Canada's Poet!
A flowing poem by Canada's
first parliamentary poet laureate,
George Bowering:
Van, Can
Sometimes in mid-April we fill our hot-tubs
with Perrier water, we are so pacific, west
coasting through spring, casting not a thought
to our poor cousins in Toronto, slogging
through dirty snow to their cute restaurants
with nifty names. Casting not a thought
but delivering an image if we can, posing
wisely as the people who were foresighted enough
to create a city with warm winters. Would anyone,
they ask in gelid Ottawa, live on the edge out there
except for the weather? This will make
a good enough question for a gentle poem to pose.
(Even in something that sounds like prose.)
Sitting in my Perrier water, nibbling on sushi,
I will respond-in time, in time. But first,
pass the pale wine. Listen to the peaceful wind
in the glass chimes. Put war from your mind.
Note yon billboard-it was commissioned
by an eastern firm. It tells us to buy snow tires
for a Canadian winter. It is a pretty billboard,
I like it. I just have no time for the fancy man
who insists our season past was not
Canadian. Not Canadian, he says, hardly glancing
at the Japanese plum blossoms. Not really Canadian,
that pretty whale. Not interesting, your poems
with no snow, no stoic drone. Take off your pants,
I say, and step into this tub. Oh no you dont,
he says, I know every stereotype in your town.
Here's the story: there's no more truth in that story
than there is music in this poem. Why dont I
buckle down and fix it? Maybe I will, but
not right now-let's have a spinach salad
with avocado. Let's encourage those bristling
folk on Bloor Street, let them fancy we never think
but dance, never put on our pants, let chance
and the Japanese current whisper when our ship
comes in. Laden with little foreign cars. Light
as the touch of our soft flowing guilt.
Eversince I came to Canada, I have been wondering about the ways people from different parts of the world identify or differ with each other. It has occured many times when talking with friends and peers, that some people talked about a common childhood experience, such as a book or a cartoon series, and I had nothing to say, so stood just outside an invisible line, which grouped and separated them away from me. There have been moments of identification as well when I, too, have had a similar experience with a book or something nonlocal enough to connect us over the globe of Earth.
A few months ago I made a search in google on a book, with inaccurate keywords I managed to drag out of the abandoned corenrs of a fading memory and reached at a name: 
I borrowed the books, and in the car, on the way back home, found out it was actually partially rewritten by the persian translator and so was not truely Ohser's creation. Still, Ohser's drawings are so piercely influential that the spirit of the great man he was transcends the disappointment of finding out the tamperings.
Then the question popped out, considering the fact that the book is somehow international, do other people here around me know the book? Have they known it as kids? Do they identify with me in the fascination I have for the book? And so on. That is something I eagerly want to know! It will be the first thing to talk about tomorrow morning with the officemates in the office, or at lunch with others.
