Earth Prime

By Bert Almon

Winner of the 1995 Writers Guild of Alberta Award for Poetry

Bert Almon's poems are centred in local, apparently unremarkable moments which are addressed with such a fine, ironic eye that they suddenly yield their innate comedy, tragedy, paradox, tenderness. "Poetry," he has said, "is a message slipped under the door/ You don't even have to read it/ It wants to tell you about danger/ life and death and good parties."

In this, his seventh collection, Almon's locales range from the Texas of his youth to the physiotherapist’s office near his present home in Western Canada, through concert halls in London and amphitheatres in Greece.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Release date: Sep 15, 1994
• ISBN: 9781771311861

Bert Almon

Bert Almon won the Writers' Guild of Alberta Award for Poetry for Earth Prime (Brick) in 1998. He has been a Hawthornden Fellow in Poetry and a finalist in the Blackwell's/Times Literary Supplement Poetry Competition. His poems have appeared in journals such as The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Prairie Fire, Descant, Prism international, and Queen's Quarterly. He lives in Edmonton, where he teaches creative writing at the University of Alberta.

Book preview

Prime

SAN JACINTO BATTLEFIELD MONUMENT, 1962

The monument behind my father and me in the photograph is made of limestone studded with fossils of marine animals, who left records of themselves but not history. I know the year because the developers imprinted the date on the photograph. My father is five feet eight, a little banty rooster, my mother called him, with prematurely grey hair. The blocked arteries which would kill him five years later are not visible in the photograph. The picture is a little overexposed, so we both appear to be wearing white shirts but probably were not.

The monument is 570 feet tall, faced with Texas fossilized limestone, modeled on the Washington Monument but topped by a Lone Star in steel and concrete 34 feet high. It went up in 1936 to commemorate the centennial of the battle. The base of the monument was the largest continuous pouring of concrete in history: 6000 cubic yards poured in 57 hours by 150 men on relief, who consumed 3800 meat sandwiches and 5700 cups of coffee in 60 hours. The Journal of the American Concrete Institute sounds like a send-up of a math textbook, but I love the statistics and would never cash in a fact for an idea. There is a poetry of engineering whatever engineers think of poetry.

Not far from us is the spot where my maternal great-great grandfather, William Kibbe, a rancher of Liberty County, fought in the battle as a second sergeant in Captain William H. Logan's Company. I have a thick folder of documents signed and sealed by various officials attesting to his reality, though he will never be as real to me as my father, banty rooster or not, who fought in no battles. Kibbe supplied his cause, the cause of freedom to own slaves, with:

The grey horse was lost the day before the battle in an unsuccessful and vainglorious skirmish to capture a cannon. A story years later claims that he was spared by the Mexicans because of his head of white hair which led them to think he was an old man. I stamp this story rejected, as it fits neither the accounts of the skirmish nor the practice of an army which attacked under the red flag of No Quarter.

The day after Kibbe's horse was killed, the Texans attacked while President Santa Anna was disporting himself with Emily Morgan (or West), a mulatto woman later called the Yellow Rose of Texas. There is no monument to her. Following a flag that depicted Liberty as a woman with a sabre and one bared breast, the Texans advanced to the tune of a popular song, ‘Will You Come to the Bower I Have Shaded for You,’ earning themselves eternal glory and the world's greatest pouring of concrete. Heroism is out of stock at the moment, discontinued perhaps. For his pains Kibbe received a grant of 640 acres and a pension. His survival permitted me to appear in the picture with my father, who was not a descendent, and might have visited San Jacinto with a different son.

The next photo in my album is Air Force One, which carried John F. Kennedy to El Paso in the spring of 1962 and which would carry him back to Texas the following year. And the next picture shows Kennedy shaking hands in a crowd shortly after he graciously received (but would not wear) the Stetson hat presented to him by the mayor of El Paso. My father had the choice of shaking Kennedy's hand or taking his picture on that fine day a year and a half before Oswald would push his handsome head into the sediments of history. ‘I was close enough to touch him,’ my father would say over and over again, but differently after Dallas, and those are the words that come to mind as I look at us standing in front of the Monument.

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