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CANADIAN LITERARY AWARDS

Welcome to the 2001 Canadian Literary Awards. This year marks the first time the awards are being handed out alongside the Grands Prix littéraires Radio-Canada. It is also the first time that the winners of both awards will be published (over the next six months) in enRoute, Canada's premier lifestyle publication.

These prestigious competitions, held in collaboration with the Canada Council for the Arts, present awards in three categories: poetry, fiction and travel literature. This month, enRoute introduces its readers to some of Canada's strongest creative voices by publishing the first-prize winners in the poetry category.

Erin Noteboom is the Education Program Manager at the University of Waterloo and lives in Kitchener, Ontario.

POEMS FOR CARL HRUSKA
November 19, 1923 - January 5, 1997
Drawn from visits April - December 1996

SHE COMES TO MEET HIM
Omaha, Nebraska - April 1996

Most of a leg left on a hospital ship -
the rock, the reek of ether.
He learned to walk, after,
but now he's going back
to bone, listing
into old damage.
They meet in the parlour.
He sits and sets his cane to picket
besides him, takes
her untouched hand.
The young researcher, he says -
a charity. It might be
the young lady, in a yellow dress,
a perfume called Forest Lily,
as if it were a different April
and she had come to see him
carried from the train.
Outside,
on Farnam Street, the tulips blown,
the rain.

SNAPSHOT
Troop Transport - October 1944

He's spent the morning below decks,
practising to break a gun down blindfold -
which never did come handy -
but now,
he's leaning on the bow rail,
him and Gawosky, who buys it early,
hamming for someone with a camera -
Who? I don't remember -
turning in that moment into flash
and silver, into paper soft
as Bible covers. Bright-edged,
dapper. A decent boy.

LETTER HOME
Troop transport - October 1944

He's heard that Kansas is a sea
of grass, but leaning on the transport's rail,
he does not see it. The dragonfly green
of wheat just up, or the baked-bread smell
of fields in August - nothing
like that. The Atlantic, all of it, is
as he imagined whales.
The great grey backs blow and break,
roll down in deep dives. He was sick
eleven days.
But a man can get used
to anything.
Yesterday,
the first death. The cook's mate -
a Negro, first he's seen-who slipped and split
his lamb's wool head
on the hard mess table.
The kind of thing
you don't live down, or wouldn't.
They buried him pretty plain, though out here
you couldn't call it burying.

BROWN VELVET
Wichita, Kansas - June 1943

Vivian wore brown velvet to my brother's wedding.
I liked it. Liked her in it.
When I came back,
she used to stroke my hair, say, soft, soft -
nights when I couldn't even shake.

SILENT NIGHT
Ardennes - Christmas 1944

At midnight Angelus bells
fall soft into the foxholes.
Across the shattered field, someone
is singing Stille Nacht.
He takes aim at the sound.
The perfect trees lean in,
listen.

NAMES
Ardennes - January 1945

The hardest thing was keeping track
of names. The new ones,
green, we lost so quick
sometimes I never learned them,
or learned two, you see,
like Smith and Jones, and never
straightened which was which.
Checked the tags, but it didn't fix
in my mind - which was which.

REST
Ardennes - January 1945

The hardest thing
was sleep - that cold.
Cold enough to crack stone
You couldn't lie down
in it - or even sit.
Even the springs of the rifles
slow.

NIGHT
Ardennes - January 1945

The hardest thing
was night, all white
and the snow whipped up
in devils. Or worse,
still. That cold -
you could hear everything.
Trees would creak and crack
like rifles. Voices,
sometimes, words you couldn't make out,
or cattle, bawling to be milked.

DREAMS
Ardennes - January 1945

In cold sleep his blood turned
to velvet. He woke and couldn't even shake,
it was that thick.
Once he knocked
at a farmhouse where he hoped to steal
some socks. No one came
to the plain plank door.
But then, he meant nothing
by knocking, no more than a dog means,
who turns three times
into an ancient dream.

MORNING
Ardennes - January 1945

You wouldn't believe how beautiful
it was. In the night the fog would freeze
and in the morning everything
was soft with it - ghosts of trees.
We advanced into open fields
the colour of apple blossom,
delicate with blue shadows.
Against that snow we stood out
like deer.
And then
the shelling would start.

WINTER WHITE
Ardennes - January 1945

Midafternoon in some nameless town
a door bangs, a woman comes running,
arms full of folded white. One sheet
flies out behind her like a banner, and
they understand. She's giving them linens,
winter camouflage. With no language,
he thanks her, and she presses to him,
weeping. When she runs he lifts
his hands and finds
a table cloth. Not lace, but that stiff stuff,
cutwork. He cuts it
with his bayonet.
Pulls it over his head. Inside,
he smells the starch, the ghost of iron.

LETTER HOME
Ardennes - January 1945

I cannot write you where I am,
besides Belgium.
It is a pretty country.
Our boots haven't come,
as I hoped last time I wrote.
If you want to pray for something,
pray for boots.

LETTER FROM VIVIAN
February 1945

No news, really.
It's been cold.
We lost a bull calf,
born too early.
Brought him into the kitchen,
but still, he shook himself out.
White star on his forehead.
A wet red coat.

NIGHT PATROL
Ardennes - February 1945

Snow sluffs off pine boughs -
you got to know the sound,
the kind of crust -
which will creek
and which will tick.
Got so you'd move
darn close to silence.

EXCHANGE
Ardennes - February 1945

Once, on night patrol,
they came nose to nose
with German scouts. Fog curled
through the thick trees. The moon
shone like a newsreel. What was there
to say? An exchange of cigarettes,
of silence. The moon slips on.
The stars take up
their fixed positions.

SPRING
Western Germany - March 1945

Melt trickles into foxholes.
He wakes and bails it with his helmet,
lays back down in it. Sleep
drops out under him like rotten snow.
When he wakes, dawn is pink
and birds are singing.
The air stinks of something burning.
The birds are strange birds.
He does not know them.

THE NEST
Western Germany - March 1945

Sully stumbled on this nest of bumble bees
and flapped like he was learning to fly.
He drew them right to me - God,
how we laughed, strafed
by that little army.

LIBERATION
Cologne, Germany - March 1945

Cologne was the first place
we saw Germans.
Civilians, I mean.
The whole town twitched
like a curtain. A sniper
tumbled from a rooftop
turned out to be
a tow-head kid of maybe ten.
It was Sully who got him.
Can you imagine?

WOUND
Western Germany - March 1945

It wasn't the first,
but it was the first to go so deeply
into him -
through the shin,
between
those long fine bones,
their arch flying open -
a sudden eye -

Stupid, to get hit
so near the end.
There isn't any story to it,
if that's what you're hoping.

FIRST AID
Western Germany - March 1945

Black scissors swing
from the medic's wrist.

Vivian, the morphine
is the colour
of your hair.

LETTER FROM VIVIAN
March 1945

The wheat's come up,
first thing through the snow.
So green, darling,
dreaming of you.

LETTER HOME
Field Hospital, Germany - March 1945

Cross your fingers
and I will be home soon.
I am hit but this isn't bad -
a million-dollar wound,
which means the leg -
it isn't bad.
I've been moved twice
and am now in field hospital,
real civilization - clean sheets
and morphine.

A BIGGER LOSS
Omaha, Nebraska - June 1996

Vivian's smell
is gone from everything
except her pillow.
That's a bigger loss than a leg,
if you want to know.

PURPLE HEART
Hospital Ship, English Channel - March 1945

The medal-pinners came to Dover
to meet the ship. I remember, we were s'posed
to lie at attention. A man could die, and they'd
only say
how fine his attention -
Never put my name
on anything, would you, Erin?

HOMECOMING
Omaha, Nebraska - April 1945

For nine months,
Vivian watched the eyes
of neighbours' houses.
Saw the service stars
wing on small red banners.
Saw the slow draw of blinds,
in the broad grey weather.
Now the train judders
under Union Station.
The boiler huffs and shushes
and a machine
begins to speak.
She waits
to see the damage.

NEWS
Wichita, Kansas - July 1945

Vivian dashes in from thunder,
newspaper soaring over her head.
She stands in the kitchen, dripping,
laughing. She kisses me.
Her fingers are inky, her face printed
with news.

WEDDING
Wichita, Kansas - July 1945

A hot day, dusty. The boys still in
their velvet haircuts, the church all shut
and thick with broken colour.
I remember
three men fainted.

Vivian wore satin.
The door behind her opened and
she shone there
like a parachute.

WEDDING SNAPSHOT
Wichita, Kansas - July 1945

He's in uniform, all dark detail:
starched crease and pointed collar,
medals grey with colour.
She's in stain, more white
than clapboard, bright as glass,
as mirror. Her hair is moving silver -
the wind blows it in a spray like water.
She's twisting to save her veil, laughing,
lifting a hand from which dark roses tumble.
He has not yet turned with her,
still looks through the camera.
Their shoes dusty. His open mouth
a small dark seed.

THE DAY WE WON THE WAR
Wichita, Kansas - August 1945

It was just after my wedding.
I was still learning to walk.
Round the side of the house,
Vivian puts out the laundry -
screech of pulley, then
the snick, snick of pins.
I hold to the drainpipe
and hoist rag and kerosene
to a nest of yellow jackets.
Orange slants
through the oily smoke
and the sheets
snap.
When I went to war,
it was simple
as handkerchiefs.