House Guest

What I've discovered, while sitting here trying to write my essay, is that so far, I really enjoy Al Purdy's poetry. I may even go so far as to say that I am seriously considering purchasing a book of his poetry, if I don't get totally and completely sick of him by the time this paper is finished.

"House Guest"

For two months we quarrelled over socialism
poetry how to boil water
doing the dishes carpentry Russian steel pro-
duction figures and whether
you could believe them and whether Toronto
Leafs would take it all
that year and maybe hockey was rather like a
good jazz combo
never knowing what came next.
and working with saw and hammer at the house
all winter afternoon
disagreeing about how to pound nails
arguing vehemently over how to make good
coffee
Marcus Aurelius Spartacus Plato and François
Villon
And it used to frustrate him terribly
that even when I was wrong he couldn't prove it
and when I agreed with him he was always
suspicious
and thought he must be wrong because I said he
was right.
we argued about white being white (prove it
dammit) & cockroaches
bedbugs in Montreal separatism Nietzsche
Iroquois horsebreakers on the
prairie
death of the individual and the ultimate destiny
of man
and one night we quarrelled over how to cook
eggs
In the morning driving to town we hardly spoke
and water poured downhill outside all day for it
was spring
when we were gone with frogs mentioning
lyrically
Russian steel production figures on Roblin Lake
which were almost nil
I left him hitch-hiking on #2 Highway to
Montreal
and I guess I was wrong about those eggs