the green notebook

, in which one celebrates one's (fifty-fifth) birthday,

Birthday, once more. The Ides. My annual reminiscence of Canadian comedy duo Wayne and Shuster’s classic “Rinse the Blood off my Toga,” otherwise known as their Julius Caesar sketch, the pair as Roman-era hardboiled detectives investigating the murder of one Julius “Big Julie” Caesar, dated March 15, 44 BC. Known as the “Canadian act” by Ed Sullivan, Wayne and Shuster appeared more than fifty times on his infamous variety show, more than any other performers. Across decades of continuous performance, from a live act, radio show and entertaining troops in the 1940s through television in the United States and Canada well into the 1980s, they employed a highly intellectual ridiculous in their sketches, comparable to those first seasons of Ernie and Bert via Sesame Street, Bugs Bunny cartoons from the 1940s, The Simpsons or, more recently, the sharp wit of one Mr. Stephen Colbert. Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster (cousin of one of the creators of Superman, and father of Rosie, former wife of Canadian Lorne Michaels) wrote jokes and bad puns around Shakespeare, Latin, politics and anything else they could get their hands on, offering unique and educated takes that didn’t talk down to anyone. Originally performed on their CBC Radio show in 1954, I caught the 1980s televised version of their Julius Caesar sketch, delighting as Caesar’s wife Calpurnia laments in her thick Brooklyn accent “I told him, Julie, don’t go. Don’t go Julie, I said. Don’t go, it’s the Ides of March—[.]” Anyone who wouldn’t find this hilarious must, methinks, be made of stone. “If I told him once, I’d told him a thousand times, ‘Julie, don't go—’— [.]”

“Julie, don’t go,” I said. “It’s the Ides of March. Beware already.”

Beware, already. Every year on my birthday throughout the late 1990s I would leave audio clips of Canadian actress Sylvia Bela Lennick (1915-2009)—you probably had no idea her real name—delivering those classic and cartoonishly Brooklyn-thick Calpurnia lines on my ex-wife’s work answering machine. I would leave her an evening message to catch first thing in the morning, as my ex found it first thing in the morning funny, once she landed at her desk, but not middle of the night funny. It came up weekly on her work phone for eight months, as she’d listen to it again and save it, before it began to come up daily. That’s when she erased it. There are limitations, after all. The subject of birthday, as I once again sing loops of Weird Al Yankovic’s “Happy Birthday” under my breath, from his 1983 self-titled debut, or “Birthday Song” from Hamilton band the Dik Van Dykes’ 1987 album, Nobody likes The Dik Van Dykes. Classic. A moment to pause; to celebrate, reflect, consider and reconsider. To celebrate joyously with family and friends. I might make a chili later, for incoming guests.

The annual birthday poem. I started poking at these in my mid-twenties, attempting as a kind of check-in, to see where I might be, working through my thoughts on my adopted-self, conversations not easily held with family, or friends. My first attempt at a birthday poem, a birthday sequence, landed in my fourth collection, The Richard Brautigan Ahhhhhhhhhhh (1999), although I hesitate to look that far back, even from such a comfortable place as this. I published the second part of this thee-part “last leaves” as issue #15 of my long poem chapbook-sized journal STANZAS, back in March 1998. I refuse to look it up. Although, more recently, from my poem “elegy (birthday”: “at thirty-seven, I can talk / aware, to garner // or segregate the trees; knows just / what missing [.]”

I’m sure the first decade or two of my birthday poems offered wistful takes of longing, whether overt or subtle feelings of loss, wondering around the fate of my birth mother. Where she was, and if she ever thought of me. By the time I was forty-three, I knew her name; and on my fiftieth birthday, we’d met, providing the annual poem, the annual blog post, a different element of purpose, although that same checking-in. As some might through New Year’s Eve, I hold to my birthday. Three years ago, writing:

Birthday, birthday: what do you want of me?
Banal acquiescence

of cake, pints, comic books ; has nothing changed
across these thirty-odd years?

The birthday, and the birthday poem; similar, one might think, in how I’ve also been approaching my “Sex at 31” poems: a declaration and exploration of where I might be. Fifteen years ago, the chapbook-length examination that became Some forty (2010), offering similar question:

some forty: an almost

ambiguity, the space

of numbers, age; what does all

this time mean, spent?

Can one learn anything from going through one’s own work? I’m probably too close to it, still. Moment such as these suggest all poems are poems of mortality, of time. Of where one is at, a moment which will quickly fall into the past. What can you see in this, from where you are now. American poet Robert Creeley, his poem “A Birthday” from Words (1967), published when he was forty-one, offering similar lines of questioning: “I had thought / a moment of stasis / possible, some // thing fixed— / days, worlds— [.]” The question of where one is at, and if any moment might be held, like a breath. Or this poem by John Newlove from THE TASMANIAN DEVIL and other poems (1999), a little unnerved to think about how close I am to this age, now:

FIFTY-SEVENTH BIRTHDAY

I seem to be forgetting what words sound like.
Soon I shall be reduced to a tiny vocabulary of phrases
such as I love you,
or I hate you,
or death.

“[…] my / birthplace, / that is substance / of me, quick against the form,” wrote Thomas Clark (1941-2018), as part of his poem “BIRTHDAY,” from a 1964 issue of Poetry Magazine. One could suggest this a substance with further clarity these days, given the administration south of the border continues to push the idea that we become the fifty-first state. I write a substance, against the form. I spent years attempting an annual birthday poem, but I’m not entirely in that mindset these days, working instead in other directions, although, as they say, the poems will come soon enough. Is that what they say? The poem might not have occurred this year, but the return to those same questions, those same clarifications, hold. Perhaps this is my poem this year.

Or my poem for forty-five, which seems both recent and distant: “We measure, syntax.” Is that all there is?

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CODA: You probably already saw my birthday post on my blog here, from earlier today. And you know that I’m reading tomorrow night in Ottawa, yes? Launching my Snow day (2025); an event built around the fact that Rob Manery is in town from Vancouver, so we’re hosting a reading; other readers, apart from myself and Manery, include Jorge Etcheverry Arcaya (Ottawa), Chris Turnbull (Kemptville) and Grant Wilkins (Ottawa). You should come out!