Day after day Paphnutius asked his servants and bailiffs, Where has my daughter gone? How could she have left me? Why would God give me a daughter in answer to the abbot’s prayers only to allow her to run away and leave me alone? Go to the abbot, the servants said. The abbot said the whole monastery would pray for her. Brother Smaragdus and all the other monks prayed for a very long time. No news of his daughter came to Paphnutius who again, distraught, consulted the abbot. I’m sure she’s well, the abbot said, otherwise God would have sent some sign. Speak to one among us who is so full of wisdom that all those who talk with him are deeply comforted. And the abbot led Paphnutius to Brother Smaragdus.
Paphnutius didn’t recognize the face – years of toil had sculpted and lined it. Smaragdus hid his tears. Your daughter’s in a good place, he said, You’ll see her again, and she’ll bring you great joy. Paphnutius left in peace, but he came back often; only Brother Smaragdus could calm his worries. One day he found Brother Smaragdus dying. What happened to your promises, Paphnutius cried, but the brother’s spirit had already fled. Paphnutius fell upon his friend sobbing for the consoler now lost to him. Then he found in Smaragdus’s hand a letter saying, I am your daughter, and here at last is my body for you to bury.
Mèimei
Tutu ballerina riveted to rake handle, with interlocking wishbones for partner – two sisters sally out like Don and Sancho. Or knight errant Vincent Kirouac, on the road again, riding his mare Coeur-de-Lion from Rivière-du-Loup to Vancouver, crusading in pointed helmet for friendship and honour. Or the woman who crusaded for frogs and newts till the Ministry of Transport built a tunnel under the Tofino highway. Or the rambling Scottish man who preferred not to wear clothes, who, naked, disturbed the peace, and naked remained in contempt of court, and was imprisoned two years, naked, then released, and naked again, disturbing the peace again, was arrested, naked, and imprisoned in solitary where he prefers to be naked. Rakehandle and Wishbones wander in no man’s land of womanhood, their trail of crumbs through rampant undergrowth eaten by crows. I shall not let it matter, Rakehandle pirouettes through the forest. Nor I, Wishbones chassés elbows and knees, poised on her sister’s toe and tutu, We have this interlockingness, these angular fields, between us. Let’s find a gingerbread house. Let’s eat a chimney and soak in a chocolate bath, and push a king into a plough. Let’s say it’s epidemic. Like apple blossoms and fog. Liquid as light waves, sporadic as galaxies, rhizomatic as tongues. Let’s say the king bakes to a hopscotch with a glazing of pincushion and strawberry frills. Let’s forget to eat him. Forget to have been forgotten as forest. Forget to have been forgetting. I shall not let it matter, Rakehandle pirouettes. Nor I, Wishbones chassés.
Bù
You plunge forth, arms swung up in full march, left hand behind, right flung forward offering as though in a shout, Here! Buy this platter of brains, this tray of tripe. Never will you ever eat such fine entrails. Oblivious that your forward leg bleeds into the pole of a water carrier tall as a lamppost, buckets hanging. You plow on, nose to futurity, mindless of your Siamese twinship with Water Carrier, mindless that she anchors you, while you, like the arm of a shop sign, hang this pail-carrying stalwart over the street so that everyone passing will be entranced at your pas étourdi, your reckless nonchalance, unheedful insouciance, and general inappetence for the fact that you’re balanced on Water Carrier’s elbow.
What’s it like up there sailing over her head, full of blatancy, full of averment and unequivocal vociferation, full of flourish and fanfare and cocksure legibility, with your leg that’s also a water bucket in which you dangle suspended, irresolute as a butterfly while Water Carrier balances your unsettled hovering by growing on her other arm biceps and triceps big enough to hoist a cast-iron bathtub below your outstretched platter of lampredotto? What are those toothless whale gullets gumming your arms? That hatchet hooking your stanchion? That nose in your crotch? That leg-swallowing jaw bookended to square head lecturing his adoration?
What’s this warpness that seizes your woofy significance of where you thought you were going when you were water – you floated in a watery room, you breathed with gills and heard whales opening and shutting gates in the ocean – a gently jiggling thunderous ocean. You think of Jonah and wish he could have been she, a water carrier, and you wish she had returned from the leviathan, you wish she had taught us to unravel it, so that never again could it swallow us, and we could always stand on our own ground.
Hăi
A cat sidles cornerwise into the room, her whiskers knobbed like leg bones, her eyes footprints in a Halloween sheet to see themselves in mirrors floating on the night. Oh, mirror mirror unfairest of them all, my tongue’s caught in a mouth trap. I’ll claw this bedsheet, shred it to naughts and crosses. Shred it to hopscotch. Let’s see how flimsy I can make this dogged whitewash where they do their doggy roll-on-the-backery and piss-on-the-wallery. Let’s see how far I can prick it, see how it sharpens my pricks up their ears. Let’s make it a pricknic of pricktitude. Mirror mirror, who’s the prickliest? Who’s the best teacher with periculum for the prixiest cataprixses? I’ll look in the prictionary. Get some juxtaprickaments. Cat on a mat. Mat in the night. Night beneath snow. Snow seeming right. Right angled wrong. Wrong facing self. Self as a snake. Snake on a shelf. Shelf in the sky. Sky under sheet. Sheet over cat. Sheets to the wind. Shoed to a coat. Shut to the coot. Cut by the shirt. Shoot for the kite. Hopscotch these grid-eyed looking-words of flapping and tattered legbones. This spooking glass. This scratch mark and sea-saw of flag-natter. I’ll nip your nine-tailing. Turn again, Lord Whittington, thrice mayor of London. Your pussy in boots has stolen your clothes and all the king’s rats and all the king’s men can’t stick pussy together again.
Māo
It starts with a rabbit ear and a snout, then an eye mask and another rabbit ear that could be a tongue of the snout or the snout could be talking, wagging its jaw to explain what it’s got in its hands or why its arms are empty – this is just the way it is in times like these, and what’s a dog or a cat to do about it anyway – this is all I’ve got – this is who I am – I’d like to please you, but in times like these one can’t always do that and, in any case, I’d like to be pleasing when being that other thing which is not that wanting to be pleasing. The jaw goes on with a neck curving down a spine which could be a leg – one of four – making the arms also legs and the tongue or lower jaw also – that would be the fourth leg.
Or it could be a chair balanced on the spine, a chair with a very short back and long fat-footed legs – the back being what might have been the tongue and the chair tilting almost upside down so that if you were sitting in it you would slide out on your back, if this were in a world that had gravity. Or the curving spine could be the back of a four-toothed comb with long prongs for really curly hair. It once was an eight-toothed comb but prongs have broken out leaving gaps and a pile of crossed pieces that could be chopsticks or antelope horns or teeth pulled out by the dentist, not stubby molars, but the kind with sharp edges tapering to long pointed roots whereas really they’re prongs of a comb piled to look like whiskers of a cat shooting up from its eyebrows and out from its cheeks to warn her that her tunnel is only big enough for mice.
The upside-down chair could be the head of the cat sitting on its haunches pondering what to do and the chopsticks or comb prongs could be its whiskers in a painting by Picasso or Chagall, which is both a painting of the cat and a painting of the cat’s thoughts floating around in space. A head thinks it’s bigger than its legs and forgets how whiskers attach. It longs to attach them but the whiskers swell to clubs or become knobs of antennae on a butterfly. Or knobs of goat horns above flopping goat ears.
But Goat has lost her face in a window so very much not a goat or a cat. So very much not something growing like a lake or a tree, a mountain or a blade of grass. So contained and divided. So cornered, squared, and closed. So criss-crossed like a muzzle or a strapped trunk waiting on a dock. Cat, too, with back to Goat
, waiting on the dock. Their ears almost touch, listening to listening. Goat’s voice caught inside the trunk, Cat sprawling back on her side in the sun, looking over her shoulder, reading Goat’s thoughts. It’s not really a trunk, you know – it’s a book that’s hatching your horns and ears. See the pages – two bricks on end, all mouth, talking, floating on the blackness of endless universe. Can you hear them? They have no bodies, only heads – no eyes, only hinges jawing the lines in a play about a cat and a goat. It’s not very funny, thought Goat.
Pictograms for Daphne Marlatt
Robin Blaser said at Naropa, We swim among the constitution of words – chemical – always challenging our stillness. At Steveston, you swam with salmon. Yü, a fish held a furrowed field itself a mouth an entrance for an eye an ear, erh an eye held flaglike from the head, or erh a plant spreading underground, like words once they’re heard. Here you’re gathering chi an assemblage under the roof of she, a shed, junction of paths on your river, yü, a small boat assembly of eye and currents, stream with ground with dawn’s sun over the horizon and tree and heart heart’s right angle ten eyes could not find fault with. You hold here chin actuality; presence. Walking boldly along you hold heaven and your bow you draw its string and lead into threaded fields . Your bird flies up unfurling wings from your square and labour your meditation gathering documents. A dog rides your shoulder for a kiss.
Scriptorium
If I, scrivener, print a letter,
say an e, in orange, then m in blue, r wearing red, d wearing brown, t dressed green, h sporting purple, i in sleek black. Words of colour. Hold on to the world of our first histories. Like purple Vasco, blue da Gama sailing his ships around lion-coloured Africa for spices from cinnamon Orient. The new world of green Lief Erikson in his square-sailed ships. Greenland claimed by orange Erik the Red. Hold on to the world.
Hold on, it’s coming. The yellow world in the hold of a pink whaler. The brown world in a white galleon. The spotted world in the hold of red, white, and blue. Rolling seas of horses going to World War I’s coronets and golden eagles. Will the rope hold to their dungy stalls? Hold on to a job invisible as window glass. His decision holds for all cases and capitals, countries, and provinces. Which one is the biggest – Russia the rusty or Canada the white; Ontario the rose or British Columbia the peach? Which one holds your breath? In blue states or red. Gold-star tested. You find yourself outside, sailing schooners of grudges, not holding water. Just a puddle on the pavement leaked from your limp flags and washcloths. You are tired of this tendency of words to become toy merchantmen. You wish they’d absorb you in cotton balls. Then you wish you could rub them like lamps – genie away on her carpet. To a sunrise crossing paths in the forum. Of what? Still you don’t know. Of room-for-everyone-ness. Speech beside itself. For and against. Speech on the carpet.
Yellow of a windbreaker found in Mom’s closet after she died. Needing this, now that my hold on the world is less certain, I put it beside her binoculars, her orange statuette of Buddha meditating, and her radio. Forsythia yellow, her favourite colour. She wasn’t supposed to know colours because she wasn’t an artist like Dad, her art restricted to choosing print blouses to pick out the green in hand-me-down trousers, while he wore plaid shirts with checked jackets.
Sunny yellow, the colour of her 1940s short wool coat with big wooden buttons, which lived in the pine chest waiting to be made into something else. Yellow taffeta, the dress she made me when I was ten, trimmed with dotted voile. I wore it, with crinoline, white gloves, and a little white purse, down the rows of papered tabletops in her home-ec class demo. Dad photographed me in black and white and I saved the blue plastic off the flashbulb. Years later, after they divorced, she sewed some light summer robes – a maroon one for my sister, a blue one for me, somehow lost, and a peach one for herself, which I saved from her closet. Along with a rag I’d used in the final cleaning of her apartment – a frayed and faded salmon towel I used to wonder why they kept in their bed.
I like the red of a deep-scarlet valentine. Red words, too: vermilion, rose madder, oxblood, henna. What about a knock-around word like ruddiness. Like blush. Hot cheeked. Age seventeen with a crush on my father’s friend – his European accent, his suits, his MG convertible. Some joke made and my face the colour of raspberries. It was best not to like. Not to show it. Not to proclaim your loves. Put them away. Let them smoulder. Horrible to be laughed at. To feel others knowingly poking fun and your body giving in to their jibes – your cheeks a billboard for all to see. That the teasers were under your skin shooting bows and arrows and batting ping-pong balls. Infuriating that they had this been-aroundness that let them make you drop your gaze.
Then you try it, too – hey, let’s make him blush (this is how to be knowing and smarter than). Ho ho, lookit Ken wearing Sally’s cherry lipstick. Roses are red, violets are blue, Ken and Sally, doodley-doo. Piss off. Ha-ha, check out the kiss marks. But it didn’t make you smarter. It just made you somebody who could bug people. Make them blush. You’ve got too much blush on – let me fix it. It’s not blush; it’s real. Teacher powdering my cheeks in white foundation: my stage debut as lead in The Ugly Duckling in my homemade white cotton muumuu. Princess for a night, in the plywood community hall with its benches and loggers and shake makers watching a drama put on by the Quaker kids across the river. Watching the prince who would transform the duckling, after the play was over. By poking his fingers into her vagina and talking dreamily and importantly about the hymen.
Don’t wear blue with green, or brown with blue. My first suit was beige polyester. Mom chose it, and the suede pumps that didn’t quite match. No longer would I be a forestry worker in steel-toed boots. Pantyhose in camel, taupe, and sand would turn my legs to shivering targets of male gaze. A brown leather purse, school oxford colour, would be my constant companion.
Padded walls of hemp sacking divided my vinyl wood-grain desk from other brown vinyl desks. Co-worker Dan wore polyester suits the colour of coffee grounds, and we carried our brown Samsonite briefcases to other offices of brown vinyl desks and beige dividers, where we sat at vinyl wood-grain tables with chrome legs and taught payroll clerks to fill in data-entry forms.
We drew flow charts with mechanical pencils, our flow lines crossing completely logically, linking our arrowheads to merge-triangles, decision-diamonds, input/output parallelograms. Dan’s hair, baker’s chocolate, fell over his pimples, his fingers flew over the keys writing lines of code. His ancestors had come from China, and at lunch in the vacant desks, we built walls with black and white Go stones, while our pinstriped navy bosses spoke of touching base at this point in time in terms of the bottom line for the state of the art. They won’t keep me, he said, jaw set, eyes intent on Go-board grid lines, I want to be associate, then partner. They want too much money to buy in. He’d sail off to a better company.
Our bosses let me go instead, and a dank emptiness, a tossed-out greyness, seeped in till I was nothing but a clouded rainy sea. Nothing but a sickening feeling that I’d failed a test though all my answers were correct; that before I could live I’d have to beg someone for the right to food and shelter; and who would ever choose me – I was too university, too tree hugger, too tongue-tied. I pressed hard on my flow charts, clicked the button for new leads. Didn’t want Dan to know. Didn’t want him to think I wasn’t just as destined as he was for partnership. You’re breaking a lot of pencil leads today, he said, through the divider.
Scriptorium
In the sixties and seventies, Dad had a studio in a warehouse on the edge of Chinatown. He lived there, contrary to city regulations, cooking on a hot plate, sleeping in his office, and cadging showers from friends. I remember the toilet brown with dirt, and the wash basin, used for everything from shaving to dishwashing to brush cleaning, splattered with paint and grime. But among the jumble of magazines, LPs, and food wrappers on the office table, I would find white boxes containing almond cakes big as dinner plates.
Years later I searched for the wh
ite wall and the grey door open only at certain times to the windowless almond-cake shop where he got them. He took me there only once – the room bare except for a single glass case, where two or three clerks boxed and sold these giant golden cookies at least an inch thick and six inches across, their tops decorated with bronzed almonds, the cracks in their edges as they rose and spread during baking bursting with sugar, shortening, and almond paste. I never found that almond-cake shop. I tried every bakery I could find, but the almond cakes they sold were small and thin, like regular cookies. They were too shiny on top or they tasted too much like the mashed red beans of moon cakes.
I, Bartleby Page 3