Read an Excerpt

A. Poulin, Jr.

BOA Editions

Chapter One

    The Front Parlor

Whenever someone in our family
died, the wake was in our house,
downstairs, in the front parlor.

It was a spare room, really, and,
except for a few extra folding chairs,
empty and unheated. The shades were

always drawn, the best lace curtains
hung. And in that constant cool
twilight, the wallpaper damp

as banks of carnations, when we
dared to go in, forbidden to,
we played like shadows under

the great cross, the enormous
suffering, dying or dead Christ,
the room's only constant ornament.

It never was a living room.

* * *

I've slept above the dead before,
my bed in the same far corner
as their caskets. Assured their lips

were sewn, their arms clamped,
I've fallen asleep to the rhythm
of hummed rosaries. My grandfather,

choosing to die on New Year's Day.
His wife, big-boned and stubborn,
paralyzed for fifteen years,

bedridden five, decaying three,
gangrene growing on her back
like some warm carnivorous herb.

An uncle who never spoke a word
until the week he died, insane,
babbling the poison of his liver.

* * *

I've slept above the dead enough.
Whole generations of a tribe. Still,
in the middle of the night, I hear

the prayers of the living and the dead,
a crescendo through the floorboards,
filling my room like an ancestral chorus:

Que les ames des defunts reposent
en paix par la misericorde
de Dieu. They have burned

the seams of their eyes, chewed
the nylon cord threaded through
their lips. They have cast off

their clamps. They stand at my
bedside every night moaning my name
off endless strings of beads, burning.

She plants a growing kiss on my forehead.
With her green hand, moist as moss
and wide as my skull, forever free,

she strokes my back and thigh.

    To My Brother

You'd think there was no end to this
tribe. They set out and multiplied
as if survival of their species

depended on the acid of their sperm.
Now, in the middle of the night,
they call us to come bury their dead.

So we make that black pilgrimage
back to Lisbon to slide one more
familiar corpse into the holy hillside.

We've buried twelve of them, a dozen
deaths survived, with still a dozen more
or so to live through. The horror

of their deaths and lives lives on
and haunts us: Mandia bent and stunted
by that monster riding her shoulder,

lied into believing she was partly angel;
Blackie drunk before his couple suns
rose every morning of his life, except

the last; and Larry loving various wives,
not one of them his own, his children
strangers to him even when he hemorrhaged;

one Emile lingering for months in
hospital beds infested with leukemia's
piranha, another dropping on the corner

during lunch-hour, gaping blindly back
at the mill hands watching our father
take him in his arms and whisper the act

of contrition to his soulless head.
Time and time again I resurrect them.
They gather in my head, eat, drink and

sing, celebrating their own wakes,
prolonging our interminable deaths.
But each time I return from burying one

of them, all the way back home from
Lisbon I can feel unremembered and
unknown parts of me vanish in the dark

and exhausted silence behind me.
They die, Normand, they die.
And, dying, they kill our only history.

To My Aunt

All through your life
        they lied to you. They said
               a baby-sitter dropped you

and never told your
        mother. They never could
               admit that you were crippled,

born deformed, your shoulder
        jutting out into the blade
               of a stunted wing. Therefore,

they said, you could never
        lead a normal life, and,
               therefore, you never did.

The mutant of our crippled
        wills and hearts, you played
               tribal nurse and clown,

the fool of our cruelty and needs.
        I don't think you ever knew.
               Today we buried you.

No. You were even spared
        that simple fact: ice sealed
               the ground, a clenched and final

pack of lies. But you
        are dead, and, dead, leave
               me obsessed by that hump

and bright lie on your back.
        After they pronounced you
               dead, drained your blood

out of your veins, and dressed
        you like a helpless child,
               was it impossible for them

to close that cage? Did
        your arms, furious, push back
               the leaded lid? Did they raise

you, then, turn you over
        and with a hammer gently
                crack the cartilage of your wing?

Poor dead thing,
        we should have told you all
               along that you were only partly

human. Then, perhaps,
        neither girl nor angel,
               that one thrust of yours

bandaged by your skin,
        with its invisible burning
               mate, might have grown, grown

larger than your frame.
        Before we'd had a chance
               to break that wild wish

riding on your back,
        you could have winged
               yourself away from our lies.

Instead, what you were
        and always will be, now
               always will be trapped

inside the mausoleum
         of our fabricated memory
               until they bury all of us.

But tonight, before
        the ground has thawed, before
               they stuff you in its mouth

rigid as an owl
        at dawn, let me open up
               your cage; let me touch

both sides of your wounded
        back; let me heal you.
               Oh, with the new moon

cracking on the snow
        and all your sisters
               chained to their dying

husbands, sleeping,
        let me show you now
               the truth about yourself.

Just once, believe
        the light you feel
                trembling behind you.

Let that inhuman
        power carry you. Do
               it. Try. Slowly now,

    In the Sleep of Fathers

A mist rose from the river and hovered
in the air, a heavy slab of granite.
Tongues of satin ribbons flapped Father,

Father, Husband, Brother from the wreaths
and baskets of dyed flowers on the rented
artificial turf, while your casket quivered

on the tiny elevator that goes down forever.
An ancient woman watering her rock
garden in the rain, the priest sprinkled

holy water over you and intoned that last
incantation for the dead's longer-lasting
life, for the deeper sleep of fathers.

The night before, when all your relatives
and friends had left, your sons and daughters
lingered in the mortuary with our mother.

We plucked flowers from the bank that rose
around your bier, a mad farmer's garden
cultivated on the face of some slate cliff,

and laid them as ourselves on your steady
chest, in your hands already grafted
to your ribs. My brother held you in his

outstretched arms, the son he never had,
and begged you to be born again, while we
held each other as we never would again.

Then it was over. Your brothers, sisters,
friends walked back to their cars and slowly
drove off through the cemetery ruled by

our family name. Our wives flanked our mother.
And the undertaker pulled back that blanket
of damp roses children buy to warm their dead.

My brother and I broke two sprigs of evergreen
and placed them just above your mouth.
We knelt and kissed your sealed, implacable

pod one last time. With our knees and feet
still wet with that rich earth surrounding
you as you root yourself deeper, sturdier

in this ground we walk on, in our dreams
we tend to our own families. No longer
sons, we work, we sleep in the sleep of fathers.

    Prisoners

I wait until my wife and daughter have survived
the hope of nightmares I can never satisfy.
I wait until the quick-freeze traffic of shifts stops
and factory workers weave to work or home as you did,
until the hot screech of tires has turned cold and mute
in two-car garages under sleek and impotent creatures
serene as saints becoming extinct....

I wait until bars close and my students, higher on
nine months of terrifying freedom from their fathers
than on grass, have fallen into one another's arms.

Father, I wait until that blue, blue moment between
pitch night and milk light when I can almost hear you
whistling those melodies you invented for yourself,
that slow time holding light back, back,
when you were alone and slowly drank your coffee
near the hot woodstove in our small kitchen in Lisbon
in winter, as much at peace as you may be now,
because you wanted it that way. I wait. And when
your presence fills this room with that calm
I slept in as a boy, assuring me I am your son
again, I know it's time to go back to your grave.

Your headstone penetrates the half-light of this
granite sky, but it's no wider than a common cot.
I stretch my heavy body over yours until
the ribs' pressure is returned. I could fall asleep
here. Instead, the hands you gave me gently trace
the small and fragile contours of your shoulders
and your hips. And when I've discovered precisely
where you are, I speak to you -- those few words
I've unburied for so few, just to bury them again.

The ground begins to heave, slowly; grass tongues
my ear, a language of love no one understands or
wants to. In the mist rising from the brown river, I can
hear the wide white mouths of the many dead I've loved
breathe a single breath that trembles all to silence.
But Son. I love you. I forgive you your sins.
are still prisoners inside your mouth.

Before the sun can touch me, before all those workers'
desperate eyes open, traffic begins again, and my family
discovers I am gone, before I walk back into their light
-- with my body still in the furrow it has plowed,
I plant the only seed a guilty firstborn son can
sow, Father, to make us live forever.

---

Excerpted from A. Poulin, Jr. by A. Poulin Copyright © 2001 by A. Poulin. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---