Selected Poems II (1976-1986) Read online

  ***

  You wonder about her crime. She was condemned to death for stealing clothes from her employer, from the wife of her employer. She wished to make herself more beautiful. This desire in servants was not legal.

  ***

  She uses her voice like a hand, her voice reaches through the wall, stroking and touching. What could she possibly have said that would have convinced him? He was not condemned to death, freedom awaited him. What was the temptation, the one that worked? Perhaps he wanted to live with a woman whose life he had saved, who had seen down into the earth but had nevertheless followed him back up to life. It was his only chance to be a hero, to one person at least, for if he became the hangman the others would despise him. He was in prison for wounding another man, on one finger of the right hand, with a sword. This too is history.

  ***

  My friends, who are both women, tell me their stories, which cannot be believed and which are true. They are horror stories and they have not happened to me, they have not yet happened to me, they have happened to me but we are detached, we watch our unbelief with horror. Such things cannot happen to us, it is afternoon and these things do not happen in the afternoon. The trouble was, she said, I didn't have time to put my glasses on and without them I'm blind as a bat, I couldn't even see who it was. These things happen and we sit at a table and tell stories about them so we can finally believe. This is not fantasy, it is history, there is more than one hangman and because of this some of them are unemployed.

  ***

  He said: the end of walls, the end of ropes, the opening of doors, a field, the wind, a house, the sun, a table, an apple.

  She said: nipple, arms, lips, wine, belly, hair, bread, thighs, eyes, eyes.

  They both kept their promises.

  ***

  The hangman is not such a bad fellow. Afterwards he goes to the refrigerator and cleans up the leftovers, though he does not wipe up what he accidentally spills. He wants only the simple things: a chair, someone to pull off his shoes, someone to watch him while he talks, with admiration and fear, gratitude if possible, someone in whom to plunge himself for rest and renewal. These things can best be had by marrying a woman who has been condemned to death by other men for wishing to be beautiful. There is a wide choice.

  Everyone said he was a fool.

  Everyone said she was a clever woman.

  They used the word ensnare.

  ***

  What did they say the first time they were alone together in the same room? What did he say when she had removed her veil and he could see that she was not a voice but a body and therefore finite? What did she say when she discovered that she had left one locked room for another? They talked of love, naturally, though that did not keep them busy forever.

  ***

  The fact is there are no stories I can tell my friends that will make them feel better. History cannot be erased, although we can soothe ourselves by speculating about it. At that time there were no female hangmen. Perhaps there have never been any, and thus no man could save his life by marriage. Though a woman could, according to the law.

  ***

  He said: foot, boot, order, city, fist, roads, time, knife.

  She said: water, night, willow, rope hair, earth belly, cave, meat, shroud, open, blood.

  They both kept their promises.

  NOTE: In eighteenth-century Québec the only way for someone under sentence of death to escape hanging was, for a man, to become a hangman, or, for a woman, to marry one. Françoise Laurent, sentenced to hang for stealing, persuaded Jean Corolère, in the next cell, to apply for the vacant post of executioner, and also to marry her.

  Four Small Elegies

  (1838, 1977)

  i

  BEAUHARNOIS

  The bronze clock brought

  with such care over the sea,

  which ticked like the fat slow heart

  of a cedar, of a grandmother,

  melted and its hundred years

  of time ran over the ice and froze there.

  We are fixed by this frozen clock

  at the edge of the winter forest.

  Ten below zero.

  Shouts in a foreign language

  come down blue snow.

  The women in their thin nightgowns

  disappear wordlessly among the trees.

  Here and there a shape,

  a limp cloth bundle, a child

  who could not keep up

  lies sprawled face down in a drift

  near the trampled clearing.

  No one could give them clothes or shelter,

  these were the orders.

  We didn't hurt them, the man said,

  we didn't touch them.

  ii

  BEAUHARNOIS, GLENGARRY

  Those whose houses were burned

  burned houses. What else ever happens

  once you start?

  While the roofs plunged

  into the root-filled cellars,

  they chased ducks, chickens, anything

  they could catch, clubbed their heads

  on rock, spitted them, singed off the feathers

  in fires of blazing fences,

  ate them in handfuls, charred

  and bloody.

  Sitting in the snow

  in those mended plaids, rubbing their numb feet,

  eating soot, still hungry,

  they watched the houses die like

  sunsets, like their own

  houses. Again

  those who gave the orders

  were already somewhere else,

  of course on horseback.

  iii

  BEAUHARNOIS

  Is the man here, they said,

  where is he?

  She didn't know, though

  she called to him as they dragged her

  out of the stone house by both arms

  and fired the bedding.

  He was gone somewhere with the other men,

  he was not hanged, he came back later,

  they lived in a borrowed shack.

  A language is not words only,

  it is the stories

  that are told in it,

  the stories that are never told.

  He pumped himself for years

  after that into her body

  which had no feet

  since that night, which had no fingers.

  His hatred of the words

  that had been done became children.

  They did the best they could:

  she fed them, he told them

  one story only.

  iv

  DUFFERIN, SIMCOE, GREY

  This year we are making

  nothing but elegies.

  Do what you are good at,

  our parents always told us,

  make what you know.

  This is what we are making,

  these songs for the dying.

  You have to celebrate something.

  The nets rot, the boats rot, the farms

  revert to thistle, foreigners

  and summer people admire the weeds

  and the piles of stones dredged from the fields

  by men whose teeth were gone by thirty.

  But the elegies are new and yellow,

  they are not even made, they grow,

  they come out everywhere,

  in swamps, at the edges of puddles,

  all over the acres

  of parked cars, they are mournful

  but sweet, like flowered hats

  in attics we never knew we had.

  We gather them, keep them in vases,

  water them while our houses wither.

  NOTE: After the failure of the uprising in Lower Canada (now Québec) in 1838, the British army and an assortment of volunteers carried out reprisals against the civilian population around Beauharnois, burning houses and barns and turning the inhabitants out into the snow. No one was allowed to give them shelter and many froze to d
eath. The men were arrested as rebels; those who were not home were presumed to be rebels and their houses were burned.

  The volunteers from Glengarry were Scots, most of them in Canada because their houses had also been burned during the Highland Clearances, an aftermath of the British victory at Culloden. Dufferin, Simcoe, and Grey are the names of three counties in Ontario, settled around this period.

  Two-Headed Poems

  "Joined Head to Head, and still alive"

  Advertisement for Siamese Twins,

  Canadian National Exhibition, c. 1954

  The heads speak sometimes singly, sometimes

  together, sometimes alternately within a poem.

  Like all Siamese twins, they dream of separation.

  i

  Well, we felt

  we were almost getting somewhere

  though how that place would differ

  from where we've always been, we

  couldn't tell you

  and then this happened,

  this joke or major quake, a rift

  in the earth, now everything

  in the place is falling south

  into the dark pit left by Cincinnati

  after it crumbled.

  This rubble is the future,

  pieces of bureaucrats, used

  bumper stickers, public names

  returnable as bottles.

  Our fragments made us.

  What will happen to the children,

  not to mention the words

  we've been stockpiling for ten years now,

  defining them, freezing them, storing

  them in the cellar.

  Anyone asked us who we were, we said

  just look down there.

  So much for the family business.

  It was too small anyway

  to be, as they say, viable.

  But we weren't expecting this,

  the death of shoes, fingers

  dissolving from our hands,

  atrophy of the tongue,

  the empty mirror,

  the sudden change

  from ice to thin air.

  ii

  Those south of us are lavish

  with their syllables. They scatter, we

  hoard. Birds

  eat their words, we eat

  each other's, words, hearts, what's

  the difference? In hock

  up to our eyebrows, we're still

  polite, god knows, to the tourists.

  We make tea properly and hold the knife

  the right way.

  Sneering is good for you

  when someone else has cornered

  the tree market.

  Who was it told us

  so indelibly,

  those who take risks

  have accidents?

  iii

  We think of you as one

  big happy family, sitting around

  an old pine table, trading

  in-jokes, hospitable to strangers

  who come from far enough away.

  As for us, we're the neighbors,

  we're the folks whose taste

  in fences and pink iron lawn flamingoes

  you don't admire.

  (All neighbors are barbarians,

  that goes without saying,

  though you too have a trashcan.)

  We make too much noise,

  you know nothing about us,

  you would like us to move away.

  Come to our backyard, we say,

  friendly and envious,

  but you don't come.

  Instead you quarrel

  among yourselves, discussing

  genealogies and the mortgage,

  while the smoke from our tireless barbecues

  blackens the roses.

  iv

  The investigator is here,

  proclaiming his own necessity.

  He has come to clean your heart.

  Is it pure white,

  or is there blood in it?

  Stop this heart!

  Cut this word from his mouth.

  Cut this mouth.

  (Expurgation: purge.

  To purge is to clean,

  also to kill.)

  For so much time, our history

  was written in bones only.

  Our flag has been silence,

  which was mistaken for no flag,

  which was mistaken for peace.

  v

  Is this what we wanted,

  this politics, our hearts

  flattened and strung out

  from the backs of helicopters?

  We thought we were talking

  about a certain light

  through the window of an empty room,

  a light beyond the wet black trunks

  of trees in this leafless forest

  just before spring,

  a certain loss.

  We wanted to describe the snow,

  the snow here, at the corner

  of the house and orchard

  in a language so precise

  and secret it was not even

  a code, it was snow,

  there could be no translation.

  To save this language

  we needed echoes,

  we needed to push back

  the other words, the coarse ones

  spreading themselves everywhere

  like thighs or starlings.

  No forests of discarded

  crusts and torn underwear for us.

  We needed guards.

  Our hearts are flags now,

  they wave at the end of each

  machine we can stick them on.

  Anyone can understand them.

  They inspire pride,

  they inspire slogans and tunes

  you can dance to, they are redder than ever.

  vi

  Despite us

  there is only one universe, the sun

  burns itself slowly out no matter

  what you say, is that

  so? The man

  up to his neck in whitehot desert

  sand disagrees.

  Close your eyes now, see:

  red sun, black sun, ordinary

  sun, sunshine, sun-

  king, sunlight soap, the sun

  is an egg, a lemon, a pale eye,

  a lion, sun

  on the beach, ice on the sun.

  Language, like the mouths

  that hold and release

  it, is wet & living, each

  word is wrinkled

  with age, swollen

  with other words, with blood, smoothed by the numberless

  flesh tongues that have passed across it.

  Your language hangs around your neck,

  a noose, a heavy necklace;

  each word is empire,

  each word is vampire and mother.

  As for the sun, there are as many

  suns as there are words for sun;

  false or true?

  vii

  Our leader

  is a man of water

  with a tinfoil skin.

  He has two voices,

  therefore two heads, four eyes,

  two sets of genitals, eight

  arms and legs and forty

  toes and fingers.

  Our leader is a spider,

  he traps words.

  They shrivel in his mouth,

  he leaves the skins.

  Most leaders speak

  for themselves, then

  for the people.

  Who does our leader speak for?

  How can you use two languages

  and mean what you say in both?

  No wonder our leader skuttles

  sideways, melts in hot weather,

  corrodes in the sea, reflects

  light like a mirror,

  splits our faces, our wishes,

  is bitter.

  Our leader is a monster

  se
wn from dead soldiers,