Something I'm Supposed to Remember 9780773596016

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Something I'm Supposed to Remember

Something I'm Supposed to Remember Holly Kritsch

HARBINGER POETRY SERIES AN IMPRINT OF CARLETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

O Holly Kritsch and Carleton University Press Inc., 1996 Printed and bound in Canada

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Kritsch, Holly, 1946Something I'm Supposed to Remember: poems (Harbinger Poetry Series; 1) ISBN 0-88629-303-0 I. Title. 11. Series PS8571.R754S64 1996 C811.54 C96-900719-1 PR9199.3.B698S64 1996 Cover design: Barbara Cumming, Carleton University Press Front cover art, "Remnants of Familiar Territory," oil on canvas, 6' x 5', 1989 by Sue Rogers. Collection of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton.

Carleton University Press gratefully acknowledges the support extended to its publishing program by the Canada Council and the financial assistance of the Ontario Arts Council. The Press would also like to thank the Department of Canadian Heritage, Government of Ontario through the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Recreation, for their assistance.

for Carl and for Jennie Lee, H e a t h , and Jonathun

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My thanks to the editors of the following journals and anthologies where these poems first appeared: Waves Descant Event Antigonish Review Arc Canadian Forum Capital Poets Dangerous Graces Open Set Symbiosis

CONTENTS MOUTHING THE WORDS

Walking the Highway 3 Mouthing the Words 6 The Tall Man 7 Travelling with Luther 9 Leaving Home 12 The Lobster 15 Childhood 16 What are you Supposed to Say? 17 Hallucination 20 Hannah -words Imagined or Overheard 21 SOMETHING I'M SUPPOSED TO REMEMBER

Playing for Keeps 25 Swish 28 Baptism 29 Carnival Man 30 Rudiments 31 Something I'm Supposed to Remember 33 Initials 35 Tourists 36 Something to Cry About 37 When I was Fifteen 41 Friend 42 Son 44 Son 11 45 Salvation Army 47 LEAVING THE DEAD BEHIND

St. Luke's 51 Leaving the Dead Behind 53 Family Bible 55 Carnival 56 "The Bump" - Springhill, 1958 57

Old Friend 58 Remembrance Day 59 The Fully Illustrated Household Physician 61 Legal Tender 62 Recollection 63 Vacancies 64 Designer Stores 65 When she Died 66 In the Villages 67 Women's Ward 68 Nursing Home 69

MOUTHING THE WORDS

WALKING THE HIGHWAY

This is something like a game; my mother and I are walking the highway; she pushes the carriage, my brother rides inside. We have walked a long time and I am tired but I must say nothing; my mother will be cross if I speak. The lights from cars shine on the rock face of the curves ahead; I try to read the white messages that people have painted there; I cannot tell words yet, but I know all the letters. When a car stops beside us my mother smiles, talks softly to the men inside; the little light from the ceiling of the car shines on their faces their slippery black hair.

My mother pushes the carriage across the ditch and into the woods where we must stay until she returns. I hear the door slam as she gets in the car, the sound of laughing or screaming as they drive away. From this place I cannot see the road, but headlights sweep over the trees above me like the searchlight at the fisherman's fair. There are sounds in these woods, in the rustle of bushes, my breath going in and out of my body. I stand very still and look up at the sky where it's lighter. My brother is not sleeping but he doesn't cry; he hides under the hood of the carriage where I will not fit.

This is something like a game and my mother will come back before I count all the stars in that patch of sky above my head; I will hear her crashing through the bushes to find us, she will be happy and have dollars in her pocket.

MOUTHING THE WORDS

Walking behind Mr. Acker, stepping in the holes left by his rubber boots in the snow. Calling him father, dad, daddy, knowing he isn't listening, can't hear me. Not knowing what a father is what he does, just missing the sound of the word. Savouring the feel of the syllables falling off the blade of my tongue. Too afraid to speak them out loud, lagging behind Mr. Acker staying just out of reach, mouthing the words.

THE TALL MAN

Cinderella dressed in yella went upstairs to kiss her fella

I am skipping on the front porch while the tall man visits my mother, I have tried to go inside, but the door is hooked, I have tried to see through the keyhole. The tall man has told my mother to send me to the orphanage, he says that girls are too much trouble, but boys like my brother are fine. how many kisses did she give him one two three four The tall man has a golden tooth that sparkles when he chews his gum, When I go away he is coming to live with my mother.

I want to go inside to see the tall man, I want to say that I won't tell, like I told on Mr. Acker and made my mother angry. Cinderella dressed in yella went upstairs to kiss her fella

I can't remember what I told but it won't happen again I won't tell anything If he'll let me stay here.

by mistake she kissed a snake two, four, six, eight. I am skipping on the front porch while the tall man visits my mother.

TRAVELLING WITH LUTHER

When the rum is gone we pile into Luther's car to go to the bootleggers; my mother pushes me into the back between two men; I am too young to stay home alone. She spreads a blanket across my knees to keep off the draft because the car has no heat. The men sway against me as Luther takes the turns; I watch their pudgy hands, wait for them to slither beneath my blanket.

In the front seat my mother is singing a song and everyone laughs; she repeats it over and over, words falling thick and broken from her tongue; we are travelling with Luther in his long white buick with fins.

He shows us how it takes the corners on two wheels; I watch the woods flash by, the white line of highway curling under our wheels; someone screams and Luther pushes the pedal to the floorboards again. We shut off the car lights when we leave the highway, bump over a track through a field and park far off from a house, we wait for the porch lights to go on for someone to tie up the dogs. Luther gets out of the car and goes inside. We are quiet now, . My mother has stopped singing, I can hear the crickets in the ditch beside us the sound of the dogs barking my mother's muffled giggles from the front seat.

The red glow of a cigarette burns in one hand of a man beside me, his other hand fumbles in the darkness. Under the blanket I sit with my legs tightly crossed, one foot locked behind the other, I am too young to stay home alone.

LEAVING HOME

I soak in a galvanized tub of hot water; Soap bubbles tickle my armpits; when I move my mother shouts for me to sit quiet so I don't splash water on the floor.

I look down at black and purple marks on my body; I do not know how they got there; my mother says I am bad and God put them there to make me ugly. I am going to a new house to live; the people won't want me if I'm covered with marks; they will send me back and my mother will be gone, I will be alone.

I am like an apple that is bruised when you bounce it on the floor, I am spoiled. I have soaked a long time; my mother says it will take these marks away. When the water cools she adds more from the tank at the end of the stove. Maybe I will come out smooth and pink like my brother David; he has no ugly marks, he is round and perfect like a doll. David sits beside the stove; he is not going away; I blow him soap bubbles when no one is looking, but he does not smile; David hardly ever smiles.

He must not become bruised and spoiled, I must sit quiet in this tub and not splash water on the floor, I must take good care of him.

THE LOBSTER

I only remember this; the man's coattails flapping in the offshore breeze as he stood before me offering the lobster. I remember clutching it arms outstretched from my body, running all the way back to the house, The pile of empty shell on the oilcloth of the table, and angry questions, who was the man what did you do did he touch you until memory blurred into shame and afterwards I was never quite sure that he didn't.

CHILDHOOD

It's in the feel of the soft muck of the riverbank against the soles of new waders as I watched them drag for his body every day after school for a week.

In the sound of the crackling of trees with ice the snap of the twigs under our frozen feet as we checked the snares for food for dinner. In the cold smoothness of the unyielding doorknob against my hand, the smell of cigarettes and beer and something undefined drifting through the keyhole.

It's in the smell of exhaust fumes on the crisp autumn air, from the car idling quietly in the lane, waiting to take me away.

First time on the bus alone squeezed next to the window, your feet don't touch the floor but you hold them still like your mother said, you're too big to swing them and kick the seat in front of you. And the man sitting next to you says he likes your dress, you tell him it's new and he laughs pats you on the knee like an uncle - or maybe not, cause he's staring at you, like your mother's friends sometimes stare, and sometimes they squeeze you too tight your mother says don't complain, don't be foolish ignore them and who do you think you are Marilyn Munroe? and everyone laughs cause you don't even have breasts. The man starts talking and his voice is blurry so you have to listen hard, he wants you to understand how it felt when his girlfriend left him, but you don't and you can't think of anything to say.

He's drinking from a bottle hidden in his jacket and his breath smells like rum so you try not to breathe when he leans near your face, saystUdon'tgrow into a bitch," like his girlfriend. And he's pushing closer, so you squeeze tight into the comer, the window is cold against the side of your head, and your new crinoline digs into the backs of your thighs. An empty bottle falls from his jacket, rolls up the aisle; the other passengers are looking your way and your throat aches cause you want to cry. At the next stop when the driver asks if the man is bothering you, you shake your head "no" cause you're scared to say yes, scared you'll make the man mad or the driver will move you, and when you stand up everyone will be staring.

So you stay where you are and his hand is on your knee again above your knee and you beg God not to let it go higher but he doesn't listen, and you want to tell the lady in front of you but she may say you're foolish and who do you think you are Marilyn Munroe? and everyone will laugh cause you don't even have breasts. And you think of the breasts that you're going to grow and you hope that you don't; you think of your mother, how she can twist away from men, laugh and not even get mad, how she makes fun of you says you can't take a joke. But the man has fallen asleep with his hand on your thigh, you don't move his hand cause he might wake up, and the lady across the aisle is frowning at you, but you're almost to Yarmouth on your first bus trip alone and you haven't swung your legs or kicked the seat in front of you and your mother will ask if you were good and what are you supposed to say?

HALLUCINATION

He would appear when I opened my eyes suddenly in the black night, bending over my bed or standing not far off beside the dresser.

I would scream until you stumbled from your bed and sidled carefully over the spot where he stood. I became unable to go to sleep at night afraid of his intrusion. I don't remember when I stopped seeing him, only our ritual of exorcism, your body gliding closer towards his image until he became you. I didn't know then that he was my father, only an image, preserved in the soft fold of cells as the brain holds the curve of a favoured sling shot against the palm, the slick of a peeled alder branch, retains fragrances in its hidden layers reincarnations of memories long dead.

HANNAH

- WORDS IMAGINED OR OVERHEARD

My boys cruise the Cape on Saturday night like we did back twenty years, cause the dance in town cost three and two bits no beer allowed, while a girl we knew lived up at the Cape but her father turned mean if the catch wasn't good, Hannah was easy, Hannah was cheap, Hannah was there on Saturday night. Doesn't seem long ago she was pushing her pram up the old shore road in the dark, stomping along in grubby white socks crammed into run-over shoes. We'd pull up beside her and yell something smart while she hid her pram in the bush, with the kids just sitting there, never could talk or too scared to try, not even a whimper, only their eyes, burning like cat's eyes from the bushes.

She'd hop in beside us and drive to the shore, took thirty minutes all told, couple of bucks, the split of a beer, sight more than she rated at that, but Hannah was easy Hannah was cheap Hannah was there on Saturday night. When we dropped her back to pick up the kids, she'd start up the highway again, looking behind as we headed for town we could see those white socks, lit up in the headlights from somebody's car.

Hannah still lives in the harbour they say keeps dogs since the kids have been taken, can hardly remember her face anymore, most forgot her name till tonight, don't even remember the children at all, only their eyes, burning like cat's eyes from the bushes.

SOMETHING I'M SUPPOSED TO REMEMBER

PLAYING FOR KEEPS

He asked me to play at the town marble hole, right outside the post office where everyone could see. I clutched my collection in a drawstring bag, catseyes, shooters, cloudys, and one special big blue glassy, that I kept for luck but would never play. I'd loved him since first grade while he loved everyone else, Shirley with the ringlets or Carole who showed her underpants with one flip of her poodle skirt. It was hard to concentrate being so close, hard not to admire the way his hair swirled around the nape of his neck, the carefree ridge of dried snot that streaked from the comer of one nostril. He won the first ten holes, said we should play doubles, triples, and my friend Eddie was making choking gestures from the side lines,

but what did it matter, my luck would change, We dusted a smooth path to the hole and lined up for our triple shots.

Down to my last few marbles, it was past supper and Eddie was yelling for me to quit, but one more try, and I'd win for sure. But I didn't. The only marble left was the blue glassy the one I'd found in a wrecked car and the junkyard owner said I could keep, the marble I never played before, and everyone watching as I pulled it from the bag, Eddie on the sidelines yelling-don' t do it but I did. And Eddie following me home shouting," why did you do it," spit spraying through his front teeth.

D u m b Eddie offering to win it back for me, trying to fill my bag with marbles from his own collection, not knowing anything at all.

Not knowing I didn't want the marble now, that I was crying only because I wouldn't have taken his last marble, the best one he had. Neither of us knowing it wasn't about marbles at all.

SWISH

An empty rum barrel from the local distillery cost five dollars delivered to the cellar door, and everyone knew the value of the strong black dregs in a village committed to temperance. It had a place in a corner of the cellar, near bins of fall apples and shrivelling carrots. Our parents poured boiling water through the bung hole and tightly stoppered it.

.

The rest was the job of children swishing the mixture back and forth ten swishes a day for ten days, a lunchtime ritual before we emerged into winter sunlight, our hands covered with oily dust from the barrel. We carried that guilt into the pew on Sunday; our bare thighs wiggled against sticky varnished seats as the preacher glared from the pulpit, we didn't yet know the necessity of putting sin in its right perspective.

BAPTISM

Stepping waist deep into the water of the baptismal font arms outstretched in his cassock the preacher begins his supplication. Under black baptismal robe, I tremble in my best nylon dress and patent shoes that will not be the same again. Waiting to repeat the practised vows, I know this once-in-a-lifetime purge will never be enough.

I have not been so close before; The lead weights in my gown tickle at my knees, I peer through ripples of living water and glimpse the preacher's legs safely encased in undulating hip waders. A revelation, before I am swept backwards under the cold water, aware already of the practical reaches of being born again.

CARNIVAL MAN

I can still see your body blocking our doorway the summer I was twelve, know the yeasty mingle of beer and sweat, your lips thick, glistening, gargles of phlegm rolling in your throat with each quick breath. I can remember measuring the distance to the back door in a glance as my knees turn to rubber, like in dreams where I try to escape and cannot run. I can still feel your faltering grip and the surge of strength that carried me out the door and down the street in search of my mother. I can hear your voice hours later, running like oil through our house, reassuring, bargaining fistsful of free tickets to the rides and a sure win at the bingo table.

RUDIMENTS

We watched them snickering behind the backs of women making jokes and laughing and we laughed too, but never quite so loud, even then we knew the joke was on us. Later at school boys made rude gestures, from under desk-tops, while our faces grew red with shame. We were expected to learn the rules to slide politely from beneath the touch of a family friend, to pass men huddled on comers not hearing the words that slithered through their teeth to stare somewhere beyond them and never acknowledge a possibility.

And we did learn not to take it personally, this fault of sex, but they've grown more cautious, these men who boast of their conquests now wear vasectomy scars like trophies, sit with legs drawn closer together, listen more carefully to the same jokes, no longer as certain the ending won't be changed.

SOMETHING I'M SUPPOSED TO REMEMBER

There's something I'm supposed to remember; they've been asking me over and over; my grandmother sits in the rocker, her glasses shine so I can't see her eyes, my mother is standing beside her, I can see wet spots under the arms of her dress, I am trying hard to remember. It's about Mr. Acker, I am cold; my mother isn't there but I can see Mr. Acker through the brown rungs of my crib. Through the wavy pane of the window I see a black dog over by the woods, it is getting dark, the dog is walking on the snow, my mother is mad, there is something I'm supposed to remember. It's about Mr. Acker; I am lying in my crib trying to pull up the covers Mr. Acker is lifting me up, carrying me to his bed, my Mother isn't there.

In the woods there is almost no snow under the trees, and pine needles aack under your feet, There's something I'm supposed to remember.

It's about Mr. Acker; I am cold, Mr. Acker's bed is warm but something is happening under the covers, I'm trying to lift them but I can't, I can't remember, but.. . there is something.

INITIALS

That autumn we carved initials into smooth maple limbs, jagged wounds complete with hearts and arrows. Impatient at the rustle of brittle leaves their gentle release to season, impatient at erupting nipples already chafing against T-shirts, at legs dangling long and awkward beneath us. Already clever we still believed we could grow beautiful. That autumn we realized we couldn't hold childhood forever, We deftly wielded point of jackknife through moist young bark impatient to finish final messages.

TOURISTS

We glimpsed them through car windows as they passed through town, or stopped just long enough to use the washroom of the garage across the street. The men wore floppy shorts and revealed masses of tanned flesh through the opening of half buttoned Hawaiian shirts; a contrast to our own fathers, who browned only to level of shirt sleeve or collar, leaving bellies white and gleaming like the underside of fish. The women talked loud and laughed, their eyes perusing us like artifacts, snapping pictures of our gaping faces. We endured and felt privileged. They descended like the circus or a flock of tropical birds, dazzling our imaginations, making our own lives bleak by contrast.

SOMETHING TO CRY ABOUT

Didn't they know if they had waited one more day a week maybe I would have done it myself. If they had held off just a little, my mother and a grown up cousin held off wrestling me onto the bed that lunch hour, pinning me down, tearing off my blouse, buttons flying forcing the thing over my shoulders as I twisted and kicked. Rolling me over, their elbows pushing into my spine, when they fasten the hooks at the back, before releasing me to stand at the mirror humiliated; two perfect padded cones sticking straight out beneath my blotchy face.

And my mother telling me to stop crying or she'll give me something to cry about. Nothing to do but accept those perfect 34's my mother's cast-offs mine to inherit. The spaces are huge, inside these points entrapping my shrivelled nipples, And there is school this afternoon. the whole class rivets attention on my chest, swelled to miraculous proportions over the lunch hour. Nobody says a word but for days they keep watch expecting another eruption, and this one they don't want to miss.

Tree climbing becomes hazardous, straps break and hang below T-shirts, long white strings flapping around my thighs. At school parties boys suddenly ask me to dance, until one boy performs a reckless twirl and rams his elbow into one of these empty cones,

denting it in, where it stays, while we both keep dancing as if nothing has happened. where it stays until the music stops then rehuns to its glorious shape with one loud pop resounding across the room.

Didn't they know these were dangerous objects like cars or motorbikes, they should never be entrusted to a thirteen year old. Didn't they know there were things they should have told me about, like those spongy pads my mother kept in her top drawer to stuff her own with, things that would have made dancing less cruel as I stood on that awful dance floor.

WHEN I WAS FIFTEEN

When I was fifteen and believed that sex only happened in books and to girls from the Cape, you told me you were pregnant. To tell me this when virginity was a cause greater than the plight of seals or small fur-bearing animals. When we both knew your father wouldn't keep a pregnant girl and the home for unwed mothers cost two dollars a day. To tell me this, then talk of school next year, convincing yourself it was possible if your eyes never met mine. Didn't you notice, as we stood outside the dancehall scuffing white bucks in the dirt, that you were already older? Didn't you feel us separating, feeding our retreat with giddiness and gossip, like those last few minutes waiting for a departure or a death?

FRIEND

I remember the way you powdered your face to make it look white and cursed the black man who loved your mother. In school you sat at the back of the room the oldest one in grade eight, too big for your desk, and when you spoke of women your words implied a knowledge not found within the crinolines of village girls.

.

On the dance floor defiant, you held your partner too close under the stem gaze of chaperons, never stumbling or counting beats, reducing the music to the rhythm of your own body

Never quite black or white enough, you left town early, returned in a uniform, later with a woman, and now carrying a Bible, a born-again preacher, railing against sins of the flesh, altering your focus on a lesson begun long ago when virgin girls first came to understand why dancing was sinful in the eyes of their Baptist God.

SON

This room grows warm as I watch the door, a book sticks in my hands, I don't know what 1 read. Four floors up they dress her child in the clothes I bought, to bring him down to me. She signs her name on one last line, and waits inside her room for him to go. A nurse arrives, the baby in her arms, I reach for him, he casts me one blind glance, then drifts back to sleep.

Four floors up a girl still sits on her well-made bed and hopes her choice is right.

SON I1

Standing before me slick from the shower I cannot imagine you on the deck of a fishing boat hauling in nets, setting traps, but you would have; only your height and the strength in your shoulders suggest that you could have been bred for the sea. In my head there's a name and a place where she lives that I'm holding in trust these last ten years waiting for the day you will ask. I must warn you, it may not solve all the mysteries, the curious lilt to your gait, the way your fingers wander a keyboard in perfect harmony or your rage that sometimes transcends reason.

You could be disappointed; I know that village, the gxey wooden houses

clinging to rocks above the harbour; the reek of fish? gulls circling the wharf, the boats, a path winding up the hill though the Stations of the Cross, their statues peeling of paint Her name I will hold in custody until you have less need for either of us.

SALVATION ARMY

Up from the Mission on Saturday night, their voices rising higher against catcalls from couples parked in cars.

Up past the Legion where the band is tuning up for the first set, past the old man smiling and nodding to little girls, his pockets bulging with candy. To the comer where some children wait, their skin crawling with goosebumps at the first roll of the great drum, the thin warble of song that bounces off the tavern walls, then they are gone, and the sidewalk turns cold under bare feet. The street belongs once more to drunken fathers, girls up from the Cape chewing forlornly on stale gum, and children huddled against walls scrawled with graffiti, long past the toll of the curfew bell that no one ever hears.

LEAVING THE DEAD BEHIND

ST. LUKES

Between us the children, the fourth generation to occupy this pew, sit quietly, sobered by a burden far greater than religious belief. We've waited a long time to bring them here to this place their great grandfather helped to build. Before us the altar, looms large and dark, shipped across the Atlantic one hundred years ago, a symbol of older times. And I notice your hands as they rest on your lap, the pattern of hair, the line of bone, your father's and when you kneel the angle of your body, unmistakeable threads carried backwards, forwards, to your father, to our children. I am a stranger here, I, who can trace myself no further than this body, each mole, each fold of skin without history.

Afterwards, I shake hands with the pastor, share limp conversation while parishioners coddle the children measure resemblances trace family connections establish linage

LEAVING THE DEAD BEHIND

When they moved here my grandparents bought burial plots for generations of family, and-erecteda stone for the infant son they left behind in a Yarmouth graveyard. They took comfort in knowing precisely where everyone would lie, visited the graves of the dead with armloads of peonies in lard pails filled with water. How could they know we would leave this valley, the last of the name gone twenty years, spaces beside them flat beds kept ready with perpetual care. I return every few years to scrape lichen off the stones and place insignificant bouquets on the graves; other plots show similar neglect, or are decorated with plastic flowers that defy the season.

Now there are too many moves, I can only carry with me my father's tie-clip a grandmother's berry dish, photographs that are strangers to my children, and sometimes an image of stones drifted over in winter, and faded plastic tulips poking up through a covering of snow.

FAMILY BIBLE

leather bound parlour table edition, the spoken words of Christ outlined in red typescript. Between its pages, yellowed newsclips of marriages, deaths and church suppers, a child's curl clipped half a century past, ingredients for a contraceptive made from cocoa butter, birth notices, rhyming couplets, a file box for the concerns of a lifetime within gold leaf borders.

CARNIVAL

When the carnival began every child got new jeans, and hung around the games running errands for the barkers, scuffling with the mealy-faced carnival kids who dragged themselves between towns, their home a company trailer in mudsoaked ballparks. Girls half grown, flirted with the carnie men, winning free rides and straw-filled panda bears. When the midway closed, mickeys appeared from hip pockets to be shared over bales of hay in the cattle barns. Bored wives or single girls lolled in warm corners under the smell of tanned leather and animal sweat, finding relief from their silent men, sawday night hockey and mid-week bowling. Until the closing date, when men worked through the night taking down rides, folding the tents, leaving used cups and hot dog wrappers to blow across the daylit field, with the first wind of autumn whistling through the grandstands, creaking doors of empty barns.

"THE BUMP^

- SPRINGHILL,

1958

For seven days we watched their grief flickering on the black and white screen of the television. The long slow blur of days furrowing into skin and bone as they waited at number two colliery. Then the miracle, survivors squinting from the blackness of captivity, bearing last messages stories of men who prayed and sang, told to waiting newsmen who turned them into legends. Afterwards the women would say that they felt it first, knew even before the shrill whistle rang out from the pit head. Felt that sudden lurch in their bellies, could record it to the instant, like the final twist of a dying embryo.

OLD FRIEND

Talking with you after so many years I must speak of that town to convince myself that it was ever real. Not the things we remember, but the way we agree without words to maintain old silences. The night as children we awoke to screams, a mother, father, drunk, threatening, rage that subsided into other noises, how close the ear brings sounds of love and hate. All the things we almost heard knew without being told, , the happenings we let memory turn like a kaleidoscope until we can remember things the way they never were.

REMEMBRANCE DAY

All the men marched in the legion parade. I watched my father's spastic hand fumble with the clasp to fasten the medals on his lapel, the awkward swing of his hip as he walked to the front of the line, where they matched their pace to the drag of his right foot. All the women made coffee to warm the chilled bodies returning to the hall to talk in modest voices of the victories.

No one spoke of the joy in returning that collapsed into despair as they buried themselves in jobs at the feed mill or the grease pit of the local garage, or the discontented girls coaxed across the Atlantic to be shunned by the local women.

No one spoke of the glory shed with their uniforms, of wives chafing under peacetime routine, their own self righteous anger at cradles filled in their absence. Ashes fell from cigarettes to the oiled floorboards, as they spoke of battles won, women conquered, and narrow escapes from another enemy; within green painted walls bare but for the portrait of the Queen, they never spoke of defeat.

THE FULLY ILLUSTRATED HOUSEHOLD PHYSICIAN

It lay within easy reach on the kitchen shelf in my grandmother's house, a compendium of every known disease with explicit illustrations neatly excised sixty years before by a prudent mother. More damning than the Old Testament, undercurrents of suspicion run through the pages, behind every complaint hints of human excess. It offered no reassurance for the father whose only son died of diphtheria the year he was four, no hope for the woman bearing children year after year until she was dead at thirty two. There was no comfort and little relief in the practical directions laid out in thick black type. Still, the crisp worn paper the fraying edges give testimony to anxious hands that thumbed its pages, twenty miles from the nearest town, fortified with just a medical book and God.

LEGAL TENDER

You =member the depression, being sent out to find and brush away the telltale chalk mark on some hidden part of the house. One comer of the foundation a window sill, a mark put there to let others know that here there would be a handout. You remember your mother making them sandwiches when they knocked at the screen door asking for food. You ask me to understand the logic of saving as opposed to investing, of patching and repatching clothes and limiting the toilet paper to two squares a person, a sign of aging or of remembering when a bite of sandwich and a strong cup of coffee counted as legal tender.

RECOLLECTION

This morning you lost your breath, wanted me to crawl under your bed to look for it, imagining it wrapped around dust balls in the comer, or maybe hiding so the man you married couldn't knock it out of you. He has been dead ten years but can still bring a curse to your lips. .You cannot recall my last visit or the names of your sons, but memory rides a reckless path in brain cells, and the mask of your face splinters in shame as you hear your father's steps approach through eighty years, the squeak of floorboards outside the darkened room where you lay not breathing, listening for the quiet click of the doorknob turning.

VACANCIES

After fifty years living together, having passed through love to a truce of companionship, she hardly noticed he was there. When he died the family cleaned out his things, half-used bottles of aftershave, the razor by the edge of the sink, clothes still holding the shape of his body, stripped from the cupboards. But his belongings demanded their place after so many years, and she ached for the absence reflected in the empty spaces.

DESIGNER STORES

After the salesman passed through town the graveyard almost doubled in size, and town council had to buy up Shaffner's whole west pasture; those big slabs of granite moved in almost before the cow flaps could be gathered up. "Buy now and enjoy these beauties while you still can," the salesman whispered, "Choose who you will lie beside, there's prestige in location, design it yourself, see it engraved." *

But now that Mike Thomas beloved of Marge, lies beside Ethel Sands in life when it should have been in death, and Tom Shaffner's wife Angie left town two months past, the stones will have to be cross-matched for accuracy, and there is no mention of that on the invoice, only the special one-time price and the big stamped letters PREPAID

WHEN SHE DIED

She was standing at the altar giving testimony of her faith, her arms raised towards heaven. Her face showed only mild surprise, as if she thought this should be more apocalyptic. The arms dropped first, then the body folded gently on itself until she lay crumpled on the floor, like a marionette whose operator has dropped the strings. Afterwards the minister pronounced it the supreme way to be taken, as if this last exhaling of breath, this final loosening of bowel and bladder, in front of a church filled with people, was somehow a reward. Or was God striking her dead? the realization of childhood fears for playing cards on Sunday, sneaking liquor at school dances, or allowing a boy's tongue to slide between clenched teeth.

IN THE VILLAGES

In the villages rumours grew, were handed down like old clothes and grew again, ears pressed against air vents bent towards open doors absorbed and knew. On walls covered with flowered paper or painted the newer pastels, old portraits hung from gilt frames, and death was as real as the body groaning in the room down the hall. In the villages time dragged from season to season, weeks were punctuated by Saturday night, years marked off by the length of the Legion parade. And youth vanished from bodies to return in Toronto or Winnipeg or West Vancouver with the crunch of snow under winter feet, a familiar scent on the autumn wind that just barely tickled the nostrils to complete the cycle, for the villages never gave up their kin.

The Down's child and I share the fresh fruit my husband left at my bedside. She was admitted yesterday holding a doll and her mother's hand. Her mother says she's fourteen already a problem with neighbourhood boys. The doctor will fix her her mother says she's doing the only responsible thing. At night the light from the corridor leaks under the door. I munch Okanagan apples and listen to night nurses mumble their way back from coffee break. Beside me, the Down's child whimpers into her pillow neutered like the naked doll she clutches.

NURSING HOME

My world has narrowed to the space around this bed, without familiar odours worn furniture and creaking stairs orientation becomes difficult. From far away my children send cards that offer love in rhyming couplets, their glossy coloured pictures litter my dressing table like prize ribbons offered at livestock shows.

I sit in hallways with strangers, isolated by separate pasts into a silence I'm too tired to break. Sometimes my tongue scatters past shame through fragmented speech to be chuckled over by nurses until even my sins are reduced to trivia.

T H E HARBINGER POETRY SERIES

Harbinger Poetry Series, an imprint of Carleton University Press, is dedicated to the publication of first volumes of poetry by aspiring poets. Initially, Harbinger's mandate is to publish two volumes per year, and eventually to publish no fewer than four volumes per year. As the title series implies, our mission is to herald poets in whom we have discovered not just the potential for good verse, but an already clear and confident voice.

Series Editor Christopher Levenson Editorial Board Diane Brebner John Flood (ex oflcio) Blaine Marchand