Two Bowls of Milk

by Stephanie Bolster

  TO DOLLY

  Three Sheep, Alex Colville, 1954. Casein tempera with graphite on masonite.

  If that look originates in eyes

  identical to yours but not

  your eyes, who is watcher

  and who watched? All three

  might be you, each responding

  to the name a child gives

  the plastic baby she bestows

  her heart and all her hurt upon.

  Once my friend – my sister

  but for blood – strode toward me

  in a café I was not in, in a city

  I had left. You didn’t answer

  when I called your name –

  she blurted by phone and I,

  lost and fraught with guilt,

  apologized. If I’d been her,

  would the café-me have answered

  to myself, then turned away

  as Vermeer’s girl – anonymous

  but for grief – turns from

  and to me? Do you, Dolly, take

  comfort in that mother,

  sister, child whose smell

  is you and yours – or want

  to vomit out yourself? Soon

  you’ll fill this field and never be

  alone, and that’s my fear.

  THE BEHELD

  The Lovers, Fred Ross, 1950. Tempera with oil glaze on masonite.

  Not mine, this woman’s nostrils

  widening to furry tunnels;

  her mouth a cabinet of enamel,

  pebbles burrowed in her gums.

  Not me, this lip-gape, this neck

  he forces back with one of his hands.

  Hers clutch each other, in prayer,

  in thanks. I know what she wants:

  for his heat to melt her freckles,

  smooth her brow, restore the nose

  she had before she spent an hour

  looking in the mirror. For him to see her

  perfected like that. For how long

  did I adore that photograph of me

  and the man I love – lips open

  unto each other, shut eyes resplendent –

  before he pointed out my nipple

  flaring in a corner? I slid the picture

  in a drawer, arranged my dress

  in folds across my chest. I avoided lenses.

  SUM OF OUR PARTS

  Ancient Roman Bowl with Early Christian incised Grape Vines transformed into Oil Lamp with French Empire Mounts. Agate with silver-gilt and gilt bronze mounts.

  An object is its story, so: a bowl

  was once broken and became this

  relic embellished with a maiden –

  to hide cracked sardonyx

  and burn between her stiff wings

  a wick over oil. Encased and labelled,

  she pores over an empty bowl

  held whole inside a patterned shell of gold.

  I am alone. I admire from above,

  her arched body not unlike mine

  but bare to naked gazes. Then bend

  and find the gold that holds her there

  (and keeps this elegance together)

  is an ancient gorgon mask: mutter

  underneath her song, rumble of guts.

  Snakes I didn’t know I harboured

  start to wake; my features, granite,

  crack. I have seen. I have been seen.

  STOP MOTION

  Dropping and Lifting a Handkerchief and Woman Pouring Bucket of Water over Another Woman, Eadweard Muybridge, from Animal Locomotion, 1885-86. Collotypes.

  A naked woman walking, snap

  by snap, drops her handkerchief,

  picks it up, moves on, always a step

  ahead of me. Farther down the wall,

  she pours a bucket of cold water

  over another naked woman …

  naked too the scream when the torrent

  hits, although – because – both knew

  what was expected.

  A man watched through a lens

  (her walking, a horse lunging

  forward) and clicked to still each change

  as it was changing. I follow the fetlock,

  swell of the striding woman’s calf,

  watched by hidden cameras

  of the gallery. A guard clicks his metal

  counter as I leave the exhibit,

  leave behind the air I moved through,

  still pretending flow

  is true: each wave

  that shivers pebbles on the shore is no event,

  just continuity, the water slipping back

  beneath the froth and smoothing down the stones

  for another inrush. I pretended love

  was inevitable, as though there were no moment

  when a certain neuron clicked and I said this –

  yes, this – and plunged ahead,

  let the handkerchief get muddy

  under others’ shoes. I picked up the bucket,

  angled it above myself and let the icy water

  flood me: wondering if anyone was watching –

  wanting this image for future

  witness: this is me, deciding, permitting

  my body to be overtaken.

  BLOOD

  Atara, Rita Letendre, 1963. Oil on canvas.

  A dark metal stinking

  through my panties,

  stockings, skirt.

  Strangers sniff my ability

  to bear a child, my deliberate

  lack, neglected cave

  expelling iron ooze

  and shutting up.

  What could begin

  in that rank enclosure

  walled in ruddy moss?

  Lascaux’s blotched

  animals and spears

  prove that life is possible.

  But I did not come

  from that place.

  I arrived complete in a white

  peroxide box, my name

  in pink plastic sealing my wrist.

  My horse-shaped birthmark

  soon faded. I’m human

  once a month.

  THREE GODDESSES

  I. Fear of Desire

  Venus, Lucas Cranach the Elder, c. 1518. Oil on linden.

  Love, the Romans said they made you –

  and how small you have become.

  Barefoot on stones, you have no need

  of fig leaves, for you’ve learned

  to keep the body in itself and not to let

  the breasts go loose. What child

  could your hips span other than yourself?

  In fear you’ve put on heavy necklaces

  as though you were not enough. Your

  painter must have thought you wanton,

  his neck aflush with shame at posing a girl

  unclothed for Art. Your shame at having

  flesh is greater. Would you rather lack

  a body and so be safe from probing

  fingertips and gazes, be safe from what

  that body wants? I have wanted

  to turn away from the sudden ivory

  of your skin, too rare a thing,

  endangered, endangering its self

  and mine by such exposure.

  II. Fear of Enormity

  Hope I, Gustav Klimt, 1903. Oil on canvas.

  Impossible the taut globe of your belly.

  What does it not contain? You trust

  that each nail, once born, will be

  immaculate, as you have become, having

  shunned man’s touch for months and carried

  in your body another body’s weight.

  Your feet are lost behind some monster

  wave of shadow those masks behind you cast:

  Death, Decrepitude. Against their knowing

  sockets’ gaze, you hold your elbows bent

  as wings to make a phoenix of your hair.

  He hated that your ordinary reddish

  freckles turned into
a universe of far,

  insistent stars, that you were shapely

  and misshapen, vertical and utter, and loomed

  inside his doorway – his model grown

  to distances he couldn’t span. Your

  certain look fixes us both in our places

  and will not fix anything. How I narrow

  in your eyes to barren one, to mothered.

  III. Fear of the Twenty-First Century

  Transformations No. 5, Jack Shadbolt, 1976. Acrylic, latex commercial paint, black ink, pastel, and charcoal on illustration board.

  Yes, she is here, she is real –

  she smells of iron afterbirth; her mad

  red wingflaps knock loose chunks of dirt,

  shit, the hundred shades of myth.

  She’s the mess you were punished

  in school for making, she

  thinks herself resplendent, she thinks herself

  important. What have you given into the air?

  You’ve gone too far and already

  she’s beyond you. No one will rest.

  Not content to let you be the chrysalis

  that’s left, she breaks you as herself

  in fragments, she does not recognize

  any of our shut-tight shapes. Nightmare

  the caterpillar had, mouth made of wings,

  salamander come through fire,

  she bursts into bits of flag and firecracker.

  Father basks in her quick-given

  flame and says he has created.

  If she came to me I could not

  give my meagre breast to suck, I would want

  her every colour for myself and she would laugh

  with her worm-mouth she will devour

  the world as she must.

  NOTES

  The first line of “Come to the edge of the barn the property really begins there” is from “37 Haiku” in A Wave by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1984 by John Ashbery. All rights reserved.

  The title Seawolf Inside Its Own Dorsal Fin is used with permission of the artist, Robert Davidson.

  The opening quotation for “Red Stiletto” is from “Our Angelic Ancestor” in Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell by Charles Simic. Copyright © 1992 by Charles Simic. Reprinted by permission of The Ecco Press.

  In “Assonance,” the line “Hurt bird in dirt” was adapted from an unpublished poem by Christopher Patton.

  The italicized text in “Edge of the River” was adapted from informational signs in the Arboretum in Odell Park, Fredericton.

  The photograph that inspired “Virginia Woolf’s Mother in the Blurred Garden” depicts Julia Margaret Cameron’s niece, Mrs. Herbert Duckworth. Later known as Mrs. Leslie Stephen, she was the mother of Virginia Woolf.

  The National Gallery of Canada’s Library and Archives, particularly the clipping files, were indispensable in my research for “Deux personnages dans la nuit,” as were Madeleine (Beaulieu) Samson’s personal reflections on Lemieux as a teacher. Books by Guy Robert (Lemieux, Stanké, 1975), Marie Carani (Jean Paul Lemieux, Musée du Québec, 1992), and Marcel Dubé (Jean Paul Lemieux et le livre, Art Global, 1993) aided my research.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Poems in this book have previously appeared or will soon appear, often in different forms, in the following journals and anthologies: Arc, The Backwater Review, Breathing Fire: Canada’s New Poets (Harbour Publishing), Bywords, Canadian Literature, Contemporary Verse 2, Dandelion, Ellipse, Event, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, Meltwater: Fiction and Poetry from the Banff Centre for the Arts (Banff Centre Press), Ne West Review, PRISM international, A Room at the Heart of Things (Véhicule Press), Versodove (Italy) and We All Begin in a Little Magazine: Arc and the Promise of Canada’s Poets, 1978 to 1998 (Arc magazine and Carleton University Press). An excerpt from “Many Have Written Poems About Blackberries” was part of the B.C. Poetry in Transit project. Some poems from “Inside a Tent of Skin” appeared in Inside a Tent of Skin: 9 Poems from the National Gallery of Canada, a limited-edition chapbook published by {m}Öthěr Tøñgué Press in May 1998.

  “Deux personnages dans la nuit” was one of two winners of The Malahat Revie’s long poem competition in 1997, and a selection of poems from “Inside a Tent of Skin” won first prize in {m}Öthěr Tøñgué Press’s chapbook competition in 1998. “Poems for the Flood” won first prize in Contemporary Verse 2’s 1996/97 poetry contest. Some of the poems in this book were part of the winning manuscript in the 1996 Bronwen Wallace Award competition.

  Thanks to the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, all of which provided invaluable assistance in the writing of this book. Thanks to the Banff Centre for the Arts for time and space.

  I am grateful to the many people who have read these poems and supported their development. Special thanks, for inspired and incisive critiques, to Barbara Nickel, Christopher Patton, Michael Harris, Diana Brebner, Don Coles, George McWhirter, Rhea Tregebov, and Don McKay, my editor. Thanks also to all my friends who make the writing life so worthwhile, especially Sara Graefe, Shirley Mahood, Caroline Davis Goodwin, Carmine Starnino, Tim Bowling, Keith Maillard, Craig Burnett, Peter Eastwood, Shannon Stewart, and Eleonore Schönmaier.

  Thank you, as always, to my family.