Peter Jaeger
$5
1960-69published in Ottawa by above/ground press
My mother put her pregnant belly in front of the mono speaker while listening to Beethoven. The importance of infant and adult tools. First group exhibition, Meadowbrook Elementary School, Lachine, Quebec. How limitless the summer holidays. Photos of trees, taken before we all missed trees. All those balloons everywhere. At Sunday school I was supposed to put a dime in the collection basket, but once I only had a quarter, so when the basket came around for the collection, I put the quarter in and took out 15 cents and when the teacher saw me making change she yelled, "You're stealing from God!" so I got up, left the class, and went outside to the church yard, where I climbed way up high in a maple tree. Sitting on a porch in suburban Montreal, I saw a bright red light fall through the summer sky. For years I believed it was a UFO. That night set up a long chain of events, still felt today. Or did it? We ate meat every day. Playing with radiant dolls on the lawn. At that time, something awful was happening on our black and white TV about Viet Nam. The empty cowboy, his six-shooter, the scary dark. The importance of my father’s laughter for social stability. Spinning around on our egg chair. Although I played at being an astronaut all summer, I slept through Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon. My mother slathered medicated tar on my eczema. Endlessly watching the yellow and orange label spin around and around on the Capitol records 45 of All You Need is Love. It was so important that I climbed to the top of our front-yard maple on a windy day. Sitting in the sun wrapped in wool with a plastic toy ukulele. The snow formed mountains that we stuck our broken hockey sticks into, making Himalaya ledges to perch on in the cold. My sister Laurie and I sat cross-legged on the floor of our enormous Pontiac on the way to see our grandmother. Taking the narrow, winding path deeper into her woods rather than the strait path to the orchard. We celebrated with early forms of plastic. Caspar the friendly frontier town. I burrowed further into the darkness and silence of a snow bank by the road, wondering if the blades of a snow blower would suddenly appear and cut me into pieces, turning the snow pink with blood. By the creek, clear light, not yet named.
September 2024
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Peter Jaeger is a Canadian writer based in Bristol, England. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, fiction, and criticism, as well as several artist books. Jaeger has written on such diverse topics as John Cage, ecology, Marcel Proust, Zen Buddhism, and contemporary pilgrimage. Recent publications include Postamble for an Invisible Sangha (If P then Q 2021) and 10,000 Hand-Drawn Questions (Pamenar 2022).
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