“For This I Could Not Speak” – Ian “Bowline” Bruce R.I.P. – 1953-2023

Ian D. Bruce (April 1953 – October 15th, 2023)

News Of Death

– For Tom Charlotte

Last night they came with news of death
not knowing what I would say.

I wanted to say,
“The green wind is running through the fields
making the grass lie flat.”

I wanted to say,
“The apple blossom flakes like ash
covering the orchard wall.”

I wanted to say,
“the fish float belly up in the slow stream,
stepping stones to the dead.”

They asked if I would sleep that night,
I said I did not know.

For this loss I could not speak,
the tongue lay idle in a great darkness,
the heart was strangely open,
the moon had gone,
and it was then
when I said, “He is no longer here”
that the night put its arms around me
and all the white stars turned bitter with grief.

David Whyte from River Flow – New and Selected Poems 1984-2007, Many Rivers Press, 2007

This poem by David Whyte, Anglo Irish poet, inspirational speaker and champion of poetry transfixed me when I read it years ago. The shock and grief of a beloved friend’s death. The  for-this-I-could-not-speak moment of shock and distress. That moment hammered into me last night when a long-standing friend and former business colleague from London U.K. sent me corporate business announcements from Cameco Corporation and MEG Energy Corp. of the unexpected and accidental death of Ian D. Bruce, board chair for both companies.

I knew Ian not as a board chair, a job for which he was ideally suited, but as my friend Bowline. A man I met in the Calgary business world in the 1980’s who became a cherished friend. Ian was an anomaly in the business world. He was a canny judge of people and all things to do with corporate finance and biology (his first degree) but he was also a wizard with carpentery and all things mechanical and nautical.  And he was as at home with men and women in the trades as he was with men and women in boardrooms.

And man, did Ian know the ropes. Literally. Hence my nickname for him: Bowline. He could tie a bowline knot in seconds. Tried to teach me with limited sucess.

Ian may have been wonderfully at ease in board rooms around North America but he never abandonned the boy inside him who grew up in Kenora, Ontario, near the Manitoba border. And, literally, he never really left that town and the lake it is built beside – the Lake of the Woods. He bought an island there decades ago and in the vernacular of the Lake of the Woods he built a Camp there. A wonderful house and boathouse. When he retired (sort of!) from his full time position as president of Calgary-based brokerage house Peters & Co., he spent months there with his beloved wife Darlene on his island each year after the ice breakup and before freeze up.

This is the hard part. The awful irony. That it was here at his beloved Camp on the lake of the Woods which showed so much of his handiwork that he died in a tragic accident last Sunday.

When I heard of Ian’s death last night I wanted to say:

No way. I wanted to ask: who gets to decide to untie the knots
that tie us here to this earth? I wanted to ask: why this poetry
of a death in Autumn? I wanted to ask: why were we given words
when they are never big enough to carry the weight of death?
I wanted to say: now, I will never be able to call him back.

Ian’s death came within the shadow of another death I was grappling with last week – the death of the Nobel Prize Laureate and American poet Louise Glück. And in particular I was being haunted by the first poem of hers I ever read: The Sensual World. And these uncompromising words:

I caution you as I was never cautioned:

You will never let go, you will never be satiated.
You will be damaged and scarred, you will continue to hunger.

Your body will age, you will continue to need.
You will want the earth, then more of the earth –

Sublime, indifferent, it is present, it will not respond.
It is encompassing, it will not minister.

Meaning, it will feed you, it will ravish you,
It will not keep you alive.

These words, not just poetry. Their reminder that tolls like a bell. And so many examples around the world right now, how, in so many places, men, women and children are not being kept alive. And, how it was, here, in this country, Ian showed how he so loved the Earth.This Earth, that today, feels smaller, less alive, without him in it. I will miss you Bowline. And I will sorrow for Darlene and your children, Eric, Alison and Rob who miss you beyond words.

Now, the full version of Louise’s poem:

The Sensual World

I call to you across a monstrous river or a chasm
To caution you, to prepare you.

Earth will seduce you, slowly, imperceptibly,
Subtly, not to say with connivance.

I was not prepared: I stood in my grandmother’s kitchen,
Holding out my glass. Stewed plums, stewed apricots –

The juice poured off into a glass of ice.
And the water added, patiently, in small increments,

The various cousins discriminating, teasing
With each addition –

Aroma of summer fruit, intensity of concentration:
The coloured liquid turning gradually lighter, more radiant,

More light passing through it.
Delight, then solace. My grandmother waiting,

To see if more was wanted. Solace, then deep immersion.
I loved nothing more: deep privacy of the sensual life,

The self disappearing into it or inseparable from it,
Somehow suspended, floating, its needs

Fully exposed, awakened, fully alive –
Deep immersion, and with it

Mysterious safety. Far away, the fruit glowing in its glass bowls.
Outside the kitchen, the sun setting.

I was not prepared: sunset, end of summer. Demonstrations
Of time as a continuum, as something coming to an end,

Not a suspension; the sense wouldn’t protect me.
I caution you as I was never cautioned:

You will never let go, you will never be satiated.
You will be damaged and scarred, you will continue to hunger.

Your body will age, you will continue to need.
You will want the earth, then more of the earth –

Sublime, indifferent, it is present, it will not respond.
It is encompassing, it will not minister.

Meaning, it will feed you, it will ravish you,
It will not keep you alive.

Louise Glück from Louise Glück – Poems 1962-2012, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012