rob mclennan

a short history of the chinook

 

 

it is the mountain range

of unfurled combinations

 

a slow hybrid breeze

, to address you as such

 

careless is red

& apology, too

 

riding kitchen-care blue

 

when I said undress,

I did not mean to bone

 

but you are, there

 

warm wind, or

a passionate alter

 

where nothing remains here

unchanged

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

a short history of the space program

 

 

if the moon you were after

 

a delicate mint, popped up quick

to your mouth

 

the progression was slow

 

not a place where you wish

to be held back

 

if you wish to be held

 

one small step for another,

golf balls litter the pale rocky surface

 

I mark window resilience

to lower atmospheres

 

& experimental rocket boosters

, you are still building airplanes

 

if the moon we were after

 

the days lining up a cold unwound coil

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

an old poem: in like (errol) flynn, in like flint

 

There are a whole bunch of great stories of Americans coming up into Canada and having all sorts of adventures and misadventures, and then other stories not so great, of Americans getting trapped somehow, like Malcolm Lowry or even John Thompson, two writers who made it across the border, and somehow never made it quite back. Then there's Errol Flynn, the American actor who pretty much killed himself slowly through sex, drink and drugs, nearly dying on the airplane before it landed in Vancouver on October 9, 1959. The poem makes it sound as though he died before the airplane landed, but he was said to have finally gasped his last, dying of a massive heart attack, just after a week in a hotel room at the infamous Sylvia Hotel on English Bay with his seventeen year old girlfriend Beverley Aadland. Aadland, whom he'd been involved with already for a couple of years, and, according to her, was set to marry, couldn’t even get him back to the airport before there was further trouble, and was looked at by Dr. Grant Gould, uncle of the piano player Glenn Gould. Was the troubled actor, once known for his swashbuckling pirate roles and that of Robin Hood, three times the poor girl's age, or four, by that point?

 

errol flynns last lover

 

breaking 40 years of silence & bad stigma,

            well after his swash & buckle days.

 

dying of everything in vancouver, a failure

            made complete—of liver, heart.

 

like malcolm lowry, death by misadventure,

            an accidental yankee caught for good.

 

theres love at seventeen & then theres this, the starlet

            & the alcoholic cad, old misfit.

 

the magic of life & bigger than, shrunk down to copy,

            when none of it matters. never did.

 

as the couple lands in canada, 1959, the final stop

            in all adventuring. the airplane touching earth.

 

I always mistakenly attach him to the film The Misfits (1961) instead of Clark Gable, who was actually in such, an accidental obituary for Clark and Marilyn Monroe, both of whom died a year later, he of a heart attack and she of her infamous drug overdose.  Not the last film either of them did, but the last that they managed to complete, somehow involving Montgomery Clift in the whole mess. This was close to the end of the period where actors were owned and operated by the big studios, kept at certain weights, certain hair colours, seen in the right places and cleaned up after various indiscretions, with quiet denial to rumours, if there even were any. The media still too polite to talk. There were things they could still get away with. Mickey Rooney managed to somehow survive it, but not poor Judy Garland, a train wreck on stage by her later years. They even got Rock Hudson married, for the sake of his image. Not everyone could handle it. Some fell into drink, some fell into drugs, some threw themselves headlong into both, and a few other distractions as well.

 

Even when Malcolm Lowry died of an accidental overdose of drink and possibly sleeping pills in 1954, it wasn’t called such on the death certificate, but politely referred to as "death by misadventure." Flynn, on the other hand, was pure defeat; his body simply gave out.

 

This is one of the poems that John Newlove picked for my section in the anthology Introduction: Poets Present Poets (2001), writing the bare bones of his introduction that barely said a bald thing. It's the poem, too, that Stephen Brockwell still calls my best, partly for the rhythm of it, and probably a few other reasons too. I can never quite fathom why, but I like it too, but perhaps for some other reasons. 

 
I've slipped Flynn into a poem or two since, and recently. How is it he keeps to my imagination, so dashing, so charming, like the fictional James Bond, but so bent on hedonism and self-destruction? He sits in my imagination far more than, say, John Barrymore, father of Drew. Is it better to burn out, as they say, than to fade away?









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