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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781550963007 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Exile Editions |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2012 |
| Pages: | 120 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
BODY
Starting School
After you have wiped off flies,
eaten the jelly of strength and cunning,
taken the knob of cheese and the quivering bird,
and left home with these in your pocket,
and you've met the giant,
given blood from a stone,
thrown the stone without return,
stripped the cherry tree of sweetness —
someone whispers: Every cause has a pearl; every cure has effect,
but who will protect the innocent?
You are walking home from school;
a classmate stalks you.
He has five stones in his pocket.
He lets fly the first and the second and the third. You run so fast that the fourth and fifth remain in the air: they do not fall to earth.
Then your mother says: That boy in your class, the one who followed you home, his sister strangled to death in her crib on a strand of real pearls. Imagine.
Seine
I was born by the Seine River:
it rolled slowly,
it spilled and soaked the grasses,
many birds traversed it,
the river bank was forbidden though aprons from the nearby houses fluted the air like river gulls.
There were small boats stashed, and a pigpen in the yard;
my brother rinsed underwear outdoors in a tub while great uncles mended nets under the stairs.
I remember stepping from the window into water:
the house was a living island, its raincoat flying,
boots to its knees, a peddler's sack of poison.
It wrenched loose on restless foundations,
edged close to the riverbank and an episode of drowned children.
When a stranger arrived, carrying chickens,
he took off his coat, and hung it, headless,
on the clothesline.
I was born by the Seine River:
it rolled slowly,
it spilled and soaked the grasses;
the river bank was forbidden,
many birds traversed it,
I was among them.
CrowTwa craws fly over my head in the winter sunshine;
it doesn't mean anything.
Crows at the beach, bead eyes scrolling,
crows flitting down from the fir tree bent over the garden —
martyr crows,
crows with the gift of derision —
in that time of loneliness,
the apples binned, the rain soaked cabbages —
crows in the boughs screeching, Yes!
They couldn't see me, but I could see them —
I had to row over their water green eyelids to get to the other side.
Breakdown
The truck was blue,
coal sacks swagged against its sides,
snow fell on our tongues,
the pickup slewed,
the smoke-thick skies burned cold;
and near where we stopped, men and boys hung fishing lines over the wet bridge railing.
We climbed out of the truck bed, ears stinging,
to buy ice cream cones from the shop.
Our father unfolded his wallet,
our mother stayed in the cab,
her face turned to the rear window.
She cleared a path with her glove to view the herring below the bridge.
When we returned,
she said she'd forgotten her wedding dress and photographs in a shed while escaping the flood:
there was no way, now, to prove what she'd been,
who she was.
Fish
The tug on the line was a stocking snag,
the tuck of a blanket at night while I slept,
the flash of a dream, leaf-sweet in daylight;
the water was sunlit and razor-edged.
There's nothing there, my brother said.
It's lake-weed, he said.
But our father tried the line and said:
Wind it in slowly.
The squint of my eyes, the gaff nearby —
my arms were sore and the reel too shrill —
the fish flipped up like a small cache of silver,
then we watched it lie still.
Let it go, my father said.
But my hands were raw,
and all over the world there were wide pink mouths that could never be filled.
Naked
Ahem, we've work to do:
unbutton that blouse, release the waistband — those shoes —
slip-ons are better, they slip off.
Why have laces at all?
Now that you're naked, forget the cold:
it's only the north wind on the breath of your childhood,
hours at a window, fingernails tracing intricate cells of frost.
You called to your father to hurry;
you twisted and squirmed on the skating shack bench while he laced your skates.
The men kept the heat in the stove in a roar,
the girls dressed loudly, the boys with mittened hands in their armpits.
You tottered away from the frozen shore,
towed by your father. The wind nipped tucks of hair free of your hat and whispered:
One day the planet will ask you to tell a story in return for today.
Not everyone gets to fly without frostbite in exceptionally low temperatures,
under a kind gaze,
and believe it is good to be born without clothes.
Banff, 1953
A two-tone Chevrolet,
a handle-strap to hold me to the window glass:
we crossed the brown and frost of April,
the horses heavy-maned,
and swans just landing on the lake.
Back in the prairie dust,
an aunt and uncle in a barrack's shack.
Inside, too, the bunk beds where we'd slept,
my nurse's kit, with candy pills, parked on a blanket.
My uncle and my dad were meat-fed men,
my aunt and mother slim,
their faces smooth with pleasure —
chatelaines.
Each had a pocketbook she carried when she shopped,
its contents closed as lives of voles in pastureland by which we drove that spring.
The mountains still ahead of us were new —
we looked to them —
rough sketches in an untried hand,
they might be friends.
Museum
It makes no sense — I was so small —
but I know I was alone when I found the bees: they crawled,
golden, velvet as bees are,
through a glass tube inserted in the wall.
I knew their tread —
intending footsteps on my arm and on my neck;
they drew a line so sweet I curled inside,
all leaf.
I was caramel-headed, patent-shoed;
a velvet collar striped my camel coat.
The costume gave me entrée to the glass hive honeycomb, the wax near-fluid and alive,
and at its heart, the Queen, a giantess in dense gold Matter.
Were those her eggs?
Was that larva?
The furry bees queued inside the tube;
beyond the hive, the floor was paced with taxidermied paws,
and clatter rose to break the diorama case that kept them from attack upon the human drones that brought them death.
I felt as if I'd stumbled on some truth,
and silent shrieking birds and tawny-coated cougars under glass,
would one day join the exodus of bees.
I held my breath lest someone thoughtless thought to intervene and shut their egress.
Airing Cupboard
At the back of the top shelf,
on clean slats of pine,
against the insulated water heater and warming blankets, I unwrap a towel.
Inside are a red rubber bag and a white hose with plastic nozzle. I lay them aside and open a grey hardback marriage manual,
leaf through the red-with-blue-veins colour-plate genitals,
search further a-field and find the marriage bed itself,
the sheets pulled tight, a nightdress laid out across lace pillows: curtains closed, window open to the damp.
When it's over, she changes the sheets, stores away the bed for another month — but wait —
here are his letters on thin blue paper:
My darling, I need you! And discover deeper,
cached in the niche behind the water tank with head bent and knees clasped,
where wooden walls retain the scent of forest,
the marriage itself:
because they cannot agree what's to be done with it,
and unlike an abandoned child,
it will not die.
Connection
I was never a dealer —
I wore an Indian sweater and green hair ribbons, and ate tinned jam with a spoon.
When I looked out the window,
I found orchards of greengage plums:
caterpillars tented their leaves in gauzy detail, and then reinvented.
I was never a dealer —
but my brother and I knelt in the grass of the flats and picked magic mushrooms.
I kept mine in a tin while men from black limousines tucked up their sleeves and grazed the fields clean.
I was never a dealer —
but when the counterweight slipped on the drill rig,
I sat in a car with my boyfriend and stared at some pills.
It's okay, he said — and I hated him —
I know exactly how it must feel when somebody dies and you loved them.
Tug
At the end of the afternoon, when the sun released our burned shoulders, and the last log rider beached and sat on a blanket with the fried chicken and potato salad and gherkins,
the uncles stood, fists crushing cake.
Muscular as walrus, they were heavy as anvils,
smoothly unwound as seals.
From the trunk of one of the Chevys, the cousins brought out rope, and we ran to take sides — me with my dad for anchor:
he was more than a match for the bulk of his brothers.
My mother joined in, cardigan sleeves rolled,
hair in a scarf,
while the aunts — majestic in dresses, ripe-bosomed —
travailed and trammelled with dishes.
When it was time, we hauled, my father and I and my mother and brother and the numberless cousins:
the uncles tugged landward, but the tide lapped at our legs,
and the moon, the planets, the stars doubled in water and pulled hard, too,
through the uncoiling sea,
the dead along with us,
in their too tight good clothes.
Red Sweater
I was the one with the red zippered sweater and red shoes and overalls and a heart red as fire.
God above couldn't have me though the unnumbered worlds ran through my brain in numeric swirls.
God knows, I loved the garden,
the worms in the cabbages,
the plum at the fence, but I did not like the boy next door who said,
You have to see. I grew bored,
looked at his bum and thought of the depot downtown where a machine dispensed aluminum slugs punched with my name.
That warm afternoon in the shed,
while the bulldozer operator's son pulled at his plumage,
and the fields wailed with cows,
my red shoes ran to the fence: I edged underneath and he shouted,
You're scared!
and I called back,
No man hath seen God ...
At the outdoor cinema, I crouched in the grass and my boyfriend gave me a tab:
then we took off our clothes and discovered our rest with the golden Tibetan gods.
Sixteen
I'd long had tendrils of a ferny feeling,
and I'd read the books:
a boy would push his tongue inside my mouth,
and bring me close to wisdom and to death.
With entry would come love, a perfect fit:
a gift much like my mother's velvet dress,
in elegance and touch — piano music:
I'd only have to practice, then to use it.
But when a boy approached me on the porch,
my father flicked the night light on and off —
a signal from a shore retreating fast.
My pink and white angora sweater slipped —
first shoulders, then a breast:
I'd never thought a task so gently could unmask and open with a kiss —
slow barges on a river's restless movement.
Virgin
It was summer.
I sat in the Sprott Shaw typing class,
the feeling all day like metal and brick,
a hook on a pole to open the top pane of a tall window.
Blood clots fell like apples from a torn pocket of a torn apron.
I ran to the washroom.
My mother brought towels from home;
they typed on and on, in the next room.
In the hospital ward,
the nurses, nuns, brought me a pan.
They pushed the bed along a corridor and into a room.
I won't hurt you, the doctor said.
Tighten up, he said. Your breasts,
they're big for your size. Ha ha.
I wore a green plaid nightie and jacket to greet him,
but I walked away through the halls without them.
Bear
Like me you wear a heavy coat of flesh; like me you are hungry:
you travel the woods and tread through sunlight to smell the sea.
How alike we are, and yet you flee my embrace, my bite into the muscles of your neck.
What if my paw as it cups your head,
is the hand that helps,
and the snout that snuffles your armpit only wants your scent?
It could be worse —
you could be ignored.
Each night when I turn in my bed of leaves and look up,
I hear your voice: sometimes it sings
(sometimes it weeps).
So why should you resist the sincerity of this kiss?
Elephant
It is enough to hold your hand when we step from the curb,
to feel the smiles of the other walkers rain down.
Some shrink in fear when the shadow of an airplane's wing darkens the stream,
but the rest is as we desire, although an old woman near me falls behind.
But we are moving towards the brass band:
my father plays tuba,
my brother the trumpet,
I have a toy ukulele on a string and my name printed on a card upside down.
Your grip crushes mine, but ahead is the band shell,
and warm loaves of bread,
and comb honey, and the pains in my hands are only because of time.
I can feel what I like because my mind fastens with beauty —
as if I were a girl who knew where she's going and to what end in this unreeling company,
your spirit around me like a spangled cloak,
for the day when we reach the elephant and I will ride.
Wardrobe
I come to the door, the building large and old; the walls groan,
the elevator displays a taillight.
Upstairs, I lie on the bed — so many flights of snow.
My childhood knocks at the window,
relentless and pure in intent as the stranger who called when my mother died, and said
Hello, hello, who's calling me?
night after night.
On top of the wardrobe there's a long grey snout that pushes a box to the edge.
Rat — you think you can frighten me with your shoves,
but there are people in all the houses on all the streets who will never give up their love.
Excerpted from "Soul Mouth"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Marilyn Bowering.
Excerpted by permission of Exile Editions Ltd.
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
BODY,
Starting School,
Seine,
Crow,
Breakdown,
Fish,
Naked,
Banff, 1953,
Museum,
Airing Cupboard,
Connection,
Tug,
Red Sweater,
Sixteen,
Virgin,
Bear,
Elephant,
Wardrobe,
Hotel,
Fidelity,
Deer,
14 Washington Place,
SOUL,
I have to be still ...,
If I knew the horses ...,
I am afraid ...,
Hours,
Considering Apples,
Only yesterday ...,
Chamonix,
I love the little birds ...,
That hummingbird ...,
Wild Roses,
Satin Flower,
Fawn Lilies,
Summer,
And now I can't come ...,
When I close my eyes ...,
She sits in a field ...,
In a dark wood ...,
THE STORYTELLERS ON THEIR CARPETS,
Soul Mouth,
Wasps' Nest,
Christmas Eve,
Soul Dressing,
Firebox,
Prayer Room,
Winter Fever,
Passover,
All Winter He Constructs,
The Ferry,
Natural Disasters,
Space Talk,
The Pupils of Plato,
Why are you here, my dear students?,
Dear my students ...,
When I used to walk here ...,
We are deep in the labyrinth ...,
When Scheherazade went to the sultan ...,
How many times ...,
Nebuchadnezzar,
Naming the Animals in the Time of the Reptiles,
Colour Theory,
Author Biography and Acknowledgments,