Grant Guy is a Winnipeg, Canada, theatre maker and poet. He has 6 books published and his poems and satories have been published internationally online and as hard copy. He was the 2004 recipient of the Manitoba Arts Council’s Award of Distinction and the 2015 Winnipeg Arts Council’s Making A Difference Reward.
Today’s poems are very reductive. They reflect more of the micro theatre pieces I began during the time of COVID. In the micro theatre pieces the object or the gesture was the event. In today’s poems the words are the event. Each word and/or line can be connected as pieces of shards by the reader.
One Christmas Eve, many years ago, I sat on the pavement, outside my pharmacy, having gotten my meds and now waiting for the door-to-door transit bus, which ferried disabled folks about town. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but in my old Carhart jacket and tattered jeans, I must have presented something of a spectacle to others who were going in and out of the building. As I sat there idly observing other people, I noticed that many of them averted their eyes in passing. I figuratively shrugged.
At one point, a middle aged woman approached bearing a twenty dollar bill and implored me to take it. I tried to refuse it, telling her that I was not a begger, but merely waiting for my bus — I was sitting on the pavement because my legs weren’t strong enough to support me for long periods of time. But, she insisted, telling me simply, “Merry Christmas.” Not wanting to hurt her feelings, I reluctantly accepted her gesture of kindness.
Ten minutes later, still awaiting my ride, I spied a pretty young woman with two little children. She approached a well-dressed man emerging from the pharmacy and briefly spoke to him. I saw him shake his head no and continue on his way. She stood there, forlorn, and I struggled to my feet and approached her.
“Can I help you, miss,” I asked her.
Taking in my disheveled appearance, she shook her head and said, “No, I don’t want to trouble you.”
I thought: she thinks I’m a panhandler too. I smiled as kindly and as unthreateningly at her as I could and merely handed her the twenty. She was stunned. Then she narrowed her eyes at me a little suspiciously for a moment, but finding in my face only kindness, she accepted the bill and hugged my in gratitude. In my mind I imagined the predators who might have tried to coerce her.
“Merry Christmas,” I murmured, but she was already half way across the parking lot with her children, en route to McDonalds.
In 1968 I followed my math Ph.D. thesis advisor Karl Stromberg to Kansas State University from the University of Oregon in Eugene to complete my studies. Professor Stromberg decided to visit Eugene over Christmas break. His new wife couldn’t drive and he was legally blind. He asked me to do the driving.
We followed blizzards for 1,740 miles to Oregon. The first day the snow was so deep that I lost the road and drove into a snow bank. We were towed into the nearest town by a road grader, but we could only get one room there. The couple took one bed and I slept with the wife’s two young children, one of whom wet the bed. As bad as that was, I would have preferred to stay where I was to getting back on the road, but we went on through the perilous weather. The other excitement on the trip was losing traction on a street in Baker in Eastern Oregon. We were fortunate that the car slid down a vacant street hitting nothing, rather than running into pedestrians or a building. No harm done, just horror.
We got to Eugene and then I took a bus to Portland where my father picked me up from a pay telephone booth (they were common then). When I checked in with the woman that I had been dating while in Oregon, she was distant and cold. I got the hint. There hadn’t been any passion in the relationship and I wasn’t very disappointed, despite a desire to see her again. My sister who had introduced us suggested she was interested in marriage, which didn’t interest me.
After that there was a low key Christmas with my mid-fifties year old parents. Of that and the trip back, I remember little. There was no drama, pain, or joy.
Epilogue – I got my Ph.D at the end of that school year back in Eugene. I never heard from the girlfriend again. I got married the next year while teaching at Morehouse College in Atlanta and remain married to the same person who among other things is my live in editor. Professor Stromberg’s wife left him and he got a mail order wife I am told. He has died; I don’t know anything about either of those wives – there had been some before those two.
Bell Angel Evergreen Chime (the fast closing dusk)
There was dusk, and it closed in fast. The creative one glanced out a window at a squirrel grey and remembered things. He was determined to think of interesting and positive, life affirming phenomena and people, to frame the world on the side of goodness. There had been a bell on a door, and also a bell in a church top structure,- the bells were soulful and well made, reminded him of times he didn’t live through, but had seen in old films and maybe old books. Small towns. Well made things mechanically, structurally, maybe many hand made things.
He imagined there was an angel sometimes, just over things, between the tops of bookshelves or Christmas trees and the ceilings. Wouldn’t that be a nice place for an angel, guiding us, concerned about, seeing, whispering softly,- benevolent, ghostly but in a good way?- and the evergreens. They were brave, choice or not, to stand out there in all the seasons. He thought people took them for granted. But they were something wonderful in life. The snowy ground sometimes, and then the green, and the clear blue sky. He had just said to someone recently while walking, ‘Today is not the day, not the ideal day. It’s one of those ones you have to get through is all. It’s one of those days for sure. It’s freezing and windy without many redeeming qualities. It’s when the snow was there, and the wind had subsided and one could just enjoy the calm day.
That is the thing. In the forest. By the evergreens. You know. That is it. Much better.’ And then the idea of the chimes. Leave the chimes. They have soul. Silver on black strings. They don’t sound a lot but sometimes. Other people, a gratitude for them. The beloved with the dimples, brown eyes, wisps of hair falling down. The blonde, good hearted and outgoing. The artist, having knowledge and kindness, interested in the paranormal and always giving keen insights into things she was. And the woman whose eyes were all colours, all different colours at once,- a true and long friend that one.
One day in the countryside, or one day in the south by the sea, there will also be chimes. By the rural fields alone but not lonesome, at home themselves in the bright noon sun, a small breeze, like an angel, like an angel out from the ceiling area. Or, maybe better yet, chimes in the south, maybe even made of shells from the sea!- making their nice noise, by a place where there are palm fronds verdant and stucco walls painted the lightest of orange colours. By the crests of the sea waves and the electric lights blue green yellow purple orange blue like Christmas lights themselves, flowing light on thick grasses and some fence, on a cement bench with turquoise tiles in the top like the one or ones from long before. Everyone has forgotten. They even laugh. But they are hasty and haughty and full of ambition and pride and ego.
I remember. I appreciate. The grace of it all. The angels, they know. They don’t laugh. They honour place and person, pastoral atmosphere and seaside sanctity, rural restless wildflowers and ferns feral, and even, maybe especially, the fast confident dusk. The dusk of winter so strange and all.
