by Liz Howard
of my hand the fingers phalanges
the rivers of northern Ontario
all at length elaborate the dawn
as our baroque moment qua
the gorgeous brokenness the viaduct
is a glitter of lacklace
you say you have a culvert to your name
its brackish echoes fracture into
the reeds the diesel the fertilized
emblem of a culture disabused
to abandon the regular stars that
mark your arrival
in the community shelter the orange
is porous a kind of dawn seeping into
the storage space where
we have accounted for our nouns
the coterie is split along a conjugal axis
these urban foxes bury
our wisdom teeth by the river
the bingo of happenstance has
already started but we have
no amulets for trust
your jeans are high above
my face I don’t know what to say
the feeling erases me
the city the township the home
range displaced the cattle the caribou
the day itself displaced sea swell
and fenestrae, the unintelligible
diction we are wont to swallow
across transatlantic silicon
hear your clinic, hear it clear
what hand over my plush-covered gills won’t sing?
forged from Algoma steel
receive me caught in mayflies
a verdant symptom through
the porch screen of you
in this sinkhole of time called the present
exquisite kinship we coddle our knees
against the stolen furniture
we simply tumble down
the rote division
of light
ANISHINAABEMOWIN GLOSSARY
Jiisakiiwinini: spiritual healer who conducts the Shaking Tent rite wherein spirits are consulted to obtain beyond human knowledge
miskwaa: red
nibowin: death
Gitchi Manitou: Great Spirit
Bowating: original name for Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario
Nanabozho: trickster figure and cultural hero
NOTES
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1855 epic The Song of Hiawatha appropriated and confused Anishinaabe history and mythology and inserted/naturalized a colonial presence within Anishinaabe cosmology. It is a textual assimilation of Indigenous rhythmic oration into a bombastic trochaic tetrameter, itself borrowed from the Finnish national epic Kalevala. Minnehaha, a creation of Longfellow, was the spouse of Hiawatha, whose death set the stage for the reception of settler influence later in the poem. “OF HEREAFTER SONG” is something of a translational détournement of The Song of Hiawatha, an intertextual recombination, filtered through the sited embodiment of myself and subsequent readerly selves; it engages the systemic tentacles of assimilation as they unfurl within and possibly enclose the contemporary New World. Words and phrases from Longfellow’s epic are sampled and remixed. As I am both settler and Indigenous, the text may contain the sweet horrors of my diary, a girlish self-narrative that arose from the once-irreconcilable. Language is also thrifted from ecological reports on the Lake Superior region, in which the original text is set, and sociological reports regarding the injustices lived by many Indigenous women, men, and two-spirit persons. These injustices are an inevitable extension of the ideologies inscribed in Longfellow’s poem. “OF HERE” is a linguistic performance that seeks to display/acknowledge its own implication in the effects of assimilation while simultaneously revealing those ideologies that underpin the assimilative program as it operates to this day.
“Ring Sample: Addendum” is a recombinative sonnet that constitutes a dendrochronology of language pulled from the first 14 poems of the book. The preceding “Revenant” poems constitute an earlier foray into this strategy and linger here as a necessary haunting.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The writing of this work was supported by a Toronto Arts Council Writers Grant and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Research Scholarship.
Previous iterations of several poems appeared in The Capilano Review, ditch, The Puritan, The Rusty Toque, in the anthology Toward. Some. Air. (Banff Centre Press), and the chapbook Skullambient (Ferno House Press). Special thanks to the editors of these publications: Jenny Penberthy, Kathryn Mockler, Amy De’Ath and Fred Wah, and Mat Laporte and Spencer Gordon.
Thanks to my editor Ken Babstock for his fierce intelligence and reassurance.
Profound thanks to Dionne Brand for her keen attention to my work, to Margaret Christakos for deft guidance and encouragement, to Lisa Robertson for her mentorship and generosity, and to Erín Moure for her continuing support.
Thanks to the excellent team at M&S, especially Anita Chong and Ellen Seligman.
I have been supported by many friends, colleagues, and family throughout the writing of this book. Simply listing their names here does little justice toward the gratitude I have for them or for the measure of their influence and love. Infinite thanks to: my partner, David Whitton; my poetic godmother, Lynn McClory; fellow Influencers Sonja Greckol, Ralph Kolewe, Joan Guenther, and Eric Foley; Kerri Scheer, Richie Stevens, Cara Chellew, and Jaime Whitecrow for unwavering friendship; and the following fellow workshoppers, reading hosts, and poets: John Bell, Sean Braune, Natalie Marie Helberg, Shannon Maguire, Jimmy McInnes, Jay and Hazel Millar, Edward Nixon, Ariana Reines, Meaghan Strimas, Fenn Stewart, Jess Taylor, and many, many others. Thanks to my employer, Professor Lynn Hasher, and the members of the Aging and Cognition Lab. Thanks to my parents, Tamara and Sylvain Rousseau, the Howard family, my grandmother Betty Ann Turcotte, and my brothers, Jameson and Nelson.
Finally, a big thanks to you the reader. Chi-miigwetch. Merci.