by Alyda Faber
and lift of tropical
birds, all the heft
a container ship.
Words flit in colour
around the grey metal,
drop unheard, a
limp lustre of bodies.
A squirrel nearly hits you,
falling from a telephone wire
onto the sidewalk. Shakes
itself and scurries
up a nearby trunk. You’re
unsure how much this desire
has left in it, after the ignition
of adrenalin. A full lifespan,
or a quick burn, hidden
up there in the leaves.
Light strands shuffle dune grass,
a kaleidoscope wobbles
between an illusion
of stable sand and ragged
drag and drift that goes on
as far as the eye can see.
This desire so large
a scope as a child running
the beach, into water,
all pink careening joy.
Birthday Call
I know the routine this call breaks into —
after dinner coffee on the black leather sofa.
My uncle’s voice picks me up
and puts me down again,
he hands my voice to my aunt.
She’s swimming in uncertain places,
a sieve my speaking pours through.
We drift along sentences
with quick flashes of fins,
questions that shed an impulse
to gather and go somewhere,
diverted by her reedy repetitions to him
of my words, or his to me,
so she becomes the glass we speak through.
A puffer fish when he repeats again
that she’s running up my long distance bill,
the elbows of her words grow sharper.
Her goodbye, in dikke tút, a big kiss.
He takes the phone again.
Asks, are you still there?
I am.
We begin again the usual water skimming,
everyday vignettes. Mine sing with a riff of sadness
that he interrupts with fanke, fanke, girl, girl —
two words which days later I’m still interpreting:
Play, play a little more.
You are as near to me as that.
Arrival: Schiphol
I cross the distance once again —
late night Halifax, dawn over the Atlantic,
blinking at Heathrow’s numbered gates,
a fugitive on the run inside my mother’s
month-long escapes from her children,
a life she could not leave. She fled
chaos for thirty days at a time:
the pier of Scheveningen ticks
its pendulum into the North Sea
and then cinescape flatness
scored with greenhouse graphs,
straying rivers, and boxy canals.
On the ground, I step into the waiting
mouths of ancestors, their armchairs
and their canonical hours: tea trays
and coffee cups inherited from ravages
and spasmodic joys. Their furniture set
squarely in the eyes of the living.
Meeting My Mother in Rotterdam
Ossip Zadkine, Verwoeste stad (1951)
How the war lived on in my mother
I hardly knew — but this statue on the edge
of Rotterdam’s water city, found in the drizzle
on a walking tour,
holds my mother’s bronze keening. Undefended heart:
an empty hole
where sky gapes, mouth and arms howl.
Five years of occupation after the Germans destroyed
Rotterdam’s medieval centre and my mother wore this
like rain the rest of her life.
She was fourteen when the war began
and nineteen when it ended. The war fills
her workbook. Under large numbers 1943
she asks: Will it bring, like the days of Exodus,
more sorrow or the end of the plagues?
Near the statue, the new city
a cubist dog, body of blocks, tubes, triangles,
bright colours and dun. My mother crosses
the wide empty space that she traverses sometimes
as the dead will do with the living under changing skies
without regard for which city or country.
Hawthorn
Claws unsheathed, I’m on guard,
mother, for anyone who mishandles
your dismal form.
Nurses empty catheter bags,
roll over your attenuated
limbs. Fingernails gouge my palms
when father sits keening
your name. Quiet-voiced
church women step into this scene
with assurances of a better place,
a freckled aunt in a black
tank top strokes your face, sings
lullabies to light the uncertain way.
Offstage, an orderly asks
Harry for a second time
if he can find his room.
I escape your shallow breathing,
walk away through the back-
drop, clatter down the stairs, surprise
the uncle who just left, standing
by the fire escape, smoking,
his eyes red. Pass a yellow
brick factory, marshy
ditch of jewelweed, hawthorn
trilling with chickadee
song, past a pool with a lone
swimmer, each fingernail
a different opalescence,
and not far from the Driver’s Ed
Centre, mishmash of fur-flesh
on the pavement, reeking ugly.
Bedside again, an almost deserted
stage. I avoid father’s mute eyes,
stare at his scalp, mottled
under his thin hair, his clavicles
ridge poles inside a shirt tent.
Housekeeping: Portrait of My Father at Eighty-Two
Seated on his cracked vinyl chair, he pours diesel fuel from a plastic bottle onto the wood and lowers the stove covers. The kitchen countertop and electric stove covered with layers of greased dirt, a Vise-Grip, wrench and flathead screwdriver, stacked yogurt containers, crumpled paper towels and newspaper, a microwave unused since the day it was brought in by his brother-in-law. A drain tray has some fairly clean utensils on it and a green glass bowl lying in a brown skim. He shows me the small bag of no-name cat food (only three dollars) that he mixes with other cat food (sold in large bags at the feed mill) for his border collie. Leaning against the wainscotting behind the stove are two feed bags of tin cans, and stacked boxes of wood slats and newspaper. And a pail full of clumps of dog fur. On the table, two blackened newspapers serve as his placemat, next to a jar of peanut butter, a tin of white sandwich cookies, a beer glass half-filled with shadowed sugar. Underneath are stacked crates of condensed milk and more boxes of wood. Moved to where the sideboard used to be, his bed has grey flannel sheets — a gift from a woman at the church. She took the other set away with her to wash. He shows me a statement for $215,000 in GICs at the end of their term — that’s one bank. Darkened spiderwebs fringe the cheeseboard hanging on the wall. Cleaning while I cook spaghetti, surfaces reappear. My brother starts the tractor and car and truck to diagnose problems. When my father reaches the end of his questions, he sits eyes closed, legs (sore) stretched out. When we stand up to leave, he says (head down), I’m glad you came.
Obdurate, Infirm
This is not a metaphor,
wiry or sharp,
but how he now lives
coffined in one room.
On the floor, acrid
slime and curdled lumps
spill from the wretched
dog’s mouth.
The old man’s feet are swo
llen,
red boots, ankle high.
Age backs up his throat,
lungs rasp complaints.
Uncased remains
of a rotary phone:
smashed off the wall
because it rang.
And the few
visitors told
to stop advising
doctor or pills.
They look away
from the body’s sloping flesh,
eyes that eat loneliness.
Resurrected Body
You don’t get a second chance
with your mother.
But your father’s body
returns from the grave of your eyes.
For years, feet only: cowled
socks fallen down over ankle knobs,
red-toed rubber boots manure-
flecked, heavy-soled Sunday shoes,
then corduroy slippers worn
everywhere on pain-rife feet.
Your eyes beggared for years.
His body begins to green
in the mauvest crevices,
a porous sponge-light settled
in his shoulder ridges, hammock
lines of the lower back. You address
his eyes now — no longer seek
some stray limb on the edge
of the field. His psychic tent
no longer has you zippered inside.
There he is, coming into view,
inscrutable, in all his fractured
grandeur.
Stockbridge Cemetery
How these two gravestones bicker
as heat spackles the crevices in the day
and grackles catapult between
the hemlocks. They quarrel
while surrounding granite shines the hours.
Both felt the cutter on the sod, ground
sliced and squared, both heard parents
walk away from their boys sealed in
earth’s humusy ears. One stone a knell:
Thy will be done. Hollow pockets
in the air after reverberations end
around his spindle arms and legs.
His little furniture has its place,
toy farm a sprawl of pens —
sheep, goats, and cows. The giraffe,
lion, and hyena stored in his jungle box.
But the other laments What hopes lie
buried here! His hair unusually long
because scissors sounded like bleeding to him,
the walls of his room painted black
to let the nightjars in all day.
Angling across the floor a creek,
moss-cushioned rocks.
A corner with quick sand
kept free of chairs, and he always careful
never to step there.
Visitation for an Aunt in Holland
All the time in the world,
she said.
Enough with hurrying out the door
for doctor’s appointments, parties, trains.
No more departures.
But you, the internal fire drill
says find the exits.
She would give you some of her silence
if you could carry it.
Washed and dressed by her husband
and sons, lipstick lightly applied.
For now, she’s chilled
and taken out for family viewing.
Simple fabric trimmed with cord
lines the box where she lies.
One eyelid peeks an eye,
teeth, piano keys at rest.
Your clamouring ebbs in her presence.
You know you belong to sound
above the silence buried here
between hedgerows bordering neighbourly graves.
A few bees still visit sagging floral
arrangements. The horizon rips
as a stealth fighter takes off on a training run
and north of the cemetery
kennelled dogs bark in a hollow room.
And you give yourself up to departure again.
One moment the train waits in the station,
then its ticking wheels pass
graffiti-covered walls, communal garden plots;
you want to watch the city shrink to car size, a cat, a coin,
but the train cuts off the view.
The last word that can never be spoken
He hated his military service, calling it slavery,
yet in his children my father formed
a rigid regiment trained in protocol
for greeting his royal presence:
keep a proper distance, follow orders,
smell them in rising shoulders and snagged gaze;
trained to live like animals in the hollow
between exterior and interior house walls,
stealing warmth and shelter, rarely creeping
into rooms for fear of extinction.
He killed the very idea of goodbye.
Each farewell rattled like an overturned
bin of children’s blocks. People approached
his deathbed as if requesting information
from a store clerk. An aunt touched his shoulder
as if testing the ripeness of an avocado.
I tried this too and the avocado
asked, Are you happy to be my daughter?
A hesitation, a decision. Yes.
While he lay still as death,
mouth sometimes answering, I planned
my goodbye with a random feature:
I would leave when I finished Rilke’s Book of Hours
(it was my last visit). I would take his hand.
I would say I love you. Years of rehearsals
of this moment with a psychiatrist.
Eye to eye with my father’s eternal departure,
his body torn to strings, masticated
into pulp by long impacted rage
I ventured out into the middle of the room
with no assurance that I would not kill or be killed.
I closed the book. I have to go.
Took his hand, and said what I had to say.
His eyes closed, maybe he smelled tears;
mouth replied, I’ll see you again.
When I saw him again, his hands were undertaker-folded
on his abdomen, fingers straight except one,
a grasshopper leg about to spring.
Cronus
Not overthrown by his children,
this mortal father
came to his end as many do.
Through hunger’s ugly fast,
mouth keeps on eating.
Late learned, not a virtuoso in his yodels
of pain. Uprooted bulbs on dry stalks,
hands shadowbox the wall.
He no longer has eternity in his shoes.
That came and went weeks ago when he wanted
to die but could not, grinding
between reverse and acceleration.
Chug of the portable oxygen machine
takes him down long sleep corridors
on the blanket edge of death.
Sleep cut with riffs of talk.
My hair looks like a stekelbarg —
literally “pinpig,” a hedgehog.
Months of toddler incontinence,
mess after mess: he likes the catheter now.
I can just let it all go.
Drug-induced animals occupy the corners,
no threats, just a furry silent fellowship
that might entice him to vacate his room.
Not overthrown in the end, just outlived:
his obituary, his casket, his checkered slippers.
Portrait of My Father after Death
A sign on the edge of a field warns
no crossing without proper documentation
where two countries lie side by side
along a narrow asphalt road
near sleepy villages and vineyards.
/> Just outside a garden gate
a stray plum tree
split down a crook
into two personas —
one flag-waving-tall,
the other, an unstrung bow.
In the hunched half,
canker and crimes
collar the branches,
long dried into grey-brown ruffs.
Waiting in the shiny leaves
of the laden tree, more fruit
than I could eat
in a casual theft of plums
clouded with surface fog,
fired shades of violet
run up and down
the scales, stopping at a low note
that unhinges the listening throat.
Speed Dating
What would you ask God?
What kind of question is that?
Do you mean — is it a pick up line?
Well if it is, could you begin with something less intense?
Could we talk about God’s eyebrows?
We could.
Colour?
Grey and black with purple streaks.
Shape?
Of perplexity. Haphazardly bushy. Jolt-like.
Other body parts?
Toenail.
Which toe?
The little one on the left foot.
Features?
Jagged cuticle, nail badly cut, reddish toe.
Other body parts?
Do you need more?
Not really. Do you have questions?
Why do your eyebrows twitch when you look to the left?
When I look left, I’m looking at you. . . is that enough?
Sort of. Do you like ellipses?
Where?
In punctuation.
I like marks of silence in speech, and places where absence marks silence.
Do you prefer the dash?
I like the dashes, square brackets, space between lines, gaps within lines, page breaks.
A blank page?
No, the in-between is missing then.
Awry
Flattened your words against your speaking mouth.
— Edna St. Vincent Millay
i.
He showed me Betelgeuse in Orion
from the trampled path that cut
Johnston’s Field into snow-crested
triangles; other students passed,
eyes on the icy ground. His look was
everything I wanted. Across the quad,
I watched an emergency crew respond to a false alarm,
quietly packing up the unused equipment.