lying on its side beside the wicker basket. They
will never give in, and we will never give in. We
are like the lake, flexible, because we are immovable.
GELATI LIMONA
The desire this morning, early, still lazy
with coffee,
a clear blue morning outside, almost Aegean,
to write a poem about how hot it was
a couple of days ago – the question mark of a favourite
big shirt which has, yes, definitely developed a frayed
collar, plus, would you believe this, a rip under one arm,
but loose, comfortable,
some 1989 copies of Esquire over by the door
& some recent copies of Vanity Fair,
I want to keep the article on Jean Stein partly because
I find her father, Jules, the way those steel-rim glasses
sit so aplomb on his composed face, relaxed tension,
so interesting – yes, it was hot on Thursday, a clear
gelati limona day seen through glass
but
a sizzling butter day outside. You could have taken
a strip of bacon & laid it on the Queen Street sidewalk
& it would have fried in about ½ an hour. Marcus & I
go to play pool at The Squeeze Club, the balls roll
slowly, the espresso makes us feel cooler; & then when
we come outside the city is still clear & even paler blue
but the temperature has dropped slowly to about 78
with a cool breeze. High pressure ridges &
low pressure troughs. Stuff we can’t do very much
about.
This little drop in the temperature
is so pleasant, plus I won 3 games in a row & Marcus
is fun to be with, that I begin to feel balmy,
simultaneously light-headed & full of espresso. If
that piece of cream&dullred bacon you put on the sidewalk
down on Queen was up here on Dundas,
cooked to a nice crisp red, I would just scoop it up
with one easy arm as we walk along & eat it for a snack.
Instead we walk up to Giancarlo on College Street. The red
snapper with extra virgin is as good as it was
when Andrew M used to cook here,
but the veal chop isn’t as good, they don’t cut it
properly, it makes a difference to the way it grills.
You see what perfect weather & easy pleasure do –
they make the whole body into a relaxed tuning fork
for picking out accomplishments & imperfections;
too much balmy heat & espresso makes me long
for absolutes, Iraq will become a peaceful country,
Ottawa will reform a number of laws,
the missing children of Erie County will return,
& we will all live forever & be happy with the world;
if I eat ½ as much I will probably remain
just a shade critical – of the meal, the dark blue
awnings, yellow light; but I have soup, & I eat
the whole fish c/w an order of fettucine & tomato sauce,
when it passes into my system with all that lovely
oil & basil, I fall in love with the night,
the moon, although there is no moon,
Marcus, although neither of us is gay,
& all these figures passing along
both sides of College Street in the dark,
although if
I were to pass them again in the morning
while shopping, I probably wouldn’t recognize
the thick-moustached Lebanese guy
in the dark suit. Sure. Sure I would.
THE AMAZINGLY CALM FACE OF THE YOUNG PALESTINIAN BOY
I’m living downtown again, & making money,
sharing for the moment with 3 other guys.
I go to
Kensington Market about once a week. One of the stores
has free-range chicken. I don’t eat rabbit. But the fish
is good, & I buy oranges & purple black plums
& bright green avocado pears.
I was very moved by those
lines about the perfume maker you murdered. Poverty can be
attractive. Presumably he was a fairly poor man,
with a wife & 3 children perhaps.
Also the lime seller
out in the Jamaican market.
Everything which is truly
beautiful is to some degree exotic. Look
there’s a kid
on pink roller skates curly blond hair elephant earring
& I’ll bet he doesn’t even know
what the word exoticism means. Poverty can be attractive.
Markham was boring.
I’m living downtown again & making money.
Sharing a house for the moment with 3 other guys.
Likewise
the Portuguese fish handler. I used to live around
here several years ago. Or the young Palestinian boy
selling brown paper bags
of lentils & mung beans.
I am vaguely interested
in what will happen when the Portugese fish handler’s
daughter
begins reading Saturday Night
or going to French films. Moon in the Gutter, for
example. Or when the young Palestinian boy
discovers me
& thinks I’m exotic. I am, after all,
don’t you think,
a lot more than just a good mind
& a couple of degrees from Queen’s?
CITIES
We have salami and Emmenthal sandwiches for supper
fresh fruit
mangoes and oranges;
I change the sheets and read the first four chapters
of Broca’s Brain while you take a bath;
Broca was a man with a problem
he was devoted;
I look over at my typewriter and think about the essay
that I want to write on the autonomy of information grids;
mangoes are tropical
mangoes are universal
all mangoes are fundamentally alike;
the front brain is at war with basic ideas
but what happens when you can’t get back
to the foundations?
We make love in the soft blue glare
of the television set
between the night sky and the pale grey broadloom,
I almost lose consciousness until all I can hear is
your voice murmuring over a million small white stones;
your nipples are rough dark strawberries in the profile
of the empty apartment with its large windows facing east;
the red oblong PARK PLAZA sign winks back black
this stained mustard building floating on a current
of earth – clear moon overhead young mother innocent
moon. The smell of potato salad and musk mango and musk.
Bruce Springsteen’s beautiful New Jersey voice
singing the word streets over and over and over again.
The south is a rotten peach
these rooms in the night are cities also
where we turn our backs on bedlam and bellevue
and walk into America again – the rain on our faces
soft and cool,
patient, unflinching. It is, after all,
the only home we have ever known.
STAMPS
Charlie Parker would make a good stamp,
there should be a lot of votes for that,
& Rosa Luxembourg,
she’s popular in Toronto,
& Orel Herscheiser.
Frank Sinatra once sent Orel
a publicity picture of himself & signed it – For Oral,
like hygiene, or like Roberts.
Herscheiser – wh
ile he’s still a hero,
before he starts losing, before the fabulous golden arm
develops some infinitesimal bone chip
around the elbow, some surreal flaw to defeat.
What’s
the difference to us if the person on a stamp
is occasionally Belgian,
or the landmark might be Dutch, for that matter,
as long as it’s significant. I would like to see Grand Canyon
& Smashed Head Buffalo Jump on some of the 2¢ or 5¢ stamps,
make them large, okay
buddy, with good colours, bright dusty roses & hot yellows,
they cost enough, go ahead. We need indigenous images also,
so now, in 1992, this is a good time to put Tomson Highway
on a stamp. Or it’s not too late for Pierre Trudeau
on the 10¢ stamp in a black G-string trying to look sexy
& articulate. Or how about a real honest-to-god working girl
from Detroit, brown-skinned, short black skirt,
no fist in the air, just staring right out at you.
Those
eyes. Level.
If you’re going to put a stamp on an envelope –
why not put something on it with guts?
THE GREAT LIBERATION
When you walk into The Liberty
one of the waitresses gives you a big hug & finds you a table
where you can sit & order the Cab Sauvignon
which costs about 16 or 17 a bottle
& you can relax
with your elbows on the table & lower your head
into a pool of interesting tidbits of gossip –
a story about a new arts group, a juicy bit about a
well-known columnist who has left for Mexico. And
you can tell your stories – go ahead
it’s all here like a chic Kingdom Hall. But
I think I usually like the bar scene itself
better than the specific stories.
The clear dark
light & the voices rising & falling & the smells
of Japanese chicken & cinnamon & Thai noodles
are pleasantly interrupted by a variety
of interesting faces, a girl with wonderful breasts,
a fey young kid he looks suburban apparently has
something to do with money & he looks hot
he keeps snapping his galluses wide yellow ones.
Everyone has a different kind of sugar
or coke. I don’t
need anything more than this to get back up.
ALLISTON
The summer weather up here is terrific.
There are green peas & snap beans to pick over at
Panharget Farms sometimes in the afternoon,
the students
in my workshop group are really bright as clean shiny
new nails,
the after-supper summer light is lovely,
but, I admit, there isn’t very much to do
in the evenings.
I was watching a PBS science program
½ an hour ago, but
you know, I don’t really give a
flying copulative verb about quasars. I think
the meaning of meaning
is what you have
before you begin to think about – What It is.
Pagliarullo
hit a brilliant slow inside pitch for a quick single
& this monzer the size of a tank came down the base
line & gloved it just in time. Tough.
But
Pagliarullo hits some nice balls out of the park.
I’m still hungry; it’s amazing how a dumb white male
like myself with several published books
& an exhaustive knowledge of contemporary history
can make a sandwich in the dark without any problems.
I think it’s something I inherit from one of my aunts.
I buttered the whole wheat bread & put a little salt
on the rare roast beef Lilly
brought me from Schomberg.
While I was making
the sandwich I watched the darkness out
in the backyard.
There is something very comfortable
about rural darkness at the end of a long day –
up at 6 a.m., lots of bright sunshine, 78–82°,
4 meetings with students, 2 new poems,
lunch at the German Delicatessen
across from the library. I think it’s
the completeness; darkness in the city
doesn’t have that completeness
& of course it doesn’t have the late-night hawks
& Toronto full moons don’t seem to be even
½ as large.
So after the sandwich & a piece
of homemade pie I picked up my jacket
just in case it gets cool
& went for a walk down the hill over the Boyne
River bridge for a late-night drink at Oliver’s.
And again it was this comfortable, like a favourite
blanket from childhood my old buffalo robe perhaps,
quality of the darkness – not disturbed or diluted
with city sounds or traffic, & full of odd nudges
from the past – walking over Trout Creek Bridge
in St. Mary’s for after-supper ice cream with my parents,
or that night in Galt when my crazy stepfather
tried to jump off the Grand River Bridge
at Victoria & Water Street.
Peaceful,
just the darkness, a few late-night hawks.
2 or 3 passing cars, bridges as calm as sculpture,
& the shimmer of dark wet rural grass.
PHILADELPHIA
for Jan Conn
I have been thinking about Philadelphia
all afternoon, about trains and newspapers,
about gas stations,
about a job I used to have in a mill on River Street.
I sit around with my friends in the evening
and we talk about the same things, literature, politics,
sex, the Van Gogh exhibit at the AGO,
but why is it
that I am the only one who thinks there should be
a train to Philadelphia every morning,
O say,
around 7:45 a.m. would be good?
Or who misses
the sense of Philadelphia in the autumn,
and how it stands for something even in the middle
of a cold dark January afternoon?
This is unfair, especially when you
consider that a year ago the central part of the city
was a sea of flames.
There is a myth that encloses
all these things and I am susceptible to that myth. I
phone Sam, and we go out for coffee & chocolate cake,
and then we take a cab out to the Danforth,
go to Esperides and have squid fried in a light batter
and sweet roast lamb with large golden brown potatoes.
The food is good
and Esperides is a warm room. Even the darkness
of the Danforth late at night
by itself fulfills something deep and important in me.
Still, even out on the warm dusky street,
hanging loose after supper,
our cheap dress shirts pulled loose out of our pants
because of the heat,
it is my perception
that something is not quite right. Even the marvellous
new Hydro building by Raymond Moriyama
at University & College is not as appreciable
– unless you put it into a frame:
Sherbourne Street, for example, and Philadelphia,
and that building we saw by Philip Johnson in Chicago.
HEY, HEY, MITCH
How will
I des
cribe the darkness of Wrigley Field at night
& how people turn to each other
after a great hit & say, Did you see that?
Or the popular song
that keeps running through my head, “Your daddy’s rich
& your momma is so good-looking.”
The darkness
is a soft ½darkness,
The light falls on his blond moustache
& makes his eyes bluer, midwestern, cornflower
blue. He is with his wife
& one child, a boy; his wife’s name is Serena,
Lebanese descent, beautiful, the other child, 4,
also a boy, is at home.
I am
by myself for a week; Mitch Williams –
not the
Bad Boy of postmodern baseball, I have seen him
in bars once or twice, tall, slim, good-looking,
laughing a lot; I would be more inclined
to call him the Iconic Hot-dog, in the Barthian sense,
of postmodern Chi City –
is pitching, it’s the 8th
& he’s holding a slender 3–2 lead & keeping them
hitless & witless. I am never lonely
when I meet people like this. His wife’s eyes
& the quick way she has of laughing nervously
but with pleasure at an unexpected play
make our small pool of order a warm place
& the beer tastes that much better. “Throw the
fast ball throw the fast ball Mitch,”
chants his 9-year-old son. I say, “He’s going
to hit him with the sinker,”
& he does, he throws
the heavy ball with a lot of thumb behind it –
drops it in under the amazed batter’s knees
to get the last out;
& he himself, always the clown,
a tall slim good-looking guy who laughs a lot
in the bars,
is bent so far over after the pitch
that he’s almost like a crab –
legs stretched out
glove in the air, right hand fingertips touching
the dust in front of him, eyes locked
at that exact point where he placed the ball. They
are all on their feet yelling for him
& I am glad. I like this field better in some
ways than the huge cement skydome with its giant
retractable clamshell helicopter-focused roof. But
it is also those blue midwestern eyes
that say, “Comeon, relax, forget it, you’re at home.”
& Williams, of course, because he’s such a fabulary
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