Ornamental plasterer who immigrated from Wales to Edmonton in 1910.
Like plaster pushed through lath
he moved where it seemed obvious to go:
from the compromise of Wales
to the cold promise of --
"Ca-na-da"--the very variations on a rhyme
called like birdsong of childhood memory.
Cardiff to Quebec, train to Calgary,
and up as far as steam would take him,
bringing to the forest of pine and fir
his skill at molding oak leaves in plaster.
For each new resident brings new beginnings,
possibilities not tried, new entrances,
new ways to exit.
Rumours of work regaled him,
winked like morning sun on river-run,
but were gone at the glance. So Jack Chorley
moved where it seemed obvious to go:
at the lowest point of the lowest flood plain
of this Edmonton he pitched his tent
an alley's width from water.
Next door a house of brick was underway,
and so our ornamental craftsman
gave his time for pay in shoring up,
with brick, a house against the wind, the rain,
against the offing of a summer flood.
And in evenings turned his hand homeward.
Behind his tent he built his own house, a shack,
a slap-board clapboard two-room mansion,
its threshhold barely out of mud.
The clay just inches down,
sediment of lakes primeval, unknown,
felt between his fingertips like gypsum plaster,
the finest granules marking moments
he could have known in the laying of his life,
the silting-in of possibilities.
But with a home, and wife and child from Wales,
soon he found his trowel silting plaster
into Legislative lath. Lintels, corbels,
cornices and ceilings made legendary
by the hint of Celtic curls
or of understated Tudor rhythm.
The Legislature corridors, it was assumed,
would usher to the dome august appraisals
of the lives of men like Jack:
"steeped in high tradition, but almost unknowing,
needing guidance."
The Legislature finished, Jack continued
where it seemed obvious to go, unknowing,
downstream atop the riverbank
to mold medallions and calculate the cornices
of Hotel Macdonald, his contract complete in time
to pay for moving where it seemed obvious to go,
when the river's flood brought clay and mud
through the windows of his home. | LISTEN to this poem:
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