Of Momentary Dark

Today, Momentary Dark is missing. After I send the kids off to school, put in the laundry, pull off the plastic on the garden beds, I sit down at my desk, intent on writing about something that happened to me in the archive on Thursday. One of the first boxes I opened contained a correspondence that seemed meant for my eyes only – not my own which I found later and which I did not care a whit to look at – but something else. It was a short correspondence between Margaret and another writer, both of whom were Christians, and who were struggling with each other, and also with a great darkness that perplexed, troubled, and saddened both of them. I read the correspondence furtively and then later, recounting it to my husband, I wept.

Momentary Dark was in that box. One copy alone, nothing else. All weekend long, I thought about that correspondence, and about that book in that box. I’d taken out Momentary Dark in my raid on the library for Margaret’s poetry, and quoted from it already in a past blog posting. I decided that on Monday (today) I would read more of that book and perhaps glean from it the wisdom in it that must somehow have grappled with the darkness I read about in the correspondence. I also wanted to read this book because its title was different than the others. For yes, in the lives of all – pessimist or optimist, believer or non – there is momentary dark.

Strangely, the book this morning is missing. I clear off my desk in an attempt to find it, but it's disappeared as if whisked out of sight. All the other of Margaret’s titles I’ve taken out of the library are here – the three volumes of Always Now, Not Yet But Still, Concrete and Wild Carrot, Winter Sun, and the Pascal lectures monograph. But no sign of Momentary Dark, anywhere. I wonder where it’s gone.

I flip through Always Now, thinking that Momentary Dark might be in there, but Momentary Dark came after Always Now. Momentary Dark was Margaret’s last published book. It appeared in 2006, a year before her death. In fact, its title does not even appear on Margaret’s list of published works on the Margaret Avison website that I’ve put on my list of links. I find one link from M & S that contains a synopsis of the book and a list of the poems, but I dearly want the book in hand. Momentary Dark, where are you? What hand has hid you from my sight this day?

Heaven's Guest

I pick up Momentary Dark at the library today. Flipping it open after a night snack, I read this poem:


Where is Everybody? (a dream)

Where is the typical little town I knew
with the dark little store
by the stone clock tower?
Had there been some hullabaloo?
Why did it seem
before I came
they had all run on,
gone home? Alone,
my gliding shadow
was all I saw.

Up from the unseen
park they come,
musicians in golden
outfits. Oh I
was happy to be
there to cheer as they
solemnly play-
ing went by,

but what if they are the enemy!

No wonder everyone else is hidden
but one unknowing and unbidden
here without motive, without reason
overwrought – because caught – in treason?
Worst of all if the residents heard
and the enemy proffered me some award!

(“Where Is Everybody?” from Momentary Dark by Margaret Avison © 2006. Published by McClelland & Stewart. Used with permission of the publisher.)

It seems here the poem is written as a verbatim description of a dream. The poet is trying to find out what the dream means by writing it out. When Margaret died, I had a very similar dream which I wrote about in a poem:



Bisque

After hearing of the death of Margaret Avison,
you have a dream. You are with her in a mountain town
she recollects from her young womanhood. You are
walking down a road. She is looking for a house – bisque-colored,
she says. (Bisque – a word that would have found favor with her.)
She once lived there.

That old town is gone, you think ... but not so much.
Some things are still there, like the big sign
for a hotel, shaped like a star. It had some words
on it. You recognize that sign;
you read about it once in her poems.

Everything is bathed in a golden light – of
a time more innocent, bygone. You think
you are traveling back in time with her
when in fact, she is leading you to the heaven
she remembers poetry was for her;
she is returning to the bisque colored house
she once lived in – she is showing you
the end of poetry, the end of a line in time.



Instead of the ‘dark little store’ and the ‘stone clock tower,’ I had in my dream a hotel and even a schoolhouse where Margaret the teacher had once taught as a young woman (which I didn’t mention as it seemed too obvious a symbol.) Like Margaret’s dream town, mine too was completely devoid of citizens. All I could see was her as a younger woman leading me up the main street to a house where she had once lived when she taught in this town. A long time ago, she had been its resident and now she was returning. I could not help but interpret the image as a return of Margaret to the ‘heaven’ she knew as a poet, the ‘heaven’ of which she or other poets could occasionally be a Star Hotel guest of, the ‘heaven’ she could teach other people about in the schoolhouse, the ‘heaven’ of which consciousness she had finally reached in death.

In “Where is Everybody?” the poet has arrived too soon to a town occupied only by ‘golden’ musicians and is afraid. But aren’t the musicians really only angels in disguise? Instead of ‘golden’ musicians, my poem had 'golden' light – that sun-buttery light that appears often as an image in Margaret’s poems.

Do poems cut across individual consciousnesses into a deeper sub-conscious that is somehow connected – a chthonic ‘small town’ as it were where one might meet a fellow sojourner? I wonder, I really do.