Meditation on Tom Thomson
Tom Thomson I love you therefore I apologize
for what I must say but I must say
damn your jack pines they are beautiful
I love your bent trees and I love your ice
in spring candled into its green rot
and I love the way you drowned all alone
with your canoe and our not even knowing
the time of day and the grave mystery
of your genius interrupted is our story
and art, man, art is the essential
luxury the imperative QUESTION(?)
the re-sounding say of the night's loon
and holy shit mother the muskeg snatch
of the old north the bait that caught
the fishing father into his own feast
the swimming art-man who did not drown
in the lake in his pictures
who drowned for murder of grief or
the weave of the water would not hold
the shoulders of the sky were deep
the maelstrom would not spin to spit him
free, daddy, FREE FREE FREE (but I must say
DAMN your jack pines) for the whorl
of the whirlpool breaks us one by one
we stretch and tear the joints
opening like curtains on a cool
Algonquin morning onto a red sun
or down onto the black bottom or far
(the grammar of our days is ill defined)
or rapt in the root and fire of that wind
bent forest (about your pine trees
this evening one of them moved
across my wall) daring the light
daring the bright and lover's leap across
the impassible gap the uncertain
principle of time and space straight down
he dove and he would seize unearthly
shades and he would seize the drowned land
the pictures from the pool the pool's picture
and the gods cried Tom, Tom, you asshole
let go and you had found their secret
and would not ever let go they cry
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Kroetsch actively pursued an effort to unpack poetry, to dismantle it and re-invent both myths and the way that we record them. He was opposed to the simple completeness of lyric poetry, and so his work rambles all over, and refuses to come to a point or a conclusion. It's anti-lyric poetry, but still really strongly structured. It's actually pretty cool, from a poetic point of view.
Tom Thompson was a Canadian painter who influenced the Group of Seven (Canadian painters who painted nature scenes in a distinctive style), but he died before the group was founded. As Kroetsch mentions, Thompson was famous for his paintings of jack pines. He died on a canoe trip in 1917 in Algonquin park, and there is considerable speculation about how he died - murder? accident? suicide? - with no conclusive answers forthcoming or even really possible.
Here is a pair of Thomson jack pine pictures:
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