Piling Blood
a collection of Poems by the dead legendary Canadian Al Purdy
Piling Blood
It was powdered blood
in heavy brown paper bags
supposed to be strong enough
to prevent the stuff from escaping
but didn't
we piled it ten feet high
right to the shed roof
working at Arrow Transfer
on Granville Island
The bags weighed 75 pounds
and you had to stand on two
of the bags to pile the top rows
I was six feet three inches
and needed all of it
I forgot to say
the blood was cattle blood
horses sheep and cows
to be used for fertilizer
the foreman said
It was a matter of some delicacy
to plop the bags down softly
as if you were piling dynamite
if you weren't gentle
the stuff would belly out
from bags in brown clouds
settle on your sweating face
cover hands and arms
enter ears and nose
seep inside pants and shirt
reverting back to liquid blood
and you looked like
you'd been scalped
by a tribe of
particularly unfreindly
Indians and forgot to die
We piled glass as well
it came in wooden crates
two of us hoicking them
off trucks into warehouses
every crate
weighing 200 pounds
By late afternoon
my muscles would twitch and throb
in a death-like rhythm
from hundreds of bags of blood
and hundreds of crates of glass
Then at Burn's slaughterhouse
on East Hastings Street
I got a job part time
shouldering sides of frozen beef
hoisting it from steel hooks
staggering to and from
the refrigerated trucks
and eerie freezing rooms
with breath a white vapour
among the dangling corpses
and the sound of bawling animals
screeched down from an upper floor
with their throats cut
and blood gurgling into special drains
for later retrieval
And the blood smell clung to me
clung to clothes and body
sickly and sweet
and I heard the screams
of dying cattle
and I wrote no poems
there were no poems
to exclude the screams
which boarded the streetcar
and travelled with me
till I reached home
turned on the record player
and faintly
in the last century
heard Beethoven weeping
Canada Lit.
15 or so years ago I saw Purdy read on south Granville,
across from where the Vancouver papers, the Sun and the Province,
use to be printed,
a chinese lady read a poem
about her boyfriend pissing on her
while she sat on the toilet
and then she drank and smoked cigarettes and watched the sun come up from her east side apartment
Purdy was not impressed
and the organizers had to
take him outside to calm him down
then he read about subduing a drunk and beer tasting like a horse fart
which my house painter friend found amusing
After i went to talk with him and buy a book from a stall he had set up… his wife was there…
i asked him what book i should buy and he said his best one was “Piling Blood.”
He signed a copy and punched me on the shoulder
i can’t remember why…
working class poems don’t seem to get a lot of play these days...
and if they do…
they are sentimentalized…
working outside in minus twenty
is not romantic or fun,
you just want the day to end
so you can get warm.
Al Purdy was a poet who worked and drank and wondered.
