saying we should stay for a while, though I’m not sure
if I mean Toronto, since soon we will live an ocean apart,
or your kitchen. It’s hard to imagine, I say, never
seeing you again. But already I can see
the kitchen window becoming soft,
the bird feeder slightly pixelated,
the snow blanket dimming, everything turning
to the way I will remember it.
SINGLE MAN’S SONG
After Al Purdy
After he makes love to himself
the not quite middle-aged single man
listens to his sigh
sail to the end of the room
With pants around his ankles
and wearing a grey wool sweater
she called his rat suit
he peers at his cock’s sad pug head
and returns to the Kraft Dinner
he has been eating with a ladle
astonished and a little frightened
by his immense freedom
He does up his buckle
and walks out the door
taking pleasure
in not knowing the precise nature
of his fashion crime
only that he’s committed one
if not several
and that he’ll get away
with them all
As he clashes down Queen Street
the oak leaves applaud
I am myself again
he sings into the wind
Not that she would have stopped him
from wearing that sweater
only told him the truth —
that he looked bad
Freedom it occurs to him
is no one caring
what you look like
At home he imagines someone watches —
imagining otherwise is unbearable
but he cannot call this witness god
and instead thinks of himself as on a TV show
where he is a lovable sort
for wearing such an ugly sweater
but knows its magic was contained
in her dislike
in the way she gave so much thought
to what he did
and sometimes hated what he did
but never loved him any less
It was just the day before
when he took relief in draping
his sweater over the sofa
and flinging his underwear
to the four corners of the earth
but he now hangs his rat suit carefully
and the scratching of the hanger’s wire stem
sliding along the aluminum
is a chime bringing him back to a moist day in April
that felt like November
when despite her protests
he bought the sweater
for the change in his pocket
He only said then he liked it
not that he pictured clear as the day before him
a widow in a time of war
knitting the sweater’s basket weave
in a cabin where a doe slows by a window
and stretches her small mouth to a birdfeeder
half full of rain
and her slender legs are momentary sundials
but all of this goes unseen
by the woman
as she draws the needles together
and then pulls them apart
in a time and place
where what mattered most
was staying warm
BIKING DOWN A COUNTRY ROAD
IN SOUTH-WESTERN MANITOBA
The bales are fat as boulders.
At your back, the hill of silos and the feed factory —
red as the sun in The Grapes of Wrath, the book
you stayed up half the night reading
that made you understand something
about your father. Life settles like dust
inside some men. And the train tracks you passed,
three and a half miles back, must not depart
much from the ones his brother lay upon
decades before, as though he were
a coin, and the bridge you passed
an hour ago isn’t that different from the one
his niece leaped from last week, drifting
like something stirred from a field.
And the sky above the prairie is pink
as the pills your mother popped,
making her belly a salmon-filled river.
Before you the dry land is still as a frozen river.
You hear your father’s voice
on the phone, last night, telling you
what happened to your cousin. Hear
his breath push the dust
when he says he wants things to be
different while there is still time,
as though he has found a track
to lay your life upon while you wait
for the train to change its shape.
As he speaks you fear that he might breathe
his dust into you. Or that he already has.
The flies rise from the roadside marshes
in the fading yellow of the day, and pelt
your helmet like sheets of rain.
You are far enough down this road
to no longer see the lights of town.
It is so flat you see the precise point
where you see no further. You stop and stare
into the limits of your sight, glad to be alone.
If someone else were here, they might ask
what you’re looking at. And what
could you say? You’d say
“nothing” and look away,
as you look away now
at the nothing all around
and crowding in.
THE OPPOSITE OF CUBISM
You were the sum of the things you once did.
Sentences a series of used tos and stills. Used to:
cocaine, dance for money, thought
about dying a lot. When we met you had begun
to work in an office. Still: wrote poems and songs. Still
dyed your hair from blond to red according to the seasonal shifts
within. Looking back, there was a winter you were
mostly in love with me. It was written in your faded hair,
the colour of blood retreating. You told me with your unstill hands. Come here,
but not for very long, you were saying. I don’t know
what you were saying. We fucked nightly
in the glow of a Pentecostal church. Its signboard punch lines
greeting our naked and smoke-drawn bodies. It didn’t take long
before we stopped even deserving the love we had
for the person we were betraying.
How hurt she will be when she finds out we told
one another, solemnly, piously.
Then we started writing poems to each other
and they were bad, but worse were the poems
we would write at each other. The last time we made
love, I woke as you were leaving for work. My flickering eyes
making a slide show of you putting on your face,
pulling your suit on. Then gone.
I stared at your minimalist room: a guitar leaning against the wall
and little else. Girl with a Mandolin, absent the girl.
If there were truly an opposite of cubism,
not a singular point of view, but n
one whatsoever,
I was looking at it. I left your house as the morning sun soaked
the brown brick of the church and walked homeward for hours.
I stopped in nearly every personal landmark along the way
and stayed awhile in the lobby of the hospital I had surgery in
where the three of us, I include myself here, fell in love with me
for about two weeks. That was five years ago.
Your hair has remained a single colour in that time,
and I find there is nothing your husband says
that is true. He doesn’t lie. Just has nothing true to say.
You know this. It’s your final small betrayal.
Even though it has little to do with me. Or rather
that’s the precise nature of it. You live in the suburbs. You are
pregnant. Have stock options. Believe in the free market.
Think I need to grow up. Your husband throws his garbage
at the sanitary workers’ picket line
and you laugh. You are the opposite
of your list of used tos and stills. Girl with a Mandolin
absent the girl, absent the mandolin.
THE LIGHTHOUSE
It has something to do with the osprey nest like a black spool of yarn
sitting empty atop a telephone pole, and the beached, rusted rib bones
of the oil tanker and the seaweed snaked
through sockets of a car engine. Something
about how little this place resembles the postcards.
I’m not leaving this province until I see a fucking lighthouse
I tell you and begin to turn. I’m going to sit on the beach and meditate
you say, reminding me the boatman will be back
in two hours, and offer me the map, which I refuse.
It has something to do with the moment the ideal drifts
and seeing up ahead that everything that seems to matter
so much, won’t very soon.
The rocks along the shore are dull punches
under my feet, and I let the salt-stung air envelope me
and feel what a flimsy partition my senses are —
how it might be possible to let everything in
and listen to the ocean, what it has to say
on the limits of limits.
I am sprinting, tripping with nearly every step,
desperate to reach the lighthouse, miles away. But I stop.
I know to go further will mean a kind of chaos,
the boatman and you, waiting and wondering.
I imagine search parties and you trying, and I can only hope failing,
to believe this too is happening for a reason. Because, yes,
everything does; it’s just the reasons are poor. I turn around,
head back to wherever there is for us to go to from here.
I take one last look behind. The lighthouse is white as a cloud
with a halo of dull fire just below its peak, with waves splashed
in still frames against the small distant boulders.
I know it is beautiful but, at this moment, cannot feel its beauty.
Something in me is ruined, which is refreshing: I had thought
everything that could break in me had done so some time ago.
I try a shortcut through an abandoned barrack and find myself
walking past several empty forts; broken windows
reveal bottle-strewn floors and concrete benches arranged
like pews,
reminding me of the wooded seats on the boat here,
where I looked up at you once, and you appeared
not so much like a stranger, but an acquaintance
I had once wanted to know intimately.
I walk through these thoughts till there’s only bramble
and the ocean, heard but unseen, at my back. l call
to tell you I’m lost. You ask me How lost? And I say
Only a little. I ask you to tell the boatman to wait.
But he can’t. He’ll be back for me in four hours.
You say I’m going back with him. Since, as you will state later
It doesn’t make sense for us both to suffer.
Later, I will yell. I will rip the blankets off and say
You have no feelings. But I have done nothing, you will respond.
And I will say Yes, that’s it exactly, and yell louder.
I will call you a robot and imitate you speaking in a robot voice.
It will almost be funny. It will never be funny,
but we will laugh about it, years from now, alone.
And it will sound strange even to our own ears
as though it came from somewhere else.
When suffering finally pushes to the surface of your face,
I am both smug and ashamed, and something else.
A feeling that comes with realizing the worst thing about shame
is that it never stings quite as much
as it should. And yet this is the best thing I can say
for life right now, and possibly the worst —
that we get away with it. And it’s probably true,
without god everything is permitted,
but I never thought before how this meant
we are also capable of doing so little.
OCCUPY
“We know that people often desire something but do not really want it. Don’t be afraid to really want what you desire.”
— Slavoj Žižek at Occupy Wall Street
You look thin again, in that way . . . Bubble. Burst.
More things haven’t changed. You still
carry a Diet Coke bottle, half full of rum
in your purse. My first time here since I said
goodbye to all that — those days we traded Taibbi
articles, went to free lectures at the Brecht,
and believed the whole thing was about
to collapse in an instant, like a feeling
between two people that can’t be sustained
once the moment passes. “We were blindsided . . .
We didn’t see it coming.” You swig
what’s left as we watch Seeger’s procession
on the bar TV, arrive at Zuccotti. “I’m not
going down there,” you say, “I’m sick of activists.”
ELEGY FOR TEENAGE LOVE
How did we not know it would be so quick
and irrevocable. Our love
of broken snow globes. Of spilled
water and plastic flakes. Of curved glass
jagged in your hands. Of light
held to your wrist like you were
holding your breath. Our breath. We held
the certainty that is the provenance of the young
who know grief a little earlier than they should.
We were hardened alchemists, transformed wise
from hurt. We knew our love was
everything. We hid inside its immense pocket
and it was hard to tell if it might be larger
than our lives or if we just grew very small
inside it. We could not have stayed together like that
and lived. But we compromised, being together
till we ruined ourselves, just a little,
just enough, to extinguish what permitted us
to love that way. We didn’t know
we were kind. We knew
we weren’t beautiful but we were young
and beautiful for that.
THE BROKEN HEART IS A CLICHÉ
I tell my students.
When you write that,
we hear an echo
of the first heart to break.
And the few after that.
But not your own.
I tell them there may have been a time
when those words would cause us
to hear something
like frozen puddles cracking
under the rubber boot
of a small child.
But these days we no longer hear
a boy stomping just to see how easily
surfaces can splinter.
I just don’t hear your hearts break,
I tell them. Inevitably,
there are objections,
for they know very little about most things,
except heartbreak. Perhaps,
not more quantitatively,
but the sound of it is closer
or louder to them
as though another child
knelt beside her friend’s falling boot
to be as close
to the precise moment of the break
as possible. I am becoming
too old to kneel
beside thinly frozen streams,
and so I only hear them break
from the distance
of one who passes by hurriedly
on his way somewhere important
like to teach a poetry class.
But my heart does break,
one of the very young will protest.
There just are no better words for it.
It’s hard, because
I know what he means,
but I must play numb
for their sake.
Soon they replace their broken hearts
with a simile they believe
will please me. And I know
it does not sound like that
to them. You need to invent
more earnestly, I tell them,
and I begin to sense some tension,
a question about whether that bioethics course
might have been a more enjoyable elective.
Things get worse when I ask
if the very subject of love
is stale. Some agree, because
they think it’s what I want
to hear. Not knowing I want
maybe need
them with their freshly broken hearts
to remind me
no heart has
unfolded before like an origami swan
or locked itself like a parent’s liquor cabinet
or opened up too much like light collapsing
or just broke
Letter from Brooklyn Page 2