Three Things from Edmonton podcast - Episode 48: a quiet house, The Singer's House, a neighbour's house


Happy end of the week, friends!

I remember the Humanities Building on the University of Alberta campus and what Professor Bishop told us there in English 309 on those mornings long ago: go out and notice things and write them down. This week the three things I noticed that made me happy or grateful were more one thing in three stanzas, kinda.


1. A quiet house

Suddenly, I am awake, and there is no going back. I am in bed, it’s dark. Is it a work day? Or weekend? What time is it? I fish for my phone in the waves of covers and use the twisted earbuds cord to reel it in. I touch the face to get the time. The battery is dead. No music to get back to sleep, either. I am on my own. I brace myself for the usual goblin parade of my mistakes, doubts, regrets and fears to come through the walls. A poem, yes, I will recite a poem to keep the shrieking down! This is when it’s confirmed that, while I love poems, I don’t know them by heart. They’re in books or they’ve been outsourced to the memory in my phone. But there is a poem with a seal…and a…singer that I had once tried to memorize. How do I search my own brain? Every request for information I send out drives right by without stopping like a Fed Ex truck without my package. How about the books I have read lately? Could the poem in one of those books? I picture the covers. The Knausgaard novel?, no, the memoir about the bar in Brooklyn from Peggy? no, the book of Poe short stories? no and no to summoning Edgar Allan Poe in the middle of the night I can still picture three stanzas printed in a book. I can see them, sitting there on a right hand page. And then the image of the ink disintegrates and I slip back from the world of print into the realm of orality, where I am helpless.


And then a voice: Heaney. Yes, it’s a poem by Seamus Heaney. I find the floor with my feet and walk down the hallway, through the kitchen—the clock on the microwave says 4:19—and toward the Heaney book on the little shelf on the wall by the dining room table. I close my eyes and flick the light switch and withstand the blast of orange onto my eyelids. I open my eyes. The book is on top of the pile.


At the end of the first essay, on page xxiii, there it is: The Singer’s House. I read a line, close the book, scratch a verse out in pencil on a sheet of printing paper, watch the next line emerge, check the book page against delivery, and repeat, trying to imprint the poem in my memory for good.



2. The Singer's House, by Seamus Heaney (almost memorized, swear on my heart)

People here used to believe
that drowned souls lived in seals.
At spring tides they might change shape.
They loved music and swam in for a singer
who might stand at the end of summer
In the mouth of a white-washed turf shed,
his shoulder to the jamb, his song
a rowboat far out in the evening.
When I came here first you were always singing,
a hint of the clip of the pick
in your winnowing climb and attack.
Raise it again, man. We still believe what we hear.

Oh, my. The singer standing in the mouth of a building, like a tongue, like a voice…the poem as a rowboat, a piece of craft atop the deep…the command to sing again, again [I hear italics] because the singing voice is prone to exile…and the seals, the lovely, listening seals….all these things come in crystal clear at 4:42 am.



3. A neighbour's house

Two days later, in the sun, I am layered up and outside to shovel snow. Scrape, scrape, ssssscccrrraaape. And then from a direction I can’t immediately pin point, the sound of laughter and music. It’s Chantal, the neighbour across the street, propping the front door open, her shoulder to the jamb, holding a speaker, Chantal, from the French for song, smiling out loud, shouting that she knows I enjoy music so here’s some Christmas music for you while you work. I feel my spirits rise the way they do when a voice locates you out there. I raise my shovel and holler a thank you. She closes the door. I go back to chipping the ice. And then it hits me that we have just voiced and acted out the Heaney poem (corrected for, among other things, the season and the latitude and the current chemical state of water here), and that I haven’t completely forgotten the seals in me.

This, as they say, resonates.

I hope you find your favourite sounds, or, better yet, they you.




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