back from logging on Vancouver Island
with men who get rid of crabs with Raid
2 minutes bending over in agony
and then into the showers!
Last night I joined him for The Prisoner of Zenda
a film I saw three times in my youth
and which no doubt influenced me morally.
Hot coffee bananas and cheese
we are ready at 11.30 for adventure.
At each commercial Sky
breaks into midnight guitar practice
head down playing loud and intensely
till the movie comes on and the music suddenly stops.
Skyler’s favourite hours when he’s usually alone
cooking huge meals of anything in the frying pan
thumbing through Advanced Guitar like a bible.
We talk during the film
and break into privacy during commercials
or get more coffee or push
the screen door open and urinate under the trees.
Laughing at the dilemmas of 1920 heroes
suggestive lines, cutaways to court officials
who raise their eyebrows at least 4 inches
when the lovers kiss …
only the anarchy of the evil Rupert of Hentzau
is appreciated.
And still somehow
by 1.30 we are moved
as Stewart Granger girl-less and countryless
rides into the sunset with his morals and his horse.
The perfect world is over. Banana peels
orange peels ashtrays guitar books.
2 a.m. We stagger through
into the slow black rooms of the house.
I lie in bed fully awake. The darkness
breathes to the pace of a dog’s snoring.
The film is replayed to sounds
of an intricate blues guitar.
Skyler is Rupert then the hero.
He will leave in a couple of days
for Montreal or the Maritimes.
In the movies of my childhood the heroes
after skilled swordplay and moral victories
leave with absolutely nothing
to do for the rest of their lives.
SALLIE CHISUM/LAST WORDS
ON BILLY THE KID 4 A.M.
for Nancy Beatty
The moon hard and yellow where Billy’s head is.
I have been moving in my room
these last 5 minutes. Looking for a cigarette.
That is a sin he taught me.
Showed me how to hold it and how to want it.
I had been looking and stepped forward
to feel along the windowsill
and there was the tanned moon head.
His body the shadow of the only tree on the property.
I am at the table.
Billy’s mouth is trying
to remove a splinter out of my foot.
Tough skin on the bottom of me.
Still. I can feel his teeth
bite precise. And then moving his face back
holding something in his grin, says he’s got it.
Where have you been I ask
Where have you been he replies
I have been into every room about 300 times
since you were here
I have walked about 60 miles in this house
Where have you been I ask
Billy was a fool
he was like those reversible mirrors
you can pivot round and see youself again
but there is something showing on the other side always.
Sunlight. The shade beside the cupboard.
He fired two bullets into the dummy
on which I built dresses
where the nipples should have been.
That wasn’t too funny, but we laughed a lot.
One morning he was still sleeping
I pushed the door and watched him from the hall
he looked like he was having a serious dream.
Concentrating. Angry. As if wallpaper
had been ripped off a wall.
Billy’s mouth at my foot
removing the splinter.
Did I say that?
It was just before lunch one day.
I have been alive
37 years since I knew him. He was a fool.
He was like those mirrors I told you about.
I am leaning against the bed rail
I have finished my cigarette
now I cannnot find the ashtray.
I put it out, squash it
against the window
where the moon is.
In his stupid eyes.
PURE MEMORY/CHRIS DEWDNEY
‘Listen, it was so savage and brutal and powerful that even though it happened out of the blue I knew there was nothing arbitrary about it’
CHRISTOPHER DEWDNEY
1
On a B.C. radio show the man asked me, coffee half way up to his mouth, what are the books you’ve liked recently? Christopher Dewdney’s A Palaeozoic Geology of London Ontario. Only I didn’t say that, I started stumbling on the word Palaeozoic … Paleo … Polio … and then it happened on Geology too until it seemed a disease. I sounded like an idiot. Meanwhile I was watching the man’s silent gulps. The professional silent gulping of coffee an inch or two away from the microphone. Unconcerned with my sinking ‘live’ all over the province.
2
I can’t remember where I first met him. Somewhere I became aware of this giggle. Tan hair, tan face, tan shirt and a giggle-snort as his head staggered back. His arms somewhere.
3
The baby. He shows me the revolving globe in the 4-month-old kid’s crib. Only it has been unscrewed and the globe turned upside down and rescrewed in that way so Africa and Asia all swivel upside down. This way he says she’ll have to come to terms with the shapes all over again when she grows up.
4
He comes to dinner, steps out of the car and transforms the 10-year-old suburban garden into ancient history. Is on his knees pointing out the age and race and character of rocks and earth. He loves the Norfolk Pine. I give him a piece of wood 120 million years old from the tar sands and he smokes a bit of it.
5
When he was a kid and his parents had guests and he was eventually told to get to bed he liked to embarrass them by running under a table and screaming out Don’t hit me Don’t hit me.
6
His most embarrassing moment. A poetry reading in Toronto. He was sitting in the front row and he realized that he hated the poetry. He looked around discreetly for the exit but it was a long way away. Then to the right, quite near him, he saw another door. As a poem ended he got up and officially walked to the door quickly opened it went out and closed it behind him. He found himself in a dark cupboard about 2 feet by 3 feet. It contained nothing. He waited there for a while, then he started to laugh and giggle. He giggled for 5 minutes and he thinks the audience could probably hear him. When he had collected himself he opened the door, came out, walked to his seat and sat down again.
7
Coach House Press, December 1974. I haven’t seen him for a long time. His face is tough. Something has left his face. It is not that he is thinner but the face has lost something distinct and it seems like flesh. But he is not thinner. He is busy working on his new book Fovea Centralis and I watch him as he sits in the empty back room upstairs all alone with a computer typesetting terminal. I can’t get over his face. It is ‘tight’, as if a stocking were over it and he about to perform a robbery. He plucks at the keys and talks down into the machine. I am relieved when he starts giggling at something. I tell him I’m coming down to London in a week and he says he will show me his butterflies, he has bought two mounted butterflies for a very good price. If I don’t tell anyone he wil
l let me know where I could get one. A Chinaman in London Ontario sells them. I start to laugh. He doesn’t. This is serious information, important rare information like the history of rocks – these frail wings of almost powder have their genealogies too.
8
His favourite movie is Earthquake. He stands in the middle of his apartment very excited telling me all the details. He shows me his beautiful fossils, a small poster of James Dean hitting his brother in East of Eden, and the two very impressive mounted butterflies.
9
On the bus going back to Toronto I have a drawing of him by Robert Fones. Wrapped in brown paper it lies above me on the luggage rack. When the bus swerves I put my arm out into the dark aisle ready to catch him if it falls. A strange drawing of him in his cane chair with a plant to the side of him, reading Frank O’Hara with very oriental eyes. It was done in 1973, before the flesh left his face.
10
His wife’s brain haemorrhage. I could not cope with that. He is 23 years old. He does. Africa Asia Australia upside down. Earthquake.
BEARHUG
Griffin calls to come and kiss him goodnight
I yell ok. Finish something I’m doing,
then something else, walk slowly round
the corner to my son’s room.
He is standing arms outstretched
waiting for a bearhug. Grinning.
Why do I give my emotion an animal’s name,
give it that dark squeeze of death?
This is the hug which collects
all his small bones and his warm neck against me.
The thin tough body under the pyjamas
locks to me like a magnet of blood.
How long was he standing there
like that, before I came?
Elimination Dance
(an intermission)
‘Nothing I’d read prepared me for a body this unfair’
JOHN NEWLOVE
‘Till we be roten, kan we not be rypen’
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
Those who are allergic to the sea
Those who have resisted depravity
Men who shave off beards in stages, pausing to take photographs
American rock stars who wear Toronto Maple Leaf hockey sweaters
Those who (while visiting a foreign country) have lost the end of a Q tip in their ear and have been unable to explain their problem
Gentlemen who have placed a microphone beside a naked woman’s stomach after lunch and later, after slowing down the sound considerably, have sold these noises on the open market as whale songs
All actors and poets who spit into the first row while they perform
Men who fear to use an electric lawn-mower feeling they could drowse off and be dragged by it into a swimming pool
Any dinner guest who has consumed the host’s missing contact lens along with the dessert
Any person who has had the following dream. You are in a subway station of a major city. At the far end you see a coffee machine. You put in two coins. The Holy Grail drops down. Then blood pours into the chalice
Any person who has lost a urine sample in the mail
All those belle-lettrists who feel that should have been ‘an urine sample’
Anyone who has had to step into an elevator with all of the Irish Rovers
Those who have filled in a bilingual and confidential pig survey from Statistics Canada. (Une enquête sur les porcs, strictement confidentielle)
Those who have written to the age old brotherhood of Rosicrucians for a free copy of their book ‘The Mastery of Life’ in order to release the inner consciousness and to experience (in the privacy of the home) momentary flights of the soul
Those who have accidently stapled themselves
Anyone who has been penetrated by a mountie
Any university professor who has danced with a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Jean Genet
Those who have unintentionally locked themselves within a sleeping bag at a camping goods store
Any woman whose i.u.d. has set off an alarm system at the airport
Those who, after a swim, find the sensation of water dribbling out of their ears erotic
Men who have never touched a whippet
Women who gave up the accordion because of pinched breasts
Those who have pissed out of the back of moving trucks
Those who have woken to find the wet footprints of a peacock across their kitchen floor
Anyone whose knees have been ruined as a result of performing sexual acts in elevators
Those who have so much as contemplated the possibility of creeping up to one’s enemy with two Bic lighters, pressing simultaneously the butane switches – one into each nostril – and so gassing him to death
Literary critics who have swum the Hellespont
Anyone who has been hired as a ‘professional beater’ and frightened grouse in the direction of the Queen Mother
Any lover who has gone into a flower shop on Valentine’s Day and asked for clitoris when he meant clematis
Those who have come across their own telephone numbers underneath terse insults or compliments in the washroom of the Bay Street Bus Terminal
Those who have used the following techniques of seduction:
small talk at a falconry convention
entering a spa town disguised as Ford Madox Ford
making erotic rotations of the pelvis, backstage, during the storm scene of King Lear
underlining suggestive phrases in the prefaces of Joseph Conrad
Anyone who has testified as a character witness for a dog in a court of law
Any writer who has been photographed for the jacket of a book in one of the following poses: sitting in the back of a 1956 Dodge with two roosters; in a tuxedo with the Sydney Opera House in the distance; studying the vanishing point on a jar of Dutch Cleanser; against a gravestone with dramatic back lighting; with a false nose on; in the vicinity of Macchu Pichu; or sitting in a study and looking intensely at one’s own book
The person who borrowed my Martin Beck thriller, read it in a sauna which melted the glue off the spine so the pages drifted to the floor, stapled them together and returned the book, thinking I wouldn’t notice
Any person who has burst into tears at the Liquor Control Board
Anyone with pain
Secular Love
‘You’re an actor, aren’t you?’
The man nodded silently and averted his eyes.
‘I’ve seen you in films. You always seem embarrassed at the thought of what you have to say next.’
The man laughed and again averted his eyes.
‘Your trouble, I believe, is that you always hold back something of yourself. You’re not shameless enough for an actor. In my opinion you should learn how to run properly and scream properly, with your mouth wide open. I’ve noticed that even when you yawn you’re afraid to open your mouth all the way. In your next film make a sign to show that you’ve understood me. You haven’t even been discovered yet. I’m looking forward to seeing you grow older from film to film.’
PETER HANDKE The left-handed woman
Claude Glass
A somewhat convex dark or coloured hand-mirror, used to concentrate the features of the landscape in subdued tones.
‘Grey walked about everywhere with that pretty toy, the claude glass, in his hand, making the beautiful forms of the landscape compose in its luscious chiaroscuro.’ Gosse (1882)
He is told about
the previous evening’s behaviour.
Starting with a punchbowl
on the volleyball court.
Dancing and falling across coffee tables,
asking his son Are you the bastard
who keeps telling me I’m drunk?
kissing the limbs of women
suspicious of his friends serenading
five pigs by the barn
heaving a wine glass towards garden
and continually going through ga
tes
into the dark fields
and collapsing.
His wife half carrying him home
rescuing him from departing cars,
complains this morning
of a sore shoulder.
And even later
his thirteen-year-old daughter’s struggle
to lift him into the back kitchen
after he has passed out, resting his head on rocks,
wondering what he was looking for in dark fields.
For he has always loved that ancient darkness
where the flat rocks glide like Japanese tables
where he can remove clothes
and lie with moonlight on the day’s heat