ALSO BY CASSIDY McFADZEAN
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Copyright © 2019 by Cassidy McFadzean
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
McFadzean, Cassidy, author
Drolleries / Cassidy McFadzean.
Poems.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 9780771073175 (softcover). – ISBN 9780771073182 (EPUB)
I. Title.
PS8625.F35D76 2019 C811’.6 C2018-903243-X
C2018-903244-8
Cover design: Andrew Roberts
Cover image: The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo
Published simultaneously in the United States of America by
McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada
Limited, a Penguin Random House Company.
McClelland & Stewart,
a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,
a Penguin Random House Company
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
v5.3.2
a
to Nathan
CONTENTS
Cover
Also by Cassidy McFadzean
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Disclaimer Page
Epigraph
Nymph
Saturnalia
Mercury
Janus
Ill Omens
Gallery of Gems
Pompeii
Mood
Ten of Swords
Aspect of Saturn
In the Forest
Death March Sestina
Labours of the Months
Venus of Madrid
Leaving the Atocha Station
Holy Wounds
The Way
To Find a Ghost Forest
Ghosting
Clinting in the Woods
Saga
The Necropants
Fortune
Witches’ Sabbath
Mind Reader
Dream Interpretation
Carve Out the Eyehole
On Remixing Velázquez’s Las Meninas
Real Madrid
Study of a Torso
Phantom Limb
Kunstkamera
Maying
Four of Cups
Dovecote
Last Walk
Prayer for the Undoing of Spells
I Dreamed He Came Over
Immaculate Conception
Anniversary
Oblivion
Catalogue
Gorgon
Saturn Return
Leaving the Garden
The Unicorn Tapestries
Line Composed in a Dream
Summer Palace
Swan Dive
Automaton
Russian Ark
The Observer Effect
Blanket Creek
Notes
Acknowledgements
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The plastic tote trays of the Domesday seed vault, flooded
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Glasses, glasses is the only drinking: and for thy walls, a pretty slight drollery, or the story of the Prodigal, or the German hunting in water-work, is worth a thousand of these bed-hangings and these fly-bitten tapestries.
Shakespeare
Henry IV, Part 2
NYMPH
Forest pine needles formed a false floor
that broke away below me, earth
loosening around the roots
of a rotting log’s hollow chambers.
I fell ass-first in the dappled brook,
grasping moss-covered rocks,
and scrambled uphill as twigs gashed
my legs, leaving two thin thistle kisses.
To stop myself from slipping
into a nearby fox den, I clasped
half a sheep skull – purple collagen
hardened to ridged teeth – and skimmed
my hand against a lichen-flecked trunk,
a smooth rail that pulled me upright.
I held tightly to snapping branches
as maggots danced, then vanished.
Suspended between certain dirt
and a glossy cobweb caught at head height,
the tree’s outstretched hand took hold
of my ring and wedded itself to me.
SATURNALIA
Someone left a sliver in my big toe.
By Cassini’s rings, was it you?
I shattered a glass on the counter.
When one ring falls, the rest follow through…
Those shards of ice scattered
into invisible meteorites across the floor,
brushed my legs and feet with abrasions.
I was cut by grass bending in a fierce breeze,
and dabbed at the injuries, but my blood dried.
Outside, a field of wheat moved as a single mind,
lowering its blades to peasants’ scythes.
Like Levin’s slow-mowed sickle,
I hunger for such synchrony.
I’ve found the feeling of sisterhood rarely.
Was it only in the company of men?
When we’re each of us in our bleeding,
and might speak to matters of the abdomen,
then it’s moonlets and stars that ground me.
In morning, my wool-bound feet can’t walk
for limping over craters.
My kitchen’s crystals gleam at me,
gag gifts winking in their twinning.
MERCURY
I saw a stream of silver
leave your mouth, he said,
teasing the wisp of mercury,
a lizard’s tail, out of me.
When Hermes hung retrograde,
we wandered aisles carrying
mandrake, nightshade, canned
half-moon hearts of palm.
It was the eve of another news
anchor’s son’s fentanyl death.
Climbing a mountain with no peak,
we wanted to numb ourselves
for the fun of it, little dogs
gnawing at scraps of meat.
Was that when you entered?
Turning away invites you in,
your hand between my thighs,
feeling for an opening.
JANUS
The shower curtain’s spots
of black mould were constellations
in the shape of larkspur,
cultivars the tapestries marked noxious.
That cold morning I swallowed
mouthfuls of spores as droplets struck,
clusters of fungi staining my lungs.
We were children again,
whispering under glow-in-the-dark stars
that dimmed as we slept.
One of us faced the bookcase;
the other faced the wall.
ILL OMENS
She woke in the dark,
stricken with a premonition:
my body on a stretcher,
a vision of my impending trip.
My mother’s third eye peered
into her crystal ball of night
and found me brain-dead.
Insisting I take a taxi in the city,
not get lost on subways,
nor split my head open, nor fall,
her worry became a cure-all.
Mother, crone, soothsayer,
she listened as my once-halting
speech cleared to a wisp of ink
billowing in the scrying bowl.
I shied from her praise, loath
to see shame rooted within –
not spectre of myself, but twin.
GALLERY OF GEMS
A mouse scratches its way
through my head, clawing deeper
each time I blink my eyes.
Alone in the museum I buy
a gold-leaf laurel necklace, direct
a woman to Ancient Greece.
A wall of geodes appears
as a doorway I enter.
Cavities lined with amethyst,
the sharp edges of my brain.
When the subway swerves
around the junction, it captures
the city as a closing aperture
in an iPhone’s reflection.
A woman teaches her son to say
Garbage, repeat after me. I turn away,
I can’t eat. I have a weakness
in me that attracts others
who are weak. Ice crystallizes
on the window, tiny trees.
POMPEII
Through the stereoscope’s 3-D,
I see myself preserved in ash
in a glass cage. I return to Pompeii
in the museum alone, a model
of city walls, Mount Vesuvius looming.
You said we narrowly missed
a landslide of hurt, like villagers
who, fleeing the shooting pumice,
somehow made it to safety.
The dog chained outside the brothel
wasn’t so lucky. We worshipped
Bacchus on the volcano’s fertile
land. Drank Thanksgiving night
as tremors rattled underground.
Years ago, you told me to feed
the monster inside, and I did.
My cellphone became a bulla
I clasped to my chest waiting
for you to return my text,
and tell me if we’d flee or burn.
Screens display our final moments:
the dormouse fattened for feasting,
figs in a bowl blackened to pits.
Here is a charred loaf of bread.
Here is a middle-aged man proud
of his accomplishments. Mars’s
affair with already-married Venus
teaches us that love prevails.
My mother’s premonition
I’d end up brain-dead I took
as an omen to stop using my head.
Our eruption was Plinian, flash heat
contracting our muscles to climax.
MOOD
Witch hazel in my pussy.
Rose water on the brain.
Let’s not go down memory lane,
but memory locker, feelings stored away.
I keep my garbage in the freezer
just like this city taught me.
I know it’s love, when during sex,
my new lover wipes my ass for me.
Zip up your feelings, Will advised
looking over the Brooklyn Bridge.
I watch a man zip his pet rat
into his jacket on the subway.
Have I ruined another group chat?
Have I repressed a painful memory?
I say goodbye with vocal fry
so I can feel it in my body.
TEN OF SWORDS
This island’s where the lonely go
on holiday weekends away from home.
I came here to think things through…
Like, if my father figures stop trying
to fuck me, will I still have daddy issues?
At the petting zoo a penned-in pig
pressed his head against the grate,
mewling till my fingers graze him.
Poetry means never being sated.
For the first time, when the male gaze
follows my miniskirt down the street
I reciprocate. Your hand on my leg
shows me the place you dream –
we can meet there in our sleep.
Fruit flies followed us from bar
to bar, hovering above our bodies.
Parasites: medieval haloes of desire.
I heard a fly buzz when I read
my poems at Tony Roma’s. In bed
I told my husband, “I’m your wife.”
He answered back, “A witch.”
ASPECT OF SATURN
IN THE FOREST
Somewhere’s a frond,
a leaf under a canopy
of deciduous trees in the colonies,
blades jackknifed under jack pines,
in places settlers now occupy.
Ferns shied away from our fingers’ touch,
from humans and our taxonomy.
Some we called Mimosa pudica,
the shrinking, sensitive plant,
one that furls its bashful leaves
then uncurls in ten to fifteen minutes,
once the unpleasantness proceeds.
Its shyness is only momentary,
the passing glimpse of a lunar eclipse,
a vision that disturbs, then languishes.
Sometimes grazing the fern with fingers
fans its lapsing. Sometimes it closes
against the heat of a forest in flames.
When policemen entered the woods,
did you stop running to record
the fern’s peaceful curl?
Will you, too, write poems about trees
when the woods are full of police?
DEATH MARCH SESTINA
From Berlin to Krakow we rode the train,
passing a forest where snow clung to trees,
a layer of white over chimney dust,
cottages growing from charred ground.
As saplings reached for sunlight,
I blocked the glare with my hands.
Seventy years earlier, starving men handled
a rusted tin can’s lid thrown from a train.
They held the scrap of metal lightly,
grated the tool against the bark of trees.
Cut with a dozen jagged holes, it ground
the dried bark into a fine, grey dust.
They mixed water with collected dust,
creating a thick paste in their hands.
The taste was like muddied groundwater.
Can the human body, with time, train
itself to survive, even off the stuff of trees?
The uniformed captors lit
the path in flickering orange light.
Flames spread like cosmic dust
as men found discarded canisters under trees,
openings sliced into metal lids, handed
over and tossed in a pile like bodies from trains.
How will mothers explain these grounds
to their children? The models of grounds
were displayed in museum light,
miniature tracks leading tiny trains,
where
writhing faces became a pile of dust.
Behind us, was it one of those hands
that carved a branch of the Goethe tree?
It wasn’t hard to see the emaciated bodies as trees
feeding on themselves, scattered over ground.
The branches were reaching hands
in a sky somehow still filled with light.
The forest’s monolith became dust
as we moved away in the passenger train.
Our hands gripped the steel of the train
as bodies underground breathed dust,
trees disappearing in the morning light.
LABOURS OF THE MONTHS
The shiny parts a magpie has gathered to build its nest
Too much batter poured into a muffin tin’s segments
More strung-out succulent than tightly wound rosette
The plastic tote trays of the Domesday seed vault, flooded
VENUS OF MADRID
O pilaster with tendrils and birds,
I want the lightness of your flowers
carved in stone to inscribe itself in me,
Ara Pacis: happiness, abundance, peace.
Am I your wingless Cupid, a metal
torch in each dumb servant hand,
or twin-figured Eros and Aphrodite?
We know the muse of dance is headless,
the raving of maenads unrestrained.
In transparent dresses, women abandon
their bodies to music like I never could,
all my days spent behind a sheet of glass.
I’m the ochre fixed to the rounded snout
of the stone horse. Years from now you’ll
find me here, hard thing hinting at light.
LEAVING THE ATOCHA STATION
I can’t stay here anymore
in my body, where it’s difficult
not to ideate the oncoming train.
I ask you how Anna Karenina ends
and you tell me, closing the book
and stepping out into the world.
In our rented bachelor suite
a toilet gleams behind a glass partition.
No door handles in the Airbnb
but a series of locks
and one set of keys. I take off
my wedding ring when I feel
a rat scratching in the walls,
metal sticking in noonday heat.
HOLY WOUNDS
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