A note to US-based customers: All Lit Up is pausing print orders to the USA until further notice. Read more

Two Poems: Out of the Ordinary

In his new collection of poems Out of the Ordinary (Harbour Publishing), Tom Wayman uses poetry to lend sense to the incomprehensibilities of the 21st century (so far). Read the poems “The Party” and “Nail” from the book, below.

The cover of Out of the Ordinary by Tom Wayman, featuring an illustration of a Christmas Cactus with pink flowers.

By:

Share It:

Two Poems from Out of the Ordinary by Tom Wayman

THE PARTY


“This night is going to last forever.”
—The Eagles, “Heartache Tonight”

Stuart Peterfreund 1945–2017
Dennis Saleh 1942–2020

Another party at the rambling rental house
on the cliff edge above Shaw Cove beach
in Laguna that October evening, half the people present
up dancing to the Doors’ “Light My Fire”
—seven minutes, more than twice the length
of a standard hit single of those days, organ and drum
and Jim Morrison’s insistent vocals fuelling us
as we sway side to side and shift our weight
foot to foot, sweating, as if going someplace.
Several party guests cluster
on the back porch to pass a joint,
still seriously illegal in California. Beyond them,
the night Pacific strikes the beach below
with its own thundering percussion, repeated
and repeated, and the sea also flows west
past rocks on which sea lions
croak and bellow, and farther
to where the rim of the world turns into stars.
Two couples have taken the curving path
from the bottom of the porch stairs down
through ice plant and bougainvillea to the sand
—mostly dark, although checkered by dim patches of light
cast from the windows of other houses along Cliff Drive
or from the windows of the party, and from
the door to the porch opening and closing. One couple
has slipped off their shoes, walking the edge of the
resounding surf. The other
leans together in blackness
to kiss, hands passing down each other’s bodies.

And in the room where so many of us
are pressed close jouncing up and down to
hear what there is no time for—wallowing
in the mire—other people perch on old couches
and chairs, talking together in twos or threes
and drinking, or gather to talk and drink and
reach for snacks by a table crowded with
full, half-full and empty wine bottles,
beer bottles and bowls that contain or contained
potato chips or corn chips alongside
depleted dishes of red and green sauces
for dipping, and an empty one that held
guacamole, gobs of which have dripped
across the tablecloth amid chip shards
and small puddles of the other salsas, beer, wine.
Cigarette smoke spirals up from the talkers’ fingers
and ashtrays balanced on armrests or on the floor
and pours out of lips to saturate the air
with a slowly swirling fog
that hovers above everything.

At the fireplace
that is never used, its mantel jammed with half-empty
glasses and bottles temporarily left on it
by people who have risen to dance, Dennis
and some others stand talking to the poet Robert Bly,
the ostensible guest of honour, here because
he has given a reading that afternoon
at Irvine, where many of those in this living room,
kitchen, porch, or down at the beach
in the darkness outside are students.
Later in the conversation with Dennis,
Robert will abruptly hoist one foot
and kick him in the stomach
apparently for no reason—a moment
Dennis will remember all his life.

And at last the police are at the front door,
summoned by a neighbour because of the noise,
two large cops asking Peter,
who had signed the rental agreement, to end the party.
Our peace can’t be disturbed, one of the officers states.
But when we receive a complaint we act on it.
The police on the front stoop wear as their shoulder patch
an artist’s palette, since the town likes to think of itself as
an art colony, and indeed, Pacific Coast Highway
two blocks inland, which serves as the main north-south street,
is lined with commercial galleries featuring
paintings of the surf by moonlight
—like this night, but without anybody on the sand
and with a bigger moon. And now Dennis,
as at every party once the police
arrive at the door, moves through the dancers,
the drinkers, the talkers, to confront the uniforms and
guns, to object, he says, to their attempt to stop
people harmlessly enjoying themselves, and to argue
it isn’t even 1 a.m. Then Stuart, as usual,
pushes his way to the discussion happening at the door
and in his drunken manner tries to
justify to the cops Dennis’s attitude, believing he can
explain things better to authority, which of course
annoys Dennis and soon those two
are disputing with each other, tonight exasperating Peter
whose sole aim is to get the officers to leave
before they are provoked enough to demand to enter
to check ID or something, and maybe smell the pot
and somebody ends up arrested
with word getting back to the landlord
and having the lease or whatever Peter had signed
cancelled, and all staying here evicted.
The Stones, or Janis, are on the stereo now,
as the police stand firm like time, like
death—You have to shut it down—as the dancing inside
continues, the dancers forgetting for a moment a low mark
on a quiz, or their draft status, or a paper due Monday,
or how to end the war in Asia, or some of their poems
rejected by a magazine, or the situation
in Watts or of Chavez’s farmworkers,
or that they wish they had asked Erin rather than Joan
to dance.

That dancing, that music,
the party, even after the cops leave
with their warning Don’t make us come back,
continues, the dancing has lasted for
years, decades, across a new century, through the fear of
nuclear obliteration, the great fires, fierce rain,
Main Beach and Forest Avenue flooded,
war after war, love after love, that dancing
goes on, the dancing, the party, the night,
the dancing


NAIL

When I bent my ear close to
a nail—two-inch, common, galvanized
I use to repair my fence rails—
a clamour of voices and engines
was audible. I stepped inside the nail
where a small skid-steer loader,
bucket filled with earth, was backing up
to the rhythmic noise of the reverse alarm.
Nearby a man operated a small winch
to lift roofing shingles up a ladder. I saw
a woman, first into an extensive office in the morning,
turn on the overhead lights, heard
two truckers talking in a parking lot
over the noise of one of their tractors’ diesels,
watched a nurse starting a shift
peer at a medical chart on a screen.

I flagged down a schoolteacher.
How can a nail secure anything? I asked.
If you hammer it into wood, why doesn’t it slip out
from the hole it made going in?

“You want someone to unplug your drains?”
she said. “Sell you insurance? Gasoline?
Assemble a new shirt? All we do
that shapes us, and those around us
because of our work
pushes the diameter of the nail
outward against what constrains it.”
But wouldn’t, over time, that grip
loosen,
I protested, and the nail fall out?
“One day the expanding nail
will do more than build, connect,
imagine,” was the answer I got.
“One day the nail itself
will be a house.”

Madwoman,
I thought, and stepped out of the racket
and commotion, into sunlight.
Somehow my right hand
held a hammer.

* * *

Tom Wayman’s prolific literary career includes more than twenty poetry collections, three collections of critical and cultural essays, three books of short fiction and a novel, as well as editing six poetry anthologies. He received British Columbia’s 2022 George Woodcock Award for Lifetime Achievement in the literary arts. In 2015, he was named a Vancouver Literary Landmark, with a plaque on the city’s Commercial Drive commemorating his championing of people writing for themselves about their daily employment. He won the Western Canada Jewish Book Awards prize for fiction in 2016 (for the short story collection, The Shadows We Mistake for Love) and for poetry in 2023 (for Watching a Man Break a Dog’s Back: Poems for a Dark Time). His memoir, The Road to Appledore (or How I Went Back to The Land Without Ever Having Lived There in the First Place), was published in 2024. Wayman lives in Winlaw, BC.

Photo of Tom credit Jude Dillon.

* * *

To purchase a copy of Out of the Ordinary from us or your favourite indie bookstore, click here.

For more from Two Poems, click here.