After writing the Triangularity piece, I went back to Ten Canadian Writers in Context, and to The Office Tower Tales, and worked out this glosa, by way of a thank you for all the stimulation reading Alice's writing has provided over the many years we have known each as members of the Edmonton Stroll of Poets and serving with her on the Board of the Edmonton Poetry Festival, of which she was the founding President, during her term as Edmonton's first Poet Laureate. 

                       Pausing to Gloss Alice: wishfully

 

                Time is both scourge and defender

of the scattered coins, blown leaves, seeds sown

by all those poets who have touched me:

                Austere, impassioned, vitriolic, vast or tender –

                                Alice Major, “Afterword,” The Office Tower Tales

 

 

Tripping this ghost dance across this half-mapped mindfield,

this morning’s empty pages open onto

this pencil that minimizes the risk

of indelible error, eases the fear of exposure

living the life of a determined pretender

discouraged when again the lines resist

fluent expanses of wandering wonder,

find no deft shine down unploughed sillion

and hear no news, good or bad: creator and destroyer,

Time is both scourge and defender,

 

a ticklish tease of relative moment

doing its own thing, working passages

mild and wild and cumulative in their

sometimes painful, sometimes palliative

ways that migrate us through the ups, the downs,

that fill the spreadsheet of the normal

with an averaged variability, surprises,

unpredictable successes, disguised failures,

the bankrupt harlequinade of the crown, of the clown

of the scattered coins, blown leaves, seeds sown

 

randomly from a grab-bag assortment

tossed by hopeful hand across unevenly

prepared, indifferently receptive

seedbeds where others have chanced earlier

cultivation, even occasioned some odd hybrid yields,

all while seeking relief from feeble wordless

calamity of minor proportions in the grand scheme

of things that don’t bother to bump in the night,

projects doomed to meet disappointing strange joys

shocked to the surface by the unpredictable mercies

shared by all those poets who have touched me

 

And who had been touched themselves by others

named or unnamed -- or in my ignorance

unnamable – a searching assembly

of the disciples of Erato;

here we huddle, wishful, gathered to render

due respect to the passing of one more thought

into the archives of temps long perdus,

trying to catch the drift of some memory

resting, pending, laid down by some sender

austere, impassioned, vitriolic, vast or tender –