From Beyond Forgetting: Celebrating 100 Years of Al Purdy. Edited by Howard White and Emma Skagen and published by Harbour Publishing in 2018.

It wasn’t the brawling man who wrote of dangerous women with whiskey-coloured eyes, it was the other man I knew in ’62, the awkward one you hid inside the Contact book, the one who spoke of lines that never end. That’s what I heard first and that’s the man I knew. It was the uneasiness you had with the myth you’d made of yourself. You were a mama’s boy and spoiled like only-children are. Even your ride on the freight train back in the thirties wasn’t a real struggle, was more adventure than endurance. Survival had nothing to do with it, though later you’d learn, picking through Air Force garbage with Eurithe to keep food on the table. Three days in Vancouver and you couldn’t wait to hop a freight back to Ontario, homesick, a little scared. Suffering was never your strong point. It took Eurithe to help you with that. But I remember ’66, the night we left the Cecil to visit Newlove on Yew Street and giddy with drink I threw a full bottle of beer at the sky. You stopped dead and waited till the bottle fell and smashed. Only throw empty bottles at the moon, you said, shaking your head at the waste of a drink. It’s a metaphor I’ve lived with in this life, that moon. Or the time we stole books at the McStew Launch in ’73. You told me to stop taking the poetry. Take the picture books, you said. No one will give you money for a poem. Jack McClelland was railing at us and Newlove was dancing drunk on a table while Farley glowered in a corner because he wasn’t the centre of attention. Clarkson was prissy and Layton was trying once again to get laid. God knows where Acorn was. All names now, men and women either dead or getting closer. And you? I could talk with you about the attributes of Rubus spectabilis and Etruscan tombs. We could go from there to a discussion about the relative venom of Laticauda colubrina. You liked the leaps and made a poetry from space. You went from the yellow-lipped sea krait to the eyes of Eurithe and found love at the end of your complaint. I think love was at the heart of all you did, the only loss you knew. Not knowing what you should learn, you learned everything. An autodidact (I loved that word when I was young, it gave my ignorance a name) you put in everything you could, your mind moving like your body, a poem too big to fit into the world. Sitting at the kitchen table three months before your death you told me you’d never had a friend. Are you my friend? you asked. I’ll never forget your eyes. There were never any cheap tricks in your art. It’s the one thing you taught me. Don’t tell it slant, you might’ve said. Your poems were Möbius strips. Following your mind was like my wandering in South America years ago. I knew there was no end, it was the going I had to learn, the nowhere we all get to. I split the word these days. Right now I’m here. You liked the story of me almost dying from a centipede sting in the jungle east of Ecuador, the little brown woman who nursed me back to life as she fed me soup made from boiled cuy. Like most men you liked stories. All your confessions were metaphors, those tired horses in the dust at Hundred Mile the measure. Or the time you made coffee in the frying pan in Toronto for Lorna and me, the bubbles of bacon grease just something to add body to the day. With you I could almost make it through. I fixed your deathbed, the second-hand you and Eurithe bought at a garage sale. You stood in a reel while I hammered it together. Three days later you were gone. I could say I still have words but none of them add up to you. Whispers mostly in the racket. Poems go round and round, this one too, never quite getting there, but I still live, and your ivory thought is all that keeps me warm some nights, still writing, still alive. It’s a cheap out, Al, but where else to go but back to you grabbing picture books, telling me once again that poems don’t sell. They never did.