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Like ninety-four other people in the province of Quebec, Robert Lacerte was born on November 18, 1941. It happened in a house on the main street of the small town of Saint-Donat, and later in life, when he saw similarities between his poetry and Gaston Miron’s, Robert put it down to their shared homeland in the Laurentians. As if the trees, foxes, river bends, mountains and trails of smoke left behind by vacationers could bring about the genesis of words. But words have a way of finding their own path, and this origin was all he ever had in common with Miron. In the Montreal poetry scene his nickname was ‘Baloney.’ He never told me why, and I eventually realized he himself didn’t know. He was much less ridiculous than the nickname implied, just a tad feeble of body and mind, not entirely equal to the daily struggle of life on the margins, always a touch off the beat, a length behind the others – always, deep down, alone. His weaknesses were clear for all to see, but no one was there when he was flying high. He flailed in silence and died, along with 151 other Québécois, on January 6, 2009, at Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital.
Robert remembered so little of his childhood that he managed at times to believe he’d never had one, and he would tell himself, when consciousness returned after a fit of severe pain, that life isn’t a continuous flow of which we retain only fragments but an arrangement of broken, unconnected tableaux, accidents separated by cracks where everything is erased. Digging into his past, he might remember an event, a day, sometimes even an entire season, but then there was emptiness, until the next memory, when people re-emerged older and places had changed shape and colour after disintegrating into darkness. He once told me that was why he wrote, to prolong the time he existed, to have fewer of these moments of nothingness. But another time he told me that none of it mattered – memory, words, photos, film – because by their very nature the chasms everything disappears into may well be unfathomable, infinitely deeper than any traces we try to leave, and that’s why we’re no better off than the dead.
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floaters drag the heavy logs, stranded on shore
Or on the ice clad, jagged rocks, whole forests
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