by Alayna Munce
I lift my eyelids and it’s like rolling away a stone heavier than myself. Just in time to see the nurse leaving the room, tucking her hair behind her ear without the slightest thought, as if she were a chosen one. As if she’d never die.
Last night I gave a woman the last bath of her life. Ginny. Her legs have grown too weak to get in and out of the tub. It’s too dangerous to try to lift her. From now on she’ll have to be taken to the shower room down the hall. Ginny loved her baths. Oh well, she sighed when I had her out and powdered and pyjama’d and sitting on the side of her bed, frail as a girl. She folded her hands and looked up at me, finding the shaky footing of a smile, You can’t have everything.
The perennial order goes something
like this: crocus, tulip, lilac, lily
of the valley, iris,
poppy, peony, and he
slips into the earth somewhere
between the lily of the valley
and the iris. Late
May. An early spring.
A week later, the stripped stamens
of the irises, the poppies with their red
cups empty, each peony balled up
like a kid glove waiting for a
hand and I’m thinking, how well
the poppies know their part,
thinking, how strange
the colour red, thinking,
too late—over and over the fact
of it fills
the glove.
fancy meeting
you here
We force Grandma’s stiff arms into the dress she wore on their fiftieth wedding anniversary, manoeuvre her into a wheelchair and then, because it’s a nice day and easier than getting her into a car, we push her along the sidewalk, past their old house, to the funeral home. She blinks in the midday, late-May light. She blinks at the traffic lights. She blinks at the bed of irises I point out to her, and then she looks up at me and blinks again.
I smile. She smiles back.
When we get to the funeral home, we push her right up to the side of the coffin. Mom kneels beside her and explains, as if to a child, “It’s Peter. Your Peter. Dad. He’s died, Mom. We brought you so you could say goodbye.”
And she blinks and blinks as if at a light too bright.
There isn’t much crying; it seems time. After the funeral, we manoeuvre Grandma out of the wheelchair and into the car. The procession winds slowly from the funeral home through town toward the cemetery. The undertaker drives the lead car at the pace of a walk. We creep down the hill, ease onto Main Street. Cars stop. People stop. I’m dry-eyed until I realize they’re stopping for us.
Then I cry, and honestly I couldn’t tell you why I’m crying. Perhaps because people in small towns still know to stop when a funeral passes. Or because people in cities don’t. Or for the life that begs this pause. Or maybe I’m crying for us all. For us all walking unaccountably dry-eyed over the earth.
New Year’s Day, 1932
As I said everything is going fast
and where a poor guy knows it first
is when he starts counting the few slippery greenbacks
which he has earned by pulling four horses
and the implement
and pulling cows teats of course.
About the hired girl Jean Wilson there is little to write
though I know plenty
about her. All I can say is Youth
will have its fling and she certainly had hers
and how. Poor kid in a way I feel sorry for her but
oh well who am I to take life serious I’m free
in a free country
so here goes—whoopee
for 1932!
What does that mean Grandpa?
What? Eh?
That curse you always say. What does it mean?
Come again?
You know, ay-ay-ay, matoushka ri-nanka, or whatever it is.
Yessir and what about it?
What does it mean?
Damned if I could say now.
Oh come on. You must know what it means.
Of course I know what the goddamn thing means. It’s just to try to switch it over and get it across to you what it means is a whole other kettle of fish goddammit.
Just give me a general idea then.
Alright, alrighty. If it means that much to you. Let’s see. Close as I can come is something to do with your mother, a goat, and a bolt of lightning.
Your mother a goat and a bolt of lightning?
That’s right. You do the math.
things buried with us (2)
1
Lately James and I have been eating only soup and bread.
Funny what happens when the hunger
to be simple is whetted daily;
after a while it stops being dull.
2
He rowed before he knew me, and I love this
odd and unimportant detail (come to me
from that time like someone else’s keepsake):
rowers face backwards so he’ll
always have starboard and port reversed.
How my head is
hushed and my skin strokes
hot at the thought of his
unknown hands at
dawn on those oars.
3
When we fight we
go from room to
room, closing doors
behind us, then
opening them again
moments later.
4
I notice we put on our t-shirts differently:
I shake my arms into the
sleeves first then slip my
head through the
neck hole as quickly as
possible so as not to
miss a thing.
He lassoes the whole thing over his head and pulls it down.
Then he pushes his arms up through, as if climbing
out of a manhole.
5
Sometimes when I hug him around the neck he lifts
me just a little to his height,
my back crackles into alignment
and then he sets me down again,
taller.
There’s a man who travels
the sidewalks of my neighbourhood
in a wheelchair pulled by huskies.
I see him often at intersections,
two dogs panting, waiting
for the light to change.
At the exact moment it turns
green they spring
forward so if you didn’t know better
you’d be confused
(do they trigger the light,
or the light,
their movement?).
They pass the dishevelled man who stands
barefoot in undone sneakers no matter what
the weather, one leg of his track pants
lodged up around his shin,
the other, ragged
under his heel.
He stands at the same
intersection all day long,
conducting traffic,
urging the cars forward and back
in perfect unison with the traffic lights.
This, perhaps, is as likely as anything else to
turn out to be
what makes the world go around.
The man in the wheelchair calls yee and haw
for right and left,
speaking the same language
my grandfather spoke behind his plough horses
once upon a time.
As they glide away
you can almost hear
the earth turning in response,
the shshsh of sled runners over snow,
can almost bear
to call the city home.
Someone has tapped a maple tree
in the parkette down the street.
I think now I’ll be able to sleep at night knowing
somewhere nearby there is an apartment,
<
br /> windows fogged with steam—
shshshsh
—when it’s all boiled down there will be just enough
to fill a teacup,
a bird’s nest,
a bell.
One garbage day
my neighbour Connie
spotted an old leather couch on the curb
on her way to trade in her empties—
the springs in the couch were
shot, so she skinned it.
Connie is Ojibway,
makes dream catchers
with couch leather and seagull feathers
dyed eagle.
I’m standing at the intersection, waiting
for the streetcar. I see her pass
with her bundle buggy, waving.
I wave back, aware I’m only
human but hoping I have the human
touch. When you say the word
human, do you mean it
as excuse or incantation? Ask me
and I am torn
between the two,
again and again my head
turned by how we make
do on the way
to trade in
our empties.
Well, we got out of doing the dishes, didn’t we Grandma?
Although you always said you liked doing dishes, right?
I know what place
I should be now I think
It’s okay Grandma, you’re fine right here. Just relax. Okay? We’ll go back in when they call us for pie. Okay?
(pointing to the ploughed garden) like that
(silence)
I love watching the leaves fall.
You like fall, don’t you Grandma?
(silence)
You’re looking at the wind chimes.
Do you like the wind chimes Grandma?
if you call it right
Call it right?
I should name it
You should name it?
I should
but I don’t think it wants to be named
(silence)
Fall’s my favourite season.
Do you have a favourite season Grandma?
What’s your favourite season?
I don’t think
there’s any pie left
for me
I need to leave now Grandpa. I have to catch my train so I can be back in the city by nightfall. Make sure the nurses are good to you. And don’t let the doctors do anything to you that you don’t want them to do.
oh you took the train did you?
(nodding) It’s a nice day—a good day for a train ride. I like to choose a seat by the window and read a book.
and look up out the window now and then?
Yes.
you better go then the train won’t
(silence)
Wait for me?
yes
Acknowledgements
The opening quotation from Jan Zwicky is from Songs for Relinquishing the Earth, Brick Books, 1998, page 13, used by her kind permission.
The passages on pages 39, 57 and 76 are from Alzheimer: A Canadian Family Resource Guide by Lori Kociol and Myra Schiff, McGraw Hill, 1989, pages 10 to 12. Used by permission of the authors.
The entries on page 89 are from Mind Your Manners: A Complete Dictionary of Etiquette for Canadians, by Claire Wallace, edited by Joy Brown, Harlequin Books, 1953.
Passages on pages 7, 8, 18, 19 and 240 are inspired by (and in some cases are modified quotations from) the diaries of Peter and Mary Papky.
The line referenced on page 64 is from Once in Europa by John Berger.
Thank you to the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council for financial support during the writing of this book. Thanks also to the Banff Centre for the Arts.
Parts of this book appeared (sometimes in slightly different form) in the Malahat Review, Geist and Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets; my thanks to the editors of these publications.
Many people read and supported versions of this book (and of me) along the way. Thanks in particular to Kelly Aitken, Michelle Cameron, Kirsten Corson, Degan Davis, Scott McLoughlin-Marratto, Don McKay, Jeremy Munce, Liz Philips, Alison Pick, Johanne Pulker, Joyce Redford (for her example of faithfulness), Jo Roberts, Doug Raisbeck, David Seymour, Sue Sinclair, Suzannah Smith, Alana Wilcox, the generous souls of Brick Books (Stan Dragland, Marnie Parsons and others) and the good people I wrote with in writing groups over the years. And thank you to Silas White and Kathy Sinclair at Nightwood Editions for, among other wonders, their trust in me.
I’d also like to thank all of the characters who appear in this book: friends, family, passing acquaintances and strangers, naked, in costume, in disguise, in the wings. Sometimes main characters show up as extras, walk-ons as stars. In all cases, the portraits are necessarily partial, because of our boundlessness and in service to the whole. My gratitude for all of you. As my grandmother used to say when she was losing her mind and needed a phrase that would fit any occasion, it takes all kinds.
Finally, this book is for my father, Greg Munce (1946-2002). Though he does not appear directly in these pages, he’s behind every one.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alayna Munce has been published in various Canadian literary journals and in Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets (Nightwood). She is a past winner of the CBC Literary Awards and a three-time winner of Grain magazine’s Short Grain Contest.
Alayna Munce grew up in Huntsville, Ontario, and now lives in Toronto.
