I: Oubliette
Forget the moon and trees just
for the sake of argument. Their
variety is insuperable and blocks
the city out. Toronto has already
learned to overcome the stars, and
the heat trapped in the buildings
clustered over concrete and asphalt
makes light of most snowstorms.
An aerial infrared photograph would show
the town like the end of a cigarette
smouldering on the planet's flank.
Unkind city? Let's leave the question
open.
II: The Biker on the Bridge
Over the 400 near Hamilton he stands looking
at the traffic. His sweaty white skin glistens
in the sun. He must have a heart of steel and
breath of sparks to love this flow. June has
dried the short cut grass to sharp
yellow stubs splashed with the green
of persistent weeds. The cars' roar
is constant, the sun unvaried, the light
a glare which melts all vision to a slippery
gleam. Nothing is here that is not intended.
Have cities always been like this?
Did roads in Sung China have
no point without their destinations?
I have walked through parks and
forests where each step had its own
reason to hold me, where cool
greenness was allowed its scope,
where random shoots of new growth
sprang from gnarled bases that seemed
wisdom to the touch, in glades
where the sun's warmth burst forth
tall with light and flowers.
But the biker doesn't care. Will the whiteness
of his skin bum in the sun? His stillness
could be crushed by any stray machine
and barely mar the power of the scene.
What is it that relaxes him? A plan
so purely realized that brightness
washes out all shade, that heat
bums out mere randomness, gives
him, to-day at least, his peace. He has
left in my memory more than I have
from day to day. Praise him.
As I ride in the car I see
the side-mirror can slice reality
and send it tumbling.
I look ahead and see the world speed
by in order, according to our need.
The banditry of chance is banished
and my arrival is well assured.
But the moving mirror casts my present
into threes, the middle distance moving
as it should, while close by, the road-posts
flip along maniacally and the aerial distance
seems to barely move. The biker is the stillness
that flickers for a microsecond
in my mirror, and is gone.
Dear Keats, our modem casement windows resist
the weather better, now that we
are realists of imagination. We are
constantly renovating. Our mastery of travel
is so complete it begs delight, but even so,
we landscape roads, plant parks, sweat
over yards, and debate the scale
of cities with the air
of an affluent race not quite sure
how to compensate. We are not as pure
as thought or love. We are stage magicians
pretending to a wholeness that
is only briefly there.
III: You Need Motors to Fly
The modern city is the car.
The car brought wealth to our two anglo-dominions
and power to many states. It straightened
out the roads and flung the crawling
suburbs out and forced the buildings to grow
as flat and plain as asphalt. Broadway
boogie woogie, says Mondriaan; bugger us
all, says Ford.
Only a male could have conceived the
endlessly plunging piston and there
is no way none that you can smell the
roses while the car sucks wind. On a
quiet morning while the ash tree meditates
on blossoms and the maple spins its keys
as I walk the dog I feel the breeze of a
lone corvette flutter my pant-legs on my
calves, a hiss of seduction into
flight.
This is the city right enough, a zoo for
plants and a semi-legal after-hours club
for people. The rusted underbelly of an
over-heated traffic jam on the rattling
rocky buzz of my oldie-goldie CHUM carries
me to work and back to a night of beer
and dance and love. I remember my uncle
on Crystal Beach as clear as though my
mind were psychic sitting high on an old
convertible skimming along the flattened
sand and hooting at the girls. He got
one with lipstick as red a girl's first
menses and eyes as uncertain as his
own, while they explored the fear and delight
of their awakening adolescence in the
backseat of a car.
So ride me to songs of
synthesizers and clutched
guitars. Play loop de loop
with the future and the past.
That pale cigarette will burn
my hide too.
I will slide
I will glide
I will fly
I will die
I will try
I will try
I will try
in my car.
IV: For Jim, When My Car Broke Down
Thank God for women and men who
can do things with their hands.
I can cobble and stitch
words or make an idea
flow with the curve of beauty
or rant with crotchety sparks
but when it comes to crafting shelves
or sewing a hem it would be a
compliment to say I'm all thumbs.
And growing up, you see, means
making repairs–cleaning surfaces,
adjusting structures, replacing parts--
machines and bodies and minds
are always breaking down so we
must all be doctors.
Thank God for women and men who can do
things with their hands.
Toulah can, while shortening
my daughters' snowpants, move
up the inner webbing and finish
it all so neatly you'd swear
that's how they had been made.
When my car broke down, the taxi-
driver with a few well aimed
questions could describe the
clogged soul of my machine
down to the last significant
crack, and Tino's brother
(a little Portuguese with a wry
unshaven body whose every
third word was fuck) started
me again with a single tap.
While many men knew how to do
it, only he could find and
reach the hidden part.
Thank God for women and for men who
can do things with their hands.
Jim found Tino's brother hands
followed and ferried me about
persisting where I would have
wandered off distracted by a
thought, a word, a sight, he
being a handy man committed
to the way things work. Confabulous
Jim! Middle-age is life's high
summer where men and women
can do whatever they will and he
is on the nether edge. Now that
Mother and Father are coping with
death's queer blandishments and we
are no longer provided for, his
precise, pursed, Scottish help
is a friendship well worth having.
Thank God for women and for men who
can do things with their hands.
Thank God for women.
Thank God for men.
Thank God for friends.
V: Awaking
After a stormy night
(when the rain made streaks
against the long windows
and a face of blackness blotted out
the street and garden)
we still were full of talk
and much too vivid yet for sleep.
So we decided we'd find some place for breakfast,
some place to talk and eat and let the conversation
live out to its natural end.
Who would believe this city could be so still
with only the birds and us
to break the silence?
Stepping out of the park we saw
the broad road extend on either side
like sleeping arms,
open, peopless
and the buildings stiff and tall,
the long rays of the sun
turning their windows to a flashing gaze.
The evening was undone, poured
like an open stream
into all this newness.
Like the snarl of high-pitched woodwinds
scraping across the strings
a taxi squealed around the corner.
We felt a wind behind us from the park.
So on we went and stayed together
until the day was no longer ours.
When Anna Knocked Up Dry On Our Shore …
When Anna Knocked Up Dry On Our Shore She Had No Certainties,
Only A Pocket Of Dried Rice From Various Defaulted Marriages
Billed As Lusty And Interesting Experiments
I: A Letter to My Mother
Yes, I have quite often
made furtive love.
We all did, didn't we, when
we were young?
I felt the blaze of lust
give my body
a potency
beyond
all doubt.
But something colder used
my youth
and would not let
pleasure out.
We are the dead.
We communicate
by lying still
head to hand to head.
(I stood on the balcony
of my apartment
leaning on the rail
gazing at the park below.
You lay on the bed behind me
soft at last with sleep.
Inside me
it was as though
I still could feel the glow
of your stiff body,
a dark lustre of satisfaction.
I knew the birth of pleasure
without the endless debt.)
If we are dead,
we can communicate
by lying still
head to hand to head.
I saw a movie once
in which the heroine blunts
the doglike carnality of her lover.
The men were primitive
and entered from the rear,
seeing the multiple inviting cracks
and feeling the hard backs
of women whose fear of rape
mingled with their mutual pleasure.
Piquant? Well, perhaps,
but limited, with little time
for lingering.
Our heroine,
that grand explorer of her
sex, felt some newness stir.
Persuading her lover
(swollen, eager, curious)
to withdraw, she turned
to see his face
and in that intimate space
love was made,
with many private strokes
and some deft fingering.
If (from time to time) we die
from lack of understanding,
the world does not, and can revivify
us, guiding us through sex
to a state that's pure.
For some few necessary moments,
Mother,
at least that's sure.
II: Thick
I'm afraid of drought.
The last year we were in England
the lawns and gardens died and
the earth cracked. The weeds, however,
thrived. My husband tried to kill them.
I can still remember the barbs of
thistle on his hands.
The cracks were voids,
mouths gaping for the rain.
The earth was like a spinster 1
scorched dry by the raging thought of sex.
Now I like to walk in the rain
and think of strawberries sucking at the
moistened soil,
damp, red, rooted creatures full of seed.
All men should have the hands of women
and the driving hips of bulls.
III: Sauce (From Heine)
The young girl on the sea shore
moaned loud and long
to see the sun on fire
going down.
Baby, don't you worry.
It's always the same old story,
I find:
Whenever he goes down in front,
he always comes up behind.
IV: Canon
When Campion sings of Cupid's fire
Does he know, does he know, does he know
How great is the god that makes desire
flare and glow?
How cunning are the forms of lust
That move, that move, that move
A man and women to put their trust
in passing love?
The well-knit passions that make a mind
Dissolve, dissolve, dissolve,
Have subtle music wherein we find
deep truths revolve.
And truth has harmony all its own
Where sings, where sings, where sings
Passion coherently felt and known
in the mind of things.
And the song is tempered to such a key
So clear, so strict, so pure,
That the mind returns more subtily,
bearing heart's cure.
V: For Grace Paley
I see the girls of summer
their hair is a frizz of grey,
dandelion clocks
waiting to be blown away in the wind.
The release of youth
is the flowering of age.
Surrender?
There's no one to surrender to,
the enemy's all fighting with himself.
I: Twists
So briefly in the world,
out of the mind of God,
our steps are still uncertain
although our eyes are bright.
Ribbons of time stretch out before us
as we carry forth our past.
The twists of destiny inside us,
although we die, will last.
My daughters are my history
encoded cunningly,
and as they play beside us,
my mind and flesh take flight
and day arises roses out of night.
You made my heart a garden
and planted there two sudden roses.
Their roots feed on my memories.
Oh may they grow and spread and bloom
till my life closes.
The past is such a desperate event
our present is perpetually in debt.
So we are bonded to our work,
clawing, acquisitive, hungry
for whatever we can get.
Susannah! take her hands. She's growing. She can walk already.
Dance with her. And what a smile!
I'm a little teapot,
short and stout.
Here is my handle,
here is my spout.
When I bubble up
you hear me shout,
Tip me over and pour me out!
Tip me over and pour me out!
Short and stubby,
soft, ebullient,
my daughter Sarah, joy and joke!
Oh God, have mercy on us
for the hopes we bear
and for the promises we broke.
II: Richness
My youngest daughter,
gentlest soul,
even when we break
our hearts are full.
Across the desert of my days
I see you reach.
Teach your gloomy father
the illusion of his fears.
We feed on laughter and on tears
more luscious than summer rain,
and we can heal the harsh dry sickness
when we touch and laugh
(o delicate melodious daughter )
and laugh and touch again.
III: Opening
After the fine grey rain
which the wind drives on in sheets
(as dullness drive on pain)
there comes a day which greets
the narcoticized difficult soul
with a strong and simple light
which purges what is foul
with moss and twigs and blight
(the neurotic and the mean)
of all that chokes its flow
until the basin's clean,
and then there's room to grow
(where the bank is thick and dun)
plants whose fledgling leaves
are shot through by the sun
to green transparency:
When the senses are awake
the soul begins to see.
I: Huron Street: Other Voices
The story haunts me, although I remember
only what I was told.
Even as I age I hear young voices
talking, animated,
in the backmost rooms
where the northern sun pours in
fresh winter light
and the rads are always cold.
II: Rooms
Shut the child in a quiet room
where broken shadows shift and loom.
Visit him on sunny days.
Leave him crying. These are the ways
the world decays.
In the blue prairie light of
early morning a tall black bird floats
through the sleep-deserted halls and
settles like an early dream on the boy
in bed. Neither 30 generations of warrior
blood nor the soft silence of his own
body can protect him.
Put the girl where she cannot speak
because of the ghosts that shudder and squeak.
Let her wander on sunny days
alone and growing. These are the ways
the world decays.
The cool yellow sun of early evening feathers
the birch trees. Their thin paper turns to
light, but nothing here can rise. My
soul is mud and I cannot even remember
how my own tongue should say mother.
Lock the man in a chaos of breath
ordering pleading
quitting needing
badgering binding
ignoring blinding
soothing hating
loving waiting
Let him witness his own soul's death
while the city rattles on sunny days
steadily working. These are the ways
the world decays.
I have seen seven beasts. None
of them would kill. I am
afraid. Who will I
fight? Who will
be murdered?
Seal the woman in a body not hers
where the muscle and bone refuse to obey
and age squats laughing in her womb.
Let her remember the sunny days,
his body's smell, the quiet room:
the ghosts that shriek as she bends her joints
can blacken even the sunniest days. These
are the ways
the world decays.
I spoke to my sisters. One
bore a fish, the other, a
clot of blood. I stay
awake because I have
borne dreams.
III: Warp
Can you feel your body move?
Can you feel it crack and strain
against the force of insults?
This is a birth.
Does the old skin split against your side?
Let your long finger stroke the moistened itch.
This is the gate of birth,
the slow pain of beginning.
Slither out NOW wholly you and wholly new,
reviled and dangerous.
Sorrow is for beings who have never eaten dust.
Brothers! You were walked upon.
Sisters! Abandon trust.
The world belongs to those who sense its changes
like nerves that fret their fine lines on the skin.
Identify your enemies Inform your natural friends