by Dennis Lee
Civil Elegies
By the same author
Kingdom of Absence
Civil Elegies
Wiggle to the Laundromat
The Death of Harold Ladoo
The Gods
The Difficulty of Living on Other Planets
Riffs
Civil Elegies
AND OTHER POEMS
DENNIS LEE
Copyright © Dennis Lee, 1972
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published by
House of Anansi Press Limited
1800 Steeles Avenue West
Concord, Ontario
L4K 2P3
(416) 445-3333
An earlier version of Civil Elegies appeared in 1968
This edition published in hardcover and paperback in 1972
Reprinted February 1994
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Lee, Dennis, 1939-
Civil elegies and other poems
2nd pbk. ed.
First version published under title: Civil elegies.
ISBN 0-88784-557-6
I. Title.
PS8523.E3C55 1994 C811’.54 C94-930648-7
PR9199.3.L44C55 1994
Cover concept: Angel Guerra
Cover design: Brant Cowie/ArtPlus Limited
Cover photograph: Stephen Quick
Printed and bound in Canada
House of Anansi Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council, Ontario Ministry of Culture, Tourism, and Recreation, Ontario Arts Council, and Ontario Publishing Centre in the development of writing and publishing in Canada.
Contents
I COMING BACK
400: Coming Home
Glad for the Wrong Reasons
Brunswick Avenue
He Asks Her
High Park, by Grenadier Pond
The Morning of the Second Day: He Tells Her
Recollection
When It Is Over
Night
In a Bad Time
Thursday
More Claiming
Heaven and Earth
Sibelius Park
Coming Back
Words for the Given
II CIVIL ELEGIES
Notes
I
COMING BACK
Illisque pro annis uxore
400: Coming Home
You are still on the highway and the great light of
noon comes over the asphalt, the gravelled
shoulders. You are on the highway, there is a kind of
laughter, the cars pound
south. Over your shoulder the scrub-grass, the fences,
the fields wait patiently as though someone
believed in them. The light has laid it
upon them. One
crow scrawks. The edges
take care of themselves, there is
no strain, you can almost hear it, you
inhabit it.
Back in the city many things you lived for
are coming apart.
Transistor rock still fills
back yards, in the parks young men do things to
hondas; there will be
heat lightning, beer on the porches, goings on.
That is not it.
And you are still on the highway. There are no
houses, no farms. Across the median, past the swish and thud of the
northbound cars, beyond the opposite
fences, the fields, the
climbing escarpment, solitary in the
bright eye of the sun the
birches dance, and they
dance. They have
their reasons. You do not know
anything.
Cicadas call now, in the darkening swollen air there is dust
in your nostrils; a
kind of laughter; you are still on the highway.
Glad for the Wrong Reasons
Night and day it
goes on, it goes
on. I hear what feel like ponderous immaculate
lizards moving through; I call it
absence I call it silence but often I am
glad for the wrong reasons.
Many times at 6:00 a.m. there is a
fiendish din of cans, like now
for instance and we
lunge up punctured through the
blur & the broken
glass of last night’s argument, fetching up
groggy on a landscape of bed, well I can
taste our dubious breath and look it’s
me, babe, I wabble my neck and lounge the
trophy from my dream across your belly, your
body slouches towards me, jesus, there is
something about our lives that
doesn’t make sense, tomorrow
I’ll fix them up, remind me, the garbage
cans have stopped now but the room is
bright too bright to
fix I mean ah jesus I burrow slow
motion back to sleep; and the
lizards resume their
phosphorescent progress, I crowd towards them but I should
not be here now, swallowing fast & doggedly gawking &
staying put and glad but glad for the wrong reasons.
Brunswick Avenue
We are in
bed, the dark is close to my face. Hilary
moans in the crib. It is getting
warm in here, the covers are
close, I am going
into it.
All the long-legged suns have clotted again
in my head, and only keyholes know a song.
Emptiness is my alibi, but it is pitted with syllables like
caterpillars moving hoarsely across the face of the Bible.
Outside, the rasp of a snow-shovel
grates in the dark.
Lovely
sound, I hang onto it. In the
stillness I feel the flakes and the heft of
that man’s left arm, and the sudden
twinge as the shovel lets go of the wet snow I am going into it
Many spaces no longer belong to the ones who once filled them.
The air keeps striding through.
Pinholes arrive & open like sprayguns, and always
the long-legged suns are combining.
Beside me on the bed the woman with whom I did
great violence for years, preserving
dalliance and stigmata, stretches
easy in her after-pleasure, sleeping.
Clothes and our wetness load the air.
Her hair is on my shoulder.
The covers lift and fold, and the shovel scrapes and I hear the
endless holes in the night hang down and the snow and our fragile breathing.
He Asks Her
What kind of
pickle were we in? Every
piddling triumph I dragged into the house —
by the ears
(“I fixed the washer in the outside tap.”)
by the snout
(“I sold another book today. That makes eleven.”)
or by the curly Q of its little pink tale
(“I seduced Madame Nhu this aft. In the John at Eglinton station.”)
— they all became weapons in the stockpile
Sometimes I trickled under the door to tell you
sometimes I walked thru the wall, all shucks & left-handed
somet
imes I’d bound in via the second-storey window, hanging by my
canine incisors.
But what kind of
pickle were we in? You had to
turn and finger the miserable little feat,
testing the cutting edge on your own flesh,
and I would savour the way something
closed inside me and fondled itself,
knowing that soon you’d be
cast down again, that I would be rejected.
High Park, by Grenadier Pond
Whatever I say, lady
it is not that
I say our lives are working — but feel the
ambush of soft air —, nor that our
rancour & precious remorse can be
surrendered merely because the earth has taken
green dominion here, beneath us
the belly of grass is real; and lady
it is not that
lovers by the score come sporting
fantasies like we had strolling
bright-eyed past the portulaca — we could
whisper messages, they would be
snarls in our own blood;
and I am
bitter about our reconciliations, we panicked, we
snowed ourselves each time. So lady
it is not that
I hanker for new beginnings — confession and
copout, we know that game, it’s as real as the
whiskey, the fights, the pills.
And I do not start this now because the grass is green,
and not because in front of us the
path makes stately patterns down the slope to Grenadier and all the
random ambling of the couples hangs
like courtly bygones in the shining air;
the old longing is there, it always will but I will not
allow it.
But there is
you, lady. I
want you to
be, and I want you.
Lie here on the grass beside me,
hear me tie my tongue in knots.
I can’t talk brave palaver like
I did 10 years ago — I
used up all the words — but now I
sense my centre in these new
gropings, wary, near yours lady,
coming to
difficult sanities.
I want to be here.
The Morning of the Second Day:
He Tells Her
How will you handle my body?
What will I do to your name?
New selves kept tramping through me like a
herd of signatures, I mislaid
sentences halfway, the trademark was ummm … ?
Which one of me did you want?
Hey but that was another life, and donning the
one-way flesh, now glad and
half at home at last in the set of your neck,
the carriage of your thighs, I believe I sense
the difficult singularity of the man I
am not ready for.
But how will you handle my body?
Some day ten years from now we’ll both
wake up, and stretch, and stare at somebody’s ceiling —
our own, sweet jesus our very own ceiling! — and boggle, with
ten-year thoughts in mind.
Look out, I believe we’re married & lap your
hair across my face, this must make sense but what will I
do to your beautiful name?
Recollection
I remember still
a gentle girl, just married, how she
drew her husband down, they had
no practice but she gave him warm
openings till he became a
cocky simpleton inside her,
coming like kingdom come for the excellent
pleasure it made in her body.
When It Is Over
The low-light recedes, the records recede, skin
empties. Under my eyes
your eyes recede, I brush your cheek you feel what
touch what clumsy much-loved man
receding? Your body is full of listening,
exquisite among its own
Shockwaves. So. What
space are you going into?
Over & over, love, what other
music? Your
eyelids will be here for
centuries, do not come to.
But flicker, come deeper, let be — the jubilation
eases through your
body. So. What
space have you gone into?
Slowly, love, beneath me
your breathing returns.
Now it is over, the flesh and resonance that filled that
other space do not come to and
try to tell me where, for it is over.
But drowse off now; as the after-pleasure settles
gently into our lives, it is over and
over, and over, and over, and over and over.
Night
Night one more time, the darkness
close out there on the snow.
Goddamn war, goddamn smog, close the blind.
How many times have you
stared through that window at darkness?
Come on over here, lie on top of me, let’s fuck.
Good men would think twice
about it, they would
not be born in this century.
Night one more time, great
lobotomy. Come on over here with your body, lie down, tomorrow
it all starts again.
In a Bad Time
So much is gone now, bright and suicidal,
so much is on the verge.
What good are words among the
rock, the glittering wreckage?
Fallout falls; the empires breed
the nightmares that they need.
The only words are lives.
Friend. Friend.
Thursday
Powerful men can fuck up too. It is Thursday,
a mean old lady has died, she got him his
paper route and there is still that whiff of
ju-jube and doilies from her front hall; a stroke; he can
taste them going soggy; some in his pocket too, they always picked up
lint; anyway, she is dead.
And tonight there are things to do in the study, he has a
report, he has the kids, it is
almost too much. Forty-five years, and
still the point eludes him whenever he stops to think.
Next morning,
hacking the day into shape on the phone, there is still no
way — routine & the small ache,
he cannot accommodate both.
At Hallowe’en too, in her hall.
And I know which one he takes and that
night at six, while the kids are tackling his legs with their small tussling,
how he fends them off, tells them “Play upstairs”; one day
they will be dead also with their jelly beans.
In her kitchen, she had a parrot that said “Down the hatch!”
More Claiming
That one is me too — belting thru
school to the rhythms of glory, tripping,
blinking at vanishing place-names
Etobicoke Muskoka Labrador then Notting Hill Gate but he could
never keep them straight,
though as they ran together they always had
people in them, like ketchup on his shirt.
Extra-gang spikers and singalong, I believe that was
Labrador? Teachers. That
girl in Stockholm — Christ! what did they
expect? the man was otherwise engaged.
For there were treks, attacks and
tribal migrations of meaning, wow
careening thru his skull, the doves &
dodos that descended, scary
part
nerships with God, new selves erupting
messianic daily — all the grand
adrenalin parade!
He was supposed to wear matching socks?
It was a messy pubescent
surfeit of selves but there were
three I didn’t know about,
the sabotage kids.
They never budged.
One was perpetually leaving his
penis behind in garbage bags. One had a
bazooka stuck in his throat, hence had some
difficulty speaking.
The third would sob all night in the lonesome night,
crying for something damp, and close, and warm.
I came across them far too late.
They kept on dousing
epiphanies, misdirecting traffic.
They kept on daring me to
break down, like a carburetor with a passion for wildflowers.
Heaven and Earth
Ordinary moving
stoplight & manhole
maple tree birch tree oak
dandelions crabgrass
ferry boats Andromeda
fathers and mothers, and
heaven and earth and all
vivacious things that
throng around a man
will not approach until he
hears himself pronounce “I
hate you” with his body.
Sibelius Park
I
Walking north from his other lives in a fine rain
through the high-rise pavilion on Walmer
lost in the vague turbulence he harbours
Rochdale Anansi how many
routine wipeouts has he performed since he was born?
and mostly himself;
drifting north to the three-storey
turrets & gables, the squiggles and
arches and baleful asymmetric glare of the houses he loves
Toronto gothic
walking north in the fine rain, going home through the late afternoon
he comes to Sibelius Park.
Across that green expanse he sees
the cars parked close, every second licence yankee, he thinks of