Narrow Cradle
Page 1
BREAKWATER
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Copyright ©2020 Wade Kearley
ISBN 978-1-55081-815-4
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To Katherine, as always,
to our daughters Julie and Sasha,
and to our grandchildren Luke and Annika,
who have helped us broaden our
understanding of love and deepened
our appreciation for the all-too-fleeting
time we have together.
And to Paul Bowdring, wherever he may be.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my editor and friend Kevin Pittman. Thanks also to those friends and family who read some of these poems and offered encouragement: Paul Bowdring, Alison Dyer, Geoff Kearley, Paul Kearley, Tonya Kearley-Russell, Cynthia O’Toole, and Gordon Rodgers. A big thank you to Tamsyn Russell, who embraced the challenge to write the music for “Amy Chains,” and to Kelly Russell, who assisted in the final arrangement. Thanks also to James Langer and to Rebecca Rose for welcoming me into the Breakwater family. And lastly, thanks to those friends and acquaintances who allowed me to use their words as the starting point for poems including “—suicide wings,” “–in between,” “—undone,” “high anxiety in redhead cove,” “—american goldfinch,” “—re: the last one in the sequence,” and “—on the road to mount abu.”
Several of these poems are revisions of earlier work, including “—deciduous” and “—mother’s day revisited” from Let Me Burn Like This (Killick) as well as “—postcard from under a bridge,” “—postcard from the hills above clarenville,” and “—postcard from the holiday inn” from The People’s Road (Harry Cuff).
“If self is a location, so is love:
Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points,
Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance,
Here and there and now and then, a stance.”
FROM “The Aerodrome”
Seamus Heaney, District and Circle (2006)
CONTENTS
December on Lawlor’s Brook
—bar-headed geese
—rue
—suicide wings
—prayer rock
—in between
January on Lawlor’s Brook
—love doll
—a winter battle
—flurries
—high anxiety in red head cove
February on Lawlor’s Brook
—february/march falafel
—changing channels
—fighting for father
—song in february
March on Lawlor’s Brook
—electric and falling
—a cold case
—letting go
—soup bone
—binoculars
April on Lawlor’s Brook
—american goldfinch
—heart failure
—shem meditates on his disease
—hit and run
—undone
May on Lawlor’s Brook
—Calvary
—mother’s day revisited
—a reason to smile
—he drank the river
June on Lawlor’s Brook
—coming clean
—amy chains
—and now that you are not there
—postcard from the hills above clarenville
July on Lawlor’s Brook
—postcard from under a bridge
—il cauto
—il audace
—winter island
—every calipitter in the whole galaxy
August on Lawlor’s Brook
—postcard from the holiday inn
—living in the night sky
—argument with my heart
September on Lawlor’s Brook
—splitting wood
—the divorce of aurora borealis
—from under our blanket
—the words of the moon
—tea & bread rising
—full moon over wreck cove
October on Lawlor’s Brook
—crucifying corey
—first frost
—starlings
—back to the land of the living
—ore pony
—kneeling on cranberries
—after wrestling with gabriel
—the poem speaks back
—once when i was drowning
—deciduous
—re: the last one in the sequence
November on Lawlor’s Brook
—on the road to mount abu
December on Lawlor’s Brook
Hide your face from blame, cover your wrists,
Your scars accuse me of your bloodletting.
At this dark solstice I recall dandelion twists,
Cicada hopscotch, dancing, you forgetting
Breakfast to linger feline in the grass.
Found, a four-leaf clover, the lucky luck,
Then skipping past the corner boy’s passes,
To Mrs. Burry’s stoop. Trade for a quarter.
I blame you, hiding behind sad clown eyes
That innocence and beauty, making me despise
What you’ve become. And yet, what could you do
But hold the constant blade that routs your demons?
My calls to heal yourself are empty sermons
Designed to hide my fatal fear of loving you.
—bar-headed geese
On a winter migration out of the Himalayas,
After drinking a free rye or two too many,
I am beating my way past screen-flickered faces
when the seatbelt signs blink and the floor falls away.
My shoulder collides with an overhead bin and I sprawl
into your lap. You question how I knew you were lonely.
With the pain in my arm, I ignore your smirk,
take the seat beside you, signal for another drink.
I confess to you that, After six months at an ashram,
I ran out of patience. Now I just want to get home.
A slight nod and you turn to the window, the setting sun,
point to a wavering line of geese winging their way
on a river of air through mountains that prowl the sky.
You turn green eyes on me, indulge in a yawn, and manage,
How is it that up here. . . where it takes ten breaths. . .
to equal one on the ocean. . . these geese can still fly?
I wave the drink away and, after you glide into sleep,
clutch at the headrest, struggle to rise to my feet.
—rue
“If self is a location, so is love”
Seamus Heaney
With hours to
kill before my snowbound flight, I watch the same street from the same cafe where, outbound, was it just six months ago? I last saw you, my daughter. Time falls away and I am there again. Gazing down at the sidewalk three storeys below the rim of my cup, I see a minstrel plunk a black box on the concrete near the corner of Peel and Sainte-Catherine. She crouches briefly to plug in her guitar as the human flood eddies. She sets her top hat down to catch donations, then flicks back matted hair to stare skyward. As she strums, her body starts to sway. People stand in a small knot around her, some toss coins or tuck bills into the hat. Up here I keep my change. The murmur of travellers and the clink of cups calms me into believing I belong.
I tell myself I travel light, My suitcase holds no regret. But then up the sidewalk you come dancing in time with the musician who opens her arms for your embrace. You scoop her collection into your purse and pull her hat over your head. I stand at the window, knock the glass with flat hands, upsetting the coffee chatter.
Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me! Before I can gather my things to run after you, you hail a cab, turn with the sun on your cheek, duck into the car and pull away without looking up.
The sidewalks are shadow now. The musicians flown. No one lingers on the corner. I see a stranger in a greatcoat, her hair loosely shawled. She drags a fir tree wrong end round on a small blue sled. My heart beats in time with her footsteps. She stops as if remembering an errand, looks up, waves a mittened hand. I almost wave back.
—suicide wings
I still wish I could tell heaven from hell.
Your room abandoned for more than a year,
but I know some part of you lingers here.
My skin electric when I open the door,
see the duvet twisted, clothes left to burn.
I can’t pretend that straight has no bends.
All those years listening outside as you thrashed
in your room, panic mounting as pain crashed
over you, pressed your face into the floor,
while outside I stood frozen, nowhere to turn.
I couldn’t tell your anger from your cries for help.
There was no magic pill. No magic wand,
and as hard as I tried, no magic words
to stop the demons at your shoulder,
from grafting broken wings to your bones.
Is there a gate between self-love and self-hate?
I used to wish you could fly,
soar over the many who never looked in your eyes.
But then, when you couldn’t take it anymore,
you climbed the carpark stairs, threw yourself at the sun.
I’ve been told when you were young you were old.
And where are you now? Is it heaven or hell?
You stepped away from your pain and you’re still
out of reach. Maybe we’re even on that score?
But now I haunt the space where you came undone.
—prayer rock
The twin-fisted rock on my work table, a nugget of peridotite forged twelve miles deep, shoved surfaceward from the molten core when continents collided. Buried for millions of years under alpine mountains, scoured by glaciers and finally exposed on a ferric mountainside a lizard-skin tableland weathered by rains and ice, it defied lichens and moss.
Seconds before I hiked into range, this iridescent rock yielded to the heave of frost forsaking balance for the conviction of gravity, tumbled over the long-fallen scree, bounded over crowberry, lupine rebounded through dwarf birch hurtling over guardrails.
Far below, I stumbled over decisions that displaced my serenity, children grown and fled, my relationships shattered. Then I was plunging headlong into doubt over troubles yet to come. I was lost in time when it struck my foot, recalled me from the exile of thought to this impossible connection eons in the making.
If the stone had been larger it might have fractured bones but instead only staggered me my ankle bruised through the boot. The stone felt as heavy as solitude. I shoved it in my backpack, lugged it home.
I ponder the rock on my work table and when thoughts intrude I sometimes take its rough geometry in my hand, marvel at embedded gems and the precision of the journey that brought us here from the universe before the universe that started with a bang.
—in between
found poem in an email from Kevin
Xmas come and gone,
New Year’s Eve next.
No plans for me.
Stone Jug restaurant is having a do,
but expensive,
and I don’t know people going.
All good so far.
No resolutions, per se.
I sent an email
to Mariza
and proposed.
I am awaiting her reply.
NPR website has a listing
of 300+ “best books” of 2016.
Two are poetry.
But I just learned of this Jarmusch film:
http://www.npr.org/2016/12/27/507125816/
paterson-a-love-poem-to-poetry-from-director-jim-jarmusch
I must see that one.
I’m at the Stone Jug for a beer.
I must get home and see
if Mariza has replied…
January on Lawlor’s Brook
I gun the car where the sign says, “Blind Hill,”
And plunge weightless into the pit of my gut.
At the bottom, a stop sign. I recall
How nothing’s possible anymore; I’m caught
In your wreckage at sixteen as you drove,
Pregnant and scared, crashed with my fifty years
Into the frozen brook beside the road,
Me fumbling for a grip, your mother in tears.
Now I wonder, “What have you denied me?”
Did my heart forsake too soon its journey?
Do I need foreign cafes for scribbling?
Just when I felt like my life was drifting,
You anchored me with a grandchild, then another,
Taught me there are many ways to mother.
—love doll
Poised here in the window with plastic snow collecting around my boots, I keep myself relaxed watching shovellers shovel a path to the steps, and though the hour is late, they usher revellers revelling into the darkened shop.
In here, under the glitter of my night sky, the guests grow louder, break into slurred melodies, casually rehearse their infidelities. They are oblivious to the blue and red flashing in the street. A cop, big as a bear, cups his paws over his eyes, strokes our faces with a flashlight.
Someone grabs me from behind and lugs me up the stairs past a crowd huddled near the washroom watching as my ex-husband guzzles a beer while pissing into the ice-jammed toilet. I don’t need anyone to take me back now, no matter how talented they were.
I don’t feel the cold here, propped against the railing I don’t need silence. But if I could move, I’d hand it all back, the rags, the fur, the flesh, not caring who owns what, and escort them out the doors. The knocking downstairs gets louder, so some genius cranks the music.
Then I see her in front of the long mirror. Over her shoulder her eyes break on me. I want to reach for her. She lists towards me, catches on a corner. Her eyes are painted, her bare shoulder patched. She doesn’t need warmth. Her skin is smooth plaster. I’m grateful my reflection is the woman on her other arm.
I try to talk, and she pauses, so we both pretend to listen, but hear nothing, not even the roar of the party talk until the door glass crashes to the floor. The cop pushes past, clamps cuffs on my ex’s leg, drags him into the street.
—a winter battle
It snowed ashes all night.
The windows are black.
I strap on downy armour
slowly over bruised shoulders,
and rattle up the stairs,
to shove the storm door open.
&
nbsp; Brandishing my shovel,
I greave through deep drifts,
follow half-buried
footprints to where you
struggled up the bank
and left in a taxi.
A distant snow blower
coughs up the ruins
of a hard-fought night.
To forget the tightness in my jaw,
I haul back the shovel and stab
into dense mounds,
curse it up and across
the roof of your car.
Blowback stings me through
gaps in my visor.
Should I call you? No.
Maybe you’ve texted.
No. Maybe you thumbed,
I’m coming home now,
and forgot to hit Send.
Maybe you are vexed.
My phone on vibrate,
I tuck it between
my wrist and my glove.
Before waking, I dreamed
of ten-car pile-ups, planes
circling, lives changed forever.
I dig harder, clearing
the driveway at last.
Dust clings to my blade.
The ashes keep coming.
All flights are grounded.
Emergency crews
plough buried side streets,
reconnect power.
Then my glove vibrates and
in my hurry to get the phone
it slips to the sidewalk, skitters