A Newer Wilderness
Page 1
A NEWER WILDERNESS
A NEWER WILDERNESS
Poems
ROSEANNE CARRARA
Copyright © 2007 by Roseanne Carrara
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be repro-
duced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or
by any means, without the prior written permission of the pub-
lisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copy-
ing, a licence from Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900,
Toronto, ON m5e 1e5
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Carrara, Roseanne, 1974-
A newer wilderness / Roseanne Carrara.
Poems
isbn 978-1-897178-40-9
I. Title.
PS8605.A7745N49 2007 C811’.6 C2007-901104-7
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada
Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Department of
Canadian Heritage through the Book Publishing Industry
Development Program.
Printed and bound in Canada
Insomniac Press
192 Spadina Avenue, Suite 403
Toronto, Ontario, Canada, m5t 2c2
www.insomniacpress.com
Text design and typesetting: Alysia Shewchuk
In memory of my grandmothers, Geraldine and Vita
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Prologue: To a Translator of Horace • 6
i
Surveillance • 15
Miners’ Houses • 18
In Defence of Burning • 20
Lullaby • 23
The Ears of Kings • 24
Rest After • 28
The End of the Novel • 29
A Muscle in the Country • 31
Annotations on Your Pastoral, Summer • 34
Of Minor Figures • 35
A Brief Tour of the Avenue • 37
The Course of the Renovations
i. Transformation ago • 38
ii. Renaissance rom • 39
The Wife of Pilate • 40
Notes on Immigration • 44
A Newer Wilderness • 47
ii
Kenotaphion
i. Arrived at Ephesus • 51
ii. Herald • 53
iii. Aubade • 55
iv. Sweet Spices • 57
v. Prayer to a Heroine of Romance for a Better Memory • 59
vi. Old Road • 61
vii. Eye of Tobit • 63
viii. In the Garden • 64
ix. Imperative • 66
iii
During the Spring Dandelion Rush in Irvine, California • 69
A Child’s Garden • 72
Lazarus Speaks in Front of Lemieux’s Lazare, 1941 • 75
A Newer Wilderness • 79
The Masters of the Country House Poems • 80
Certain Disappearances • 82
Cabbagetown • 84
Cabbage City • 86
Opera Week in Radio • 89
The Evening of Your Proposal • 93
The Restoration of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker • 95
Daughter and Son • 102
Epilogue: Curses • 105
Notes • 107
Acknowledgements • 111
PROLOGUE
TO A TRANSLATOR OF HORACE
You spoke of the followers of a mathematician who drew
from his example the promise of a second life. Pythagoras
lived as Pythagoras. And, having chosen the weapon
of an ancestor from a pile, he lived again, or that earlier hero
whose weapon he had chosen lived a second life in him.
Now that it is sure the both of them are dead, your take
on the old question stings us iron and fresh: what good
does it do the hero to have stood for something once?
The sea eats the captain and his crew. The aged still tear
at the bright youths and those in their prime on their way
to the underworld, tumbling down as if they, too,
were young again. Nobody escapes the sport of the old gods
or the shame of the new Christ, cold in his chiefly literal state.
Stay with us. We will need you soon enough. Stay to confound
what might be termed the second life of Edward Teller,
our father of the h-bomb, what with the ethos he delivered once,
his theme, reprised by the stiffs come to trade upon his take
on the human condition: the heart’s essential weakness,
the self-serving nature of humankind, our vision, base,
not visionary, caught wittling down the truth. That Teller
was no Pythagoras, in truth, come, tell us. Come sink these stiffs
already bidding in his name for a licence to spread a sea of mirrors
into space so as to make the sunlight flicker and to cool
what they have frequently termed this sunken earth. They will ask
to dust the stratosphere, too, with haze enough to reproduce
what Vesuvius and Mount St. Helens threw upon the day-
light once. They will ask to engineer a thick albeit
temporary age of winter, to put an end to the warmth
we forced upon the atmosphere and in upon ourselves
in this (and it is almost fair) our bent for self-indulgence.
Set us right again. Ask this group the old question,
— 11 —
and in an even sharper strain of certitude, what good does it do you now that you are dead (though they
remain, for all intents and purposes, among the living)
to have treated our predicament from the tips and not
the roots? Ask them, what good, not to confirm in us our primal lethargy but to make it plain – the most of us
would choose, on behalf of our two hemispheres and their
surrounding gases, to go without our deeper wants
and most of our possessions, with little grief, and long
before we make our way to Proserpina, swung at and torn
by the aged and the youths enticed or bidden there.
— 12 —
I
SURVEILLANCE
But Light a newer Wilderness
My Wilderness has made –
– Emily Dickinson
One of the neighbourhood dogs, we imagined,
was sure to emerge from the woods with a rabbit
or a squirrel, or some other prize, dangling, bloody,
from its mouth. But nothing would come out.
And the threshing, the trampling in the woods
behind our house would not dull down.
So we came to divine them, the surveyors,
by the sounds they made with their instruments,
the retractable tape lines scuttling and riffing
along the way, the pick and sledge keening those
four metal posts into the earth, the fluoro-paint
flushing against a defensive row of ferns
or whipping bold stripes across the fisticuffed
knots of the scrub oaks.
And we supposed
that though we were separated from those men
by porch screens, a sloping yard, the creek bed
at its foot, and the few rows of trees that were part
of our land, what we owned – and even considering
the layer of kudzu that covered everything, some said
the whole state – the men lay hidden more for what
was behind them than the clutter between us, a miles-
&nb
sp; thick backdrop of trees and ferns so green it was ash.
How their measurements collected and ventured out
over the vines that clung to the woods and stalked up
our hill. As they raffled off their inches and feet
— 15 —
and translated them into metres, how those thrown
voices beat into us there, high on the screened-in porch,
the volume only increased for the canopied distance
the utterances travelled.
And then their total exposure.
How one of the men bent over his measuring tool,
and how we spotted him, his orange helmet catching
a slant of light that stripped through the kudzu, flashing
it back out at us. We witnessed the outline of a man
coining forward from the woods, an x-ray of a body
doubled over a measuring tool, hurtling through
the greenery in one illuminating flash.
A full
minute later, as if in response, the second project-man,
spaced a quarter-mile or so away from the first, caught
another shaft of sun on his hard hat, sending himself,
or the image of his whole body, careening out from the thick.
One body, then the other. I could not help but think
of a line between the two, the completion of a project.
You said it was a signature, that bright light,
or the bodies, pausing the way they did, repeating –
a sign, you said, but only a detail of what it would be like
after the clearing, when the thick behind our own
clutter of woods got removed. Remember, you spoke
with such gravity. Our woods would prove nothing
but a wind barrier then, some thin relief.
And especially
at sunset, the light would pervade the new clearing,
seeping through our trees, willing us no peace
— 16 —
of darkness and no shade, that light would aggravate
and undo, that congealed yellow glut, the effect
(you had to build upon the most immediate image)
of the sun’s taking charge of a thousand hard
hats on a thousand men, bent over in surveillance.
— 17 —
MINERS’ HOUSES
This town once had its inhabitants.
Bitten by the coal and gone under
for it, they lit-tindered the bases
of the hills as they disappeared.
If you were a tourist you would take
a tethered swing or a freight
elevator between the heaps
and try to study how they broke,
like those eighteenth-century
English travellers who kept
to their own nation for the sake
of economy, tackling the peaks,
writing their friends direct
from the man-made grottoes,
quoting Milton as they shuttled
down into the quarries for a view.
Risen again, you would find
all the two-storey houses high
in a rage for collecting, clapped
down over their catalogues
and books pierced with crickets
or the exoskeletons of southern
insects, their dust bins kept
brimming with the ends of linens
and newspaper clippings. A bird’s nest,
or a bear’s head levelled against
a few gallons of fixative, prepared
for the conclusion of its taxidermy –
almost all of the contents they
cater to and bless, these houses,
combustible, except for the array
of cast trilobites organized
— 18 —
on the side table, there, or the jar
of marbles just to the right
side of the period instruments
not yet strung or tuned.
This is an easier rage to divine.
The curtains all part slightly
at the sashes. And you can see that
as sure as the sky parts, pointing
its dove boulder down to oil them all,
these houses, in blue-backed
sheets of light, not one will stand
deprived of its possessions.
— 19 —
IN DEFENCE OF BURNING
Cassandra looked them [Jane Austen’s letters] over and burnt the greater part, as she told me, 2 or 3 years before her own death – She left, or gave some as legacies to the Nieces – but of those I have seen, several had portions cut out.
– Caroline Austen, My Aunt Jane Austen
Not much of a rite, Cassandra, holding
over the ovens, watching for her cut-outs
to seize above the coals, to spread out and to lick
into ships of ash (as if the paper, burning,
rose up like one of those women we have read
about, wild, in the ancient romances, tearing
at the unroped hair conversant with her cheek-
bones and her raw chest) at last sifting through
the errors between the coals, an unterrific
heated dust. Right, Cassandra, hedging, maybe,
or grinning a little at the utterances she weeds
from her sister’s letters and family papers,
those privacies set aside to burn. Cassandra,
burning her clippings of all the insincere
and illegitimate issues, her sister’s caricatures
of neighbours and no ones, her own scrawl
on the progress of a fever she watched shooting bull
red through the face of a woman at Lyme,
accounts of the accounting or the hairdresser’s
bills – or better, Cassandra, well within her rights,
editing out and burning the serious confessions,
all the appalled relations of an esteem here,
a resemblance there, or a foreboding – evidence
that full well might have influenced even the murkiest
sense to try for something similar in the way
of a real attachment, or to stand down, surveying
a lean loss without that much affectation,
— 20 —
or to refuse, at last, and as a rule, to spend
any sentence of time converting a mean, more
beautiful man into an angel. To dull her scissors,
to let those sentences and subjects burn stands
hers in the right. Now who would go and regret
this burning for all it omits and withholds?
And how sore would you need to be to insist
in some kinetic, modern way that even if we cannot
play privy to this burnt out correspondence
between sisters, these pits and pats gone out, now,
and down with the kitchen scraps, that this act,
in and of itself, this event, as you might call it,
would have tickled or tainted the play of one
of the minor figures in what you must imagine, now,
as the scene, driving down to stroke us, too: as if
the local Mary would have glimpsed Cassandra
burning her sister’s letters and instinctively passed
a tear as she passed by the side window; as if
the kitchen Jane would have made a lucky turn,
gotten herself into better circumstances, say,
a wholesome marriage, because she heard
an extra hiss or whistle in the cook’s report
of delays with the dinner, heard that whistle
and changed her mind about things. What is it
that you have come to expect? That if the gardener,
bent over the thawed vegetable patch, caught
a glimpse of the kitchen fire, something new
and for posterity’s sake? Nothing bloomed out
of fashion under the hands of the old haggard
who would not have watched a word start from one
blazing page and have thought to look affectionately
— 21 —
on the first greens or to make hybrids of the border’s standard rose. No glimpses over his shoulder and up
and through Cassandra, burning the letters.
No killing cuts in the wood of the lavender,
having lunged too far forward with the knife.
— 22 —
LULLABY
I cannot imagine you called to be a martyr.
I have seen too many pictures of those
famished things offering up images
and the implements of their own torture.
This saint, here, blindfolded, holding
her eyes in front of her in a coal iron.
That harried Veronica presenting a cloth
fresh-bled with the face of her victim Jesus.
I cannot see you as a botanist either. What
with everyone so acclimatized to the beautiful,
only the weeds with their enticing names
would interest the governors in their grants.
Sure, it might originate, your research,
from an urge to restore the more natural
charms, from a whole and hearty longing
(and I expect you will be set longing)
to eradicate diseases like tulip fire, to set
buds upon the blind daffodils, to force
the deadly nightshade from the ivy for now
and for good. But for you, for any of us,
despite the initial calling, there would be no
chance of being drawn back, in the end,
to a survey of the consistent fruiting
and flowering of oranges and hollyhocks.
No, do not go and be anything.
Just sit here shallowing and unbred.
In the old way, I am out to murder Vocation.
— 23 —
THE EARS OF KINGS
Within a living register, a collection of all the flora ever
mentioned in the works of Shakespeare, a college garden,
enclosed by hedges,
backed by a church, you caught the shadow of a bird skating
forward from the leeks, and you told me, once again, how
much you hate the starlings.
As if I had never heard it before, didn’t know you despised the
starlings or the man who, as you say, inflicted them on us all,
you called him out, Eugene Schieffelin, by his full name, as if you wanted to invoke his ghost or had caught him as a
child in a lie or in some minor promiscuity
that might lead to something sinister in his adult life. You