The Silver Palace Restaurant 9780773574519

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The Silver Palace Restaurant

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The Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series Editors: Kerry McSweeney and Joan Harcourt Selection Committee: Donald H. Akenson, Philip Cercone, Allan Hepburn, and Carolyn Smart titles in the series Waterglass

Jeffery Donaldson

All the God-Sized Fruit Chess Pieces

Shawna Lemay

David Solway

Giving My Body to Science Rachel Rose The Asparagus Feast

S.P. Zitner

The Thin Smoke of the Heart What Really Matters

Thomas O’Grady

A Dream of Sulphur Credo

Tim Bowling

Aurian Haller

Carmine Starnino

Her Festival Clothes The Afterlife of Trees

Mavis Jones Brian Bartlett

Before We Had Words Bamboo Church

S.P. Zitner

Ricardo Sternberg

Franklin’s Passage David Solway The Ishtar Gate Hurt Thyself

Diana Brebner

Andrew Steinmetz

The Silver Palace Restaurant

Mark Abley

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The Silver Palace Restaurant mark abley

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

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© Mark Abley 2005 isbn 0-7735-2998-5 Legal deposit second quarter 2005 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (1oo% 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 financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program ( bpidp) for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Abley, Mark, 1955– The Silver Palace Restaurant / Mark Abley. (The Hugh MacLennan poetry series; 17) Poems. isbn 0-7735-2998-5 I. Title. II. Series: Hugh MacLennan poetry series; 17. ps8551.b45s59 2005

c811′.54

c2005-903269-3

This book was typeset by Interscript in 11/13 Garamond.

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In memory of Anne Szumigalski 1922–1999

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contents

part one After Pinocchio

3

part two The Fingerprint 13 Blind, Electric 14 Kootenai 16 Kicking Down the Mountain 17 Letter from the Rockies 18 A Prince 20 In a Glove of Time 21 Red Letter 23 Again 24 Winter Quintet 25 White on White 26 A Key that Opens on the Night 27 Vas Elegy 28 Cancer 30 Dragons 31 In Saskatoon the Ghosts 33 One Night 34 part three Food: A Travelling Quartet

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part four The Guangzhou Engineering Student: A Letter 63 Dominion 65 Gaspésie 67 Thistle Sermon 68 To the Editors 69 The Traveller in Italy 70 Kings of Montreal 71 A Missing Statue 72 Speaking Personally 73 Clouded Sulphur 74 You Know Her Kind 76 Oxford Sonata 77 Flight 78 The Ruff 80 A Labrador Duck 82 Eurycea Tridentifera 84 Birth 86 Edgewise 88 Notes 89 Acknowledgments 91

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pa rt o n e

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after pinocchio

1 I recall the fear. I recall the green-faced devil who gripped Pinocchio in a fist ready for the boiling oil. “But now it’s bedtime,” I was told. “We’ll read another chapter tomorrow. Sweet dreams, my dear.” In the wake of Sir Serpent’s lithe tongue and bloodshot eyes? Sweet dreams, when a bearded grownup means to roast a boy?

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2 This is what happens if we lose control. This is what happened after weeks of play. This is what may happen to you. He frolicked with his friends on Pleasure Island until the day he awoke and found his ears a furry burden on the scalp. Then his hands and feet turned into hooves. As he bucked with fright, his skin was hide. A tail began to swish beside his rump. He opened his mouth to cry in fury but the only noise was a bray. “This is what will happen to me,” I felt in the darkness of my room, “if I’m bad. It’s evil to have fun. It must be normal to obey.”

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3 Each time he lies, his wooden nose grows more and more erect. Only if he speaks the truth can he enjoy neglect. Honesty shrinks the boy’s condition to manageable size. The lesson: call on fantasy to make an organ rise.

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4 Conceived in a peculiar style, quicktempered, he’s bundled off to jail. Villains keep urging him to sin. He astonishes the fish at sea. Yet he’s willing to die for his father – such a dutiful only son. In the end, he’ll leave some wood behind … Where have I heard all this before?

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5 To feed the moral, the plot has to lead the child into temptation. If he resisted there might be nothing to say, no wood to turn flesh.

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6 What’s true to life, I guess, is how everyone suffers. In the rough Italian, before Disney smoothed the surface, the fairy dies of grief. Pinocchio murders the cricket. Father is lost at sea. The fox goes lame, the cat goes blind and Pinocchio’s best friend – young trouble who becomes a donkey – gets abused like a donkey. He’s a worn-out nag when he dies. And the boy who sees all this is a puppet. He has free will, he thinks, the way we all do.

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7 How would I rewrite the story? Get rid of the blue fairy, get rid of the fox and cat. Get rid of the knowing cricket. Away, away with all that! Get rid of the saltwater monster. Get rid of the donkey boys. Get rid of them all but Pinocchio and multiply his joys. Allow him his raucous innocence, his rude brand of fun. Allow him to keep his father if Geppetto accepts a son who may not follow orders and won’t be whittled away by anyone who sees pleasure as the herald of decay.

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pa rt t w o

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th e f i n g e r p r i n t

Watching you, big sir, arrange your wife keeping Bow Falls in the middle distance while Cascade Mountain rises artistically behind, I remember how I used to do the same (minus a wife, of course) with my first Instamatic: how, weeks later, my mother would carry home a fat yellow envelope of holiday shots and I’d rush to my room, tearing, wanting the roadside glacier, conifers in dry air, whiskeyjacks, the ice-green lake, a marmot’s cry until I saw, one after one, my fingerprint in the lower right corner, the telltale whorls below Mount Rundle, blocking the Frank Slide, beside the grazing head of a Waterton elk, obscuring my parents by the Lundbreck Falls. Perhaps your wife, sir, is your fingerprint. I’m in no position to complain. I’m not watching Bow Falls, I’m watching you.

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blind, electric “How all this came to be is a real interesting question.” Prof. William L. Fink

Ian, give up flyfishing the upper Bow. Leave Montana’s trout-streams alone. If you parked your Honda by the Amazon, no Dolly Varden pilgrim or rainbow partisan would wreck your solitude, reeling as the light pours down. “The Amazon water is muddy,” says Dr. Fink the ichthyologist, “and twenty feet down, it’s black.” Which is why, in the deeps, creatures grow to spend a life without light – blind, electric animals who eat nothing but the tails of other fish and can, if munched, regenerate their own; eyeless transparent catfish; fish that devour dead wood

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by the banks where you’d be standing, Ian, casting your luck upon the waters, listening to bossa nova in waders and wondering how it feels to swim through a darkness charged with currents, taste buds all over your skin.

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kootenai

A conversation of ravens, hurled into the wind as it pushes low across the dry forget-me-not ridges, the green flats of the Bow,

echoes off the scree like verbs from the tongue of travellers who knew each gap in the cloud peaks, harvesting the valleys, retreating before the snow, verbs in a language without relatives, a relic on a ripped map, mouths that possessed a word for “starving, though having a fish-trap.”

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k i c k i n g d ow n t h e m o u n ta i n

Loose rock on the high face: the treeline is a rumour underfoot: each step, a ginger torture for the knees.

On the high face, loose rock: even the big stones bounce and skitter: the dust you arouse turns to smoke in the wind. High face, rock on the loose: our fingernails dwarf the jasmine: a cloud is wandering past my feet.

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letter from the rockies

“left the pass for a path through the pine forests, climbing hard until I crossed near the treeline

up again, meadows unfurling on each side – a blue butterfly among the buttercups – stopping to eat my packed high pond, halficed over, while avalanches broke and rolled down the Ten Peaks: then higher still, over stepping stones, a hill of scree, across switchbacking now up the bare head of Larch Valley, so steep I didn’t dare before I scrambled to the pass and the world fell away like a sliced peach, back down the valley or on past The Narrows to Paradise Creek –”

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Which is where I’d like to go with you. Somehow we’ve lost the trail. What I say freezes in my mouth. The warning signs are all around us: danger, this path is unsafe. But I’m if you are, to risk the journey again

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a prince

Thorns in the hedge drop away like tufts of grass. The armoured nettles tumble down before him.

Enchanted footmen are snoring on their heels. Elderly, dozing bees refuse to fall. His nursemaid suckled him on tales that said: a boy must never rail against his fate. His trial is to forget black-eyed Lisette, their whispered promises behind the stable, and if he must revive this freckled girl, brocaded in some bygone style, to feel love agitate his veins like Beaujolais. The crowd is waiting there, enslaved by sleep – so many lives, hanging by a kiss’s thread –

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in a glove of time

That September you swam in the stammering river at dusk and the water grew dark underneath you. One day you led him to a wood, and when a pair of pigeons took fright like young horses, clattering off through a field of branches, you clutched his arm and he knew what to do. That September you looked through a trellis of green and brown at a sky that trembled with cirrus, milky fur in the air until he worked you onto the comb of a wave plunging from touch with the spreadeagled land to the edge of the world – an edge, the land again, as calm as the chestnut trees turning. At night the wind would climb, you’d swallow wine and the moon would hang in the air like a medal, a red reminder of battle. That September you kept the windows wide, the curtains wide, and maybe an owl would be hunting or would fish come splash in the river? The waters were shallow, the days after tomorrow were dead … 21

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And yet they threw their shadows, they throw their shadows. You woke one day that fond September to a silence of birds, the shy budding of winter, the sky pale as water.

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red letter

This morning the vessels in my eyes hurt before I’d left my bed. I traced you beneath the sluggish lids, a mirage where veins had bled.

I couldn’t work this afternoon. Taking refuge in a garden shed I was nibbling strawberries, courting shadows. One by one the shadows fled. Tonight, before the rain set in, the blaze of Mars turned my head. I told it your name until it vanished and I stroked the crying air instead of you. The clouds are apple peels at dawn, poppies when the sun goes dead. At night they take away the planets. “I love you,” so you said.

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again

Waking for no good reason after we have made love for the first time

in far too long, I find the air looks pale, somehow, and the silent room smells different, as if our slow unexpected passion had transformed a home; but when I reach for water, I discover a fat, orange, white-rimmed candle still burning, hours later, smudge of wax congealing on the saucer beside the used Ohio Bluetip match, a fire your dreaming has no need for; I climb from the sheets and blow it out, draft of night against my drowsy body; that’s when you shudder halfawake, stretching an arm to clutch me; and I want you, I want you again.

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wi n t e r q u i n t e t

Hoarfrost on birchbark: the hours we lose together: snowberries in fog

Two crimson birds pry seeds off a thicket of firs half-hooded in white The wind holds its breath: this earth is a frozen word in a polar script An oval partridge by the roadside, trembling, clings to the huddled sun Don’t shiver, my love: let your tongue discover mine: may the short days thaw

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wh i t e o n wh i t e

Energy is Eternal Delight, said Mr. Blake

now I face a February morning by the lake below a gull at work in the delighted air as the wet snow settles, flake by flake, onto melting ridges that sketch a line of jagged puddles in the churning, half-solid water soon, I think, the weather will have to break but soon means nothing to this granite wind or the dour, unbroken mass of clouds transforming the far shore to a moist abstraction luckily the mirrored pier declines to fall though its legs look akilter, a cubist slushpile, ice and former ice in a cracked reflection a watercolour still life that keeps on shifting while a frozen artist tries to freeze the action and the ghost of Mr. Blake cries satisfaction

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a k e y t h at o p e n s o n t h e n i g h t

Before midnight the floodlights go quiet in the park. The rink is blackened and the last boy skating.

A retriever complains on the far side of the crescent. How long until she hears the snowtrudge of her owners, their breath a cloud that disappears like anger or the nightshift clatter of a freight train hauling metal off the island as the lights erratically vanish from houses that have lost their colour except for a single, green, lit-up front door? A boy lugging helmet and skates will climb three steps, looking back to face whatever lies behind him, ears on fire from the February chill, turning –

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va s e l e g y

1 Flat on my back, eyes wandering the ceiling, I’m told to place my hands behind my head. Cowardice keeps me lying on a stainless bed while the doctor finishes two “urgent calls”. He breezes back and, grinning, shaves my balls. “You really want a needle on each side?” He twists the radio. Too late to hide. I hear a woman croon, Big boy, don’t cry. The shoulders clench. The heart speeds up. I try to steer my mind off what my body’s feeling. 2 Dream about Bhutan, dream about deep breathing, don’t think about knife blades or the signature that gave the hospital the right “to dispose of all affected organs,”

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dream about summer, dream about swimming, don’t think about the pain or the doctor’s little “Huh!”, dream about Byzantine dolphins, angel fish, mermaids; no, not mermaids. 3 The laughing doctor sends me home in stitches. Codeine is dynamite with Scotch and nachos.

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cancer

The white coat was pressed and terse: faced with its verdict, my father straightened his suit,

his blood-coloured tie, his best shoes, and on the appointed day, leaving nothing disorderly, caught a bus to Admissions, observing each block slip away, the long roads of the city where his daily pleasure was mordant complaint growing, car by car, invisible as though a distant trumpet had called, and his cells alone were free to answer.

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dragons in memoriam, Gregory Wirick

“I was just a cadaver,” you said last year with a laugh, “but I’m very determined, you know. I’m in the middle of a constant war, hanging in there, hoping for new drugs. When I visualize I see a Japanese print: a man on the prow of a ship, clutching a sword. The waves are high, and in the waves are dragons waiting to be slain. My T-4 count is dreadful, almost zero, but it’s been that way for years. I had a couple of panic attacks when the retinas detached in both my eyes and now the darkness is descending in one. In the other, until the operation, the darkness was ascending from the bottom … 31

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You do get into funks, you do get slovenly, but you have to be militant all the time.” No-one was less slovenly than you. Greg, I hate the past tense. I want to call you back and hear again, “I’m lucky. As miserable as this has been, imagine that.”

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i n s a s k at o o n t h e g h o s t s

of Anne and Greg and Caroline could be anywhere – a clump of sage, a curtained stage or noisy coffee shop, the hotel that spread above the ruins of a bay-windowed house beside a bridge – friendly ghosts, at ease with change. Treading Temperance, Clarence or the Warman Road, I feed on air bruised and charged by their memory: sand in the river, rain on the lips. “Dread nothing,” they say. “Don’t forget to laugh.” One ghost alone has the power to scare: the spectre of a boy who was at home here, wearing the city like a scarf around shoulders already hunched from reading tales of places he meant to discover, never dreaming how much of himself I would leave behind, unsatisfied.

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one night for my daughter

These clouds have made an archipelago. A plane is tacking through the channels of black water as the moon, no longer round, glistens from a saltmarsh of the sky like the nestled egg of some wind-erasing bird, a migrant from the far-flung homeland. One night, Megan, it will hatch.

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pa rt t h r e e

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f o o d : a tr av e l l i n g q u a r t e t

1 A fine ship for the crossing, selling bay food – fish chowder, clam strips with fries. But you can’t see more than a few yards in any direction. The damp air clings to your skin when you step out on deck to peer through the fog. Hard to say when the ship passed The Wolves, rocky islets where seabirds hatch their young. There could be shearwaters about, flying far beneath the waves for a meal, then surfacing for an oxygen hit before diving once more. Or right whales – sometimes they risk the path of oil tankers chugging up the bay to port. Finally an island lurches out of the water and the white dissolving mist.

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2 He’s sitting at a bench on a cobbled sidewalk, red apple in hand. Two boys beside him are swigging cans of Pepsi and listening to Manchester rock on a Japanese machine. The neighbourhood’s outdoor cafes – wicker chairs, bright awnings, cloths on the small round tables – don’t have an empty place. Not like the pizzeria he passed on his way to the Stone Gate. Its arches hold a Virgin and Child that survived a great fire in the Enlightenment. The miraculous painting is a chore to see, enclosed by lilies and candles, shielded by marble angels and a metal grille. A woman in a black sweater and tights placed her silver shopping bag on a chair while she knelt. Can he begin to imagine what she prayed for? This doesn’t feel like a city hit by a cluster bomb last year.

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3 Sunday morning, and the streets of Central fill up with women wielding plastic bags. The bags contain a lunch, boxed or wrapped in silver foil. In Chater Square, eight women strum acoustic guitars while an old man practises Tai Chi. Des Voeux St. is closed to traffic for the day, and thousands of the women stroll along it, some of them arm in arm; others give and receive stories in the shadow of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. Lines unfurl from the remittance counters, open until dusk so the women can nourish children back in the Philippines. Unshaded in the tropical light, a gospel band from a Confederate state launches into Worthy Is the Lamb.

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4 Wolverine was travelling and he was hungry. For a long time he had eaten only lemmings and shrews. He craved fat, real fat, with lots of grease. So when he noticed a big she-bear prowling around, he formed a plan to get her into his stewpot. “How are you doing, sister?” he said. “I’ve been looking for you all over the place.” “Why are you calling me sister?” the bear replied. “I’m a bear, and you’re a wolverine, two entirely different creatures.” “A wolverine? Your eyesight seems to be failing you, sister. I’m a bear just like you. Indeed, I’m your brother.”

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5 He perches in the back seat of a car leaving the farmed flatland around the capital and pushing west into grey hills. The rain has grown implacable by the time the hills become Plitvice National Park. This is where the war began: a skirmish, young chaos, a death on each side; the birth of martyrdom. The grand hotel and restaurants are ready for customers again. But who wants to nibble smoked salmon flavoured by war? The driver doesn’t stop until the wrecked mills of Slunj. On the way, Filip says the park protects a salamander that lives only in caves and underground rivers. It can go for years without food. It grows to be the length of a hand. It’s fleshcoloured. It has no eyes. People say the creature looks like a fetus; they call it the human fish.

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6 At Grand Harbour you leave the car and look for a sand beach. A dozen smokehouses stand empty. No signs of life. Then a pickup truck appears, speeding past onto a wharf. Once there, it slows, turns and races back. A bell tolls in the distance. You search in vain for harbour seals, the likeliest ones in these waters. Fishermen despise them: if they get the chance, seals burgle the salmon cages and circular herring weirs. But the most graceful village on the island has the name Seal Cove. You take the coastal road to find it, driving up a hill past adjacent churches, each one painted white except for a raspberrycoloured roof.

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7 Day after day, the same beggars wait in the tunnel. Between a mass-transit station and the Star Ferry dock, a one-legged man keeps crouching on the floor. His raw stump pushes out from his shorts. A pair of crutches gleams in the metal light. Only one of his hands moves: it rattles the coins in a red plastic bowl. On board the ferry, a bearded visitor picks at a dish of sushi and watches the winter sun skid off the crowded water. Across an aisle sits a young man in jeans and a hooded sweater. His girlfriend tries to snuggle up to him. But after a wordless glance, the man adjusts his glasses and goes on reading Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities.

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8 “Your legs are too short for you to be a bear.” “Admit it, sister. You’re losing your eyesight. Why, I bet you can’t even see that patch of ripe berries over there.” He pointed to a barren hillside. “I see only moss and rock …” Now Wolverine conjured berries all over the hillside. The two of them went over there. And as they were eating, the bear asked, “How did your eyes get to be so good?” Wolverine said, “Long ago our father and mother made a sweat camp for me. They put me in the hot tent and blew on my eyes, and then they squeezed red berry juice into my eyes. As everyone knows, red berry juice improves the eyesight.” The bear said, “Brother, do that for me.”

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9 Signs along the highway warn of lambs. The signs have outlasted the lambs. He notices occasional cows, never more than two in a meadow, and a day’s total of two horses. The belongings of a region – its livestock and dried ham, mattresses and vcr s, aftershave and toilet seats – were trucked away in convoys during the war. Farm after village, village after farm, the buildings lie derelict. Fields of bracken have faded to brown next to woods that remain green; a mile farther, fields of grass slope away from woods turning yellowish-brown. A guidebook talks about “exceptional natural energy” – but this is limestone, hardscrabble land. “Poor people,” Filip remarks, “are easy for a demagogue to use.”

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10 The names are unabashed. Big notices proclaim make rich ltd. and ultimate imitation jewellery co. Near the caged bulbuls and magpie robins of the songbird market, mon treal shoes rubs shoulders with big brother mobile phone co. A man takes his greenfinch for a walk down the road past pigeon laundry. Even familiar words turn strange in a new setting. On the east flank of the Bank of China is a trim hillside garden: rocks emerging from water, a poised tree. Ranks of poinsettias flourish above the pond, and a fat season’s greetings sign is fixed below it. What season, whose greetings? Near a road coming in from the old airport stands the galaxy’s ultimate dining experience.

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11 “It surprised me,” me being Gail-Anne MacKenzie, “when I started writing this book that I have found so many words, and that I use a lot of them a great deal myself.” She meant a booklet of the island’s vernacular, published by the Rotary Club. You unearth a copy in a bookcase of the Compass Rose, and skim it over breakfast. “Tougher than a boiled owl.” “Deaf as a haddock.” “Three sandwiches shy of a picnic.” “I have to go so bad my teeth are floating.” The Rotary Club? But this is an island of voices. Later in the day you listen to a fast-tongued fisherman. Some mainlander had been so scared in a storm, “the guy was shaking like a fag at a wienie roast. I couldn’t give a rat’s ass.”

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12 “I’ll be glad to, sister. But first you must lie down.” The bear did as she was told. “Next you must remember this: your eyes will get worse before they get any better.” “I’ll remember, brother.” And so Wolverine blew on the bear’s eyes and began squeezing berries into them. The juice blinded her. “Brother, it’s hurting me very badly,” the bear said. “You’re doing just fine, sister.” Wolverine grabbed a sharp rock and pierced her heart with it. “That was almost too easy,” he said to himself.

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13 A few small plots remain on Lantau Island: banana and papaya trees grow high. In Tai O, the old fishing port, salted herring droop from hooks along the road near houses balancing on stilts above water. The government wants the people out; it’s moving them into apartment blocks. At a hillside monastery, clothes flutter in the Buddhist wind – daily wear, civilian wear. The path below clean shirts leads to a dragon shrine. Incense, petals, bowls of ripe fruit … The dragon doesn’t mind the postcards or the vegetarian food. Discovery Bay is called a village but from the look of it, as the boat abandons Lantau to the falling sun, it’s a village made of skyscrapers.

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14 The monastery took shape on an island in the fifteenth century. Indeed much of the island took shape in the fifteenth century, as monks ferried earth across the lake. Now the garden is a tribute to their work: bees in the purple bougainvillea; late cabbages; a sculpted angel of resurrection; and, between wire mesh and the water, some ducks and quarrelling turkeys. Ivica says that during the war, his people held one flank of the lake, the enemy the other. The enemy shelled the island – cypresses by the eastern shore absorbing damage – but failed to capture it. The monks just went on praying. They had outlasted the scimitars; they could outlast artillery.

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15 You buy a pale sandwich, an apple and a fizzy drink from a roadside hardware store that has expanded into groceries, and wander to a deserted picnic ground between Castalia salt marsh and the sea. Deserted, that is, except for wild irises and bunchberries, and a sweetbriar rose … After a day of fog, the sky tears itself free. Water comes up blue again, peeling distances: an islet, a lighthouse, a dory. You eat on the stony beach. Gulls circle the reeds, crying. Below them stands an egret, cloud-white feathers and yellow beak glittering in the sun. It stretches its tall neck forward; pauses; darts its beak down for prey.

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16 After Wolverine had dressed the bear’s carcass, he got an urge to eat the brains. Usually he left brains for dessert, but now all he wanted to do was crack the skull and eat them. However, the skull would not crack. Even when he threw it against a rock, it wouldn’t crack. “Well,” he thought, “I’ll just have to conjure myself into a maggot.” That’s exactly what he did. Then he crawled right in through the eye socket and began sucking on the brains. “You taste so good,” he said, “how can you be my sister?” He sucked … and sucked … and sucked.

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17 You don’t see the petrels, the foghaunted cliffs or the dulse-pickers when the fog disbands; you see the shed where a man with a big moustache sells Dark Harbour dulse in plastic envelopes. You don’t see the periwinkles that are shipped alive to Manhattan or the lamb’s quarters that are eaten here; you see the tourist houses and the dozens of for sale signs along the coastal road. You stand at Ashburton Head, overlooking the churning sea, watching the ferry that will drag you back to the mainland in a few more days; you don’t see the corpse of the Lord Ashburton, the Pandora, the Turkish Empire or any other of the 339 wrecks that ring the lovely island. You notice its isolation; you don’t grasp what the isolation costs.

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18 Each of the units has plywood walls, but the sliding grid at the front is made of metal wire. And so the tenants in this dim basement go by the name “caged people.” Home is a box, a box they cram with plastic bags, medicine, clothes hangers, jars, ointments, alarm clocks: the kit and debris of their lives. If they carelessly rise from a mattress, they bump their heads on the floor just above. Tonight the shared kitchen at the back is out of service, and a black iron pot in front of the building sits boiling for noodles, its open flame fed by scraps of scavenged wood. A one-legged man, leaving his cage, hobbles on crutches up eight steps to the street.

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19 The restaurant in the Hotel Vodice looks as big as a military dancefloor. His waitress’s foreign language is German, and the news she conveys in it is bad: “Kein Schellfisch, kein Fisch, kein Fleisch.” Except for veal, overcooked in three potential ways. When the hotel was clogged with villagers from the occupied valleys inland, a shell exploded in the dry swimming pool between this window and the sea. Waiting for her schnitzel, Nathalie tells a story about Bosnian refugees in a camp near Budapest. She met a young man whose thirteen-year-old sister had been captured by the enemy and raped, raped again and again. Afterward the girl was shot. The enemy filmed it all. They sent the young man a copy of the tape.

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20 And he grew bigger … and bigger … and bigger. At last Wolverine was such a big maggot that he couldn’t crawl out of the eye socket. “Help!” he cried. “I’m trapped inside a bear’s skull!” But no help came. For who would ever want to help a maggot? “I suppose I’ll starve to death now,” Wolverine thought. But he didn’t starve to death. Instead he got thinner and thinner until he was thin enough to crawl out. Once he was out of the socket, he got back his old shape again. And not having eaten since he ate the last of the brains, he was very hungry.

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21 Celina has been working with caged people for the last three years. Thousands of them, she says, scrape by on noodles and rice, a few vegetables. Street traders help if they can, passing a scrawny fish to an old woman for a pittance. “Sometimes I feel angry. If there is enough money for Hong Kong to develop so, there must be enough money for these people to live decently.” Why do they accept this squalor? “They came here many years ago as refugees from China, and their circle is very small. They don’t watch TV. They don’t know what prosperity is.” Or do they? Yin Lui, caged at eighty-six, tells me: “We don’t have the ability to make that kind of money, and we’re not brave enough to go and steal it.”

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22 A couple of dozen boats are moored to the wharf, among them a miniature vessel called ½ Pint. Working boats adopt the names of girls: Fundy Mistress, Jenny Ruth. The fisherman I know is manning one: last night a captain phoned to say they’d begin to seine a weir at dawn. I clamber aboard a high-masted schooner that once sailed the Panama Canal. Now, every summer, it lugs tourists through the mist in hopes of a close encounter with a whale. Out on the bay Laurie distributes mugs of smoking coffee and talks about the right whales’ courtship: “When a female calls, up to forty-two males have been seen to cluster around. That’s more than a quarter of the adult males in the world, all wanting to mate with the same female off the shore of Grand Manan.”

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23 So we rattle down the blue Croatian coast, salt water capturing the sun like filigree, and I’m listening to a cassette of the Bosnian rock band whose name translates as Red Apple. A Sarajevo band, in exile now. The lead singer is a Serb, with Croats and Muslims to back him up. Their songs are “sentimental,” Tanya says with a toss of her hair, gazing at a passing island. Tanya prefers Bryan Adams. She worked as a TV anchor in Sarajevo during the war: “But I don’t like to go back. All my generation left or died. A lot of villagers have been moving into the city, and the women are covered up. There are still cafes – Sarajevo always has cafes – but where there used to be an art gallery or a bookstore, now you find a butcher’s shop.”

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24 “It’s a good thing I have all that bear meat,” Wolverine told himself. But where was this bear meat? He couldn’t find it anywhere. He even peered under rocks to see if he’d cached it, but it was nowhere to be seen. That’s because a wolf had found the meat and dragged it off while Wolverine was stuck inside the skull. So now I’ll go back to eating lemmings and shrews. And I won’t conjure myself into a maggot again.

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pa rt f o u r

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th e g u a n g z h o u engineering student: a letter

Father, I am a little scared to explain I will not be travelling home to spend the New Year festival with you and with my mother. Nothing, father, used to give me richer pleasure than standing beside you as our kite would float high above your head toward the hills. But this year, father, I cannot make the winter journey: her name is Lo Chung and for seven months she has served the public in the Silver Palace Restaurant. Father, you have been young, can you please imagine the joy of wandering a city with my friends on a Saturday night, not discussing metallurgy but strolling past the neon signs of Xiajiu Lu, the bridal parties and the Paris blouses, diamonds, leopard coats and golden arches brighter than a thousand village moons?

No, my father, I do not think you can. If you have not already torn this page in two, then before you read it to my mother can I tell you one last thing? On my birthnight in late November, after we had walked down Xiajiu Lu, my friends and I, we found our bicycles and rode the streets to Shamian Island where my love stood working.

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We dined on fresh-plucked pigeons and yellow wine and Lo Chung, wearing a neat dark skirt and a jacket the colour of ripe watermelons – the sweet inside, I mean – smiled at me with her eyes till all my laughing friends fell silent. Father, have I said too much? May the year unfurl without me like a swallow kite.

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dominion And God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

Nothing to those who breed God in their image depending on sex, caste and colour. Nothing to those who unsheath a holy sword to stir their pudding. Nothing to all those who wait in squalor for the solace of cargo, who smoke their sacrament or who know in their well-fed bones a divine hand protects the marketplace. Nothing to those who spurn the temptation of tea, enveloped in long underwear. Nothing to those who claim they were selected, once and forever, by some jealous lord happy to obliterate their foes. Nothing to those who measure their diet by the moon, who swear their sacred books are infallible, who look for a recurrence of the not quite dead in bondage, or who raise a cup of wine and call it blood.

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Nothing but torment and grief to those who say it doesn’t matter if we maul the planet; soon God will haul us to his home in heaven … Is there some magic in our self-delusion, some grace in the sleek excuses we fashion girdled by faith? My heart goes out to each Sumatran rhino, each short-tailed albatross, each copper redhorse, each tuatara, each dibbler, each dugong, each splendid poison frog, each creeping marshwort, each bowhead whale – my useless love to you in your unlikeness.

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gaspésie

Mackerel sky above the gulf but no trace of a quicksilver school to replenish the waters, not since the draggers came and scraped living tissue off the stony beds –

Black-and-white shots of the aukkilling hopeful who sailed here from Jersey or Acadia on formal display amid natural and other history, shut more than nine months of the year – Villages laced to the punishing shore, pale beads of a rosary said long ago by a teenage bride, her daughters and only son fled to a city, their mother alone with the waves – And the prayer, polished daily, remains

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thistle sermon

Weeks later, a dry wind blowing in from Egypt, the doctor’s brother said: “Weren’t you with him on the mountainside? The stories I keep hearing!” And the doctor, prying a grapeseed from between his teeth, replied:

“It’s true. I can see him now, letting rip about the clothes of sheep, exchanging herrings for a snake, I think, and how olives never work – or was it lilies? – look, my sweat was in my eyes, I would have killed for a drink but I met a boy from Jericho who started going on and on about his mother’s palsy. Could I help her walk? No, but I had to pretend. There was something about figs and thistles, too. Evil fruit? The man can talk.”

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to t h e e d i t o r s

We, the undersigned, proud citizens of the ancient region where the Sola converges with the Vistula, desire to protest the failures and cruel distortions of reporting that continue to afflict us. Never do we read a column that mentions our forest-haunting boars and deer, never a phrase on the poppies that dazzle our spring. Factories and towns are ignored, even spurned, while fresh developments in hop and sugar-beet production earn not a breath of praise. So: how long must we suffer the past? Will there ever be an end to blame? Good sirs, we demand a stop to articles that leave us in oblivion as though we had no flesh and blood, concentrating only on the famous, disused complex of buildings in Oswiecim – Oswiecim, to give a place its rightful name.

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t h e tr av e l l e r i n i t a ly (all phrases are from a 1954 phrasebook by that name)

What is there to see in the environs? Can you give us anything to eat? It was not my fault, I did not know This was a one-way street. Good morning, I have had a breakdown. I want to go to High Mass. What a misfortune! I have diarrhoea. Shave me close. Can I have gas? Good evening, are you the chambermaid? The moon shines brightly tonight. How old is your daughter? What nonsense! You are right. Someone has robbed me of my pocket-book. I want a dry shampoo. I find Italians very pleasant. What do you advise me to do?

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kings of montreal (from the telephone directory)

Roi de la Carte Roi de la Monnaie Roi de l’Océan Enr. Roi des Culasses Roi des Pointes de Pizza Roi d’Ontario Roi du Broadloom Roi du Confort Roi du Doner et Pizza Roi du Papier Hygiénique Roi du Sexe Roi du Smoked Meat Roi du Wonton Roi René (Denturologiste)

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a m i s s i n g s t at u e

In a storied park, dappled by birches and copper beeches, needled with birdsong, not far from a path worn by cyclists and onrushing dogs. By a clearing useful to lovers and squirrels, drummers and bickering families. Near at least one bench with a view

of what’s long overdue: a tribute in stone to the wartime young who chose to serve as draft-dodgers, anarchists, “subversive elements;” conscripts who dared to desert; pacifists met by spittle and jeers while they dug potatoes or washed prison walls. No muskets or cannons. Not a flag to be seen. No-one in chiselled khaki. No imperial goddess of death … Just the helmetless women and men whom sculptors are usually paid to neglect, whose glory drew on a calm, impassioned fuck you to authority.

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s p e a k i n g p e r s o n a l ly

When every word’s a wound, every wound an open sore, don’t try to stand your ground. Those who have come through war

know that the sores will fester unless you risk retreat. You need to heal. It’s best to appear to admit defeat. Once the bandages are gone, keep watch on all you say and leave any scabs alone. We’ll fight another day.

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clouded sulphur … one of the most widespread and common North American butterflies. It flies in all provinces and territories … Layberry, Hall and Lafontaine, The Butterflies of Canada

“A delicate bush,” explained the nursery man. “We’re at the northern edge of its range.” The subtext being “Don’t blame me, buster, if it’s money down the drain.” Last night’s hailstorm made me think he had a point. Yet this morning, in a garden jagged with debris, the buddleia looks unperturbed. Its flowers – fuzzy, purple, sweet as vanilla in the shape of lilac – munch the light. A bee plunges for the blossoming nectar. Having nurtured the plant all summer I feel like calling it “bee bush.” But that phrase hangs on a desert species, and may bring to mind B-movies or bad presidents. Also buddleia – the word’s a tribute Linnaeus paid to the Reverend Adam Buddle, a scholar of moss who never saw this Andean shrub – already has a nickname: “butterfly bush.” So: as we’ve wondered since the first heat of June, where are the butterflies? 74

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Day after day, bee after bee. I’ve had enough of their martial buzz, longing for a swallowtail, a monarch or a painted lady, yet surprised at my own ingratitude for all the pest-eating, pollinating creatures blessed with stings … At the day’s height an insect, yellow as a buttercup, sips from a puddle and flutters to the buddleia for a meal. I won’t shout its English name for the name is absurd: how can impending rain, a putrid egg or hell summon these fragile sunfire wings?

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y o u k n ow h e r k i n d

A cat with a broad face, a broader belly Except this morning and a tendency to yawn; I glanced out the upstairs window a cat whose gait is a waddle, and saw her slinking across the lawn, who emits a small purr while she dines her lined ears pressed back, and whose daily exercise entails patient as night, and ten minutes later kneading the air in her dreams; no trace of the cat if she got much fatter but in the grass, a few entrails we’d have to abandon decorum and a flurry of feathers – and carry her around hollow-shafted, softer than fur – the garden in a wheelbarrow torn from a migrant sparrow.

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o x f o r d s o n at a

The robin who kept on hurtling the river from sapling to sapling sang no louder or clearer when we nestled on his territory. And although he acted tamer than a gull or Doberman Pinscher, even if we’d rooted crumbs of gingerbread from our pockets he might not have fed from our hands. We were rocks at home in the earth: we were stones the water circled. When he landed so close you could have stroked his neck, he was just preparing a foray into rival airspace. Yet the breadth of your eyes – Last night while he must have rested muscles and nerves and lungs, I dreamt that I could sing to you as he carelessly did, and the smile that grew at his music out of silence grew again.

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flight for Brian Bartlett

in the free sky above a combe, a coulee, a wadi at dawn a song is fluttering, taking wing, hunting for breath, the spendthrift melody lost in a thousand languages and found and lost again, always willing to be discovered in raptor air on a limestone ridge a delta, a muskeg, white spray through a salt marsh, in veldt and columbine thickets, the songs are waiting for earth to shape them, bodies to wear them

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bones to ground them in tooth and muscle, air against tongue among the high firs, a trail to a waterfall, hidden cave at the instep of a mountain, dark root in the sinews, playing fresh music, the nerve

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the ruff “Bill about as long as head, slightly tapering when viewed from the side. Adult male in breeding plumage is exceedingly variable in colour … An accidental visitor from Eurasia.” W. Earl Godfrey, The Birds of Canada (1966)

It couldn’t have been a reeve; it was a ruff. But if one of his descendants were to lose its way as spectacularly as this bird, mistaking Diefenbaker Lake for the Sea of Japan or the barley fields around Saskatoon for a stray patch of Siberia, that deluded ruff or reeve could never land, as this one did, beside the airport slough, a mile from the small control tower; it was the age of M*A*S*H and Abbey Road when we glimpsed a shorebird in the shimmering distance and aimed our binoculars across a reedy acre of standing water. Only a godwit might call it paradise; soon it would be drained and paved. My friend saw “a dark pigeon wading” – not that pigeons, dark or otherwise, wade. The orange legs, the bright splotches on its tail, the sensational ear tufts were nothing we knew. Only once had such a bird been welcomed to Saskatchewan, a luckless creature promptly shot.

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With its fierce bill it stabbed the slough for food. Hazarding its wild identity, its doubtful history, we left. My friend phoned other birders, one of whom appeared with a gun, unloading the instrument delicately from his car. A difficult chance: the ruff kept lingering on the far side of the water. Though I yearned to hold his glossy, blood-warm head in my hands, I knew the caress would be a mortal sin against whatever storm-gods had flung the bird astray, not fertilizing eggs in Novosibirskije but resting and feeding on a city’s fringe. The man loaded and aimed; he shot; he shot again. In the official parlance, the judicious passive voice, “an attempt was made to collect the bird.” But the gunner stood too far away, or his fingers were unsteady and the bird rose off unstained (or so I found myself hoping then, hoping still), never to be recorded since; russet feathers in a frenzy to escape the safety he flew so far to gain.

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a labrador duck “Not seen since 1875. Presumed to be extinct.” (handwritten label in the Redpath Museum, Montreal)

Presumed, indeed! It’s time you changed the label – year upon year, I watch it fading and withering, a peculiar relic in your eyes just as I am, posing in a glass box beside a brace of passenger pigeons, each of us a curiosity, a brief distraction as you trudge from dinosaur to mummy. Sixty of my kind, I hear, were spared the usual fate of the dead. But I imagine their feathers too are starting to disintegrate, the cells in their bills dissolving despite all your efforts to render us immortal. It doesn’t work; it never works; one happy day I expect to crumble. As for my previous life there are many things I’m proud to say you’ll never know – our habits of courtship, our flyways and byways, why we had so little chance against you – and I’m not telling.

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Stop. Look me over, and please let me indulge my only pleasure: looking back at you. Now that feeding, flying, mating and diving are impossible, the chance to ponder you is all I’ve got. Call me an anthropologist, alert to the coded meanings in your plumage, the significance of tiny frowns. In yarmulkes and bobby socks, Bermudas and chadors, Paisley shirts and leather boots that hurt the floor, you come and go, dying slowly on the stairs. So here I stand: preserved and catalogued and webbed, a trophy of your deadly skill, while you – still free to taste the wind and weather, peering in at me as though I had the answer to some query on the tip of your tongue – recede into the growing past.

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e u r y c e a tr i d e n t i f e r a

A salamander, off-white, found only in Honey Creek Cave with remnant, atrophied eyes, its home a void of light – should anybody care if the slippery creature dies?

No economic value, not the future of the genus: one of nature’s small astonishments, a blind perpetual swimmer with what my Audubon calls a “snout depressed abruptly” below the dissolving bedrock, the persimmon-dotted hills … No telling what it perceives. If a city drained the aquifer or some genius blasted the hell out of Honey Creek and sent its dwellers to kingdom come, why grieve for a minute? – Just the feeling, I imagine, that this earth no longer belongs to the wild things in it 84

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and they vanish one by one, hour by hour, pale morsels of flesh that can hardly dream what the world has swallowed up since a few intrepid ancestors made a cave their home.

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birth

We all know who’s waiting nearby. Night’s cloak and a pale horse. The glint of a sharpened sickle. The crackle of bone without flesh. We try anything, everything to elude his gaze. Comes a day when we fail.

Strange if we never recall his long-lost twin, his favourite enemy, his silent partner. Did we glimpse her when the dark sky opened? Did we notice her sure touch on that earbreaking rush down to light and the gulped hiss of air? Someone must remember her. An after-image on a retina. The dream that comforts a dreamer gasping in a pink-walled room, wired and tubed, clamped alive, lips like hard sand, to the beat of machines:

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A red-haired dancer in a green dress, her hands outstretched to the sun. Or a Rift Valley Eve. Or a smiling child looking up from a game of shells and walking across the bare floor in a hut with rice on the boil to hold a curtain wide, saying Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid.

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edgewise

Is it illusion that when I was younger my voice was far more confident, stronger,

raring to hold a difficult stance – or just plain arrogant? It had big plans and rarely shied from denunciation. Now it chokes on information. Can its pain be trusted, these lines included? My voice is leached out, clear-cut, denuded, nutrient-starved amid the updated noise (but sometimes, look, I get a word in edgewise).

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notes

“Blind, Electric”: for Ian Pearson. Dolly Varden is a kind of freshwater char. “Kootenai”: a language isolate, once spoken on both sides of the continental divide, now endangered. “Food: A Travelling Quartet” juxtaposes prose poems or narratives in four voices. Three of those voices describe travels in Croatia, Grand Manan, and Hong Kong; the order of the telling changes constantly. The fourth voice retells the traditional Innu story “How Wolverine Got Stuck in a Bear’s Skull.” This story appeared in Lawrence Millman’s collection of Innu tales, Wolverine Creates the World (1993). Millman synthesized his version from stories told to him by John Poker, Tshinish Pasteen, and Thomas Pastitshi, all of Davis Inlet, Labrador. I have added some material from the version printed in Peter Desbarats’ What They Used to Tell About: Indian Legends from Labrador (1969). “Dominion”: all the species named in the final stanza are endangered. “Thistle Sermon”: cf. Gospel According to Matthew, chapters 6 and 7. “To the Editors”: Oswiecim is the Polish name for Auschwitz. “The Traveller in Italy”: The phrasebook of that name was compiled by Arthur L. Hayward and published by Cassell’s in London. “The Ruff ”: “reeve” applies to a female of the species, “ruff ” to a male.

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a c k n ow l e d g m e n t s

Some of these poems, often in a previous incarnation, first saw the light of day in Blue Jay, Canadian Forum, The Listener, Maisonneuve, Matrix, Ottawa Citizen, Prairie Fire, and Times Literary Supplement. Several were broadcast on cbc Radio. Ten of the poems appeared in a chapbook, Dissolving Bedrock, published by Over the Moon Press, Outremont, in 2001. “The Ruff ” was published as a frontispiece to Birds of the Saskatoon Area (2003). I want to thank Carmine Starnino and Alice Van Wart, both of whom read the manuscript at a much too early stage. My gratitude also to Lee Ann Balazuc, Brian Bartlett, Maxianne Berger, and Charlotte Hussey for their comments on recent poems, and to Kerry McSweeney for his challenging, sympathetic editing.

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