Downtown Streets
A few weeks ago, I went a little bit crazy in the books section of the second hand store and bought up a bunch of Canadian and otherist fiction and poetry.
I am just starting to go through them, I always buy more books than I can read, and this poem crossed my eye. It’s called “Downtown Streets”, and its by a Canadian poet called Miriam Waddington. She studied English at U of T, and moved to North York after finishing a degree in social work where she would eventually work as a professor at York University until 1983 when she retired.
This poem appears in Impulse Volume 1 Number 2, 1973. Although the version I am using was publishsed in 15 Canadian Poets X2. I don’t know if there are any differences between the 2 texts, but I just wanted to give an idea of the time when it was written.
I, of course, liked this because it was related to letter writing in downtown Toronto.
Downtown Streets
There are still people
who write each other
intimate letters who
sing their personal arias
to an audience of white
paper; is it pain they
score, bursts of light they
note after a dark illness,
a childish jump, or some
mongrel dance-step in the
icicled rooms of snow?
Sometimes I still stand
outside a lighted window
on downtown streets (just
as I used to thirty years
ago) a woman sits at a
table writing intimate
letters, she is asking, do
you really like the smell
of my perfume, she is saying
next time you come it will
be winter the season of
mandarin oranges.
Standing there under
the window
I think I can hear
the sound
of her ghostly pen
moving across the page,
I think I can hear it
singing
in the downtown streets.
The spacing won’t publish properly for some strange reason.
There ought to be a space after mandarin oranges.
we should go sit in the court rooms and write poetry. or maybe an emergency room. or, better yet, maybe in allan gardens. all three are not mutually exclusive. for now, i’m sated with or pie baking date.