Selected Poems, 1956-1968
Page 10
away but cannot. She stares, dumbfounded, shattered, and ashamed.)
CoLLEcToR: We learn to get around, don't we?
MARY: It's very nice. (She switches off the machine.)
CoLLECTOR: That's more what they're doing.
MARY : Is it?
CoLLECTOR: In most of the places. A few haven't
caught on.
MARY: I'm very tired now. I think-
CoLLEcToR: You must be tired.
MARY: I am.
CoLLEcToR: With all my talking.
MARY: Not really.
CoLLECTOR: I've taken your time.
MARY: You haven't.
CoLLECTOR: I'll write you a receipt.
MARY: It isn't necessary.
COLLECTOR: Yes it is. (She writes.) This isn't official.
An official receipt will be mailed to you
from Fund headquarters. You'll need it
for Income Tax.
MARY: Thank you.
CoLLECTOR: Thank you. I've certainly enjoyed this.
MARY: Me too. (She is now confirmed in a state
of numbed surrender.)
CoLLECTOR (with a sudden disarming tenderness that
changes through the speech into a vision
of uncompromising domination): No,
you didn't. Oh, I know you didn't. It
frightened you. It made you sort of sick.
It had to frighten you. It always does at
the beginning. Everyone is frightened at
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the beginning. That's part of it. Frightened and-fascinated. Fascinated-that's
the important thing. You were fascinated
too, and that's why I know you'll learn
the new step. You see, it's a way to start
over and forget about all the things you
were never really good at. Nobody can
resist that, can they? That's why you'll
learn the new step. That's why I must
teach you. And soon you'll want to learn.
Everybody will want to learn. We'll be
teaching everybody.
MARY: I'm fairly busy.
CoLLECTOR: Don't worry about that. We'll find time.
We'll make time. You won't believe this
now, but soon, and it will be very soon,
you're going to want me to teach you
everything. Well, you better get some
sleep. Sleep is very important. I want to
say thank you. All the Obese want to
say thank you.
MARY: Nothing. Good night.
CoLLECTOR: Just beginning for us.
(Exit THE CoLLECTOR. MARY, dazed and
exhausted, stands at the door for some
time. She moves toward stage centre,
attempts a few elementary exercises, collapses into the chair and stares dumbly
at the audience. The sound of a key in
the lock. Door opens. Enter DIANE alone,
crying.)
DIANE: I didn't want him to see me home.
(MARY is unable to cope with anyone
else's problem at this point.)
MARY: What's the matter with your
DIANE: It's impossible.
MARY: What's impossible?
DIANE: What happened.
MARY: What happened?
DIANE: He doesn't want to see me any more.
MARY: Harry?
DIANE: Harry.
MARY: Your Harry?
DIANE: You know damn well which Harry.
MARY: Doesn't want to see you any morer
DIANE: No.
MARY: I thought he loved you.
DIANE: So did I.
MARY: I thought he really loved you.
DIANE: So did I.
MARY: You told me he said he loved you.
DIANE: He did.
MARY: But now he doesn't?
DIANE: No.
MARY: Oh.
DIANE: It's terrible.
MARY : It must be.
DIANE: It came so suddenly.
MARY: It must have.
DIANE: I thought he loved me.
MARY: So did I.
DIANE:· He doesn't!
MARY : Don't cry.
DIANE: He's getting married.
MARY: He isn't!
DIANE: Yes.
MARY: He isn't!
DIANE: This Sunday.
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MARY: This Sunday?
DIANE: Yes.
MARY: So soon?
DIANE: Yes.
MARY: He told you that?
DIANE: Tonight.
MARY: What did he say?
DIANE: He said he's getting married this Sunday.
MARY : He's a bastard.
DIANE: Don't say that.
MARY: I say he's a bastard.
DIANE: Don't talk that way.
MARY: Why not?
DIANE: Don't.
MARY: After what he's done?
DIANE: It's not his fault.
MARY: Not his fault?
DIANE: He fell in love.
(The word has its magic effect.)
MARY: Fell in love?
DIANE: Yes.
MARY: With someone else?
DIANE: Yes.
MARY: He fell out of love with you?
DIANE: I suppose so.
MARY: That's terrible.
DIANE: He said he couldn't help it.
MARY: Not if it's love.
DIANE: He said it was.
MARY: Then he couldn't help it.
(DIANE begins to remove her make-up
and undress, reversing exactly every step
of her toilet. MARY, still bewildered, but
out of habit, assists her.)
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MARY: And you're so beautiful.
DIANE: No.
MARY: Your hair.
DIANE: No.
MARY: Your shoulders.
DIANE: No.
MARY: Everything.
(Pause.)
MARY: What did he say?
DIANE: He told me everything.
MARY: Such as what?
DIANE: Harry's a gentleman.
MARY: I always thought so.
DIANE: He wanted me to know everything.
MARY: It's only fair.
DIANE: He told me about her.
MARY: What did he say?
DIANE: He said he loves her.
MARY: Then he had no choice.
DIANE: He said she's beautiful.
MARY: He didn't!
DIANE: What can you expect?
MARY: I suppose so.
DIANE: He loves her, after all.
MARY: Then I guess he thinks she's beautiful.
(Pause.)
MARY: What else did he say?
DIANE: He told me everything.
MARY: How did he meet her?
DIANE: She came to his house.
MARY: What for?
DIANE: She was collecting money.
MARY: Money! (Alarm.)
DIANE: For a charity.
MARY: Charity!
DIANE: Invalids of some kind.
MARY: Invalids!
DIANE: That's the worst part.
MARY: What part?
DIANE: She's that way herself.
MARY: What way?
DIANE: You know.
MARY: What way, what way?
DIANE: You know.
MARY: Say it!
DIANE: She's an invalid.
MARY: Harry's marrying an invalid?
DIANE: This Sunday.
MARY : You said he said she was beautiful.
DIANE: He did.
MARY: Harry is going to marry an invalid.
DIANE: What should I do?
MARY: Harry who said he loved you. (Not a
question.)
DIANE: I'm miserable.
(MARY is like a woman moving through
a fog toward a light
.)
MARY: Harry is going to marry an invalid. He
thinks she's beautiful.
(MARY switches on the record·player.) She
came to his door. Harry who told you he
loved you. You who told me I had my
points.
("The Dance of the Sugar-plum Fairy"
begins. MARY dances but she does not use
the steps she learned at the YWCA . She
dances in conscious imitation of THE
COLLECTOR.)
DIANE: What are you doing? (Horrified.)
(MARY smiles at her.)
DIANE: Stop it! Stop it this instant!
MARY: Don't tell me what to do. Don't you dare.
Don't ever tell me what to do. Don't ever.
(The dance continues. DIANE, dressed in
bra and panties as at the beginning,
backs away.)
CURTAIN
W I N T E R B U L L E T I N
Toronto has been good to me
I relaxed on Tv
I attacked several dead horses
I spread rumours about myself
I reported a Talmudic quarrel
with the Montreal Jewish Community
I forged a death certificate
in case I had to disappear
I listened to a huckster
welcome me to the world
I slept behind my new sunglasses
I abandoned the care of my pimples
I dreamed that I needed nobody
I faced my trap
I withheld my opinion on matters
on which I had no opinion
I humoured the rare January weather
with a jaunty step for the sake of heroism
Not very carefully
I thought about the future
and how little I know about animals
The future seemed unnecessarily black and strong
as if it had received my casual mistakes
through a carbon sheet
W H Y D I D Y O U G I V E M Y N A M E
T O T H E P O L I C E ?
You recited the Code of Comparisons
in your mother's voice.
Again you were the blue-robed seminary girl
but these were not poplar trees and nuns
you walked between.
These were Laws.
Damn you for making this moment hopeless,
now, as a clerk in uniform fills
in my father's name.
You too must find the moment hopeless
in the Tennyson Hotel.
I know your stomach.
The brass bed bearing your suitcase
rumbles away like an automatic
promenading target in a shooting gallery:
you stand with your hands full
of a necklace you wanted to pack.
In detail you recall your rich dinner.
Grab that towel rack!
Doesn't the sink seem a fraud
with its hair-swirled pipes?
Doesn't the overhead bulb
seem burdened with mucus?
Things will be better at City Hall.
Now you must learn to read
newspapers without laughing.
No hysterical headline breakfasts.
Police be your Guard,
Telephone Book your Brotherhood.
Action! Action! Action!
Goodbye Citizen.
The clerk is talking to nobody.
Do you see how I have tiptoed
out of his brown file?
He lingers his uniform
like a cheated bargain hunter.
Answer me, please talk to me, he weeps,
say I'm not a doorman.
I plug the wires of your fear
(ah, this I was always meant to do)
into the lust-asylum universe:
raped by aimless old electricity
you stiffen over the steel books of your bed
like a fish
in a liquid air experiment.
Thus withers the Civil Triumph
(Laws rush in to corset the collapse)
for you are mistress to the Mayor,
he electrocuted in your frozen juices.
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T H E M U S I C C R E P T B Y U S
I would like to remind
the management
that the drinks are watered
and the hat-check girl
has syphilis
and the band is composed
of former SS monsters
However since it is
New Year's Eve
and I have lip cancer
I will place my
paper hat on my
concussion and dance
D I S G U I S E S
I am sorry that the rich man must go
and his house become a hospital.
I loved his wine, his contemptuous servants,
his ten-year-old ceremonies.
I loved his car which he wore like a snail's shell
everywhere, and I loved his wife,
the hours she put into her skin,
the milk, the lust, the industries
that served her complexion.
I loved his son who looked British
but had American ambitions
and let the word aristocrat comfort him
like a reprieve while Kennedy reigned.
I loved the rich man: I hate to see
his season ticket for the Opera
fall into a pool for opera-lovers.
I am sorry that the old worker must go
who called me mister when I was twelve
and sir when I was twenty
who studied against me in obscure socialist
clubs which met in restaurants.
I loved the machine he knew like a wife's body.
I loved his wife who trained bankers
in an underground pantry
and never wasted her ambition in ceramics.
I loved his children who debate
and come first at McGill University.
Goodbye old gold-watch winner
all your complex loyalties
must now be borne by one-faced patriots.
168 1
Goodbye dope fiends of North Eastern Lunch
circa 1948, your spoons which were not
Swedish Stainless, were the same colour
as the hoarded clasps and hooks
of discarded soiled therapeutic corsets.
I loved your puns about snow
even if they lasted the full seven-month
Montreal winter. Go write your memoirs
for the Psychedelic Review.
Goodbye sex fiends of Beaver Pond
who dreamed of being jacked-off
by electric milking machines.
You had no Canada Council.
You had to open little boys
with a pen-knife.
I loved your statement to the press:
"I didn't think he'd mind."
Goodbye articulate monsters
Abbott and Costello have met Frankenstein.
I am sorry that the conspirators must go
the ones who scared me by showing me
a list of all the members of my family.
I loved the way they reserved judgement
about Genghis Khan. They loved me because
I told them their little beards
made them dead-ringers for Lenin.
The bombs went off in Westmount
and now they are ashamed
like a successful outspoken Schopenhauerian
whose room-mate has committed suicide.
Suddenly they are all making movies.
I have no one to buy coffee for.
I I6g
I embrace the changeless:
the committed men in public wards
oblivious as Hassidim
who believe that they are some
one else.
Bravo! Abelard, viva! Rockefeller,
have these buns, Napoleon,
hurrah! betrayed Duchess.
Long live you chronic self-abusers!
you monotheists!
you familiars of the Absolute
sucking at circles!
You are all my comfort
as I turn to face the beehive
as I disgrace my style
as I coarsen my nature
as I invent jokes
as I pull up my garters
as I accept responsibility.
You comfort me
incorrigible betrayers of the self
as I salute fashion
and bring my mind
like a promiscuous air-hostess
handing out parachutes in a nose dive
bring my butchered mind
to bear upon the facts.
L O T
Give me back my house
Give me back my young wife
I shouted to the sunflower in my path
Give me back my scalpel
Give me back my mountain view
I said to the seeds along my path
Give me back my name
Give me back my childhood list
I whispered to the dust when the path gave out
Now sing
Now sing
sang my master as I waited in the raw wind
Have I come so far for this
I wondered as I waited in the pure cold
ready at last to argue for my silence
Tell me master
do my lips move
or where does it come from
this soft total chant that drives my soul
like a spear of salt into the rock
Give me back my house
Give me back my young wife
O N E O F T H E N I G H T S I
D I D N ' T K I L L M Y S E L F
You dance on the day you saved
my theoretical angels
daughters of the new middle-class
who wear your mouths like Bardot
Come my darlings
the movies are true
I am the lost sweet singer whose death
in the fog your new high-heeled boots
have ground into cigarette butts
I was walking the harbour this evening
looking for a 25-cent bed of water
but I will sleep tonight
with your garters curled in my shoes
like rainbows on vacation
with your virginity ruling
the condom cemeteries like a 2nd chance
I believe I believe
Thursday December 1 2th
is not the night
and I will kiss again the slope of a breast
little nipple above me
like a sunset
B U L L E T S
Listen all you bullets
that never hit:
a lot of throats are growing
in open collars
like frozen milk bottles
on a 5 a.m. street
throats that are waiting
for bite scars
but will settle
for bullet holes