Tunnel Jumping: Poems

By Denis Stokes

A compelling native voice from Ontario, Canada, Denis Stokes remembers the province and the city of Toronto in verses. His verses portray an age, a city, a province, and the people inhabiting them.

Though the author's childhood was unlike mine, all the same these poems resonate, drawing me backward into my own. The poems are tightly crafted, but gently, rooted in the area where he grew up, and where I have recently landed as a stranger, not relating to it, not really feeling it at all. And yet, now, perhaps, I do.
I have so many favourite poems, especially Kiss `n' Ride, with its beautiful hypnotic rhyme scheme. Other readers will discover favourites of their own.
These are poems paying homage. they are heavily rooted in nature, honouring childhood experiences, childhood friends. And family, especially a father and grandfather. I love that grandfather! A reader would give anything to have that grandfather. I know I would, despite already having a beloved one of my own.
This is not a book to be scanned quickly. Slow down. Savour it. Enjoy the ride.
-Carol Malyon

'a voice with many compass points…'
Susan Ioannou

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scarlet Leaf
• Release date: Nov 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9791220229180

Book preview

Weil

Acknowledgements

MUCH THANKS FOR THE support of the following:

WAVES... LEFTOVER Tanka

The Crafted Poem...Pitcher in the Rain

Acta Victoriana... Bus Shelter

Grammateion...Swimming

U.C. Review... Dedication

Canadian Forum... Wayne is on the train/looking

Images (York University)... Warden Station

Descant... Damsels; Closet News

(W)rites of Spring (League of Canadian Poets): Licking Honey from the Thorn... Tunnel Jumping

Arc... Fields

Carrying the Branch (Glass Lyre Press)... Tasting Africa

Leaping Clear... Zen

Iowa Source... Arriving Light

Several of these poems appeared in the anthology, Collected Words (with Bill Dunphy, Cecilia Petierse Kennedy, Des Daley, Paul McGraw)

Several of these poems appeared in the chapbook, Scarborough Poems (Wordwrights Canada).

Several other poems appeared in the chapbook What the Street Knows (Albernum Press).

Several of these poems appeared in the chapbook Peace Comes Dropping Slow (Albernum Press).

Zen and Tasting Africa appear in the collection, A Wolf Rages Down the Little Jocko.

The Blackstock Children appears in the collection by the same name.

The author is most grateful for the support of the Ontario Arts Council, without which many of these poems would not have been written.

Much thanks to the Teachers Union of Malawi for their gracious, inspiring welcome.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

I

Leftover Tanka

Pitcher in the Rain

My Creek

Autumn Moths

Bus Shelter

Altars

Moving

In Elegy

This Bridge Ices

What the Street Knows

Leper’s Song

Warden Station

Kiss ’n’ Ride

Prayer upon Cleaning out the Yonge Street Washroom

Wayne is on the train/looking

Gethsemane

Crossing the Road

II

Dedication

Closet News

The Calling

Damsels

Tunnel Jumping

Fields

Woods

Final Suns

Kennedy Road, Woodyard Homings

Zen (from Deer Park)

Reasons

Swimming

III

In the Dark Hall the Key

Updates

In Summer Heat, Norland

From Lakes Revisited

Simcoe

Death is Romantic

North Oshawa, The Given Road

Chevrons

Sheds

The Blackstock Children

Installing the Light

Otto Preminger Begins

Near the Reservoir

The Enfield Searches

Old Song

Towards Lilongwe, A Walk

Tasting Africa

Girls of Ekwendeni

Ode to Malarone

Flashing*

Massau

Kapuscinski, Shadowing Sun

Foxridge Wonder

Half Penny

Arriving Light

Author’s Biography

I

HE PUSHED OPEN THE door and found himself walking in a labyrinth,

Corridors, elevators.  The livid light was not light but the dark of the earth.

Electronic dogs passed him noiselessly.

He descended many floors, a hundred, three hundred, down.

-Orpheus and Eurydice, Czeslaw Milosz

Leftover Tanka

THE PIGEONS, GRAY AS the evening soon,

descend.  The world chills a bit and

Feet shuffle over loose stones. A man

begs, too tired for a ragged violence.

You throw him a key to the city. He’s

lived long here. He remembers the tinges

of each sunset, the orders of noise- the angry

or humorous honking, the popular songs

telling us how we almost. Now a paper mist

is coming.  Your eye pierces its covers,

searching for better words. Is this sky

spilling, or is it only giving us blood?

Wars, hungers and wounds, the lonely

sedentary travellers- it is sad, love, sad.

We are too weak for flames here. Our clasp

has loosened its joy. There’s only evening.

EVENING AND IT COVERS, spreads sad news:

‘No joy, no truths left to save us’. Tell

me only of beauty, a flame burning these mists

for gods. Soon the stars attend, but now

it’s only air we have, simple facts of breathing.

Pitcher in the Rain

THERE’S AN IDIOT DOWN there

across the church parking lot

in the schoolyard five stories down

pitching against the wall, pitching in the rain

so heavy the traffic’s slowing down,

so dark all the headlights keep flicking on.

A room or two’s

being used in the school.

They light up

the walls outside spilled with stains,

countless waterings-

road hockey pee breaks, berby, tennis and basketball,

spud every year or so.

Schoolyards know the stories.

Gulls circle by, remembering

this idiot pitching against the wind, perhaps

in this rain getting heavier by the minute

insisting upon the rhythms of his attempts

as if I were looking down instead through sunlight,

some benevolent summer.

But you can see the kapok, his skinned planet

hopping trout quick and mad off that wall

to the glove’s rapid snapping

at each sudden swerve for spin or stone.

The idiot- he must be soaked to the bone by now.

His arm must be hurting bad.

A starling or grackle laughs,

observes from a window