A Lovely Gutting: Gender and Wealth in English Canada, 1860-1930 9780773586758

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A Lovely Gutting

the hugh maclennan poetry series Editors: Allan Hepburn and Tracy Ware Selection Committee: Mark Abley, Donald H. Akenson, Philip Cercone, and Joan Harcourt titles in the series Waterglass Jeffery Donaldson All the God-Sized Fruit Shawna Lemay Chess Pieces David Solway Giving My Body to Science Rachel Rose The Asparagus Feast S.P. Zitner The Thin Smoke of the Heart Tim Bowling What Really Matters Thomas O’Grady A Dream of Sulphur Aurian Haller Credo Carmine Starnino Her Festival Clothes Mavis Jones The Afterlife of Trees Brian Bartlett Before We Had Words S.P. Zitner Bamboo Church Ricardo Sternberg Franklin’s Passage David Solway The Ishtar Gate Diana Brebner Hurt Thyself Andrew Steinmetz The Silver Palace Restaurant Mark Abley Wet Apples, White Blood Naomi Guttman Palilalia Jeffery Donaldson Mosaic Orpheus Peter Dale Scott Cast from Bells Suzanne Hancock Blindfold John Mikhail Asfour Particles Michael Penny A Lovely Gutting Robin Durnford

A Lovely Gutting Robin Durnford

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2012 isbn 978-0-7735-3984-6 Legal deposit irst quarter 2012 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the inancial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: the epigraph to “Recipe for Poached Cod” from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1 by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, and Simone Beck, copyright © 1961 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf; the excerpt in “Reply to a Footnote” from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a Norton Critical Edition edited by Nina Auerbach and David Skal, copyright © 1997 by W.W. Norton & Company. Used by permission.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Durnford, Robin A lovely gutting / Robin Durnford. (Hugh MacLennan poetry series) Poems. isbn 978-0-7735-3984-6 i. Title. ii. Series: Hugh MacLennan poetry series ps8607.u77l69 2012

c811’.6

c2011-906179-1

This book was typeset by Interscript in 9.5/13 New Baskerville.

In memoriam Sam Durnford 1953–2004 for the Newfoundland we shared together

Contents

Apocrypha 3 Fossil Record 4 Lapsarian 5 Port au Port 6 Wild Lupins 7 Tuckamore 8 After the Wreck 9 Easter Egg 14 Wake 15 Polaroid, ca. 1974 16 The End Went Like This 17 Taking Leave 18 The Crossing 19 Barachois 20 Fawn 21 Caplin 22 Slub 23 Cul-de-sac 24 Scrap of Codland History 25 Dad 26 Recipe for Poached Cod 27 Gluttony 28 Last Supper 29 My Mother Eats Bakeapples 30 Damsons 31 Jelly Fish 32

June Bugs 33 Nativity Scene 34 The Arches 36 Some Shock 38 Guy Fawkes Night 39 What the Americans Left 40 Old Runway 41 Dumped 42 Goon 43 Sea Punks 44 Wireless on Signal Hill 46 Reply to a Footnote 50 Gutenberg’s Grave 52 History of Writing 53 The Prosthetist 55 Screen-scrawling 56 ICU 57 The Starry Night 59 The Water Rooms 60 Fishing 62 A Lovely Gutting 63 Sitting 64 Stockwell Station 65 Not Paris 66 Great Blue Heron 68 Fog 69 Surge 70 Parker’s Cove 71 Drive-by Darwinism 72 Walking 73 Vagabond 74 Certainty 75 Twigs 76

Down the Beach 77 Broken Off Indian Head Still Born 81 Misbegotten 82 Graveside 84 Notes 85 Acknowledgments

87

79

A Lovely Gutting

Apocrypha

Jesus couldn’t live here. crosses break on troubled shores, can’t survive a day of gales on Gros Morne, bald Golgotha cruciix-collapsed, waiting for resurrection, monument to enduring gusty prayers from wind-thrown Messiahs weeping for stop of rain, a grotto of soft stone without granite, wild bone, jutting elbows of rock spike pity. Satan’s no threat when serpents shrivel about cold crags, here lust-less Eve steals leaves from Bible’s onion, useless records, tattered lags with no dominion over Her

3

Fossil Record

begat the earth, pregnant rising, whimpering ash, the old Deuteronomy – hopeless rutting legs entwined with nettles breeding ragged graves, etched boulder – Darwin’s absolution yet not even Galapagos ready

4

Lapsarian

grim pulse beating the tuckamore bog my sea-veined father disturbs mute-loud as any old corpse surrounded by rib of woods if only Genesis would let me resurrect him with my cage of woman’s breath and blood black now as the day he was buried in the earth’s disease his brackish body stalks the rot, steady as a lupin in stilled Newfoundland air a reposed chest of marsh rises into my lapsarian day where Yahweh laughs to the end at his joke, seaweed-choked I see in the ripple of seagull light he’s umbilically tied to the belly of sea sutured by this coil of bog

5

P o rt au P o rt

on the worn beaches of the peninsula stuffed with fossilized crabs, rotting wrecks crushed into metal cakes, stuck at the bitter end slick black mussels shivering in shell-armour hang on, clinging to the shape of stones indistinguishable even in warrior red hermits scurry under bottle necks, dart sideways out of all perception bobbing homogeneous gulls, black crows and cats, hungry dogs forage among rusty kettles, tin cans, pinish and a plastic-bottled bong, opened on a lupin, a wild rose, a thistle, the blood of a raspberry dripping from a bush you pick one, and look at the sea

6

Wild Lupins

stark in foggy ardour, a standing gate of stems against ungainly spring, knock-kneed, worm-mad, petal-serene, waves guard against the dirt unseen, highway-lining the crags with hardy needs, their restless seeds an army, salvage of sea, that ornery grave trophies to the bogs, the dandelion dirt, shadowy boulders lean into their hurt, blooming upright cobs of posed delicacy, the blind-herd tuckamore. sighing roses turn from ravaged bushes, moose-sacked, bow to pearl-dropped lupins lacing the extremes

7

Tuckamore

slanted to no height stump of driven life, prodding wings somehow scratch a feathered beach stems of salt-tossed rock their bristling reach askew from ocean’s rolled rebuke slanted alms releasing wind’s a sculpting boor deforming nature’s briny whim, whinge-clumped ir, stark efigy of brier arthritic paws dwaring broomstick’s steady rise, krummholz claws snatching winter’s bounty brittle as its blast

8

After the Wreck

Flotsam algae-sunk plate serves a potted memory carbuncled clump mosaic of sea light rippling on the plate my relection is old sea sponge and coral roots cracking the hold of glass a knife and spoon for anaesthetic afternoons fork-fed mermaids singing random tunes sirens scraping memory for the way you looked at bottled ships, drunk melliluous lowing gaze seeping like snails through yellow fog

9

watching me roaming Gros Morne with my cup, searching for wild ghosts Jetsam slippers irst at the bedroom door molded to the arch – then sneakers waiting under dust light for your running to the car, slam the door press the gas – go softening feet holding arches in your orthotic mold the bend of your hand at the cottage lip-lops duct-taped from sole to strap of glue keeping your foot together – translucent veins of summer pulsing your trip shufling off to paint ish in the afternoon

10

snow boots in the porch when I got there how sturdy they seemed ceremonial guards footing the damage laced inside you printing with ice cold soles your death in the landill now, after the emergency Lagan my father did not have objects – a boat, a ring, shoes, odd clothes only did not have things didn’t collect artifacts of antlers, glossy dogs, stuffed partridge, singing ish on the mantel lonely guns or token angels didn’t leave a will absorbed with bedrooms housed in laws a thing only to disown, half-heartedly haunt

11

but he liked pufins – porcelain mocking auks of Stóra Dímun parrots baldly painted piebald beak a shattered streak of eye watched them drift on pools of polished wood looding things with nature magnanimous Derelict a body washed up slapped together arms, hair sewn into rubber banded hands clasping your chest the body goes under a sea of worms, shadow bearing you off to a world without Hades or Heaven where even Darwin is dead, forgotten earth still takes you mourners stand over you waiting for the anchor to drop making promises I cannot weep, shout the body is the wreck about to crumble down dismembered and strewn deeply

12

how microscopic will you become, how many pieces will loat on the seas to come – how many fossils will you make with your wild armour a lot at stake as I relinquish you, derelict father of a thousand balms whose devout protection from violent Newfoundland winds now blows and blames the anger off my face lined with your little pieces torn apart – you are not grotesque as the gull that pecks your eye, the crow devouring your belly from a broken window but not beautiful – the play is gone to shattered rest, static sleeping fragmented spirit settled deep puzzled but not pieced no signs of grace just angles of light dreaming you whole again

13

Easter Egg

frying eggs seems strange on a Sunday like that but they say it happens often: a golden omen. found out later at that very moment our brother was sipping to the good life in soggy St. John’s: ‘clink’ but there it goes drunk down like dust. he was quick to the quick. then we carried on, egg-blowing, egg-painting, egg-hiding: gulping down life like bunnies delicately caught

14

Wake

knee-drowned in snow-light hanging off the keel his shovel a paddle chopping ice from the hull he’s stern, steady on the bow an eye keeps the scene, falling overboard into gristle of March palm of mud reaching for a line of rigging – he cups the buoy with a fragile stub-knuckled claw ready for work, turning the globe like a new world starboard as if bobbing on the still of the wake no more on the gunwale scratched with nicks where Dad did his jigging, idling into afternoons alone his son turns blank as slush standing in an endless winter swaying on his daydreams

15

Polaroid, ca. 1974

your elbow greets the aperture as you stare at the baby in the crook on the edge you don’t notice lash past your look at the baby in the green blanket who buried you framed with this frozen in your cofin

16

The End Went Like This

on the nightstand a space where I placed the phone, lowed over the raft of sheets until the wet sun came up the morning dad went in rough relief you hauled me out of sleep, dried me off my feet – laid my twilight on the shore beneath the evening dad went

17

T a k i n g L e av e

still see that black mood back on plunked head at his driver’s door shade of a branch on the windshield lickering farewells to the rearview mirror – those university stones, awed in his silence as leaves aerate goodbyes through the aching blood of brought-up youth going on free for the world to comb under bristling foreign trees lifting peregrine skies over a stranger’s gate: a boy from nothing trying not to open the latch for me

18

The Crossing

reaching ocean in the shine of mid-morning on the Crossing wet with ducks and plovers and two gray gulls standing spindly, pondering the shallows, in the sands fully contemplating the day for ish a daddy wades into the geometry of Pratt wrecked only by the beach-slop of Newfoundland his ballooned belly of puddings and jam (and pop for breakfast, beer for lunch) his face pimply and slick as this sheen of earth sleepy he treads through the breakers holding his baby by the ankles, graceful she dangles chattering in and out of the sea-sharp accents of old isolations now and then in the presence of ish

19

Barachois

black-barren day, twig-brushed elusive Mom’s up ahead she hears coyotes – bushes groan with partridge lapping dead leaves and shooting sprigs Dad’s voice from the canoe lying in from metamorphic rock – gneiss – he likes biology translations of earth’s grammar caught in the muted crust uprisen, denuded rock holding with feldspar clasp sweep of her coniferous vine holding his quartz embossed entangling her widow’s wait in his ghostly incarnation

20

F aw n

in the ield yellowrimmed by pine stalks of autumn bakeapples stir the bog like pearling embers quelling sweet the licked tongues macabre. Dad held the gun iron arm pointed at the clearing wisp the breathing grass. held the ghost – one shot, through and down before the ly buzzed from my hand. my girlish echo caught him by surprise as the fawn tripped the sod for its hungry mother then my cry before the tear rolled round he shook the place where I sought grace sat stared into the barrel

21

Caplin

with the irst rolling the scavengers break from trucks with buckets cupping dinner in their ists dipped in pregnant tides – salty pilgrimage of grocery bags illing a forager’s maws by evening ish lap, pinned to lines, blown like drying socks into whiffs slipped down the gullet guzzling faith

22

Slub

high men skulking past rotting shacks pufing under pinish stars joint butts ’round where the tide used to be caplin-glutted comb of cod wrung spume-clean got a go friend to the mainland to blow money on the Fort Mac crowd gullible as me arse pass me a smoke b’y and let me breathe sit on this rock, grown brown prostituting my ass, remember poppy used to yarn with the soaps splitting his knuckle on the needle knitting nets to catch death in his hands lost in slub, rolling spindly old smokes, to spout through the hole in his teeth

23

Cul-de-sac

over spine of buried road white femur dries on the slope covered in cloth of morning – rising from its grave a subtle sleeper dressed in pillow marsh, saltsunk to death a parting gift – another planting with seeds of bone my own rude garden

24

Scrap of Codland History

a isherman hooks soggy bread in his merchant’s net scrapes dust off his collar blows holes in his shadow steams like an old kettle whistling from a hut of ice lapping winds call home to the crag and the quay

25

Dad

even writing it makes the hand slip the page ahead like white frost on black ice a wrong turn down a lane of announcing what it was like to have a father typed with soot of coals black death for other words dad sways to the end of the way swinging past my verse always following my tongue of lint inding a way to strike back at enunciation, ignite the ink

26

Recipe for Poached Cod Fish must be fresh smelling and fresh tasting. If it is whole, its eyes are bright and full … – Mastering the Art of French Cooking

I looked into the eyes of a cod once, when I didn’t have to. Dad said he was fresh, so I gutted him, chopped his head, peeled his spine, caressed his scales silvery as a nickel turning between my oily ingers, twitched when the blood spurted out of his headless body those two hollow moons, I saw as his mouth hung open, gill-gasping head sliding from the cutting board knife still trembling. Dad said don’t worry ish got no feelins he made a funny face as another one lipped from the dory into the wash of sea. I stared at a spume quiver. Dad said eat eat, so I cod-gulped for love or guilt, dull eyes rolling off my plate with an awful shiver 27

Gluttony You can really have no notion how delightful it will be When they take us up and throw us, with the lobsters, out to sea! – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

start of insect orange table tossed from maritime streets hard-boiled as folkish beats a party of paper smiles strung like magic lanterns lit into claws and mandibles sucking hollow shard of bone tongue-digging for any lesh licking at the carapace for a taste of spawn dismemberment in carnal waves gluttony and desire symphony spun as the juice drips like the taste of blood from sharpened bones a bobbing eye blinks cold as pearl under predation’s grip

28

Last Supper

vaporous scold of door lights exposing globular nuggets congealed frigid box half-open in back she stuffed pudding pops, shame of sticky fondue, a chill of wine half-corked beside the stilled champagne half-dripping cheese, chinchilla bits of fuzz trile on its crown layered with cherries tending the top from back then, when dessert was this widow’s last thought three days of gravy, funeral-bowled stew, decades of raspberry jam, bottled mussels in brine, his sandwich half-swallowed, half-empty plate the crumbs she can’t share, too much

29

M y M o t h e r E at s B a k e a p p l e s

my mother breathes the stink of bears brooding on her bogs, ire-lit shrubs, a little glow between her nimble thumbs she tastes black ly death crumbled red in her greedy grasp sluicing down her endless wrists reaching into autumn’s tarnished lesh knees bent, temptation’s lare my father knows her goodness buried there, a ripened bush snaking through her auburn hair she eats these earthy suns – spitting embers in a bakeapple tub for grunts and pies and jam he’d pick the world for her

30

Damsons

no room for fruit pies on the raw island where salt tears into skin sore blue as thumbs stubbed from slack spray winds where urchins chew the spine of hunger until oracle of relief tempts the end of branches like purple stomachs dangling from spindly evangelical arms I hold the pits distended into budding wooden bolts teasing emaciated skies with bruise of damsons ready to be plucked I bite peeling off skin burying lust as green as the lesh I suck with blown perplexity holding open my palm of bitter juice stuck to ingers urging me on as I frown to lick them

31

J e l ly F i s h

in those days I wore ponytails ate junk food while staring pop-bellied at tampons loating in the landwash riding next to strings of kelp clinging green as the snot of strangers in those days I was all hormones when the rough skin of exposed cliffs told me to do it, when behind an eyelash moon I only kissed the salt off some boy’s lips, erotic to taste – another human in this snag of nature infertile as stones though lush as jellies blooming to cups spilling into a wine of seas

32

June Bugs

charging beetles swarm like locusts the light poles of summer casting cryptic wings in a child’s eye, sending mothers bawling in hair nets past the porch-light, where their armies climb to invade the glow of snuggly small-town homes haunted under blue hills of June reaching blindly for a being to tell them where to go to escape the shuddering frame of faces stuck in myths, the falling cascades of hair lowing in the wake of seagull tides – strangers hooded ighting on under neutral streetlights in the buzzing dusk in the beetle glow we crush their clamouring souls beneath our childish sneaker feet; by daybreak they give in as the fattened army clacks exotically back like a storm of bug-eyed bats to the dewy grass to bury moonlight underground, in the choke of grub-green earth

33

N at i v i t y S c e n e

near the manger where the christ child lies I sat out once under incensed trees a baby at my hips of straw doll eyes laked as I scratched poems of exposed, obvious dreams with a virgin’s stiff hand into the wooden stable * Mary electric-haloed, blowing smoke in the eyes of the babe cigarettes puffed on the sly as I carved my tune on his rocking cradle as alphabet worlds came to me justifying my permanence as the daughter of a saint a healer man with an upturned grin falling over my crib drunk and snoring –

34

the laugh the next morning while reading news from St. Anthony: northern lights found where dogs glowed coiled in dead ish perfume the one that bit me in the eye loved me as a father should until a distant star cracked the night leaving no light for the Magi

35

The Arches

nan let go a yarn spooled in arches said she canned lobster lesh of tails, tubs of roe next to a violent tide that nearly drowned her. said dj joey electriied her ear no more lour sacks for ish trucked barefoot on the wharf scales between her sunburnt claws plucking at the rain. this before the dole or her Daniel’s Harbour fell into the hungry gulf wrecked for haunted ish plankton-buried in a snoweroded treasure.

36

* now space of arches wears a wig of grass an unilled face no eyes to see the wreckage. who’s stopping me from crawling on those tumbling waves? rolling through tuckamore hurricanes of weeds rough stings of time, salt-scoured cheeks bone-cut by gales casting a trail of twine

37

Some Shock

“ ... dropped dead at bingo, maid,” says the women from de mall ’cross the street lookin’ in yer cofin “tut tut tut,” they say, “some shock!” pregnant under jeans they pay respects in windbreakers loppy as toothless gums yellow as a glass of iery rum * she reverberates through her choking years of churlish grins, for her babies ine but whetted as a blade for the husband she chucked to the winter’s edge with a brewery on his breath outside they smoke her achievement a croak of circles witches’ brew of pig’s feet puffs open them to dust in wreaths of withering halos

38

G u y F aw k e s N i g h t

bonires come uproarious – framed in meditation, scrawling sweeps of illusion history’s pot of ire – drunk Canterbury spires phrase the eyes to murderous lames of anachronistic mirage glow of du Maurier lights on guard for plots against some English king crest the night as anti-catholic shoots of smoke swell a cabal of atvs as slow-turned tires combust to fustian waste snow blowing ash, revolting against the night

39

W h at t h e A m e r i c a n s L e f t

roughly naked squalls sigh of open-ended shores a bitter swagger Bob Hope lives in Harmon’s halls as Elvis swings Mae West shining in a slip, smashing across piss-stained crushed velvet seats all unglued is rat-chewed glamour stuck to a footlight. Mosey told me to get off the humpbacked sod-swollen bunkers, toy ammo, and shopping carts stop playing by that toxic ield of vaudevillian lupins diamond of irst bases drawn under Heddy Lamarr heels sashaying across buried B-24 pancake-pressed nose-diving Liberator pointed into sloshing sands overlooking overlooking overlooking

40

O l d R u n w ay

once bombers revved in the belly American opinions cigar-turned over which war to enter and when weeds split the issures now strips lost in dandelion maze under stage of Harmon air force gothic as the old French it replaced refracted panes, vaulted glass, blown hangars for invading guards a victory dance as armed cathedrals lean over wary brooks where the last salmon pray to the steeple reach of industrial suns

41

Dumped

at 16 they parked out here on the dump road leading to rusty bed frames and rats – out here turned off the sun, switched on the beams scanning monstrous evergreens of a gravel pit so rough dry-humping jeans could force the earth to quake the bushes behind her cracked-mirror eyes too stunned to fake a horny boy’s brambleberry gaze about to lose his borrowed faith in his slatternly girl – gone now, she wades in crabapple mud confused sheath of velveteen fog hides her shoe shine gleam in the barnacle crust under burnished skies she grips a burst of torrential rain then stops to purge this prodigal memory

42

Goon

on tiled horizons dot of light luorescent towels sponge my brain bounced, as the announcer shouts: the goon’s down, knocked into blooming concussion missing the next period under squeal of fans here in the restroom I pick up pubic hairs and lint with my face and I know you’re outside waiting, I know you’re waiting for me not to cry – to rise like the needle of an album, like the stick of a blind man clacking, so like a clod at the end of a scufle I rise at the sound of the whistle

43

Sea Punks

on spliced nerves of pavement we are hair-sprayed hard pink as a disco moon shining in a glitter squall of rain apocalyptic as we headbang past the ruin of beach screeching over yellow lines as Vicious vibrates through our throats, “I wanna be your dog!” in desire our wheels swerve away from smalltown saltbox gods, the vibe of the desolate bogs reek as the fog tongues our slimy throats, our scale-plated wrists blueshadowed, bruised legs in ishnets trawling our deeps like baited ish to be fucked by rapacious tides. but we are trout of another caste, lured by dark twitch of radio waves synthetically wrecked currents underground metallic beats cod-tattooed bones and lesh grinding into 1984 pricked with the hook of rebellion

44

swollen lips bite into pins slice through our ears pierce lidless eyes before we are released

45

Wireless on Signal Hill

.– up there on that molested bog we forgot Marconi waved to an old world strung over swells of stink and crash like mad lukes we frolicked illing cars with spawning tongues untested vibes resounding off Cabot Tower cabling in enough rain green moss, lichen, wind to blast high speeds off the bunker, past the cannons hearing Johnny muzzle the gulls light of screaming breath our miraculous voices, odd signals from a loop of miscreants

–... back then Marconi hooked the power of waves saying, “there’s England,” with telescopic prick eye to the satellites he pivots 46

erect as the spigot pointing at us, binding us, confusing our signals to “hopefully Ireland” on that wire unseen he wants to walk, to talk, to Cornwall, to lovely Cornwall, dissolved on the amorous distance

–.–. oh the town, don’t look down that damned Irish town drunk in the glut of fog stoked in the tinder pot of tickered houses, on stuttered plots with a view of the hill gritting in those bitten accents nothing but the baldest rocks in the hardest coves, only slightly putrid is the dirt of the Battery ishing death out of sleet this muddled town of perverted fogs creeps up his legs, absorbs his privates to vulgar spark then shrivelled city, beloved by the left lank of despair unlike the vales of real Avalon but pounded by port and whores

47

hyphenated, hateful joy hidden under the laughing sheets stewing – inding some reception

–.. up here the old Italian dreams of Bologna plums but stuffed with pints and dandelions walks the wire home, past the funk islands, the great auk, waves in the mirror at his own fancy skull passes the heart attacks remembering him into the future tight as a ballerina in this dire hour he splays the circus of seas walks the narrows, sour and invisible plummeting through the chaos of waves ripping the cables from the grist of algae pulling the line through mists one way back to Paris, Trieste, forget time and space on a rope of nothing he holds the world occult on the plank of the earth’s mantle – he is the hour with no boat to catch him, telegraphing home with blank connection

48

. he waits, gets through receiving dials, operatic emotion he crushes sails at midnight breaks through the starlight to a song of simple words sent to his satellite in strips of lightning enough electricity to free

..–. the message: the letter “S” on the radio litted through silence witness the covert criss-cross of dissolving bodies he watched fade into afterlife of barbarian grapes crushed by his Sasso Mussolini scaring a mermaid to chime his bottled message, smashed on our innocent rocks

49

R e p ly t o a F o o t n o t e

from the 1997 Norton Critical Edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula: “Donelson’s thick Scottish dialect is the last obfuscating language we will hear. Like Mr. Swales’s impenetrable Yorkshire speech, it is ostensibly British” (301): obfuscating, you say, to devils like me who reads you? his accent unholy as vampires contaminating your virginal Holy Words but “this devil is more clever than he is thought by some” says Van Helsing biting into opacity feeding off blaspheming throats bleeding obliquely, melodiously unfolding in clownish inidelity to the sacred script of your unassailable tongues scroll the passage: scrawls of agitations, hyphenations, apostrophes, atrophied words and signs, subtitles on the page (for those who can only read) parentheses translations or you – footnote.

50

he is impenetrable, you say, un-analyzable says, “it’s no canny to run frae London to the Black Sea we’ a wind ahint ye, as though the Deil himself were blawin’ on yer sail for his ain purpose” but as a voice don’t you hear it? even a note of pinched gyrations of your untainted tongue, your tidy obfuscations bewilder and betray someone

51

G u t e n b e r g ’ s G r av e

unmoveable type-fed uncut bricks of words mortared to the hands of garbage men tremble as the gulls circle and the cats spit that seed from Yeats unwind the winding path as Rilke weeds my life in widening circles for snifing rats that shit on onion-vulgar Bible fanning a maggoty hymn never sung off the leaf praying to the lot of worms not to be chewed but alphabetically burned into elegant internal rhymes – or buried digniied in ground encased not in dripping yolks but churning wondrous as the themes that reach and yearn from the spilling ground, deconstructing the dust

52

History of Writing

on the keyboard clck clck clock-tick clack hm hm bzz backstroke keystroke return shift option? command-control riff dirty ingers roam coffee sheen drip drip drip no notes but windows stuck blink admire cut a ghost to paste, ether-send vapour lines coltan wires strung up from Congo wars science iction sent, cursor’s quiet wink clack clack ding whz plunk return bang whir smack keys on machine’s roll etched to the edge of paper’s jam vibration slam, technology’s ledge where the ribbon winds black & red lag of writing dread no block keep going til the words spool Kerouac streams and return with a lever’s sigh padded ingers chicken pecking go, keep going, don’t be afraid, no corrections here

53

on the road only brilliance in the cigarette light – smoulder Escher tendons ride, watch the art rub the calloused bump, impart and hold, inger tap and think, thumped smooth lines move, ink’s stitch does soothe, surprise of O, loops of B, half-anchored L under slope of scroll-topped desk dries the thought spilled into scrawl, risk of ink, swift in the arch, dot and crossing spot of play, loose edits of, adding if, ballpoint touch, dynamic drift quill-tipped silence, pot-dipped, stroke of ruled lines high on the altar scribe shifting holiness aside, brushing perfection, meditative illumination. paint the codice, ornamentally hushed legends sleeping black-lit blocked calligraphy-cloistered he sits, apprentice to saints, marginalia patterned on his fate Books of Hours satin-stilled, knight and beast, wedding feasts, Kells hide, a bell tolls for halcyon script

54

The Prosthetist

sits at his vice gripped unusual Picasso in dust of severed parts, particulate sits with another’s stump turning in his plastered hand Pollocked like his smock sandpapered contours slope of calf, humped knee journey of muscle lexed hills of a body cupped in relief as the sitter grinds mechanic redeemer trained in workshops sculpted of velcro or glue moulding ache pasting space where silence burns

55

S c r e e n - s c r aw l i n g

pulse screen-simulated eyes too dead to cry through the ever-glow I turn your monitor head chord-jammed in the socket singing in reboot blink of lesh ice-creamed hands plaster-frosted snow on the wedding ring dissolves to ibre-optic black digits of electronic ash face of cotton balls and wax printed in jet-liner ink on hospital walls divine traces of no one behind the frame of stall a latline’s twitch and crawl and when the bright leaves fall we are warned not to touch the blood of angels for fear we might ly with pixelated wings

56

ICU

orphan of outports and pulsing bog salt-vein stripped widow spread lat as a drying cod on the steel of someone else’s platter, your alien skull wired to scenes dripped intravenously on the assembly line as you suck lost breath through a dissolving pane of glass – surrounded by sons and daughters loating over you, heads translucent as inlated balloons your mother’s eye pricks their outer space of plastic mums, unreal baby’s breath, catching one blue iris by the stem, lying you back to the ebullient marsh on the autumn stink where you kissed the last of your race now petri-plated on a gurney plugged into glowing screens where you blink strange faces of gray daughters, bald sons, one grandchild of wildest ink, waiting for the end of machines, the beginning of myth

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there you go – with a lickering sliver of eyes seen shooting in the mercurial distance a delicate splash of sea-light

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The Starry Night

Ptolemy never catalogued this – cyclop stare luorescent telescopic owl walks on wire buzz of bats, celestial splats of toad Ursa Major watching lashlight meteor streams battery-powered F-16s, zapping boom, engine fumes swirl past slash of pines where once Van Gogh’s cypress framed, now revolving satellites char the spangled dark stars disabused, no muse, wink behind a threatening shot Saint-Rémy’s window pane once a maddening wonder now shocking balls of dust spark nebulae of Georgia

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T h e W at e r R o o m s

August 29, 2005 St. Louis Cemetery gargoyle says good night, cemetery’s closed. but I see her peeping over walls, bits of moss around her nose eyes and hair bottled green; made living stone, she’s death’s ark stranger’s tombs bought, tour guide says, before the lood she preserved skulls inside her home now hurricanes echo in her bones The Mississippi there’s no ark, the water’s oblivion lattening marsh of New Orleans, lesh stink stream, and Bacchus with his goblet, ishing mud with a ball of twine hook stops idly blinking neon glow – bodies bloat the overlow

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Audubon Aquarium tortoise shell, sunken tomb, settled cage of beast, the water room bilge rots the loor, river bed disease crabs drowning near the beetle’s head lap-fading-drown stingray bobs without its barb, goldish glints a plunge for breath, spectators gone, vivarium’s dead Air Force One at ten thousand feet crowds feather with Audubon precision raptors, macaw, gulls lunch on decay, their prey diving past scuba mask of windshield Channeling tv sets abloom blocked aquarium within my view: pulsing arms, cries for air, blood-rolled eyes consuming I sit, agog, in goggles blinding vision 61

Fishing

you cast out across swamps, rivers, lakes, a continent angled up the eastern seaboard waves of cryptic wires throwing your lines hook me – in-tangled, metallic-whirred & enmeshed lesh-caught in stirred sea as iridescent swishing scales whip me up glinting to the shallows for the bait I surge until you tug my lip reeling me rhyming quietly on your spool lured within reach of the burning air

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A L o v e ly G u t t i n g

turkish scarf from Portobello waves over me clean, unwrapped sheath of moonlight illicit calm of bones leaving no space between me-and-my-bodyyou-and-your-body watchtower looms as this eclipse peels me back – the clasp black as the blinding night you rip, I feel a turn in that sky over Austin navigating each slip of your kiss up my tilting neck, on the bend you blow a subtle breath, and gone back into waves, silken storm where cool sheets crest a tide of irreversible foam from this sea I am ished, gutted and stripped, bled and bound, on your ship I sail or go down

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Sitting

on a train in Italy, from Venice to Florence after a night of fucking strangely a little girl sketched with a pencil on a sheet of white as I watched her eyes see me I fell asleep – to dream my portrait away

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S to c k w e l l S tat i o n

down from London enshrined in tunnel light a blind man strokes his muzzled dog under glass eyes watching for change or escalations to Brazil where Menezes’ dreams electric-cling to lowers dropped from a straining immigrant mop cleaning a city half-bombed on its way to beauty

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Not Paris

usually I want to be in Paris talking Picasso’s Demoiselles with Mavis in La Coupole on Montparnasse where all the spines are straight – but this morning’s mist got in my eye and through the dense blue I spied an elbow tilt before the light recalling how in summer twigs abuzz of bugs green as newest thoughts – for a mist this scandalous, steaming river edges with erotic hues, sequestered vaporous scenes, tattle-tale divinities absolved of oily paint in the basement of the Louvre where no one goes to shine the snows of breathing winter’s

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star-scratched eyes, Acadia melting April’s wheeze, secret roots of hairless trees in whispery moods perhaps not found in Paris

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G r e at B l u e H e r o n

his cape skims a wing of water tide-bound in the basin washing mud lats blue the spring too new and unworldly to explain the waving artful brush of his body stroking skies over Digby under fresh tint of hills daubed and pushing green from a sketch of twigs his traced legs tucked – whisked into a day of details unborn

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Fog

often there was haar on the slight wind past phantom-sprayed thoughts, kelp-fed waves cars light the density, beaded clouds of invisibility, dispersed wraith nuclei of iodine dissolved in each other, we taste the broth, intimate burn of condensation, perfectly resolved in our ininite evaporation

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Surge

clef of your back on the haze fragile and shirtless geography open my girding your neck burned brown Fundy mud low crests wash a clearing for my hand to sink like a claw on clay pressing into permanence worried tides sent forth gushing in holding back like the hour glass. time’s stopped staring my relection onto the glow of your immutable spine, rising tears without reason love is made, hoping you’ll not turn around to see the tide coming

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Parker’s Cove

ingers tipped in March winds, Fundy tongued spit of sea weeds shoelace kicked back to tides unfolding lood of white spume wipes your face off the scrawl of sand where I drew you, offering up my stick to the ishing shacks set as bobbing suns between my bathing thumbs spread salt-broken in the sands of March, where rigid coral claws haul time on the breakers

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Drive-by Dar winism

snow is leaves from you on the sluiced highway so I respond snow is . . . bleached coral and so on pass the clearing – pond open sprouting one trunk pencil-posted stork leg beaver-chewed passing clarity of ice our dirty wheels & tongues spit complexity at the street on the spot I quote: web of afinities . . . you say: Darwin, darling? the word delicate – light as spring trees as jays ill them scheming for the sky deined before us a wing, a twig, each wisp precise as spindles outlined in snow and bark sharply pencil-drawn in spidery patterns before punctilious eyes 72

Walking

boots bite into bird-print snow, salt marshes lag their storied steps: don’t go through that garden lost in conversation in-betweens – fallen roses dot the tinsel snow lonely stuck in April’s schemes holy as pew-ruled lines crows cross with arrowed steps pointing to pine-bent afternoons where ice nips the blundering heels – yet lovely plunging darkly go into pain of sitting white sheath of crisp sea-basin stream of blue jay trysts where craning branches fetch a hoary tread from reaping boot patterns left of wildest grace leaving no echo, path, or trace only empty page of rural snow – endless stretch of undertow

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Vagabond

spider trapped between panes – balls of silk suspended as if lying trapeze heaven-lifting lace covers the window echoes stretched ine under mists I sense love does go like this – a shocking yellow in the garden something coming spring are you coming? so frost nips the apple blossoms and I know it’s not my home in this garden the daffodils dip knowing they’re not my own on the basin white caps say they’ll have a prayer for this vagrant girl caught tripping on some binding roots, nature’s stolid scenery – and that horse she spooks glances back as if to say go home, girl, go on back to the wet clover and the rocks 74

Certainty

a certain way the sun warms my body a certain way the clouds swipe warmth away a certain way the path is lifting I look down a certain way, look up to ind my only way six Sundays ago was certain choking winds – your cofin mute as I quaver on a half-played lute not burst or swells, Ophelia’s weeds bereft of fame they lowered you and I could only breathe and hardly stare at certainty when today those dreams returned your death’s rush felt at ease so I could walk the trail, and mourn

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Twigs

quick as a slit of white-caps wrists of cartilage limp arch like crow’s feet

as claws of nature

disturbing waves

open woody veins earth sunk in rigor mortis

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scratch of sky

violating afternoons varicose belief

Down the Beach

1 yolk of sun breaks over what is not here stray for a day blinking at dull stones shaped in towers of eroded light arrowhead of gulls inds a thicket of brown clouds and asks no more 2 a minute leans on the day tuckamore rain absorbs the rotting snow grief comes like this through the window where the wiper leaves a slushy arc

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3 smuggled far away from the sea returning by and by the day takes the drift of numbness ice-curdled bay brings the tide dissolved blue and drowning out longing 4 in this rivulet of ice the eyes are bold a dusk of sea skein of white tide where the breaker scrawls its foggy screed if only

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Broken off Indian Head

slap of bald eagle chrome-whacked swells regale cloudy daub of sun refracted light blinks gaseous storming ruminations distilled particles, earthly delights shelled dory pounded to ribs, tide-ripped the carcass of illeted ish – cod? – stinking on the beach, laid surgically smooth, on immovable stones. so the world seems rough and rotten in late afternoon off Indian Head mounted on fractured bones memories leech to fossils in blustery bog we sit on the evening’s stippled pate

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preaching to a wave of embryo sky smashing relections, mirroring home

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Still Born

after volcanic birth, nothing grows here lopsided fetuses making room, for not growing pickled beauty blown wildlower abortions petal pink, dead bodies shunted exhausted by July, August rocks tantalize, pregnant with guts of endless granite, landscape infertile in a spit of ancient lava, island of stunted afterlife

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Misbegotten

grand beguiling of rocks cajoled to the edge of everything to ind life here is never to leave the world as home – under a tuckamore stream of rebellious ’aves h’and ’ave-nots knitted with cups of tea on a netted loop to haul sadness from the colour of fog to see sky lift fjords of battled green the lat line of bog looded with the blood of coniferous shadow never to waste the pain of wilderness for the strange grip that lets go of grief

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we live with it – bruise the stones with faint loneliness stretched out on a scrub of pebbled beach that washes but never frees you

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G r av e s i d e

sprig of dogberry profound as stones piled love, appalling to remember grief, the growing rough. mulch of words leave endings. where we threw lowers, snapped frosts of March hurled tenderness anointed tongues, petals of fate. spoke to you. through dirt placed cries unburdened rose spreading songs digging for lesh of roots

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NOTES

port au port: “Pinish” is a local name for “any variety of sticklebacks ... small ish found in fresh or brackish water” (Dictionary of Newfoundland English). tuckamore: “Krummholz” is German (literally “crooked, bent, or twisted wood”) and refers to a formation particular to subarctic and subalpine climes, where ierce, bitter winds stunt and deform trees. after the wreck: “Flotsam” is the loating debris of a ship. “Jetsam” is the part of a ship or any of its items that are purposely jettisoned in the case of an emergency, then sink, or are washed ashore. “Lagan” is cargo left lying on the sea loor, sometimes marked by a buoy that can be recovered. “Derelict” is cargo on the sea loor that cannot be recovered. “Stóra Dímun” is one of the Faroe Islands, north of Scotland; Atlantic pufins are legally hunted and cooked as a delicacy in the Faroes and in nearby Iceland. barachois: “Gneiss” is a commonly found metamorphic rock, banded or foliated, and usually coarse-grained. fog: “Haar” is a Scottish word for a coastal fog. slub: “Slub” is the “slimy substance on [the] body of ish” or the “blood, slime, [or] liquid refuse from [the] process of splitting cod” or the deposit of such slime on “ish-nets and gear” (Dictionary of Newfoundland English).

what the americans left: The Consolidated B-24 Liberator was a “heavy bomber” plane extensively used by the US Air Forces in the latter years of the Second World War. sea punks: “I Wanna Be Your Dog” is a song by early punk/ metal band The Stooges, from their 1969 debut album; Sid Vicious covered it with The Vicious White Kids, a band formed for one concert only, in August 1975; another version, recorded at a 1978 concert, was released on the posthumous album Sid Sings in December 1979. wireless on signal hill: “Sasso” is “stone” in Italian. gutenberg’s grave: “Unwind the winding path” is taken from William Butler Yeats’ poem “Byzantium,” which irst appeared in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933); “my life in widening circles” is from the irst line in Rainer Maria Rilke’s “I live my life in widening circles,” which appears in The Book of Hours: The Book of Monastic Life (1899). stockwell station: Jean Charles de Menezes, a 27-year-old Brazilian, was misidentiied by police as one of the perpetrators of the failed London bombings of 21 July 2005 (two weeks after bombers killed 56 people). He was working as an electrician; on his way to a job, he was surveilled and followed into Stockwell Station, where, in an Underground train, he was wrestled to the ground by oficers and shot seven times in the head at point-blank range. No oficer was ever held legally accountable for his death. After a long campaign by Menezes’ family, in 2009 Scotland Yard issued an apology and agreed to an undisclosed inancial settlement with the family.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Several of these poems, in slightly different versions, irst appeared in Canadian literary journals and magazines: “Port au Port” in Work of Arts; “Easter Egg” and “The Crossing” in The Antigonish Review; “What the Americans Left” in The Nashwaak Review; “Sea Punks” in Vallum; and “Reply to a Footnote” and “Gutenberg’s Grave” in CV2. My thanks to those journals’ editors for their support and encouragement. Thanks also to Brian Gibson for writing the notes and for helping me ind the poems, to Nathan Elliott for hearing the beats, and to Allan Hepburn for inishing touches and suggestions.