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The Hotel Eden

Page 1

by Beverley Bie Brahic




  BEVERLEY BIE BRAHIC

  The Hotel Eden

  Only a garden can teach gardening.

  Douglas Dunn

  Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgements

  Madame Martin and I

  All Souls

  The Hotel Eden

  Landline

  A Community Garden

  Olives, Endives and Mallow

  The Builders

  Roller Skates, a Snack, a Book

  Crouching Woman (Camille Claudel)

  Monday Morning, Croissy-sur-Seine

  Future Perfect

  Hornets

  Collateral Damage

  An Ancient Art

  Across from the Apple Store

  Gypsies, On the Road

  Real Estate

  In the Luxembourg Garden

  An Eternity

  Pelouse Interdite

  The Fête du Miel

  At the Museum (Fantin-Latour)

  The Queens of France

  In the Orchard

  Défense de Pisser

  Autumn Song

  A Stone Bench

  You Never Know

  Four Seasons (a Draft)

  Provisional

  Red Berries

  Courtly Love

  The Lady and the Hollyhock

  Exotic Perfume

  Off Frenchman’s Road

  Aubade for a House Exchange, Summer 2003

  Moon with a Supermarket Trolley

  Herbarium

  Life

  On The Existence of Doubt

  For Now

  Old Women

  A Happy Ending

  Happy he who like Ulysses

  Winter Pears

  Three Fragments

  Many Moons

  Behind

  The Sand Dollar Inn

  The First Memory

  Lost and Found

  On the Naming of Hurricanes

  After the Quake

  Letter Home

  States of Siege

  Long House

  H. Erectus

  First Snow

  Answering Machine

  Land’s End

  Scope

  The Back Road

  About the Author

  also by Beverley Bie Brahic

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks are due to the editors of the following journals in which some of these poems first appeared, some in earlier versions: American Journal of Poetry, The Hudson Review, Manchester Review, Mantis, Poetry Ireland Review, PN Review, Poetry Daily, Poetry Review, Queen’s Quarterly, Recours au poème, Shofar, Stand and La Traductière.

  Indra’s Net, an anthology published by Bennison Books in support of The Book Bus Charity, published an earlier version of ‘The Sand Dollar Inn’.

  ‘Letter Home’ is adapted from Bill Rawling, Death their Enemy: Canadian Medical Practitioners and War.

  I am grateful to my first readers for their spot-on criticisms and encouragement, especially Nina Bogin, in France, and Chana Bloch and the other members of the Berkeley Poetry Group; and to Marilyne Bertoncini and Brigitte Gyr for their translations of several poems into French.

  Madame Martin and I

  Madame Martin will throw back her shutters at eight

  One arm will scoop up sun

  She will brush her hair on the stoop using a small pane as a mirror

  Cap of hair like a well-scoured pot

  Bouncing a little

  Like the branch the goldfinch just quit.

  Monsieur Martin died last summer no

  Last last summer

  A quiet man

  Who liked to do chores round the yard

  Spray the roses

  Who liked to paint his garden gate green

  Every summer

  Leafy leafy forest green

  She’ll rake the gravel – he would do that – and pull some weeds

  Peg white sheets across the yard

  Like a seascape with sails

  across the vanishing point

  She’ll tie an apron about her waist

  Fingers doing that brief couple dance

  Over and under and bow to your partner

  He was sick all of a sudden

  He was dead

  And now he’s gone

  She says she thinks she hardly knew him.

  All Souls

  They have their backs to the altar

  The concert-goers bundled into their overcoats.

  They face the music

  One freckled fist knuckled on each knee.

  Which hand? God asks. Which hand?

  The Hotel Eden

  after Joseph Cornell

  Fragments of a life, protected under glass:

  A parrot on its perch. A crock of corks. Butt-end of an egg.

  The spring from a gutted clock.

  This poster for Eden

  Scorched and brittle as a boy’s treasure map.

  On the tip of God’s tongue, the bird waits to be named.

  Profoundly silent, the taxidermist’s shop. ‘If only,’ thinks the bird.

  If only what?

  Against survival. Against feathers. Against corks-in-bottles. Against the pathos of stuffed birds. Against against.

  From laughter to slaughter the house of objects is repossessed.

  The knife recalls the flint flakes.

  The flint nodule dreams the chalk cliff.

  There’s a key to it somewhere. Break the glass?

  Landline

  He disliked the phone, that hard-shelled crab

  Hunkered in the den.

  If he had to pick it up he’d say,

  ‘Hello, I’ll get your mother,’ or

  ‘Your mother’s on the other line, goodbye.’

  Took me years to notice

  We’d never had a conversation on the phone.

  Retired now, he fished, gardened, read

  Paperbacks borrowed from the library,

  The ones that make time go by. He dreamed.

  Yes, I think he dreamed. Visiting in summer

  I’d catch him, a tool dangling from his hand,

  Staring at the mainland across Georgia Strait,

  One foot in the sun,

  The other in the shade – the watered lawn.

  As if he’d forgotten what he came out for.

  ‘What’s with the phone?’ I asked him.

  We were picking oysters. The tide low –

  We could walk to the rocky outcrop

  We called our ‘island.’ My imagination’s

  Prime waterfront, and origin.

  Stalking the tide-line, a heron watched us

  Warily. I still try to sneak up on them,

  You only get so close before they bolt.

  He thought for a moment,

  Then – half-jokingly – that was his way –

  Offering me an oyster

  He’d shucked to slurp – replied,

  ‘I guess I’m afraid

  That when I pick up there’ll be somebody there.’

  End of conversation. The tide had turned:

  Water was lapping the purple sea stars

  Clumped in fissures,

  Favelas of mussels and barnacles.

  We sloshed back across the shingle

  With our bucket of oysters,

  The silence not uncomfortable.

  A Community Garden

  Me pascunt olivae, / me cichorea levesque malvae

  We’re weeding the raspberry canes

  When we notice them – three couples

  Snapping selfies, who disappear

  Into the rows of corn, and reappear

  Later,
near us, talking in a language

  None of us knows

  Although we have several languages between us.

  In the background, clucking,

  The hens forage and brood.

  The youngest couple – diffidently –

  Question us,

  Translating our answers for their elders,

  Grandparents

  I’m assuming, round-faced as sunflowers,

  Nodding, too, especially

  The old man, laugh lines

  Converging towards the corners of his eyes,

  Serge trousers wrong for here.

  California drought. The ground is baked,

  Pulling weeds

  Without breaking the roots is slow, repetitive work;

  Hands grope, minds wander…

  It’s a recipe for peace – of a sort.

  The old man squats down. Soon –

  You need to water, he mimes,

  Soften the ground. We agree, and go on weeding

  With our hands and small tools.

  We’re water-thrifty, we explain;

  The young couple translates. The old man nods

  And goes on weeding.

  After a while – You need better tools.

  He stands and makes a foot-on-pitchfork motion,

  Squats back down.

  His wife and children grow impatient.

  He ignores them. He is happy weeding.

  We are happy too.

  The raspberry canes

  Are looking cared for

  (A plot of ground is being tended).

  Behind, the corn shoots straight up;

  Summer squash swell under fat leaves;

  The earth is warm, brown.

  Later we’ll collect the eggs.

  The old man stands. He stares

  After the rest of his family who are walking off,

  Backs turned,

  Abandoning him like a stubborn child.

  He grins at us and trails

  After them for whatever else they’ve scheduled

  This already scorching

  August Saturday afternoon.

  Olives, Endives and Mallow

  after Horace

  What does the poet ask of Apollo?

  For what does he pray as they pour

  The libation from the clay bowl?

  Not fertile Sardinia’s fields of rich corn,

  Nor the herds of sweltering Calabria;

  Not the ivory of India

  Nor the fecund acres the slow

  Liris eats away in its quiet flow.

  May those on whom Fortune smiles prune their vines

  With high-end Calenian blades;

  Let the trader guzzle the wines

  He gets in exchange for Syria’s goods –

  Friended on high, doesn’t he go scot-free

  In every port, no matter how

  Indignant the winds? – As for me,

  I feast on olives, endive and mallow.

  Grant me, Apollo, calm and contentment,

  A healthy body, a mind clear,

  And let my old age be spent

  Without dishonour nor the sound of my lyre.

  The Builders

  Clink of a spade chipping dirt.

  Voices of labourers

  Sinking posts into wet cement.

  Sibilance of aspens rustling.

  Soft-spoken voices speaking

  Spanish under soft-spoken aspens.

  Shriek of a chainsaw ripping wood.

  Click of an empty stapler.

  Shovel thunk against aspen suckers.

  Ripples of laughter

  Racing like water

  Down a bed of loaf-shaped boulders.

  Sound of a gate bolt shot.

  Thud of a tailgate dropped.

  Sigh of the gathered up tools.

  Roller Skates, a Snack, a Book

  I stopped for traffic yesterday

  By the entrance to the playground

  On the wooded edge of town,

  Louis Something’s hunting ground,

  When a kid flashed though the gate

  Down the dirt path with her pup,

  Her dad – I guess it was – right

  Behind, trying to keep up.

  Park and woods are close to school.

  I’d go there every week

  With roller skates, a snack, a book

  To read, the kids of course.

  Girl and dad (I guess) trail off –

  Not precisely hand in hand –

  To the clearing where sandbox,

  Seesaws and zip-line stand

  Among benches set for parents –

  All things I could not have seen

  Where I sat, impatiently

  Waiting for the stop light to turn green.

  Crouching Woman (Camille Claudel)

  In old age she thinks it would be good to squat at the side of the road writing in the dust with a stick.

  What will she write?

  About giving birth. Facing death. Sleeping under the stars, which are very big (and some not there at all any more), and she is small.

  A message, say, like the child who finds a piece of driftwood and squatting, heels flat on the ground, centre of gravity close to the sand, prints some words in block letters on the foreshore of a beach. Words only gulls and pelicans can read.

  A few lines in the dust. Or the wet sand of a beach before the tide turns. Five, or six lines, say, like a child’s drawing of a house.

  Monday Morning, Croissy-sur-Seine

  Car locks zapped

  I exit the underground

  Garage, a borrowed mystery

  Under my arm.

  What am I thinking?

  Trying not to think.

  Not trying not to think.

  Not thinking.

  Doing laps in the cool

  Pool of myself.

  Gut-freezing din.

  Shocked, I spin

  To the splotch of green

  Where the river bends

  Past the football pitch

  Where a skein of geese

  Bursts brush and weeds

  And lifts

  Like a single mind

  To the November sky.

  At the delivery dock

  A driver offloads pallets

  Of drinks: shrink-wrapped

  Water bottles, soda

  In desire-red cans.

  See those geese? he asks,

  No sign

  Of them now

  Though

  To riddle our allotment of sky.

  Future Perfect

  Yesterday he thought le futur

  Was a tense they taught you in school

  Where if you make a mistake

  It’s not the end of the world.

  Well he learned his lesson

  God now give him

  His book bag back

  Let him be on his way home again

  No big boys at the construction site

  Taking his back pack

  His brand new anorak.

  And no telling Dad

  Who 1) won’t go to the cops

  For what’s just one more case of extortion

  Between a boy from Martinique

  And some fairer-skinned toughs;

  2) Won’t go to the construction site

  …One brick another brick

  Another… till Dad’s balled-up on the ground

  Like a test you failed

  Yesterday – only yesterday

  God let him be on his way home again

  With a little pocket money

  To buy a treat at the bakery.

  Hornets

  The hornets are polishing off the grapes

  That ramble over the south-facing wall.

  A season’s vine leaves are turning yellow;

  The hornets and the hornets’ reflections

  Plunder the overripe pulp.

  What do hornets do with all that nectar?


  I sit in a white plastic garden chair.

  My coffee mug steams on a boulder.

  The leaves cast tremulous shadows.

  The hornets shuttle cluster to cluster,

  Glide crosswise, down: helicopters –

  That’s what I think of – the way they hang

  Motionless over the clusters,

  Pinpoint a target, home in, sidle off.

  Collateral Damage

  It listed east, liable, the arborist warned, to topple

  Into the street, rumple a car,

  The neighbours’ shipshape house and flint-brick wall,

  So Friday, first thing, in hard-hats and gloves,

  They fell it – chainsaws wailing – beginning

  With the high branches and dream-catcher leaves.

  By quitting time the ash tree is strewn

  Groin-deep in the yard,

  Limbs and brushwood prepped for the mulch machine,

  And a rabble of garden birds surveys the debris

  Where this morning

  Their homely nests and high lookouts had been.

  An Ancient Art

  To keep the darkness at arm’s length

  We adorned our walls

  With storybook animals stick figures

  Brandishing toy weapons

  Images firelight may have lit

  Sequentially

  Producing the illusion of motion

  To while away winter evenings

 

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