The Cinnamon Peeler

  I buy postage

                           seal this

  and send it a thousand miles, thinking.

  A DOG IN SAN FRANCISCO

  Sitting in an empty house

  with a dog from the Mexican Circus!

  O Daisy, embrace is my only pleasure.

  Holding and hugging my friends. Education.

  A wave of eucalyptus. Warm granite.

  These are the things I have in my heart.

  Heart and skills, there’s nothing else.

  I usually don’t like small dogs but you

  like midwestern women take over the air.

  You leap into the air and pivot

  a diver going up! You are known

  to open the fridge and eat when you wish

  you can roll down car windows and step out

  you know when to get off the elevator.

  I always wanted to be a dog

  but I hesitated

  for I thought they lacked certain skills.

  Now I want to be a dog.

  TRANSLATIONS OF MY POSTCARDS

  the peacock means order

  the fighting kangaroos mean madness

  the oasis means I have struck water

  positioning of the stamp – the despot’s head

  horizontal, or ‘mounted policemen’,

  mean political danger

  the false date means I

  am not where I should be

  when I speak of the weather

  I mean business

  a blank postcard says

  I am in the wilderness

  7 OR 8 THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER–

  A STOLEN BIOGRAPHY

  The Father’s Guns

  After her father died they found nine guns in the house. Two in his clothing drawers, one under the bed, one in the glove compartment of the car, etc. Her brother took their mother out onto the prairie with a revolver and taught her to shoot.

  The Bird

  For a while in Topeka parrots were very popular. Her father was given one in lieu of a payment and kept it with him at all times because it was the fashion. It swung above him in the law office and drove back with him in the car at night. At parties friends would bring their parrots and make them perform what they had been taught: the first line from Twelfth Night, a bit of Italian opera, cowboy songs, or a surprisingly good rendition of Russ Colombo singing ‘Prisoner of Love’. Her father’s parrot could only imitate the office typewriter, along with the ching at the end of each line. Later it broke its neck crashing into a bookcase.

  The Bread

  Four miles out of Topeka on the highway – the largest electrical billboard in the State of Kansas. The envy of all Missouri. It advertised bread and the electrical image of a knife cut slice after slice. These curled off endlessly. ‘Meet you at the bread,’ ‘See you at the loaf,’ were common phrases. Aroused couples would park there under the stars on the open night prairie. Virtue was lost, ‘kissed all over by every boy in Wichita’. Poets, the inevitable visiting writers, were taken to see it, and it hummed over the seductions in cars, over the nightmares of girls in bed. Slice after slice fell towards the earth. A feeding of the multitude in this parched land on the way to Dorrance, Kansas.

  First Criticism

  She is two weeks old, her mother takes her for a drive. At the gas station the mechanic is cleaning the windshield and watches them through the glass. Wiping his hands he puts his head in the side window and says, ‘Excuse me for saying this but I know what I’m talking about – that child has a heart condition.’

  Listening In

  Overhear her in the bathroom, talking to a bug: ‘I don’t want you on me, honey.’ 8 a.m.

  Self-Criticism

  ‘For a while there was something about me that had a dubious quality. Dogs would not take meat out of my hand. The town bully kept handcuffing me to trees.’

  Fantasies

  Always one fantasy. To be travelling down the street and a man in a clean white suit (the detail of ‘clean’ impresses me) leaps into her path holding flowers and sings to her while an invisible orchestra accompanies his solo. All her life she has waited for this and it never happens.

  Reprise

  In 1956 the electric billboard in Kansas caught fire and smoke plumed into a wild sunset. Bread on fire, broken glass. Birds flew towards it above the cars that circled round to watch. And last night, past midnight, her excited phone call. Her home town is having a marathon to benefit the symphony. She pays $4 to participate. A tuxedoed gentleman begins the race with a clash of cymbals and she takes off. Along the route at frequent intervals are quartets who play for her. When they stop for water a violinist performs a solo. So here she comes. And there I go, stepping forward in my white suit, with a song in my heart.

  BESSIE SMITH AT ROY THOMSON HALL

  At first she refused to sing.

  She had applied for the one concert – that she was allowed each sabbatical – to take place in Havana. Palms! Oh Pink Walls! Cuba! she would hum to herself, dazzling within the clouds.

  But here she was. Given the choice of nine Honest Ed restaurants and then hurried to Roy Thomson Hall which certainly should never have been called that.

  A long brown dress, with fringes.

  Fred Longshaw at the piano.

  She opened the first set with ‘Kitchen Man’. Five people left. Al Neil had flown in from Vancouver on a tip. For the next ten minutes, after people realized it really was Bessie Smith, the hall was filled with shouted requests. ‘Any Woman’s Blues’, ‘Down in the Dumps’ … until she said I want to sing what I never was allowed to, because I died. And she brought the rest of the twentieth century under her wing.

  She wore wings. They raised themselves with her arms each time she coaxed a phrase. Her wings would float up and fall slow like a hand held out of a car coming down against the wind, the feathers black as the Steinway. You should have been there.

  During the intermission the stunned audience just sat in their seats. ‘She’s looking good’ was one of the common remarks.

  When she returned she brought out the band. They were glad to have arrived on earth, but they too had hoped for Havana. Abraham Wheat on soprano sax was there. Joe Smith on cornet was there. By midnight her voice was even better. She talked more between songs.

  At 2 a.m. the band levitated. She used no microphone. Above us banners waved and danced like a multitude. She took on and caressed the songs of Jerome Kern. She asked what happened to her friend Charlie Green. And then, to her surprise, to apologize for Toronto, Charlie Green was allowed to join her. He had been found frozen in a Harlem tenement but now stepped forward shyly with his trombone. And now he and Joe Smith and Bessie Smith were alone on stage the audience quiet and the banners still and the air conditioning holding its breath. They wheeled away the Steinway. They brought out an old upright decorated with bullet holes. Al Neil was asked to sit in. She sang, ‘It won’t be You’.

  The encore was made up of two songs. ‘Weeping Willow Blues’ and Tar Away Blues’. We stood like sudden wheat. But she could not hear us. She could not see us. Then she died again.

  THE CONCESSIONS

  i.

  Wawanosh.

                 In the corn of night

  surrounded by the dusty dark green

  hot insects and moon

                           a star coat.

  We are new and ancient here

  talking through midnight’s

  tired arms,

  letting go the newness.

  I am home.

  Old farmhouse, a defunct red truck

  under the trees

  conversation all evening

  and I have nothing more to say

  but this is a magic night.

  Our bodies betray us, long for sleep.

  Still – talk about the bear, the cause


  of theatre, the first time we all met.

  A yellow light falls onto the sink

  and our arms lean forward

  towards Elmira coffee cake.

  Hello again, after Pacific months,

  and I brought you a seed I never gave you

  and I brought you stories and a peace I want

  to give, but it is both of you

  who bring comfort and friendship.

  All night we are at this table.

                 Tableau of faint light,

  fragment of Ontario.

  We would be plotting revolution in the 1830’s.

  And outside the same heat, old coat of stars,

  the released lung of the country, and

  great Ontario night beans growing

  towards Goderich.

                           Lone houses

  betrayed by poplar

  reached only by long arms

  of Wawanosh concessions,

  the crow of night.

                           Tomorrow

  will be all highway

  till I get home.

  Go to bed, exhausted and alone.

  Go to bed with each others’ minds.

  I do not know what to say

  about this kind of love

  but I refuse to lose it.

  ii.

  By the outhouse and red truck

  I look up towards a lit window

  which seeps a yellow road into trees.

  To end in the warm

  glove of a maple!

  A bear.

  Welcome Shakespeare, Sarah Bernhardt,

  someone is starting a new story.

  Someone is dancing new on this

  terrific ancient earth, claiming this

  for mute ancestors

  and their language of hands.

                 The entertainers

  who allow themselves long evenings

  while others sleep.

  The suspicious work of the community.

  The town of Molesworth

  which once housed a dancing cow

  articulated us. As did the director

  from Atwood, the fiddler from Listowel,

  and the actress from Fergus, the writer from Wingham,

  the mystic from Millbank.

  These country hearts, a county conspiracy.

  Their determined self-portraits

  where alone one picks

  up the pencil, begins with nothing

  but these blank pages.

  Let me tell you, I love them more and more

  – all their night silences, their ignored dream.

  In daylight the car hums. Bluevale Seaforth

  Newry Holmesville.

  The deer and flamingos, another mythology,

  grace every tenth house.

  This is not your home

  but you are home.

                           Geraniums

  in a tractor tire, horse weathervanes.

  Moon over the Maitland River …

  And so that yellow light

  man or woman working inside

  aware of the cricket night

  cricket cricket … cicada? he writes, she says

  to no one but the page

  black hallways behind him

  and ahead the windowscreen and then

  the yard of yellow highway into maple

  which his mind can walk out on

  and dream a story

  for his friends, the community

  as someone once imagined

  a dancing cow, a giant cheese.

  The dream made name.

  The gestures of the barroom

  made dictionary.

  iii.

  When the four piece band sat stony in the Blyth Hotel

  and played Maple Sugar, the bar got up to dance.

  My shoulder banging against the women’s room

  to avoid flying drunk feet in their boots

  that brought the cowshit in. And the bullshit

  came too, through the beer and smoke.

  This lady on the electric piano, the two fiddlers

  and guitarist, the actors from across the street

  stepping up to sing, receive stormy ovations.

  The tv green and orange above us

  recording grade B Hollywood, flamingo art.

  And something is happening here.

  Town and actors exchanging clothes.

  The mechanic holds his harmonica

  professionally against the mike

  piercing out ‘Have you ever been lonely

  have you ever been blue,’

  and, as the man from Lobo says,

  Fuck the Renaissance

  – just get me a beer.

  iv.

  So this midnight choir.

  At 2 a.m. everyone is thrown out

  and spreads onto the empty streets.

  Unseen, as we step into cars,

  are the bear and hawk,

  who generate us.

  And from the unseen sky

  the crow watches

  traffic light up Highway 4

  then turn into unpaved

  yellow concession roads.

  The car bounces on a grass path

  between tall corn and stops.

  Light from the open car

  reveals the yard.

  And, as if painted onto the night,

  is the yellow window

  where someone, holding a mirror

  is drawing a picture of herself.

  RED ACCORDION–

  AN IMMIGRANT SONG

  How you and I talked!

  Casually, and side by side,

  not even cold at 4 a.m.

  New Year’s morning

  in a double outhouse in Blyth.

  Creak of trees and scrub snow.

  Was it dream or true memory

  this casualness, this ease of talk

  after the long night of the previous year.

  Nothing important said

  just as now the poem

  draws together such frail times.

  Art steps forward as accident

  like a warm breeze from Brazil.

                           This whispering

  as if not to awaken

  what hibernates in firewood

  as if not to disturb the blue night

  the last memory of the year.

                           So we sit

  within loose walls of the poem

  you and I, our friends indoors

  drunk on the home-made wine.

  All of us searching to discern ourselves,

  the ‘gift’ we can give each other.

  Tell this landscape.

  Or the one we came from.

  Polkas in a smoky midnight light.

  I stepped into this new year

  dancing with a small child.

  Rachel, so graceful,

  we bowed when the dance was over.

  If I could paint this I would

                           and if writing

  showed colour and incident

  removed from time

                           we could be clear.

  The bleak view past the door

  is where we are, not what we

  have made here, or become, or brought

  like wolves bringing food to a lair

  from another world. And this

  is magic.

                 Ray Bird’s seven-year-old wine

  – transformed! Finall
y made good.

  I drank an early version years ago

  and passed out.

                           Time collapses.

  The years, the intricate

  knowledge now of each other

  makes love.

  A yard in its scrub snow, stacked wood

  brindle in the moonlight, the red truck,

  a bare tree at the foot of the driveway

  waving to heaven.

                           A full moon the

                           colour of night kitchen.

  Ten yards away a high bonfire

  (remembered from summer) lifts

  its redness above the farmhouse

  and the lean figures of children circle

  to throw in sticks and arms off a Christmas tree

  as the woman in long black hair

  her left foot on a stump

  plays the red accordion.

  And the others dance.

                 Embracing or flinging

  themselves away from each other.

  They bow and they look up

  to full moon and white cold sky

  and they move, even in this stilled painting.

  They talk a white breath at each other.

  Some appear more than once

  with different partners.

  We are immune to wind.

  Our boots pound down the frozen earth

  our children leap from and into our arms.

  All of us poised and inspired by music

  friendship self-made heat and the knowledge

  each has chosen to come here driven for hours