China Blues

by David Donnell

  This title contains long lines of poetry. The line of characters below indicates approximately the longest line in the text:

  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. >