these are the kind of places that stand as beacons
in our minds, collecting us all from our makeshift rafts,
gathering us together, and bringing us to our senses again,
being, as they are and will be, the arks of a newer earth,
or if Jupiter had not already eaten here and decided to stay,
of another universe altogether. If you think about them hard
enough in your own suffering, you might even come to see
yourself standing inside of one of them, saved, your hand
stretched out of one of the open windows, waving its post-
diluvian triumph. If you think on them hard enough, these
great houses in their verses, you might even come to catch
your supper leaping at you from the waves below, a few bold fish
launched into your palm, in the great open manner of giving.
— 81 —
CERTAIN DISAPPEARANCES
There are few nuns these days, fewer cloisters.
Most women only travel among them to retire
to a still, remote location, after their husbands
pass away – or do not, for fear of insulting
their children, abandoning their neighbours.
The old material for romance has lost all
tenancy among us: no more eyeing girls
on the brink of settling into a life which cannot
return them to us individual – that moment
of crossing that is not movement but a word.
And Mary, all three Marys, stunning,
along the pews or in the formal galleries.
Their wrappings, the headdresses, the tunics,
no longer the brilliant precursors of this black
and white habit, long since relinquished.
The icons’ robes, mere clothes again, or else
the garments you might see on women
in the coverage of one of our massacres,
pieces of cloth that hold their colour, soak up
blood, swaddle the dead if they’re living a while,
or, as in the case of the Dormition, keep
them vivid while they are being entombed.
We are all too ready for the expected shock,
the report: I am sorry to say they are gone now.
The last nun’s passed away with not one
sister and barely a priest to usher her on.
And if it bears no direct relation to a crime
or serious accident, those who do the reporting
will have to explain away this sudden-seeming loss.
Perhaps they will claim that those who might
have taken orders, once, became Unitarian
— 82 —
ministers, instead. Or, thinking historically,
that with the onslaught of what we still call
feminism, they married themselves to their wills,
became husband-men of the universities, went
corporate. And, to ease the burden awhile,
the reports will conclude, though consciously
mistaken, consciously though, that in any case,
most of us abandoned the church years ago –
to ease the burden for awhile.
Not one
will attempt to explain this fundamental difference
in the atmosphere, though: the influx,
the corroboration of figures, hurtling close.
As occasionally as foul weather, we will
submit to the inevitable, half-naked bodies
of these once cloistered women, wrenching
the cities and prairies by night, tearing
at little girls by the bangs, tackling large men
and bending their elbows backwards. Stiff,
they will press their breasts into our backs, urging
not only glances but entire systems of gestures –
now bow, smack, or lift – upwards in us, and toward
the satellites. ‘Til markedly, in time, they set
us loose, so we might glimpse their hale bodies,
barely scathed, punching forward in the draft.
— 83 —
CABBAGETOWN
There it is the green and green-yellow,
the cabbage flag. It looks like the back
of a little girl’s head half-sprung with curls,
though dyed from its original blonde to the first
colour of nature. The green and green-yellow,
there it is, the cabbage flag, flying from most
of the houses here in this part of the city
known as Cabbagetown. Legend has it
the place got its name from the immigrants
and working people who came for the glass-
works and for work in other local industries.
They made do with the little land they set aside
for digging, planting vegetables in their front
and very public yards. In these their cabbages
were stars. Or even if they kept their planting
hidden at the back, on the first nights of fall,
which always surprise us with their chills,
chills colder than the chills of winter in all
their sudden, fall-like seizing, the streets here
would be filled with the warm-returning airs
of cooking cabbages, cabbages in stews
and broths or cabbages meant to be served
as sides to the occasional side of meat. You
could not say, here, that labour was not well fed.
You might say, though, the place has changed.
The people living here still work, I suppose,
but the smell of dinner, though it might wave on
luxurious, for all one knows, keeps or is kept
well within these homes, which are all about
the keeping. I love them, these houses,
their painted gingerbread, their scrubbed
bricks, and their reproduction fences – all fitted
— 84 —
to look more historically accurate than they
ever could have been. There is a fine
consistency about it all, even if it is a little
overdone. Well-loved, and well-preserved,
the birds, for instance, in the stained glass
windows set above the gas-lit entryways, they
blink the same cuckoos they have been blinking
for years. And in their care for these places they keep
ever so well and in keeping with the seasons,
the residents, as well, plant ornamental kales
and cabbages in the yards and laneways here.
You will find them in more hidden places, too.
Maybe you can just pick out that woolly head
peeking through the legs of the rose bush there,
or that kale brooding in the old milk door at the side-
entrance to number twenty-two, a door no one
there uses anymore but that they tend to decorate.
You would have to say these ornamentals hold
their own as they stand here through fall and pass
on into winter long and lanky on their stems, seeing
as they have not been cut. Even after their roots freeze,
they retain their colours, see, as if they were still living.
How could you miss this green-yellow body, half-
frizzled like a landed meteor, providing contrast
for the dogwood stems in the urn? The rouge
veins in this cabbage here, they throb just to look
at you and then go on to answer those, your own
long looks, in kind, with rushes of admiration.
— 85 —
CABBAGE CITY
POET (Preserve Our Eucalyptus Trees) is a group that
opposes the removal of eucalyptus trees. When their
opposition refers to the eucalyptus
as a ‘giant weed’
or an ‘immigrant,’ they call this attitude ‘plant racism’
or ‘specism’ and want it stopped before it spreads and
gets entrenched in the minds of Californians.
– Robert L. Santos, The Eucalyptus of California
It was a minor form of tyranny, supposed
to make us think twice about the place
of agriculture in the city. After they pulled up
the orange groves, leaving the trees’ bodies,
limbs, roots, and all, piled on top of one another
on the edges of the roads, it was supposed to attack
our senses, their planting cabbage rows, the city
company. It was their way of instilling in us, driving
by that new expanse of quick commercial crops,
that vision of wealth and abundance, the idea
that it might just be better, then, to fill the space,
fill it to the brim with housing. Most times the air
was wretched, and this was what they counted on.
They wanted us turning up our noses at the unforgiving
cabbage stench, ourselves unforgiving. Jogging by
or driving in our cars on those cool and pleasant days
of early summer, confronted with what seemed at first
a mass of bitters in the air – this was meant to make us jog
the other way and roll our windows shut. With this they
thought we might just come to think it might be better
for the land and for us all if there were only houses there.
But most of us were peasants once and most of us are still.
And those cabbages, those ripe bustles in all of their
abundance made for too much fondness telling within,
— 86 —
what with our own live hunger and with our hunger increased in remembering our fathers green with digging, the dirt
on their kitchen knives glistening green as cabbages, too,
as they stood in their back gardens, flushed from the pulling,
what with our fondness for the full cabbage dinners
that followed and at times still do. We had those dinners,
and we had our own intimacy with the land of California,
the earth and its breaking between our hands as we bent over
to make the smallest clearing, even if that clearing was meant
for nothing vegetable, nothing neat – only an annual bed,
say, or a cactus that never flowered, or an obedient plant
that hardly would obey. And when tested, our intimacy,
we would have to admit, extended far beyond those plots.
Besides, there were bodies, sweeter still, informing all
of this and set above us in our kind of bright content.
The eucalyptus trees the first men of the company
planted years ago in rows between the orange groves
as a keep-safe, a kind of windbreak or insulation
for the fruit, those other trees (some of us still
call them aliens) which served, in our time, to divide
the oranges from the fields of tract homes where most
of us grew up, those remaining trees, those hulking giants,
swaying fruitless and fat with carbon dioxide, fruitless
though they may have been, and ecologically termagant,
as we have been informed, they filled the air with their own
searching sweetness, as most of them still do, a living breath
which drew, as it draws now, the sugar from the other living things
nearby, all of our cabbages’ air and cool. That boundary
of eucalyptus planted by the company, as long as it keeps
living (though it is likely, now, it will not be forgotten long),
keeps the others lingering, too, above our kind of bright
content (the whole of nature longs as well to hold) the last
— 87 —
bells of citrus from the upturned orange groves, and the mint-and orange-green belows of the company cabbages.
— 88 —
OPERA WEEK IN RADIO
Though the design is not medieval, the city’s new opera house
will look finest in the rain. It is vast, the box of glass and
gray brick
built to protect the central core, that more solitary domestic,
the theatre – itself designed to hold only five hundred or
so as the music and the meaning are expressed
according to tradition or in some terribly modern way. No
matter your seat, they say, you are bound to be touched
because of the sightlines and the acoustics. The music there is
meant to meet the people outside too. We experienced this
phenomenon ourselves
the week the cbc radio, hosted by Howard Dick, transmitted,
live and at length, the company’s interpretation of Der
Ring des Nibelungen.
On Tuesday, labour’s jangling Mime, that man made small by
his brother’s oppression, got stuck forging a helmet with
magic
enough to make the wearer invisible or, at least, to change his
shape. Surely, Mime, powerless, himself, to make the
helmet work on his behalf
did not want his brother, Alberich, to disappear. You can be
certain the one wanted to get rid of the other, but there
would likely be more brotherly
reproach, in any case, in making the laughing oppressor think
himself evaporated when he only stood there, plain,
beneath the hat, as Mime himself
had stood there, too. That Mime got his kicks, though, anyway.
While Alberich did really disappear, the gods tricked him
into something spectacular: that dragon
bent into a toad. We had no idea how any of this was managed
on stage, say, if there were special effects to make Alberich
invisible, as his voice
— 89 —
still boomed on stage, or how he might then reappear, a greater or lesser amphibian. How it panned out, who
knows?
The percussion and the voices there were enough to insist
upon the material nature of it all.
After Wednesday night’s production of Die Walküre, a critic
from The New York Times said that the scene of immolation
where
the Wotan understudy (the original pulled out, laryngitic),
strong enough in his stance against incest to break his own
domestic solitude, struck the rock
and placed Brünnhilde in a circle of flame, that scene differed
from Wagner’s vision in that those who played the
Rhinemaidens or the Valkyries or whoever those
figures were, I have forgotten, could be glimpsed circling the
stage and surrounding Wotan and the goddess as he threw
her into sleep,
or womanhood. They would not have been on Wagner’s stage,
those girls, the critic said. The scene was only meant for
two.
Though he conceded this was a matter of taste. Perhaps the
additional figures, after all, were meant by the director,
Egoyan, to impress upon the audience the isolation of those
two gods, and to ensure the gravity of their losses.
Perhaps if we had been there, too, and seen it for ourselves, we
would have better understood.
Though, for us, there had only ever been the two gods singing
loneliness and all their woe.
Between the acts of Friday afternoon’s Siegfried, a woman from the news was sent to scrutinize the new lounges
and to gauge the reactions of the audience on the third
floor of
— 90 —
the house. After interviewing a lady in an evening gown, the reporter spoke to a man identifying himself as a museum
employee. He was still dressed in his casual uniform,
having run from work, he said, to make it before the curtain.
That man rejoiced in telling the reporter (she had just
been listening to the performance, too, from the speakers in
the lounge) how the dragon whose deep bass we had so
recently enjoyed
appeared on stage surrounded by a pile of humans, a veritable
pyramid of people, he said. In the tone of her reply,
the reporter might be said to have keened disappointment. I
would have only wanted to have seen Fafner there, too, in
his basic dragonhood,
his blood, a fire in the neck of the bass, relaying his thoughts
on a certain curse to Siegfried alone, and not the dreaded crew.
If you had looked for us in the house, the Sunday of the
Götterdämmerung, we would have been hard to find. We
kept to ourselves,
in our independent strategies of a Sunday afternoon, a Sunday
spent checking a reference for a dumb footnote on page
three, or making toast
for someone sick in bed, playing at her pillow hills, already
counting the hours until the next, presumably healthier
weekend,
or bearing up against the winter by binding an old sock or
piling wood in the cellar. The opera, that day, was not with
us for long. Though, near the end, you
could say, we found this kind of bold. At a point, the music just
required a shift in attitude. And a certain elegance associ-
ated with that age
before the advent of the television assumed us there, as we sat
up straight, though not around a family radio, but each of
— 91 —
us, in secret,
with his or her own portable box, or with earbuds and a cozy.
We would all admit, and readily, that for a moment there,
we were kept from our piling,
our work, and our play. For a moment, we were all withheld by
the transmission of Brünnhilde’s final breath; for each of us,
alone, she was alone. Though there was something in the sky,
we said, that lit up with her, too, and broke in through the
window blinds, and sundered what we knew.
— 92 —
THE EVENING OF YOUR PROPOSAL
That dream was memorable. I was alone in a public park,
raising my hurricane lantern to illuminate the place.
As I travelled among them there, the lovers,
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