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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
October 3, 2004
Once only once
IIn his wonderful play or short opera libretto Night-Blooming Cereus the Canadian poet James Reaney presented Mrs. Brown in her kitchen without her family without her friends cooking and eating and cleaning while compact in a private conversation with Jesus: My Lord I thank for bread and meat You give more bread than I can cut More for to drink than I can cup More to myself than I can eat. ... She offers every worldly pain sacramentally up to God in a sequence of domestic songs which are like a Mass. Then after her quiet dinner the dishes now all put away she moves the night-blooming cereus a desert cactus that lies limp and dry all the year but blooms once at nightfall and then fades by morning from among her many potted plants to the centre of the stage: Within Your blossom may I see Within the leaves of grief The face of my lost girl Or if that is not to be May somehow lighter be my sheaf. I have always been swept away by James Reaney who could always summon the enchantment of the Ontario from which I sprang -- the old British Ontario; the sweetness and boredom of it the serenity of his native pre-Festival Stratford or of a hundred towns that to this day in moments of peace under certain lighting remind me of home. He more than any poet and especially in his earlier poems has given me the landscape of this forgotten country my own but gone: So I long in this dark parlour Dull green brown and maroon The colour of starling feathers This stuffy dingy room. I am delivered into the rooms of my own grandparents the cicada stillness that surrounded them that interminable summer day with the first breeze of autumn in houses that had been dug out of wilderness hardly a generation before but had already achieved the stasis of some ancient realm some China or some Egypt. It was dreary magic neither black nor white neither something to accept nor something to reject it was just there. On the eastern horizon through the distant thunder of wars in Europe was the still-more distant prospect of an Empire that stretched pink on the map around all the world. Ontario was a place under this flag within this Empire this very large place which yet kept its smells: of the corn-starch factory at Port Credit or the mown cowfields of Esquesing Township; of the wildflowers beside the line-road at Limehouse or the minnow-scent of Silver Creek where I used to hike as a mud-wet boy. Written into the diary of events which passed with no significance was this unstated premise of perpetuity. A dull place a place that grows darker but on its western horizon the glimmering of a heaven beyond our steps or words. Of a heaven that still awaits today beyond the sprawl of parking lots and shopping malls and houses neither urban nor rural and tall miscellaneous buildings marking the edge of our knowledge. In every department of our civil lives it has become harder to see from here to there. A seat of grace; a settled space; man burrowed into the verdant earth. In the Ontario of the pioneers the image that comes habitually to the fore is of mill and steeple in a clearing from the wilderness of nature. Today we make when we can in our apartments a little domestic clearing in the wilderness of the heart of man. Then as now life in the clearing . The harvest is once again coming in. The supermarkets are as ever brimming. I am not prescribing anything today only noticing the approach of our northern Thanksgiving now one week away. I would leave this space blank if by doing so I could convey some stillness but instead have filled it with a stillness of speech. Mrs. Brown gathered it in her folded hands this stillness of absent family and friends and of longing for a home beyond home where we will see our faces. In the libretto her estranged granddaughter is coming towards her and off the stage tragedies are resolving in the little City of a small Ontario town mysteriously around a plant that blooms once and only once at nightfall. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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