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Overview
mute as a plum
until a vigilant limb came
to a decision. As you might have guessed
I’ve come to one myself.
Moving from the absurdity of the First World War to the chaos of today’s cities, where men share beds, bottles of ouzo and shade from willow trees, these poems ask questions: If your lover speaks in his sleep, how do you know ‘you’ is you? What good is it to decorate a headstone? What if you think of the perfect comeback to a six-year-old argument? Otter fails, with style, to find answers.
‘Ladouceur writes with an awareness of queer history, documenting it faithfully, but with his own twist … This is poetry motivated by an honest wit.’
— John Barton, Arc Poetry Magazine
Ben Ladouceur is a writer originally from Ottawa, now based in Toronto. His work has been featured in Arc, The Malahat Review, PRISM international and The Walrus, and in the Best Canadian Poetry anthology. He was awarded the Earle Birney Poetry Prize in 2013.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781552453100 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Coach House Books |
| Publication date: | 05/05/2015 |
| Pages: | 80 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Otter
By Ben Ladouceur
COACH HOUSE BOOKS
Copyright © 2015 Ben LadouceurAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55245-310-0
CHAPTER 1
ARMADILLO
My lover spent his summer in the south,
carving armadillos from their husks. It was, to hear him
say it, an experience – the term people save
for the places they hate. He spent June in the sunroom
with a pitcher of sweet tea and a picture of me.
By August, just the tea, watching hicks
suck cigarettes through long, aristocratic
sticks, papaya seeds stuck between their burnt
sienna teeth. Everything was burnt there. My lover
carved years off his life with the very same knife
the armadillos learned to fear. Where are they
now, I asked him as snowfall took care
of the candles I'd lit. The not-quite-rodents, not-quite-reptiles,
not-quite-right gatecrashers of the ark?
How does their nudity suit them? Do they sigh
all cool, how we sighed last year, when we threw our anoraks
off and found we had that chalet to ourselves?
If we were ever blameless, it was then. I held your locks
in a Chinese bun as you went south indeed,
throwing, upon my balls, your tongue, how sea urchins
throw their stomachs upon the coral reefs they eat.
At which point my lover raised his knife
to my hairline, scalped me masterfully and poured,
into my open brain, a tea so cold and sweet.
AT THE MOVIES
Made of Xs holding hands, squares
distinguished by squares, the west side
of the multiplex is an appreciation
of algebra. Annik
always hoped to make out
with a nameless stranger
as a box-office bomb blared
to an otherwise-empty
auditorium, as the score of violins
swept in to mute the audible
saliva. Now Annik is married.
She wrote me a letter
cinematic in its exposition:
You faggot, I loved you. Of all the men
you could have been, you went only halfway.
The measures and metres to which our lives
accord, the math that shows
on the sides of our buildings. Annik,
I still don't have the heart to tell you
we don't have any say. Our lives
are thrown over our bodies
like tides whose proximities
we underestimated.
I was halfway to loving
how you held yourself up
as if there were cameras
in all the rooms,
how your Eastern European comeliness
got so luminous, we
expected moths to round
the corners, carry you away
and drop you from such a height
the body would bounce upright.
OX
That was our last unripe year, rib cages bald, bright
and evermore palpable. The county's only queer bar
had just swapped its signage from hand-painted
to Helvetica. We drank as though new policies had
activated and we would not be grandfathered.
The men inside covered in slobber and glitter, I felt
unreflective, so filthy, a pauper. Did someone
say poppers?, Alexander would blurt, and his asshole
would begin to open wide. Outside, the rain arrived
as if under curfew. We had curfews too.
If I ever got a tattoo – I confessed, walking through
the dirty water, through the lightnings penmanship –
across my ribs, a zebra mussel, inching imperceptibly
away. Something clever written in the slime of its meander.
Maybe 'epilogue' Maybe occident'
Alexander protested, because everything I did
was on purpose. It filled my heart with helium. Occident,
I emphasized. Not Accident. Ox. His insufficient
moustache hairs caught small drops of rain.
Crickets scraped songs off their bodies with their legs.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, THOMAS DEAMLEY-DAVISON!
Happy birthday, Thomas Deamley-Davison!
Sorry to arrive empty-handed. The plan
was to give you some tallboys, a carton
of Viceroys and a quality handjob, but I couldn't
find an unmarked paper bag in which to keep
the first two gifts, then to throw over your ugly
mug as I perform the third. Besides, its time
to get to work! Just talk our ears off
about the nearest chip stand and you'll have
your writing den to yourself before the city owls
hit the hay. Then you can tend to a woman named
Marcie, a woman named Deb – and others too –
while they experiment with colour palettes, fondly
recall their ex-husbands and get to the bottoms
of their mothers' enigmatic dying
words. (Why do you write so much about women?
You aren't one of them. You don't even make
love to them.) Soon you'll be voting
conservative, snorting royalties off the back
of your own bestseller, telling some young
thing to make himself at home in the clutter
while you share with him your parliament of stories.
Until that morose night arrives, I hope you don't mind
if I keep calling you Brother, as if I never stood
in your doorway after a damp stroll back
from the moon district, wondering which beverage
you would nonchalantly offer me, ouzo or tea.
DERWENTATER
Your taste must once have been
unwelcome, but now, like mucus
of the nose, it is a sugary testament
to ubiquity. How things do not change
but do dim.
In a dory, I paddled
into the lake called Derwentwater.
I was in its epicentre. I could go
no further in. Any movement on my part
would have been escape.
A lake is a body of water
plus the bodies of hundreds of birds.
I was a winged collective
eschewing you, a watery cavity, toward
a definition. The birds I was
forgot that names
are just ephemeral devices.
Your syllables – er, wat, went, der – had a taste
their gullets were welcoming to.
Nobody goes to that lake today.
The hostel beside it was sold.
We moved away, to dry, flat lands,
but I kept moving, all the way to Canada.
We wrote letters, until we didn't.
LIBRARY BOOK
Please write notes in pencil and erase before returning.
– Written on the first page of a library copy of
The Honeyman Festival by Marian Engel
Peter, dear friend, I write you from Ontario.
Often I feel that anywhere I go
there you shall have been. Certain boulders in the sea
follow whales obediently, such power
in the contrails of the beast. I hoped to be,
if anything, the whale, eroded, indifferent.
No matter. In the book, you marked with a star
every instance of a pregnant woman being
kicked from within. During a bath. During a bad
thought. To lift the reader out from a shift
in perspective. In worn red ink, your question:
How must that feel? I feel uneasy, Peter.
Inside me is a cavalry
whose conception, though so warm, wasn't
worth it. You are in Korea. The narrators husband,
for sixty pages now, remains in Kathmandu.
Before you left, before you left more
sentences unfinished than you thought, you walked me
to the porch, told me which professors
to detest, which books to read, how love
toward women works. Opened your arms
like a bear finding balance with some difficulty.
I already know who shall die, who shall leave,
who shall learn what lessons. Still, I race
to the last page; soon, the book wont be mine.
CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE
You pour your change
jar into his change jar and stare
into nothing for half of an hour.
House centipedes alarm you
with their conviction, their agility: they will go
where they please. You manage
to trap one in the hollow foot
of a candlestick.
If you spare his life, toss him
into the wild outside your window, thinking perhaps
hes got a small wife who'd have him
back, skip to the seventh stanza.
If you decide that he is an it, that its awful
and odd-numbered legs should dance in the water
you boiled, originally, for fiddleheads, procure
a Bible. Read, in one sitting, the Book of Isaiah.
* * *
There aren't many faces
in your repertoire of faces. The green-eyed
grocer might be seen on Wednesdays,
his garbage cascading to dumpsters
below: potatoes with eyefuls of poisonous
growths, heartless artichokes.
Dawn after dawn, the body beside you
wheezes and brays and brings rotten
produce to mind, its nipples slowly softening
like radishes all autumn long.
That strange animalian
sound you can hear is the phone.
If you let it ring, fearing
your wife's baritone – husky and low
from a colicky infancy – begin
this poem again.
If you bring the receiver to your ear
and forget your son's age,
head to the nearest reservoir.
Remove your filthy clothes.
* * *
You ought to yearn
more often – for a lucky
break, for a better mood, for an abode further
from the surface of the earth.
They're building Goliaths by the lakeside. The term
skyscraper has stuck.
You have been known
to pray before them. You're a conversation topic
in that neighbourhood – you bring garden
parties to life. The man who's got it all
wrong, whose knees bleed and not, some
say, entirely due to prayer.
Upon hearing your silhouette described,
perhaps your wife
has thrown a tantrum, or a flute of champagne
across a long room, then excused herself.
The afternoon you left her, she cried, Go on and choose
your own adventure. Its dawn now
and the man you love is in a mood.
If you think it best not to
touch him, then let his peril dissipate
into the ether upon which done things rest
and put this poem down.
If you cannot hold back, if you rush
under his torso as if its an adequate awning, go out
back, dig a hole the size of a holy
book and await further instruction.
SALUTATIONS FROM ABITIBI
Alone clouds refused to cohere.
They darkened the city in blotches.
They rendered the city dalmatian.
I forgot my lover on the bus.
The brakes woke him up
at Abitibi and he found work there.
All year mosquitoes bit his fumbling frame.
The bites were like Grecian constellations
seen on a clear taupe day.
My Zippo was on his person.
I was planning to quit with the smoking
but how shall I now singe the frays
of my only warm coat? When winter arrives
the mosquitoes will expire
and material will cover the bodies of men.
At least I received a blank postcard
on the birthday of my lover, its message
white on white: I am alive I am alone
I am not willing to speak. Some men
are darkened, in the long run, by sun.
Others, more quickly, by clouds.
THE REFORMED PUNK ADDRESSES THE ANGRY MOB
Hear me out, children of ink and strange ash. That lifestyle
is all about regret! Haven't you heard
how microchips are cleaned? With water so virgin, so free
of expletives, that it must spread the cleanliness. It craves
demise and detritus, would char the imperfections off
your rough, unleavened skin. I do spend time
being sorry, but who could forget the dark evenings
I somehow withstood, the long intact cocks in my mouth,
v and I thought – I am the water too dirty to harm him.
And him. And him. Think of that
the next time you hold a mirror before a mirror
to form a funny tunnel infinity gallops through.
These days my sister taps on my front door,
wondering if I could babysit. I can even smoke her dope
if I light the incense too. That, my angry mob, is not
an offer a good man would refuse.
GIBRALTAR POINT
We've all mistaken laughter for permission,
but Iliya, just give yourself a look.
Of all the half-employed, unshaven boys that could've
swung my howling body through the air just to exert
some power, who'd have thought it'd be the one
a woman has agreed to wed? This will end
how all the golden ages end – with a thud
and a bruised tailbone. Patiently, Stephanie
helps me off the ground. The two of you shared
a pied-à-terre, as young significant others,
wherein the inflatable mattress
slowly lost its breath to the weight
of guest after guest. One day,
there were none of those left. Their visas expired,
their internships paid off, their sweethearts
took them back. You suddenly had the place
to yourselves, and now, a new place;
some new selves. Illya, this violent little outburst
was probably just your attempt to make another
cardigan as filthy as your own. Its nothing
a half-decent drycleaner can't tend to, and you
can pay me back by bumming fewer cigarettes
until Stephanie dons the dress she'll only
feel the weight of once. All the most beautiful things
are things we rarely feel the weight of.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Otter by Ben Ladouceur. Copyright © 2015 Ben Ladouceur. Excerpted by permission of COACH HOUSE BOOKS.
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.
Table of Contents
Contents
I. THE HONEYMAN FESTIVAL,Armadillo, 7,
At the Movies, 8,
Ox, 10,
Happy Birthday, Thomas Dearnley-Davison, 11,
Derwentwater, 12,
Library Book, 13,
Choose Your Own Adventure, 14,
Salutations from Abitibi, 17,
The Reformed Punk Addresses the Angry Mob, 18,
Gibraltar Point, 19,
Song of the Seventh Son of the Seventh Son, 20,
Notes to Self, 21,
I Am in Love with Your Brother, 22,
Gran Vals, 23,
And I've Been Thinking Dangerously, 24,
The Circle Game, 25,
Hospice, 26,
II. RITES OF SPRING,
Gulag, 29,
Fête, 30,
Pollen, 31,
Telegram from the Seventeenth Arrondissement, 32,
Glass, 33,
Dog Years, 34,
All Men Are Equal, 36,
Goddaughter, 37,
Nuncle, 39,
Somdomite, 40,
Apologia, 41,
Masters of the Impossible, 42,
Bijou, 44,
An Ideal Inmate, 45,
Printout Found in Bottle Found in the River Aare, 46,
Fossil, 48,
Butler's Hymnal, 49,
III. DEAD DREAMS OF MONOCHROME MEN,
Barkentine, 53,
Eiderdown, 54,
Marigold, 55,
Host, 56,
222 The Esplanade, 57,
Tractatus, 58,
Brown Study, 59,
Triptych, 60,
Pseudipigrapha, 61,
The Masturbating Flowers, 62,
Misery Index, 64,
Edict, 65,
East End, 66,
Poem with Long Title, 67,
Transaction, 68,
Rubric, 69,
590 Lisgar St., 70,
Intramurals, 71,
Byzantium, 72,
Remarks on Colour, 73,
Tough Luck, 74,
Cadenza, 76,
Goodbye, Cruel World, 77,
Acknowledgements, 78,
About the Author, 79,