The Madness of Youth (novel, 2011).

MARTY GERVAIS is a man of many parts – poet, playwright, publisher, photographer, journalist and boxer, to mention a few. His most recent book is Afternoons With The Devil (2010).

RAYMOND GORDY (alias Roman Gordy) lives in Montreal, where he was once an editor of the magazine Montreal Free Poet: Booster & Blaster. Author of the poetry book Doing Time.

Retired for 22 years, ROBERT HAWKES lives in Fredericton with his wife Peggy Hawkes. He recently retired from a 15 year stint as a volunteer in the UNB Harriet Irving Library Archives and as a co-editor of poetry for The Fiddlehead for the same length of time.

Born in Montreal in 1946, MAX LAYTON is the author of a novel and a collection of short stories, and is currently recording a second CD of original songs. A book of his poems, In The Garden Of I Am, will be published by Guernica Editions in the spring of 2013.

BERNELL MACDONALD was born in O'Leary, PEI, 1948, & educated in the back woods of the Opeongo Mountains and the campus of UNB. One of the Windsor House Poets who went on to publish 11 books and presently working on 11 more, simultaneously.


MICHAEL PACEY was born in 1952 in Fredericton. His first full-length collection of poems, The First Step, was published in Spring 2011 by Signature Editions of Winnipeg.

ROBERT MARKLAND SMITH is probably the only French Canadian called ''Markland.'' He is not a Québécois, although he lives in Montreal, where he moved to in 1964, and where he is currently attempting to raise two wonderful and impossible teenage daughters. He has been published in China and Australia, etc.

DAVID W. MCFADDEN is a poet, fiction writer and travel writer. His latest books are Why Are You So Sad?: Selected Poems (2007), Be Calm, Honey: 129 Sonnets (2009), and Why Are You So Long and Sweet?: Collected Long Poems (2010).

THOMAS F. PAWLICK has been writing poetry since he was 18. He’s now 70, and lives on a dirt road near Marlbank, Ontario. He was involuntarily retired from teaching journalism in 2006, following publication of a book with which his employers disagreed.

ALAN PEARSON (b. 1930) was part of the Montreal poetry scene in the 1960s. Before retiring to Huntsville, Ontario, he worked as a professional writer in Toronto. His fourth and latest book, Exploring Amazement (poetry, 2010), defines his attitude to his art.