The Woodlot

By Chris Banks

I am fifty-four years old which means I am past “my best-before date,” meaning there is much more life behind me than in front of me, which is making me think lately about my life, and its brooding Emo cousin Death who never seems to show up to any of the family functions, until eventually he does, and Great Aunt Agnes is now suddenly dead, or one’s friends, or one’s parents, or worse, one’s child.

Maybe its because I am a chronic major depressive (but thankfully medicated–woohoo!) with an anxiety disorder that much of what I write about, much of what I joke about in my poems, is Death. Is Death a joking matter? Not really. Not for someone who has survived two intense periods of suicidal ideation in my twenties and early forties. So why the jokes? The intense preoccupation with death in my poems? 

I think the jokes, the varied allusions to dead poets, the personifying of Death as a stewardess coming down the aisle with the drink cart as the plane goes down, all of it functions as a reminder we all die–that I will die–and so I need to try to live with purpose and if I am going to write (good, bad, or indifferently), I need to get it down on paper this morning. If not this morning, this afternoon, or at least this evening, because tomorrow who knows who is going to show up for family dinner with withered roses, and a bouquet full of cancer.

When I was young, my Mom told me all people die, that I would die one day, but not for a long, long time. I was maybe six. I was absolutely horrified, and convinced that I would die. I cried for over an hour on the front lawn of my family’s little home in Cardiff, ON, a home nestled between the homes of big burly men who worked in the mines, men who would come from a day’s labour covered in dirt and soot from their time spent in the Underworld.

Maybe that memory, that moment, was when I became the incipient poet in miniature, or at the very least, that was the catalyst which created the conditions for me later to grow into a poet.

Yes, I know. Am I saying anything new? Again, the answer is not really. Memento mori means “Remember, you will die”, and this artistic trope has been threaded deeply into art and literature since at least the Middle Ages. Its the reason some Dutch painter painting a portrait of some rich patron’s saucy eleven-year old daughter works in a picture of a human skull, or wilted flowers, or an hourglass beside her favourite kitten.

The inimitable Romantic poet John Keats once wrote, “Land and sea, weakness and decline are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever.” Death as Divorce Lawyer; Death as UPS delivery guy (read Kim Addonizio’s terrific poem “Scary Movies” and see what I mean!); Death as Debbie Downer; Death as poetic cliche; but also Death as the prime motivation some of us, many of us, get up and get writing or painting at six in the morning.

I wrote my first book Bonfires when I was in my early thirties, and if I flip through its pages, I see the motif of death whispering through lots of the poems even in that first book. Here is an early poem about teen male-bonding and drinking in the Creemore graveyard:

Graveyard

It seems strange looking back
at high school, when we
Would ride out to Creemore

in the July heat, a case of Export
smuggled out of someone’s garage
into a  friend’s trunk, rolling across

the iron bridge, the Mad River
dusted with mayflies, passing into
the graveyard, high on the hill.

Sometimes we brought girls,
other times just drank beer,
celebrated our youth, who we were

in those moments, often
stripping naked, clowning around,
but never disturb ing the dead,

who really didn’t care much,
and why a graveyard, or that 
graveyard, I can’t remember

except to say it was beautiful
in the July heat, that we were
young men, who drank beer,

who collected their empties
and like the dead, took no
notice of our lives passing.

It is interesting to read this early poem over twenty years later, and I highlight it not so much because I think its a great poem (I like the repetition, but its feels like a vignette), but because Death is the unspoken guest of this poem sitting on a gravestone watching the teen boys clown around, and thinking, “One day, boys…one day”.

In later books, Death makes appearances seemingly everywhere. There are poems about the last passenger pigeon Martha stuffed in the Smithsonian, America’s Trophy Case, and poems about a scrapbook with a picture of a polar bear to show my grand children. I wrote in a later poem “The Book of the Dead for Dummies” “Is it wrong to love / the feast if the guests are all ghosts?” which highlights the implied question: are the dead really ghosts? Speaking for myself, the dead do not haunt me, but their absences do. 

Yes, I miss my grandparents, my co-workers who have died, my wild party girl University friend Mel who lived her life to the fullest, and always made going out on a Friday night a celebrated event, because she intuitively knew life was uncertain so she made the most  of it.

Again, I’m not saying anything new, but it is worth saying these things out loud. And, at least to me, it is so strange how little we talk about the precariousness of life around the water cooler, or at the busy bar at the poetry event, or to our neighbours, or even to our own family. 

The great American poet Mark Strand wrote in a poem in 2002, “I am not thinking of Death, but Death is thinking of me.” And now he, too, is gone.

Is Death thinking of me? Probably. But I’m trying to keep him on his toes, and while I am still here, I am trying to live a purposeful life which means not only being a good teacher, a good father, but a good poet who has tried to imbue a little meaning, a little bit of wonder, into his poems and  his daily life. 

What’s the story, Memento Mori? Remember, you must die. My friend Mel knew it, Mark Strand knew it, and I know it too.  Is Death a poetic cliche? Absolutely, but I also would not throw that in Death’s face. To conclude, here is an untitled sonnet from my book Alternator,  a memento mori better fitted to end an essay on poetry and death than yet another dreary reading of “Crossing The Bar” by Tennyson:

 It is true the world is full of sorrows, and Podcasts, and that my memories
will eventually go down with the ship, all of it, even that time in Rome
when I left a friend behind on a subway platform, and hopped quickly
through a train’s sliding doors, his face falling as I hunched my shoulders:
all those moments chained to the oars of reminiscence shall go down into
the dark without me knowing where any of it was leading. I think death
is like a life, unrecollected. The waiting for water to boil, coffee to perk,
gas tank to fill, orders to be taken, moments no one remembers, but were
commonplace, and happened. Death has no memory, so why should we?
Because the universe remembers every single gravitational wave, because
every spring flower blooming remembers winter is over. Memory makes us
more visible, more apparent to ourselves, alters us while we are still here,
helps us wander this world with its prescriptions, its used appliance stores,
its loneliness. Our memories, like galaxies, birthed and dying in the dark.

Chris Banks is an award-winning, Pushcart-nominated Canadian poet and author of seven collections of poems, most recently Alternator with Nightwood Editions (Fall 2023). His first full-length collection, Bonfires, was awarded the Jack Chalmers Award for poetry by the Canadian Authors’ Association in 2004. Bonfires was also a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry in Canada.  His poetry has appeared in The New Quarterly, Arc Magazine, The Antigonish Review, Event, The Malahat Review, The Walrus, American Poetry Journal, The Glacier, Best American Poetry (blog), Prism International, among other publications. Chris was an associate editor with The New Quarterly, and is Editor in Chief of The Woodlot – A Canadian Poetry Reviews & Essays website. He lives with dual disorders–chronic major depression and generalized anxiety disorder– and writes in Kitchener, Ontario.