Traverse

by George Elliott Clarke

  for now I desired her “barefoot and pregnant,”

  but she’d turned Tory—stridin spike heels—so executive.

  XXXVIII

  Absconding from Clare District, those fantastic Weymouth—

  Whylah—Falls women, their tabloid-typed troubles,

  infiltrated I Dal U.’s M.A. refugee-camp.

  Here, I sculpted Whylah Falls out of Lust for Life

  and Monday night symposia with Dr. Fraser*—

  Cambridgian Minnesotan Haligonian—

  revising Pound to sound more Mississippian,

  and cranking out a James Brown-debuted

  trochaic tetrameter (cranky):

  Yeah, I was tryin to blast open the dam

  of ice-clogged, log-jammed, Canuck poesy,

  to repatriate Flanders’ fields

  to Halifax, to rose-bower the pimp-whipped whores

  circlin and short-circuitin ye olde Legislature.

  *Cf. Violence in the Arts (1974).

  XXXIX

  Professor Fraser was not safe;

  he was a perilous man—

  his classes pitched chivalrous, carnival battles—

  M.A. and Ph.D. strivers drivin pencils

  and phrases at each other.

  But I was there—

  pretendin to be a lover and a boxer.

  I yammered out an essay on Baudelaire—

  a.k.a. Bo Diddley—

  his sexing up of da alexandrine,

  while I hammered LOTS of Gov.-Gen. rum,

  tryin to make French mean more than diddly squat.

  But that arduous, stammered paper aced

  its A+, eh?

  XL

  At Dal U.’s Grad House, year-round Valentine’s Day,

  played I bone-chillin games of trivia

  while tilting toward a buxom, blonde Ukrainian-Can

  and a skinny, brunette German-Can.

  Suddenly 27, shooting tequila, I was scared

  to spy a white hair on my head

  and to have attained an age, Yeatsian,

  that required quadruple syllables to pronounce.

  Due to “runnin on the rent,” as Scotian peasants jest,

  I had to hide from Collection Agency goons.

  I hied to Gilly’s soulful flat, pure rum & purer R & B,

  where Whylah Falls kept achin into being.

  There, I “got down” with a mocha-sweet bluestocking,

  befo H. McCurdy uplifted me to Parliament.

  XLI

  Doc McCurdy’s summons come just after Y. touched down

  ex-Hong Kong, and off we went,

  “A reg’lar couple, sans distrust or deep pockets” (Li Po/£),

  skipping from her savings and my $12,000 p.a.,

  to Ottawa and my $27,000 per annum,

  and from Halifax to getting hitched—

  on October 31, Halloween—it’s true—

  and we were supposed to be happy.

  Maybe we would’ve been happy,

  but I kept craving Miss H., now suavely bureaucratic,

  and we parlayed whispers into secret rendezvous.

  Then I’d slouch to my couch and play Sixties Soul,

  howling, growling, in harmony, hoping,

  and harming, marring, my marriage until....

  XLII

  Those Centre Block, House of “Corrections” years

  mandated slapstick Opposition. I loved

  carolling true blues—uninhibited Hansard—

  from our upstairs office downstairs to editors,

  to set free McCurdy’s speeches, cadenced

  for History and “the Canadian people.”

  Glorious it was to kick back on Fridays,

  uncork Ballantine’ s Scotch and unfurl The Globe and Mail,

  and curse out Mulroney, slushy Mulroney, sleazy Mulroney,

  or, gratefully, to chow down

  in the plush-to-the-tush Parliamentary Restaurant.

  But my downscale digs down Byward Market

  saw grungy harlots stoop fast on our doorstep,

  humongous rats troop fast through our cupboards.

  XLIII

  Alas, some days it was culpably cold, even in April,

  and my spouse, Y.Z., was righteously unhappy.

  And I was not very happy.

  But I finished (window) dressing Whylah Falls:

  I had hauled it out of Weymouth Falls’ kitchens,

  Gilly’s flat, J. Fraser’s living room,

  and McCurdy’s office—

  like a disciple of Love,

  undisciplined Love.

  Whylah Falls was a brick launched through library stained glass,

  and scholars went at it like a lost blues score.

  Nothing mediocre—no tin-pan Opry—found there.

  Something “un-Canadian,” hissed a critic.

  Si, it snagged Ottawa’s Archie Lampman laurels.

  XLIV

  Unceremoniously, Y. skipped the glitzy ceremony.

  I attracted an attractive translator

  who’d just abandoned, had to abandon, Parliament Hill:

  We had transcended that bastion of Morality.

  Luncheons, suppers, postcards, and letters later

  (while Y. was estranged, cramming in Library Science),

  brought I into the breach of petit treason.

  I can’t talk about it. I’m impeachable.

  But the embraces continued and concretized,

  coalescing a mirror-marriage.

  Consequently, in my second-year Ph.D. at Queen’s,

  I packed Y.Z. off to T.O., weeping, weeping.

  Mutually. (Where is she now?

  I’d like to see her. She was my wife.)

  XLV

  While Whylah slurped a cascade of honey reviews,

  dulcet reviews, I managed to imagine

  Fire on the Water: An Anthology of Black Nova Scotian Writing,

  and soon it dawned (in two volumes, no less).

  Suddenly, Duke U., #1 in slam dunks and Deconstruction,

  summoned lil ol me,

  shocking every Queen’s English speaker at Queen’s,

  even though my dissertation interbreeding

  snowy Canuck and inky Yank poesy

  was sworn out in four sweltering June weeks,

  in the graduate Rez of Kingston, ON (& on ad nauseam).

  In the street, rednecks in a black muscle car

  screamed “Niggerrrrr!” at me one late black midnight

  when I was lugging groceries, my black hands full.

  XLVI

  Down rocketed I from Queen to Duke,

  down to Durham, No’th Car’lina,

  like a bat out of a blizzard,

  seeking magnolia for shelter.

  I became a guerilla of monographs,

  haulin the heaviest, most devious dictionaries,

  sweatin out my eyes,

  with my Afro gone real natchal picky.

  Now I stood on ancestral soil,

  the homeland, South, funky Dixie:

  How could I not okay “our patriotic,” cruise missile kills?

  Clintonian America was plumb sexy,

  and its uglified, fecal enemies had to breathe worms.

  Then, the Divorce decree sprung me, unhinged me....

  XLVII

  Taught I like a Jesse / James / Brown impersonator,

  chalkin up screechin, blackboard climaxes,

  positin post-structuralist agitation,

  XXX cogitation, pseudo-psycho upset,

  you know, doin it.

  And I motored those tobacco-sweetened streets

  in a black rag-top, 1990, white Miata

  some black-haired white girl titled “Yoko Ono.”

  That traductrice who helped mother Lush Dreams, Blue Exile,

  was still “mine,” still in Canada;

  still I sued elastically hard-to-get others—

  Canuck chicks gone sultry mong da Tarheels
.

  Then Jimmy Rolfe writ, “Jimmy me a libretto?”

  My brain twitched ornery and gruesome....

  XLVIII

  Sought I to type over the poet Shelley

  in fealty to the Supreme Shelley—

  that cinnamon-and-pepper saint of Whylah Falls—

  but with a value-added, Charles Bukowski accent.

  So I plunked an Italian Renaissance, bloody incest tale

  in a slave-labour, Nova Scotian apple orchard.

  Thus, Beatrice Chancy sprouted in Durham,

  out of a dismal apartment,

  daily duels with cockroaches,

  and gouts of red wine kept chilled in the fridge

  (to garnish heated readings of Dante’s Inferno).

  I jetted gialli and sweated jet,

  raking sacredly naked, Taschen pictorials,

  or staking my heart on passion-pit teases.

  XLIX

  While I aided and abetted the apparition

  of Beatrice Chancy, opera and play,

  and handcrafted a movie picturing, but not depicting, Whylah Falls—

  Virgo’s One Heart Broken Into Song (1999)—

  my one-and-only, one-and-only, my only-one Mom,

  was dwindling away, vertigo pon vertigo.

  But amid her passive—yet aggressive—decline,

  she recollected two dissected cousins.

  I had to dig up each cadaver outta Archives,

  restore each, gaudy, to front-page news.

  George and Rufus Hamilton demanded a long poem—

  a novel—in which to be sumptuously shown,

  to cleanse the criminal grime from their bones:

  No whitewash, just light.

  L

  Still dandy and scholarly in Durham,

  All-American City, Tree City, City of Medicine, U.S.A.,

  I set to carvin out the nastiest lines—

  grisly, bleeding cuts of live meat.

  I had to savour Liberty in the Great Republic,

  to yowl whatever the hell I wanted.

  Still I shunted endlessly to Ottawa,

  and back again, and still numbered—hand-lettered—

  that movie, essays, a libretto, and two plays,

  all anointed by the N.S. Government’s

  $25,000 Portia White Prize (yahoo, y’all)

  and then a Rockefeller (N.Y.C.) Fellowship.

  Now I could polish Beatrice Chancy in Bellagio,

  and plot Whylah Falls as black humour while tippling negroni.

  LI

  My belovèd daughter, Aurélia, was born—

  Wondrous Treasure,

  warm, breathing, living Gold—

  Incontrovertibly precious,

  and I was suddenly a true peer,

  I mean, “père”—

  and subsequently (nowadays) “Pup.”

  A.M.-C. is right honourable:

  I pray she will be happy all of her days,

  avoid all my sore errors ( et cetera),

  be as ingenious and wise and kind

  as she is beautiful, mindful, and cheerful,

  and find good fortune in Art,

  and even better fortune in Life.

  LII

  Canting after a sirocco—a mirage—ex-Mauritius—

  after a month in Italy and seven at McGill—

  I fell also under the spell of the U. of T.

  Now, Beatrice Chancy incarnated—vivacious,

  glamorous, lethal, showcasing diva “Measha B.,”

  and then the instantly sold-out book broke out,

  pursuant to Whylah Falls: The Play.

  Shortly, its players tread Ottawa boards,

  scoring 97% attendance (pretty popular),

  but plaguing killjoys.

  So? I kept chopping up bloody poems into hunks

  of Malice, strips of Beauty—

  the Frankenstein formula for Blue.

  Next stop: N.B.—to pry open The Celestial City’s Gaol!

  LIII

  I had to spy where George and Rufus got swung

  from a rope—as if in Hitchcock-like child’s play.

  Back in “Tea.Dot,” I exhumed Execution Poems—

  Gothic, darkling lyrics that denied nothing

  except well-schooled, well-tooled English.

  They were prepared with libertine liquor,

  turpentine Clarity, serpentine Wit.

  Entering them, you stumble into

  an abyss of Cajun, deep-fried blues—

  an Africadian accent black at bottom.

  Their lines are as jagged as a D-Day beach.

  Their ink is no medicine.

  I couldn’t use any post-modernist logic.

  My duty? To be as graphic as a crucifix.

  LIV

  Then Mom slept away, passing on at home—

  several family at her bedside,

  a priceless, rare miracle, in our day,

  when most of us decease, rotting in nursing homes,

  or alone in hospitals, our pricey plugs pulled.

  Yet died she a too-young 61.

  Alienated, we wept, but bore this inalienable curse,

  just as we bore Nona’s fin-de-siècle suicide,

  just as we too-soon bore her singular brother’s casket

  to Maplewood Cemetery in Windsor, N.S.

  I bought four burial plots—

  my first real-estate purchase—

  and then I purchased my mother’s land,

  3/4–acre, up home, in Three Mile Plains.

  LV

  Once M.I.A., Madelle H. unveiled next her pert face

  when One Heart Broken Into Song silvered

  The National Library screen.

  “Mrs. Dr.” dismissed my succubus as “insignificant”

  and “mousy,” and I knew Rehab:

  Hankering at last halted.

  In dreams back in the 80s,

  I’d be gripping that spectral entertainment,

  when she’d peel free her bod, then, flippant, slip off,

  and I’d awake, sodden.

  If only I’d read In Praise of Older Women sooner,

  I’d’ve panted fewer, faint-hearted albas,

  I’d’ve been less hallucinatory.

  I’d’ve sunk more spunk into my sonnets.

  LVI

  Execution Poems was this big, black book.

  Blood-hued acid was the titular ink.

  Readily, the poems, dramatically erratic,

  strayed into the epic of a novel.

  ( George & Rue could not emerge yet, however,

  from Bellagio and the Hotel Vancouver.)

  But Blue edged along, consciously atrociously too—

  using a jigsaw poetry, a hacksaw poetry,

  to maim critics with one eye already gouged out,

  mangle those already on Death Row.

  Surprise! Execution Poems set me face-to-face

  with Her Excellency The Governor-General of Canada,

  The Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson,

  who delivered me the poison-pen prize.

  LVII

  Right after 11/09/01 got struck from the calendars,

  Ajay Heble phoned in a commission

  for a Guelph Jazz Fest opera, of all things,

  and d-d Jackson of N.Y.C. and I

  immediately conjured Québécité,

  and put it in the offing,

  to float high-minded, but big-assed sounds,

  a multicultural callaloo

  of symphonic Rhythm-n-Blues, Indo alap, Korean scat,

  trash-talk English, et pissoir French,

  to urge audiences whoop and cheer

  and kick dullards back on their fat, fartin duffs.

  When this opera shoutin Love rocked Jazz,

  Downbeat squawked bout “tragically hijacked Québécois symbols.”

  LVIII

  No, just cymbals, maybe.

  But extravaganza flared, rainbow-proud,
r />   unapologetic, Bollywood fanfare blaring.

  Everyone who hears it hears Miles Davis

  debatin with Delibes and Juliette Gréco,

  or John Coltrane odysseying through India,

  or Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, but with rain

  imported from Vancouver and Hong Kong.

  But now I dug down to lift up George & Rue,

  a blood-soaked, tear-soaked book,

  to thaw out frigid consciences

  by re-staging two festive hangings.

  (The more I hung round the Hamilton bros,

  the more resembled they Shakespeare’s Aaron*.)

  *Cf. Titus Andronicus.

  LIX

  Accidentally, I’ve here blacked out some passages—

  those nights lounging in strangers’ rooms,

  barfing concoctions of sugar cookies and plonk,

  after hours fixin liquored pals’ tricky lyrics,

  deciding what was imperishably publishable,

  what wasn’t,

  cutting through cobwebs of adjectives

  to free the startling, tarantula verbs.

  On my birthday and on New Year’s Day,

  I liked—like—to ogle lake, river, or ocean.

  Every April- Nisan, May, June,

  I must eye apple blossoms.

  Spot these eccentricities—oddities—in Gold Indigoes,

  Eyeing the North Star, and even Odysseys Home (essays).

  LX

  Sprung from the House of “Comix”

  (in prissy, fussbudget Ottawa)—

  then released from the U.S. “Arms”—

  brassy, brass-knuckle America—

  and lured from Duke U., post-McGill—

  and now rusticating in T.O., this Big Crab Apple,

  this wanna-be, instantly has-been Manhattan,

  with my garden of weeds and raspberries,

  my fruitful vineyard (raccoon-compromised),

  plus peaches (sometimes) and lilacs in May,

  I am poor husband to an extraordinary wife,

  who is so deeply, clearly good,

  whose every sentence is an aphorism,

  and who makes Perfection her Art.