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that piece of cream&dullred bacon you put on the sidewalk
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Also by David Donnell
POETRY
Poems 1961
The Blue Sky 1977
Settlements 1980
The Natural History of Water 1986
Water Street Days 1989
FICTION
The Blue Ontario Hemingway Boat Race 1985
NON-FICTION
Hemingway In Toronto: A Post-Modern Tribute 1982
Copyright © 1992 David Donnell
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Canadian Reprography Collective – is an infringement of the copyright law.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Donnell, David, 1939–
China blues
Poems.
ISBN 0-7710-2843-1
eBook ISBN: 978-1-55199-578-6
1. Toronto (Ont.) – Poetry. I. Title.
PS8557.055C5 1992 C811′.54 C92-093071-9
PR9199.3.D65C5 1992
The publisher makes grateful acknowledgement to the Ontario
Arts Council for its financial assistance.
McClelland & Stewart Inc.
481 University Ave.
Toronto, Ontario M5G 2E9
v3.1
For Robert Markle
Great spirit, great painter,
b. 1936—d. 1990
“A paper published in Science in November, 1987—and signed by enough geologists to make a quorum at the Rose Bowl—offers evidence that the San Andreas has folded its flanking country, much as a moving boat crossing calm waters will send off lateral waves.”
–JOHN MCPHEE, Los Angeles
Against the Mountains
“I don’t like rock music; I don’t know why I’m in it. I just want to destroy everything.”
–JOHN LYDDON, The Sex Pistols,
lead singer on “Dancing” and
“God Save the Queen”
“One of Traylor’s pictures shows a huge, mastiff-like dog towering above a small white man who holds his leash. But the leash is slack, the dog is calm, and the idea of the man controlling the dog absurd. The two proceed as companions.”
–PHIL PATTON, writing on 1940s
black folk artist Bill Traylor,
Esquire, September 1991
AUTHOR’S NOTE
My title comes from an interest in China and Chinese history, Delta blues, the road-blocks that were set up outside the Chinese consulate on St. George St. in Toronto in 1989, which I pass on my midday walks, traffic barricades piled high with flowers at that time for several days after Tienanmen Square; a number of expressions such as China Hand, All the tea in …, etc.; and last, but not least, Greg Couillard’s excellent—and now in other hands—Toronto restaurant called China Blues. I think China Blues is a melancholy and a joyful book, and the title seems to me, at least, to be apt.
DAVID DONNELL
Toronto, Fall ’91
CONTENTS
Cover
Disclaimer
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraphs
Author’s Note
Marcel Proust
Those Klein Underwear Men
Mangoes
China Blues
Ava
Tobacco Heaven
Union Station/ Santa Fe
Darkness
Announcing Baghdad
Mondrian’s Borders
July Light
Professors
Who Says Jeff Koons Is Postmodern?
Strike
Gelati Limona
The Amazingly Calm Face of the Young Palestinian Boy
Cities
Stamps
The Great Liberation
Alliston
Philadelphia
Hey, Hey, Mitch
Tan
Great Lakes
What’s So Easy About 17?
Tapioca
Comfortable Shoes
The Sky Blue Heart of Ontario
Warhol
Sometimes Men Burn With a Crazy Fever
Kisses
Open House
At John and Carol’s
Raspberries
What Kind of Man Wears Joseph Abboud?
You Can’t Ask Everyone to Play Like Coltrane
Lost Buffalos
Buffalo Dances
A Loaf of Bread On Your Arm
David Bowie’s Image
Gorgeous Fallacies
Pianos
The Flowers
Shopping
Pale Blue Shirt, White Slacks
Call it a Day
Clarities
Massage
Borders
Tangerines
The Skate
Photographs of Sinéad O’Connor
Blue is a Focus of Memory
A Note on the Text
Acknowledgements
MARCEL PROUST
Dope isn’t like photographs or album covers, or Ward’s Island photographs of old girlfriends, or a first printing of Mark Strand’s An Elegy For My Father, or Jack Nicholson driving north in that vintage film, Five Easy Pieces, after giving up on Susan Anspach. Now there’s a cool actress you don’t see very much anymore. So, doodly: Woodle. I’m going to be infantile this afternoon, and then I’m going to be adult this evening because we’re having people for dinner. Katharine Ross was brilliant in Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid. Let me confess something of very little importance, I’ve never read beyond the first few pages of that long book by Marcel Proust, and thinking of all the different things I have to do, I doubt very much if I ever will – especially if this sunny afternoon becomes any bluer.
THOSE KLEIN UNDERWEAR MEN
for Angela Morrow
Gay women love men’s bodies. And she said,
“No, they don’t,
that’s ridiculous.” So I said, lazily,
“Well, okay, not fat men’s bodies, not guys with thick fur
down the backs of their necks,
not square-faced guys in rumpled suits. But what about
tall clean well-built guys with a clean shave
a nice tan & a snow white singlet?” She said, “Well,
that does sound a little more attractive.”
And it’s true,
of course it’s true. At parties sometimes you’ll see
a woman leaning all over some comfortable easy-going
well-built young guy, baby smooth shave
nice cornflower blue eyes, a tan
&, of course that white singlet. There’s some
shoulder stroking,
& naturally they’re both laughing. “O wipe your hand,”
he says in a really funky voice,
sloppy jean
s but the singlet is really an S-curve
under the belt,
“I’m all sweaty,” he says, & laughs at it. She strokes
him anyway, flashing her lipsticked mouth. She can’t get
enough of it, because his body’s so nice to touch. She
just doesn’t want to have intercourse,
that’s all;
&, thinking about it, why should she? Intercourse
should probably be reserved for really intimate
situations,
occasions that take place in a
comfortable structure of intimacy. What she would
really like to do most with this guy
is just roll around on a huge white bed
preferably if he would stay on one elbow
part of the time,
that would be nice, she thinks
just roll around heaven all day.
MANGOES
East of Eden
with its myth of the boy moving
away from the family was written for me.
They gave me a copy for my birthday when I was 11. There were
other factors. There were other novels.
There was always a sense of blue infinity
simpler & more marvellous than headmasters at UTS
could have dreamed of slumped
(Philosophers get tired their heads swollen like Grade A eggs)
Protestant & red-faced in western Ontario white pine chairs
unable to define infinity
although we found it easy to live. And by the time I was 20,
or 23½, or 24,
my favourite streets were Gloucester, Dundonald, Isabella.
The
east of the city. There was always an abundance of chicken pot
pies & good cold beer.
There was no gaga social pressure
or rigid white pine chairs in those rundown Victorian
2nd floors I lived in on Church,
cross streets:
Dundonald, Gloucester, Isabella,
to do anything
except enjoy myself.
I was happy. I read a lot
& drank quite a bit
but I wasn’t comfortable.
And when I came back
to what people generously refer to
as the liberal arts,
Saturday Night
& Toronto Life, I was testy. Other people
were variously snotty or generous.
I was testy
& sometimes it would affect my body,
tension,
muscle spasm,
seizure of light
the jellyfish of light rising up in my mind
like a West African beach trophy. “Just cloud patterns,”
a friend of mine said to me, “go with it, and see where
it goes.” Okay. I went.
These days I want to work all morning
until I’m tired,
and then sit in my blue dojo pants
like somebody back from a holiday in Tibet and watch the traffic
go past.
The weather looks good for the next few years.
I miss Church Street
(and the way it empties east of Yonge
south through the city and into the Lake) sometimes
but
in a fairly abstract way. Postcards. The things
I love most are like pale green fruit, papayas, sour-sop, pale green
mangoes.
Touch them to my face in the warm Toronto sun, and
say,
thank you. That was nice. The roast lamb was fantastic. The
rosemary was sweet & bitter & my whole mouth feels fresh
again.
CHINA BLUES
China Blues is a song that Miles Davis never got around to writing, & Oscar Peterson hasn’t written yet. > John A. Macdonald, Yukio Mishima, Billie Holliday. People whose names will be written on the subway walls as far south as Massachusetts, where you can garden as late as September, or as far west as Great Slave Lake – where the big-eyed Loons sing cold & clear. > You might think of John Lone in Bertolucci’s film The Last Emperor, the scene at the afternoon party where he sings a slow 30s Gershwin song with English vowels & just a trace of Chinese accent.
Or Molly Johnson singing “Cry Me A River” at a small club on Queen Street West late at night before we walk up to Massimo’s on College Street & get a large primavera from the young Thai kid on the front counter. > Or those long sad notes on the Chinese cello I heard from a young Chinese student, shaven head, good musician, from Burma, what was Burma, in the subway at University & Queen. > Isn’t this what Bessie Smith talked about when she first started to record? She had a stars&stripes earring in her left ear, & she said, I’ll slow your boat down, & I’ll send us both to China. > Of course it’s a metaphor. But it does make you think of Mrs. Bedford Stuyvestant-Fish, & Ben Johnson, the fastest man in the world, & of Walker Evans, & of Li Po, who wrote such beautiful poems about early morning air & light on the Niagara escarpment. If you look north on a clear day you can see as far as Thunder Bay.
AVA
It’s funny, though, that I should
think of Ava tonight. How she used to walk through hotel
lobbies in dark mink & heels
with nothing underneath.
Apparently she had hearts embroidered on her underwear.
Those hearts & lime green shoes & the black floor
& walls of this club shine up through the soft
indirect lighting that Billie
seems to be singing about while she gives Cole Porter
a nudge in the short ribs. Billie was always friendly,
whatever group she was working with she set up a good
rapport. I’m hot these days, the writing is good,
we’ve got Ontario garden peas in the stores,
Mexican garden peas, & California garden peas. The summer
weather rolls in & there don’t seem to be no reason
why it should end. All I really want
from the world at this exact moment, before we leave
& I go home to sleep with M with one leg sprawled
over her ankle is some cappuccino
&,
if I can get the waitress over here,
another play of that tape which begins
with an atypical cut of Joan Armatrading singing, “You
Give Me Fever.” You do. Yes you do.
TOBACCO HEAVEN
for Russell Smith
The Surgeon General has told us firmly,
in that clipped voice,
pushing out his impressive beard,
he looks almost like a Mennonite
except that Mennonites are not so articulate
& they do not have a Yale accent,
we must throw our cigarettes
away, & we must put on condoms.
So here we are, okay,
world of wonders?
standing naked
although Paul has a pair of running shoes
& Neil is wearing red&yellow Argyle socks,
out in front of
Mrs. Smith’s Cocktail Party, across from The Bovine Sex Club
on Queen Street West,
it is a Tuesday afternoon
& it is sunny, the temperature is about 23°
& the barometer must be at least 102.5. We have thrown
our cigarettes away, hurled them, various garbage cans
over the last month, & we are restless. We are all wearing
condoms; put on a condom soft & walk around – it looks
amusing, I think, & affectionate; & we have all sorts
of different colours: charcoal grey, noir, natural, raspberry,
cerise, chromium blue, butter yellow, you name it, the boys
have gotten dressed before dinner.
We are not the hottest
kids to ever come out of the U of T graduate sc
hool,
but we are not
oafs, we are open minds. Frank comes out of the restaurant
& he says, “I can’t stand it. I’m going to open up a Walter
Raleigh,” & he lights up a rich Virginia cigarette, inhales
& blows the smoke out gracefully. He is tall with a shock
of flaming red hair & an angular body.
Elizabeth I, she
had flaming red hair also, she was crazy, sometimes,
Frank is not crazy, & sometimes they had to chain
her to the bed. Then Alvin comes out & sniffs the air
& winks one blue eye. “Wonder when,” he says,
“they will get around to issuing us those neat handkerchief
& elastic strap face-masks you see guys wearing in Tokyo?”
We all laugh, standing with our hands in our pockets, sic,
leaning against the warm tiles & glass of the front wall
with our hands behind our heads,
resting on our hips,
or on each other’s shoulders. We are waiting to see
what new car designs & Mies van der Rohe buildings
the 90s will bring. “Bet you some crab & 2 Double Diamonds
that the Jays win a pennant this year.” “I’ll bet you,”
he says, “a double crab & 2 Double Diamonds
that Jay McInerney never brings out his next book.”
We all laugh, standing around in the sunshine.
We are waiting for the 90s.
UNION STATION/ SANTA FE
Most newspaper articles are not as clear as Thomas Wolfe or Margaret Laurence talking about how you don’t know who you are until you go away, and stop and look back, and see the stone angel in the town you come from – the house where you lived, the smell of the grass, tar on the gravel driveway. The large front windows are lit up, circa 5:30, it must be around 1950; your mother walks from the car up the front steps with a large brown paper bag of groceries and closes the large white front door with its 3 window panes behind her. A flash of gold wedding band, and she doesn’t look back over her shoulder. > I feel that I have lost a large chunk of time. Ontario time I guess, the 40 years or so before I was even born. It has fallen out of my pocket like a grey rock with patches of inside colour. >
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