P.K. Page is the author of more than a dozen books, including poetry, a novel, short stories, essays, and books for children. Awarded a Governor General’s Award for poetry (
The Metal and the Flower) in 1954, Page was also on the shortlist for the Griffin Poetry Prize (
Planet Earth) in 2003 and awarded the BC Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary excellence in 2004. P.K. Page died in January 2010. Her 2009 collection,
Coal and Roses (Porcupine’s Quill), was posthumously nominated for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize.
Zalig Pollock, P.K. Page’s literary executor, says of her “Cullen” poems: “It is tempting to identify the protagonist…as a fictional self-portrait, if only because Cullen ages in parallel with the author, and shares many of her experiences. But perhaps it would make more sense to see Cullen as a fictional, and not uncritical, portrait of a fellow pilgrim through the journey.”
The following P.K. Page poem Cullen in Old Age was chosen by editors Lorna Crozier and Molly Peacock to be a part of the poetry anthology
The Best Canadian Poetry 2010 (Tightrope Books, 2010).
Cullen in Old AgeCullen, at ninety, curiously attired -
shorts and a frock coat, baseball cap and spurs -
symbols, he said, of a life he’d lived forever
and ever and ever – (or so it seemed from here -)
took it upon himself to marry again.
His grandchildren rose, protesting.
“Silly old fool,” they said, embarrassed.
“Give us a break.”
“What do they know? Just what do they know?” he said.
“Puerile passion is puerile passion. Mine
is the work of a lifetime, one that includes the stars
and the depths of hell. I offer my laden heart
filled with a multitude of moons and suns,
and clouds as dark as thunder. All are hers
to do with whatever she will. She is my love.”
“In for the money,” his children said, uneasy
about the girlfriend.
Far too pretty. And young.
“In for the money and in for the kill,” they said.
And wondered about his will.
When would he die? he questioned, unafraid
but interested.
There were all those friends
who had gone before, who knew what he didn’t know.
Life after death? Extinction? He would like
to know this ultimate riddle before he died.
The Gospels, of course said, yes, the soul survived.
But has anyone seen a soul? Deep in the eyes?
No one he knew, although he believed they’d tried
to weigh it, by weighing the body before it died
and immediately after death.
Like weighing smoke, he said, or weighing air.
“The king of nothing is nothing,” it seemed to prove.
An empty page, he thought, surveying his life. A palimpsest -
illegible images glimpsed when he squinted his eyes.
Cullen, in extreme old age could dream -
his best activity, the most exact
and most mind altering of all the drugs
he in his young and turbulent years had tried.
Clowns could appear, and queens, a whole parade
of children in paper hats, and dancing dogs.
Space could divide, like the Red Sea. As for time -
infinitely fracturable. Up or down.
Nanoseconds not in it. None could guess
how slow or fast that airy machine could travel
back or forward, or hover – a hummingbird.
He slept for a week, and obsequies were sung
in the heads of his heirs, and when he at last awoke,
pink as a baby and talking in strange tongues,
they wrote him off as crazy.
He was not.
On the stroke of four the Guardian Angel spoke
in pure Angelic, “Time, gentlemen, please.”
But Cullen, not yet packed, and deaf as a boot,
was far from ready or willing to shut up shop.
He was a fossil, they said, a has-been, he
had lost his Elgin marbles, poor old creep
but he gave them a look from his ice-blue eye that froze
the marrow within their bones. He said, “The world
has made of itself a carnal shop.” – A what?
“ ‘Sex and the Maiden,’ “ he said, “a Schubert song
that nobody knows today. Hip hop, hip hop.”
A long and agonized wail came out of his mouth.
The cats, as if scalded, ran, and the ancient dog
barked to protect the house.
Cullen, not ready to die, not quite alive
outlived his third wife. Had a vision of heaven.
Total immersion. Where? He couldn’t tell.
A floatation tank, perhaps, a void, a vast
container for single souls that gathered together
and merged in a giant soul that encircled the world
where everything came out even.
Linearity no longer a question, past
and future a part of time eternal.
Cullen slept, content, his life was spent
like a silver coin that slipped from a hole in a pocket.
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