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    The Fat Lady Struck Dumb
    The Fat Lady Struck Dumb
    The Fat Lady Struck Dumb
    Ebook141 pages55 minutes

    The Fat Lady Struck Dumb

    By David Waltner-Toews

    ()

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    About this ebook

    On the day that David Waltner-Toews' young daughter Rebecca gave "Mr. Fluff, that venerable stuffed dog" to her older brother, the poet learned a lesson in community building -- to get what you really want you must give it away and then share it back.

    There is nothing didactic about The Fat Lady Struck Dumb, though the book is packed with wisdom compacted of love for the planet and detailed knowledge of its ecosystems, including the stress they currently suffer. These are passionate poems of a committed citizen ardently testifying for the globe, his home and ours. One of his recurrent techniques is the catalogue in which layers of global being are rounded. Waltner-Toews is a scientist by education and occupation. He understands better than most our tenuous place in the web of being. His poems are organisms rooted in that knowledge, gifts of language bound to call out of his readers a passionate return in kind.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrick Books
    Release dateSep 15, 2000
    ISBN9781771311175
    The Fat Lady Struck Dumb
    Author

    David Waltner-Toews

    David Waltner-Toews is an internationally celebrated veterinary epidemiologist, eco-health,  and One Health specialist. He has published more than 20 books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry

    Read more from David Waltner Toews

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      Book preview

      The Fat Lady Struck Dumb - David Waltner-Toews

      The Fat Lady

      Struck Dumb

      David Waltner-Toews

      The Fat Lady

          Struck Dumb

      Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

      Waltner-Toews, David, 1948 –

         The fat lady struck dumb

      Poems.

      ISBN 1-894078-12-8

      I. Title.

      PS8595.A61F37 2000        C811’.54        C00-932568-9

      PR9199.3.W34F37 2000

      Copyright © David Waltner-Toews

      We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts

      for our publishing programme. The support of the Ontario Arts

      Council is also gratefully acknowledged.

      Photo on the cover is of a dog being celebrated in Kathmandu,

      taken by Dider Chemin.

      Author photo credit: Matthew Waltner-Toews

      This book is set in Janson Text and Novarese.

      Brick Books

      Box 20081

      431 Boler Road

      London, Ontario

      N6K 4G6

      Canada

      www.brickbooks.ca

      To Kathy,

      for more than a quarter century of

      love and friendship

      Table of Contents

      I. A Post-Cambrian Lament

      Death of a Humanist

      Death of a Naturalist

      The Dogs of Kathmandu

      A Man Sits Naked

      Mt. St Hilaire, walking at night

      A Post-Cambrian Lament

      A Bill from the Power Company

      My Mother’s Heart Attack

      On the Death of a Father

      Here, Not Here

      Mine Field

      Absence in Old Quebec

      Sunday Morning

      How the Earth Loves You

      Beached

      A Pain with Nowhere to Run

      An Ordinary Life

      II. Grace Amid the Ruins

      Going Home

      Teilhard de Chardin Surfs the Internet

      What There Is

      Grace Amid the Ruins

      A Cold Night in Kathmandu

      The Wisdom of the East

      The Fat Lady Struck Dumb

      The Olympic Thinking Competition

      The Squirrels

      Recognition

      The Better Part of the Day

      Silver Bird on High

      Love and Chaos

      John Donne Meets Chaos Theory

      Grace in Mid-Winter

      The Amateur

      I Cannot Love You, Without

      Concatenations

      Where the Day Goes

      The Sanitary Dream Engineers

      III. Coyotes

      Temple at Dusk

      World Peace: December, 1968, Hokkaido

      Mountains: a Poem for the Millennium

      The Three Stations of Montreal

      Bringing Home the Groceries

      Birthday Anti-Poem

      For Mother: Weinachtswuensch 1995

      Flower Gardening

      Matthew

      You are Not a Cat

      Dinner-time

      Half Century Poem

      Rebecca

      Coyotes at Eyebrow Lake, Saskatchewan

      Notes

      Acknowledgements

      About the Author

      This I know at great cost:

      All life is not outward,

      Nor is all death from within.

                  Pablo Neruda, The Traveller

      I.

      A Post-Cambrian Lament

      Death of a Humanist

      In the chapel of La Faloria convent,

      Cortina, Italy, I meditate

      in the quiet dawn,

      a shadow of habits

      supplicating behind me,

      before me the silhouette of a cross,

      stark against the white mountain

      and the Arian clear blue sky.

      Later, I climb

      a well-groomed mountain path

      through the congregation of trees.

      At the top there is a chapel, a guest house,

      and a large military gun.

      Up there, the sheer delight

      of earth’s power, barely constrained,

      rolls like an organ fugue

      down, away from me

      into a complex canon of trills and rocks

      and breath-taking valleys,

      up, billowing like a ragged wind-blown sheet

      into the vaulted skies.

      It tugs, at every peak,

      against the slipping grip

      of guest house, chapel, gun.

      Below, in Milan,

      I walk the narrow streets,

      feeling at home, pause in the courtyard

      of the Giuseppe Verdi Music Conservatory

      in the Chiesa della Passione (AD 1486).

      Violin sounds dip and wing

      from balconies,

      musicians in formal attire

      pace gracefully, humming.

      Around a corner, the Duomo

      rises in the Central Plaza,

      from a distance like an intricate

      wet-dripped sand castle.

      Up close, it is a rock-heap

      of men on horses, torsos rippling,

      biceps bulging in triumph and misery,

      swords, flags, crosses

      up-thrust in victory.

      For a millennium these bodies

      chopped, hauled, re-organized,

      re-shaped wood, stone, earth,

      cut and slashed each other over differences

      of opinion, convinced each other

      with argument, praised God, made

      God redundant with thumbscrews,

      racks, irons, stakes,

      proved that people were superior

      to God in all these things, carved the Duomo

      in stone dragged down from the Dolomites,

      re-built the mountains

      in our own image until wild snow,

      rock canyons, fearsome beast,

      were transformed to cathedral, sewer, hospital,

      factory, guest house, gun.

      I sit at the edge of the plaza,

      security helicopters buzzing overhead,

      brilliant lights enflaming the magnificence

      of stone, eating pizza, drinking red wine.

      I sense the full weight of it,

      the mass of flesh screaming

      through the centuries, raining

      down on me, arms, legs,

      bodies of knowledge,

      corporate legacies

      like a legion of mad prions re-making the earth

      in our image, demanding rights, attention, liberty,

      trampling every living thing in the pursuit

      of truth, beauty,

      and efficient management.

      I close my eyes,

      recalling the small, dusky space

      where Leonardo depicted a gathering of twelve men

      arguing during a meal, one,

      lost in sadness, seeing too far ahead.

      I

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