The First Memory
In a forties Chevrolet
We move from English Bay
To a stucco bungalow
Three will unpack now
Near a park – scrap wilderness –
Whose old-growth trees
Are lightning-charred
Where one polio summer
A boy will hold me
Underwater
The time it takes to burn
A memory. I will return
To English Bay with Dad,
This quiet man
Who sits in the kitchen
At 3 a.m. drinking Bovril.
I made myself a cup of Bovril,
He says and I reply
It’s cold in the spare room.
Moving Day, the Chevy:
The first memory.
The one in which Dad stepped
From the ranks of returned
Soldiers
And hurried shyly towards us
Is missing
From the place memories are.
Lost and Found
When a text was no longer read
Its oak-gall ink could be scraped off,
The parchment recycled,
In which case the first text was usually lost;
Or scrubbed with milk and oat bran.
In that case the first text might reappear
A ghostly scriptio inferior –
Object’s memory, ingrained.
So Archimedes’ palimpsest
Comes to light, underwriting Christian prayers,
And memories we think or fear or hope are lost
May lie dormant for years,
Till, jostled by some scent or taste,
They claim a new lease on life
And swell the restless host
That cross-examines me at night.
On the Naming of Hurricanes
Dido. Cleo. Gloria. Katrina.
A force of nature? Unpredictable,
Violent, devastating –
A name for shelter swept away?
Men did the naming, naturally. Still
Wouldn’t you think they’d name
A work of theirs – wee skirmish even – after themselves?
Marathon. Agincourt. Verdun.
Dad went to war. Returned
With a drab canteen, printed
With his name and rank. Good box, says my son.
Good for keeping stuff in.
Dad was pretty taciturn.
I stored it in the basement,
My go-to when I’m afraid
I’m going to hurt my squabbling kids.
Small as a darning egg
I watch the furnace lick its flames.
Take it, I tell my boy. Take Dad’s army box.
Use it as you please. But please
Steer clear of Mother’s rage
And the battles no general wants to name.
After the Quake
I saved this photo
From the Times: Sichuan, 2008,
A squandered
Child, cheek
Nestled in her father’s clavicle.
Jittery as wrens
The father’s eyes
Record the aftershocks
Paper can’t contain.
Dust films her pullover,
The fuzzy one she wore
To school today. Today?
Today’s this egg
Snug in her palm,
Round and precarious as a belly
Full of child.
Was the egg pulled
From the rubble too?
She’s holding it – for now
She’s rescued
And will keep it safe.
Letter Home
from a Canadian Stretcher Bearer, 1916
‘I want to get a job as Battn stretcher bearer.
It’s a rotten job, of course, no one wants it,
But I think I’d be more use binding up wounds
Than just carrying a gun in the ordinary way.
‘There’s no honour in the damn job, no chance
Of advancement. But I like the work,
And understand it a little, while I hate
Looking after a beastly gun and forming fours and all that.’
States of Siege
For his father Hamoudi cooks soup from grass.
The shepherd tells him what kind the sheep like.
When they killed the donkey I took a few ounces
Though Islam forbids it. Starvation is infidel.
When neighbours slaughter the last horse in town
Ahmed says I knew that horse.
*
What poetry matches a litany of facts?
another three soldiers and an Afghan
interpreter killed in two blasts – Globe & Mail
sacked houses and temples, they killed
women and infants along with the livestock – Thucydides
Just give us the facts
In their armoured personnel carriers.
Long House
Or consider the Haida with their hundred-odd words for rain
Their long houses their bald eagles their abalone jewellery
And their elaborate gift-giving economy
That failed to save them from the Europeans
Who wanted their fish their forests and their flags over everything.
H. Erectus
They gasp
To see her stand
No hands
For the first time
In history, clap
For joy: Bravo!
Bravo! But o –
They clap hands
To their mouths
Now she wobbles
On the brink
Their small shadow
Break-dancing
With the world
Then falls
Thank god
To all fours again
And the moment that expanded
Shrinks.
First Snow
1
Tonight at dusk as hills
Shy off and the flakes
Start to whirl
We see our boundaries fade
With a sharper sense
Of the unknown. Something
Blurry crosses our field
Of vision
And enters the stand of trees,
Aspen and wild
Animal lope
And the cold that draws
Its cave of memory
Like a skin around us.
2
And what to say
About this mountain ash along the drive
Whose red berries
Are sugar-glazed in frost
And hang
Stunned into silence
In a ruff of
Brown paper leaf?
3
Our boots tromp a path
Through silence
Three magpies watch, one
From the tip of each spruce
Buffered in snow. Magpies –
Mechanical birds,
Three tin cut-outs
Like weather vanes
On a trio of spruce.
Dapper in starched shirts
And metallic blue tails
They natter at us
At us or the dogs
Or the untidy world at large.
4
A patch of ice
Shines between house and house
We go out.
Polar light over glacial hills.
The top rail of the new fence glitters.
Snow has erased each accident.
No need
To apologise now
Small creature that ventured forth
Before dawn
And left us
The small print of your tracks.
Answering Machine
for Chana Bloch
We talked on the phone yesterday,
You in Berkeley, me
In
the South Bay, always the bridges
Between us.
Women’s conversations.
Benjamin engaged to be married.
They went to Vietnam
To see her mother who won’t come –
Too many time zones for an old woman.
The poetry group convened on Sunday.
Sorry I couldn’t be there,
I said, we had a wedding – friends
Who’ve been together for twenty years.
Christophe in fuschia
Socks and a lavaliere,
James more sedate.
Now they get health care in three countries.
You and Dave are off
To L.A. on Monday
To get your results. It’s funny,
You said, how happy I feel –
One day at a time
Or it might be the effect of the pills.
*
All winter I’ve been listening to you
Repeat I can’t come to the phone right now
I can’t come to the phone…
And leaving a message on your machine.
But today when I call
To say I’m driving over to Berkeley
Sunday and I’m thinking
I could drop off
One of my famous Tartes Tatin
Which won’t be hot but should still taste good –
And I’ll ring the doorbell
And run away like some bad-joke kid
The machine picks up
In someone else’s voice.
Land’s End
The bridal parties file across the lawn
In too high heels and flimsy dresses,
Boys in rented tuxes
Holding boutonnières in boxes
Like pastries
Or eggs.
Vita brevis days are long.
We sniff the grass that smells
Fresh cut, watch the brides’
Stiletto heels stab porous turf.
The spires of the Golden Gate
Rise through a frieze
Of cypress trees;
The ocean makes a muted din.
Reclining on the grass we watch
Musicians tote
The strange shapes of their instruments
Up the colonnade
To the museum, a replica
Of a replica, whose original –
If one may speak of origins? –
Is in Paris. The bridal parties
Are replicas of something too.
It’s all as old as war
And trade murmur the figures
On the bas relief.
We Create Paradise
Replies the purveyor of palms in pots
On every side
Of his immaculate white van.
The sun posts west
But yachts still venture out to sea
And at intervals the foghorns low
Although today
Although today
Although today
There is no fog
The light is consecrating everything.
Scope
for Lucie
Standing on your porch at dusk
We observe the fingernail
Clipping of a moon as it descends
To the opposite ridge
Where a herd of elk – cows and calves –
Also comes to rest
Each day at dusk.
I’ve never viewed the moon
Through a telescope before:
Tiny craters inside big ones
As if it were scarred
By a childhood disease;
But it’s the inner edge
My eye keeps turning to – not the clean-
Swept moon that shines over
Your child’s picture-book house,
But ragged, frayed
Like a scrap of lace
That comes to light
From the chaos of a dresser drawer.
The Back Road
We can make a loop.
No need to retrace our footsteps
Strangers tell us
Over the asphalt road that winds
Through vineyards
Back to our own perched village –
There’s a path through the woods
Aromatic pine and oak
On the north-facing slope –
And surely circling back
Is better than
Returning over the same ground?
Today we scout the trailhead
Where they said
Under the hill cemetery –
All we find’s a road
Downhill into shade and mud
Not up
To the panoramic view,
And a signpost inscribed Chemin de l’Envers –
Road of the Other Side
Or maybe Back Road?
Looks gloomy.
Shouldn’t have mooned round the garden
Sipping coffee while wasps laid their eggs
In our figs.
But hey, let’s give it a try.
Down we go, into shade.
The road forks, it forks again,
We have choices to make,
But – long story short –
In no time we find our way
Right back to our usual road
Beside a slope of gently blazing vineyards
Where grappillons still hang –
Grapes for the gleaners.
About the Author
Beverley Bie Brahic is a poet, translator and occasional critic. Her collection White Sheets was a finalist for the 2012 Forward Prize; Hunting the Boar (2016) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and her translation, Guillaume Apollinaire, The Little Auto, won the 2013 Scott Moncrieff Prize. Other translations include Francis Ponge, Unfinished Ode to Mud, a 2009 Popescu Prize finalist, and books by Hélène Cixous, Yves Bonnefoy, Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva. Brahic was born in Saskatoon, Canada, grew up in Vancouver, and now lives in Paris and the San Francisco Bay Area.
also by Beverley Bie Brahic
POETRY
Hunting the Boar
White Sheets
Against Gravity
SELECTED POETRY TRANSLATIONS
Unfinished Ode To Mud by Francis Ponge
The Little Auto by Guillaume Apollinaire
The Present Hour by Yves Bonnefoy
The Anchor’s Long Chain by Yves Bonnefoy
Rue Traversière by Yves Bonnefoy
Ursa Major by Yves Bonnefoy
SELECTED PROSE TRANSLATIONS
Twists and Turns in the Heart’s Antarctic by Hélène Cixous
Hemlock by Hélène Cixous
Hyperdream by Hélène Cixous
Manhattan by Hélène Cixous
Dream I Tell You by Hélène Cixous
The Day I Wasn’t There by Hélène Cixous
Reveries of The Wild Woman by Hélène Cixous
Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint by Hélène Cixous
Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius by Jacques Derrida
This Incredible Need to Believe by Julia Kristeva
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2018 by
Carcanet Press Ltd
Alliance House, 30 Cross Street
Manchester M2 7AQ
www.carcanet.co.uk
Text copyright © Beverley Bie Brahic, 2018
The right of Beverley Bie Brahic to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 784106 10 2
eISBN 978 1 784106 11 9
The publisher acknowledges financial assistance from Arts Council England.
Typeset in England by XL Publishing Services, Exmouth
Printed and bound in Englan
d by SRP Ltd, Exeter
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