Blue
Susan McMaster
This recurring batten-
blue sky against your
yellowing face-
I bring bits of blue
into your room
press them to the walls
with sticky blue tack,
too soon, another
will take your place-
the wallpaper must stay
clean, not ripped
no holes or tears,
for each, this bed
is one last station
one last stop
a waiting room
so far from home
so cold
and not much light
coming in
from the concrete well
that catches not a single
bit of the sun
tossing blue and green
outside right now
while outside here-
clatter of trays
radios, carts,
voices in the hall—
you gesture: close the door—
not yet time
to cock an ear
for the far-off call—
you pull the blue pen
closer
to the page
I steady for your hand
one small blue mark
the blue pen falls
After Rain
P.K. Page
The snails have made a garden of green lace:
broderie anglaise from the cabbages,
chantilly from the choux-fleurs, tiny veils-
I see already that I lift the blind
upon a woman's wardrobe of the mind.
Such female whimsy floats about me like
a kind of tulle, a flimsy mesh,
while feet in gumboots pace the rectangles-
garden abstracted, geometry awash-
an unknown theorem argued in green ink,
dropped in the bath.
Euclid in glorious chlorophyll, half drunk.
I none too sober slipping in the mud
where rigged with guys of rain
the clothes-reel gauche
as the rangy skeleton of some
gaunt delicate spidery mute
is pitched as if
listening;
while hung from one thin rib
a silver web-
its infant, skeletal, diminutive,
now sagged with sequins, pulled ellipsoid,
glistening.
I suffer shame in all these images.
The garden is primeval, Giovanni
in soggy denim squelches by my hub,
over his ruin
shakes a doleful head.
But he so beautiful and diademed,
his long Italian hands so wrung with rain
I find his ache exists beyond my rim
and almost weep to see a broken man
made subject to my whim.
O choir him, birds, and let him come to rest
within this beauty as one rests in love,
till pears upon the bough
encrusted with
small snails as pale as pearls
hang golden in
a heart that know tears are a part of love.
And choir me too to keep my heart a size
larger than seeing, unseduced by each
bright glimpse of beauty striking like a bell,
so that the whole may toll,
its meaning shine
clear of the myriad images that still-
do what I will-encumber its pure line.
Sullivan
Gary Geddes
There's a strange hush at St. Stephen's
as we wait for them to storm the College.
Nurses drift like butterflies among the injured,
offering a word, a touch, a cigarette.
When the enemy bursts through the door
I'm lying on a cot at the far end of the corridor,
my head bandaged, my leg supported in a sling.
Two soldiers proceed to bayonet the sick and wounded
in their beds, to a chorus of screams and protests.
A nurse throws herself on top of one of our boys
to protect him—it might have been the kid
from Queen's—and they are both killed
by a single thrust of the bayonet.
I suppose they were sweethearts. Pinned
at last, she does not struggle. Her hands
open and close once, like tiny wings,
and the dark stain on her white, starched uniform
spreads like a chrysanthemum, a blood-red sun.
I cut the cord supporting my leg, slip on
the nearest smock and stand foolishly at attention,
making the salute. My right index-finger
brushes the damp cotton of the bandage.
Later, the butchers are shot by their own officers;
one, apparently, had lost a brother
in the final assault.
Boyfriend Long Dead
Patricia Young
You hear a lot about girls gang-raped
at parties, a lacrosse or maybe
a rugby team, punk misogynists
who assume the world's their big fat
oyster. Girl on her third Southern Comfort,
a cliché, the troop of crazed adolescents
traipsing behind her up the stairs
to someone's little sister's canopy bed,
and how could you not hear
Camille Paglia in the background,
her staccato rapid
You stupid stupid girl. And what about
those two, listening to Dark Side of the Moon
on the turntable beside his bed,
passing a bottle of wine back and forth
as though wine were just another
beverage, and then somehow they're
skin against skin and she's saying,
Let's do it, what's the deal, anyhow?
But then he isn't there, is somewhere
else in the room, pulling on jeans, No,
not like this, guiding her
back into clothes, tying her shoes,
both of them stepping outside,
cold slap of air, weaving down the street,
and every time I think
about that boy, I want to thank him
for being who he was,
an ordinary kid, no feminist or saint,
thank him for refusing
that girl, just asking
for it, begging to be shucked.
IN THE SECULAR NIGHT
Margaret Atwood
In the secular night you wander around
alone in your house. It's two-thirty.
Everyone has deserted you,
or this is your story;
you remember it from being sixteen,
when the others were out somewhere, having a good time,
or so you suspected,
and you had to baby-sit.
You took a large scoop of vanilla ice-cream
and filled up the glass with grapejuice
and ginger ale, and put on Glenn Miller
with his big-band sound,
and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke up the chimney,
and cried for a while because you were not dancing,
and then danced, by yourself, your mouth circled with purple.
Now, forty years later, things have changed,
and it's baby lima beans.
It's necessary to reserve a secret vice.
This is what comes from forgetting to eat
at the stated mealtimes. You simmer them carefully,
drain, add cream and pepper,
and amble up and down the stairs,
scooping them up with your fingers right out of the bowl,
talking to yourself out loud.
You'd be surprised if you got an answer,
but that part will come later.
There is so much silence between the words,
you say. You say, The sensed absence
of God and the sensed presence
amount to much the same thing,
only in reverse.
You say, I have too much white clothing.
You start to hum.
Several hundred years ago
this could have been mysticism
or heresy. It isn't now.
Outside there are sirens.
Someone's been run over.
The century grinds on.
Beneath My Hands
Leonard Cohen
Beneath my hands
your small breasts
are the upturned bellies
of breathing fallen sparrows.
Wherever you move
I hear the sounds of closing wings
of falling wings.
I am speechless
because you have fallen beside me
because your eyelashes
are the spines of tiny fragile animals.
I dread the time
when your mouth
begins to call me hunter.
When you call me close
to tell me
your body is not beautiful
I want to summon
the eyes and hidden mouths
of stone and light and water
to testify against you.
I want them
to surrender before you
the trembling rhyme of your face
from their deep caskets.
When you call me close
to tell me
your body is not beautiful
I want my body and my hands
to be pools
for your looking and laughing.
A Poem about Miracles
Alden Nowlan
Why don't the records go blank
the instant the singer dies?
Oh, I know there are explanations
but they don't convince me
I'm still surprised
When I hear the dead singing
As for orchestra's
I expect the Instruments
To fall silent one by one
as the musicians succumb
to cancer and heart disease
so that toward the end
I turn on a disc
labelled Gotterdammerung
and all that comes out
is the sound of one sick old man
scraping a shaky bow
across an out-of-tune fiddle.
The Cinnamon Peeler
by Michael Ondaatje
If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
And leave the yellow bark dust
On your pillow.
Your breasts and shoulders would reek
You could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.
Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbour to you hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler's wife.
I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
--your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers...
When we swam once
I touched you in the water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
you climbed the bank and said
this is how you touch other women
the grass cutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume
and knew
what good is it
to be the lime burner's daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in the act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.
You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
Peeler's wife. Smell me.
One Potato Two
Mildred Tremblay
When I look at my body,
its knobs and foliage,
sinkholes and scars,
furrows of flesh,
I reflect that
going back
to the far mists of Ireland,
to my O’Reilly
and Dolan and Kennedy forerunners,
to Queen Maeve herself
I am
mostly potatoes.
The first solid food
spooned
into my baby bird mouth
was potatoes.
Twice a day on the table
my mother
slapped down
great heaping bowls
of white fluffy clouds
laced with butter and salt.
In Heaven the Holy Family
eats nothing but potatoes.
Sacred Potatoes
washed clean
in the tears of Christ,
cooked to immaculate perfection
by Mary.
In the kitchens of Purgatory,
semi-devils
burn the potatoes
on purpose.
Hell is worse. Hell is
no potatoes at all.
– Mildred Tremblay
Dispensation
Patrick Lane
From: http://www.patricklane.ca/new-poems/
I see the dragonfly and the lily through a grey veil.
The clarity is like what I would like to remember
fine wine is and can’t because the distance is too great.
But the accuracy is there in spite of the refusal.
Yesterday I went to the garden as my mother did
in the surety of solitude, my crawling into the dark
in search of skeleton weed and hawk weed,
ragwort, spurge, hound’s tongue, toadflax.
The barren earth is what I want, the coolness there.
I know I almost know.
I am by the yellow lilies at the pond
staring at the water through the fretful wing of a dragonfly.
What is this divinity, that I must search for it again?
My mother kneels under the mimosa, demure.
Which she wasn’t. But that I see her so
through the dragonfly’s pellucid wing. Going blind slowly.
The deep beyond the gossamer. The purity of that.
THE MOMENT
Susan Musgrave
From: Things that Keep and Do Not Change. McClelland & Stewart, 1999
The legless man in the motel room next to me
listens to Country and Western music
all night, an endless song about going down
on his knees for some faithless woman's love.
I turn in my bed, thinking of you the day
we thought our daughter had gone
missing. The moment
before she disappeared you'd seen a stranger
on the block, the kind who wore a bruised
suit from the Sally Ann, the kind
who couldn't know innocence existed. Our daughter
was supposed to be next door, playing
in the fenced yard with two neighbour boys.
You'd been on the phone and I'd turned
my back on the moment to do something
predictable - move the garden sprinkler,
open the morning mail - acts
that would never again seem so ordinary
once we'd settled on the pint-sized
coffin and made up our minds
between burial or cremation. Your body
had never felt so alive as you took off
in the car, driving down
every back lane, listening for her
glove-muffled cries. You drove
deeper and deeper into the kind of hell
we reserve for ourselves and never want
our children to have to know. You knew
at this moment she could only be suffering
in the hands of that stranger who would afterwards
stuff her trusting body into a single forest
green Glad Bag, then tote her to the park.
They would find her legs first, dangling
from the swing, shoes on the wrong feet
as usual, arms hanging from the jungle
gym. I'd want to touch, to straighten
her turned-in toes: how clumsily
we lived on this earth!
She was lost only for a moment, locked
in a spare bedroom with the two boys
next door, not wanting her privacy interrupted,
but in that moment when she was gone
forever, death in all his beautiful variety
sang to us, off-key and aching
inside our cheated hearts.