The two of us are thrashing through the tall, prickly ragweed and burdock that
snag our socks and sleeves to leave behind their seeds. Sarah, another Diaspora Dialogues participant, stops to pull them off, but inevitably more adhere.
“Nature is so smart,” she says.
I imagine depositing them on the subway platform and sidewalks later on, when we’ve left these trails. We’re both itchy but far from irritable, thrilled, in fact, to be finally exploring these skirts of bush and ragged fringes of park that we’ve both glimpsed wistfully at during the commute between the Downsview subway station and the York University campus.
We’ve only met a few weeks ago, but discovering another person who also felt a
curiosity at this area’s incongruous landscape forges an immediate sense of mutual sympathy between us. Beyond the windows of the York Rocket Express, the edges of Downsview park, the old airplane hangars, the ravines that plunge below Dufferin Street, have drawn my eyes inexorably throughout the school year, elusive and attractive. It is more than mere curiosity – rather like a seizing of the attention or powerful absorption, though each of us are engrossed in different, particular ways. As we walk, we see plastic bags, remains of squatters or campers, but also a row of Canada geese, crossing the road to bathe in the pond behind the campus. We talk of the writing process, our different reasons for living in Toronto, the way that nature intercepts and invades the city. All these things become related.
As I walk, I break off seedpods and blossoms to identify later. It’s the height of summer, and the growth of the tall grasses and Queen’s Anne Lace is profuse. I want to know the names of the yellow, sunflower-like plants that leave behind the tick-like seeds on our backpacks, where dry creekbeds lead, what might have been on this land before Keele street and the York campus were put in. The desire to know comes as an insistent, intuitive feeling that grows more clamorous and refuses to be ignored.
It’s my belief that such deep, urgent experiences aren’t exclusive to poets or artists, but occur for everyone. For others, they may come at the sight of a beloved’s face, a piece of haute couture clothing, the early morning on a still lake. These events are the sparks and the flashes that call us back to ourselves and our connection with the world. The knowledge that we gain from them cannot always be rationalized, we cannot always speak about it. In fact, when we make the attempt, language often fails us to render their visceral reality.
And so, the role of the poet, has been for me one that involves bearing witness.
This has not been a role that I have easily come to accept. When I was younger, I felt detached and uninvolved, isolated by a role that felt both self-inflicted, yet also, paradoxically, predetermined. As if some other, starker, braver and brutal self insisted upon looking with a gaze that could not close. Now I understand that bearing witness is the opposite of isolation. Instead, it is a commitment to paying attention to the world and to being implicated by one’s continual involvement in it. The discipline of writing poetry, then, becomes not restrictive, but a way of reminding myself of what connects me to my environment. Recognizing such connections and interrelations is freeing, as we are relieved from the confines of ego-driven, self-centred, and possibly, human-centred knowledges. With faith, I hope that such experiences will continue to happen, and that I will have the courage to keep on listening, attending, and being accountable to them.
While I won’t always get it right, the world sends out its sticky burrs and leaves behind its seedpods on our sleeves to propragate in our imaginations.
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