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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781550967456 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Exile Editions |
| Publication date: | 08/24/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 120 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
Snow Tea
for Robert and Shirley McCracken
That June the lilacs came in heavy as if they knew something about the summer in store.
Fiesta, we called them, manna from the western mountains.
(I was ten, he was thirty seven)
With a bone hilted Texas jackknife he cut their corded stems through milkweed pastures carried them armfuls of raincloud, back to me counting nickels in his flatbed pickup truck.
* * *
A butcher by default, he was mad about motors, tinkering in the shop or on the lawn – outboards, mowers, dirt bikes, pumps.
I'd bring us Cokes and sing the choruses from Blonde on Blonde
(I was fifteen, he was forty two)
and he'd say fetch that ratchet, I want to show you how to drain this oil tank down.
* * *
They were married on a Monday in Toronto the third of June, nineteen and fifty seven Buddy Holly on the radio singing That'll be the day
the world before John Glenn and LuAnn Simms.
He drove a two tone customized Ford Fairlane my mother wore French lipstick, candy apple red trim bodice, knee length skirt, stiletto heels edged with rhinestone glances.
The rest is mostly mystery, arcane terrain belonging exclusively to them but when they made the golden fifty mark
(yellow rose in his lapel, Japhet orchid at her wrist)
I wrote to say how sure I was I'd caught a glimpse of that same car its chrome tipped fins and ice cone tail lights clocking sixty on the road to Boshkung Lake and in its wake a show of swimming kites cut from just above the whitest gem set hem.
* * *
I can scarcely see my father now, his face I mean.
You know he had a tattoo, left bicep, from the war.
Good thing, I guess, she kept those photos of him.
Mac his buddies called him, he was always camera shy.
What do you remember, the first thing?
Suppose it was the ring, your gold wedding band the one that won't come off for love nor money, so you say.
That and the fireworks.
It must have been the twenty fourth of May, Victoria Day you were pushing me sky high on a swing and in the black beyond a palamino mare one hoof raised, over by Jake Hill's dammed up pond.
Yeah I remember that time too it was well before the lakehouse, you were small.
No one was taking pictures, it was after dark or if there were any they'd be gone by now what with the couple moves, and then the fire, and all.
* * *
There were winters we slept under coats the three of us, our sisters just the same in their bedroom up the stairs.
The house as cold as starblown skies.
There were others I split five full cord of maple stocked the shed up to the rafters, primed a brand new Franklin stove to heat a home not Mac nor Florrie in their most dramatic flights could have dreamed up.
* * *
The locals gave good trade, dealt in grain fed cattle, sheep and swine. Sometimes after hours brought in out of season game.
I flanked him where he bled and boned the quartered beeves, the severed sows learned to churn a cast iron sausage grinder slice cold cuts, set rumps and briskets in neat rows.
No pollen here, no cornmeal. Instead the rituals of scrubbing down the wooden block sprinkling fresh dried sawdust on the floor in which I read his silence as the blessing that it was.
* * * Don't, won't, can't. Swim.
Like it fine here in the shade. DuMauriers. Labatts.
You go on I'll watch, you're the fish.
Just be careful not to go on out too far.
* * *
He taught Chris how to ride a Honda build bonfires out of driftwood, play baseball handle chainsaws, woodplanes, enigmatic spirit levels.
The summer he turned sixteen took him out to Hopeville each night after work for eight weeks straight until he learned to drive stick shift and automatic.
Neither of them cared a whit to fish or hunt instead they'd paddle lean canoes way up into the marsh mouths then tell about the weird things thriving a mile beneath the mottled surface, or in winter race Skidoos across the frozen lake egging the ice to crack and take them down.
It was my brother got his bosun's timbre his caballero's gait, his hands.
I'd hear them talking outside late at night with torches, thick as thieves my mother'd say plotting where to strike up camp at what angle to Polaris fell the dead limbed elm the one they called the lightning tree.
Every word familiar, at the same time obsolete lexicon from far above and deep below the water's shifting table.
* * *
Come here and take a look at this it's my old Harley Davidson kidney belt good lord it's small, no way that would go around me now.
Why don't you have it, for a lark?
You know I'm not a driver doubt I'll ever make a car, much less a bike.
Well you could strap it on for kicks some Friday night that guy you've got would think it looks real fine or see that teenage daughter of yours there give it down to her, you never know, she might.
* * *
He was expecting snow that day, spent the morning putting up storm windows, transistor tuned to CKNX, Because you're mine, I walk the line
and When the Lord made me he made a ramblin' man.
At noon there was thunder, lightning, sheets of rain.
My mother on Ward C wondering where on god's green earth he'd taken himself off to.
It was the last Wednesday in October run up to All Souls', 1960.
By the time the doctor thought to call the skies had cleared, it was good driving all the way.
He wasn't the first to notice that strawberry birthmark, crowning crimson tattoo that would give in so much auburn tough strands black as his own.
* * *
This world's a windlass, no matter how you winch it it's beyond the best of us to set the balance right
Same way you can never dodge what's writ in stone as yours, unless of course you care to set your mind to try
* * *
We flew down to Orlando in a DC8
(I was nine, he was thirty six)
first time either one of us had been on board a jet airliner, and I noticed how he noticed the accumulating stress of each accelerated revolution, the strangeness of the engines' shock and shudder then reclined into surveying cloud contours skirting moonrise or the lights below at Nashville, Tennessee.
He bought our mother perfume, Chanel No 5
much taken by the novelty of duty free and made sure my brother consumed at eight by aeronautical ambition paid his kid's fare gratis visit to the low lit neon cockpit.
Midnight on the airfield, it was humid I was busy scouting palm trees, maybe calculating mileage to the Gulf while he stood gazing at the cooling undercarriage as if it housed some haunted ark or a future he'd been ten slim years too young to see.
* * *
There's people in this town would sooner shoot you stone cold dead as look you in the eye there's others'll kindly do the driving or give you what's laid out for Sunday table if you can show the need is genuine
Remember that, and cultivate a knack for letting most of what you find just drift rain water running off a river duck's back
* * *
When his mother died it was Marie who made the call.
Twenty seconds on the line and he was dressing in the blackedged 8 am — work shirt, work boots, steam pressed overalls.
(I was seven, he was thirty four)
On the radio Nat Raider. Nat Raider whose secondhand woodpanel stationwagon its upholstery steeped in cigar smoke, leathers nicked and torn by case clasps and the claws of music stands he'd snagged for a song at the auctions out near Varney in the fall.
Thin man in a downpour he left us under cotton sheets listening to the blues our mother doing the weeping while he drove the twelve miles north to Nanny Florrie's parlour.
* * *
Sky's a fine name, it'll serve you no matter the little fella turns out a boy or girl.
I suppose it's just the thought of all that blue ...
And then there'll be those sunshot silver jet streams I'm at liberty to glass come summer sundown knowing one of them might easily have left your side of the pond at noon or thereabouts.
* * *
In this photo he is laughing, posed beside a strung up buck he didn't shoot.
Gray and burgundy bomber jacket front wheel of the Harley cropped by the frame. He's just turned twenty and is thinking back to 1941
Pearl Harbor and his brothers who as he'd cycled home the breaking news were staked out, one in Holland, one in France.
* * *
How far is so far you won't come back again?
I wonder if he wondered that when I went west, staked a claim to the Pacific Rim, holed up for a time on islands at the country's limit
(I was nineteen, he was forty six)
or later headed off for Ireland saw fit to put the gravitas of an entire ocean between us.
If he did he never said, just footed bills for collect calls and round trip flights at Christmas and the Twelfth then came for visits tuned to building shelves, repairing gates sizing up a situation he refused to argue in favour or against —
If you want that gypsy cowboy half as much as I'm inclined to think you do looks like here is where you're gonna have to stay.
* * *
Times were tough, it was a trade I was lucky Henders took me on.
Here, have some liver, the iron'll do you good.
No offence but I've decided ...
(I was sixteen, he was forty three)
None taken. Guess you'll hoe your own row same way I've hoed mine.
* * *
I'll tell you where I'd like to travel, if I had a choice ...
Alaska was the fabled land, pristine aquamarine frontier where only god and the animals would converse with him in tongues of mercury and platinum, on snowfields, icefloes, glacial till.
* * *
We could fly out west all the way to Juneau then take a train on up to Anchorage there'd be a boat and we'd just cruise the panhandle, the islands they'd be magic under that all night white midsummer light.
He had the figure of an otter carved from ivory walrus tusk, small amulet made by an Aleut sculptor from Unalaska and I'd see the way he'd look at it sometimes as if it held a spirit, or the thought of one.
We'll go sometime, your mother and I I'd like to see the salmon run, take in the Iditarod or listen to those bowhead whales, their moans and calls before the Arctic's lost to melt the way they say is bound to happen next.
* * *
It was August when the lakehouse burned
(I was thirteen, he was forty one)
prized property he'd framed and sided shingled single handed, more or less appointed so it caught the setting sun and in winter the Pleiades where they hung behind birch woods.
He thanked the gods we'd made it out alive then hardwilled ceased to eat or sleep until he'd drafted blueprints for a second its beams and lime foundations twin, identical – refuge, hideout, home from home where in the lucent lightning flare only his faintly arrhythmic heart could measure the angle of incidence.
* * *
Could have sworn I was in Korea, not just my bed and kit but the whole hospital transported.
There were women in the 4 am, talking low then loud in a language I think I heard once in a movie ...
That would be the morphine, it takes the pain and you with it.
But what about the wound, it was glowing underneath the bandages, those sixteen staples humming and on my tongue there was the aftertaste of some slow burn a fuse rocketing off out into the dark, where the road is.
* * *
Each year on his birthday I would make snow tea.
(He might be pushing seventy, I could be forty three)
He would say how there was nothing like it Roiboish or Assam or in the morning Earl Grey brewed from the season's final melt.
He prefers cast iron to aluminium any day and we always drink from kiln fired glazed clay mugs to hold the heat against the valley's earth cold April mountain air.
Snow Moon
Out over the Cave Hill mountain the last full moon of the year is going down, aureole a nacre benediction casting lots, crossing all our lives.
Folded on the palm of my hand a paper airplane, its shape in jet black silhouette against the flares, the lit up rifts and hollows where the lives of others – downed, deserted, flown – drift and lie low.
Will It Fly?
Who's to say if these slight wings can bear the weight of so much air
if the engine's primed to peak the ballast laid in evenly
if the calculations all add up to something sound?
Guy wires whine like fiddle strings or cicadas high on heat
the tail piece shimmies —
a girl's kite, a dragonfly
and etched into the fuselage autobiographies
that rarefied aluminium a sheet of aerial parchment.
We fly on faith, you'd say but all I'll ever know for sure
is when the day arrived
– holy gold, annunciation blue –
the wind kept to its cage and I did not forget to kiss your soul.
Just the Sky
What is left to us, after the dog fights and the dawn sorties the rhymed chimeric purple hearts, the perfumed women saluting our wild, adrenalized flybys
is nothing anyone, not even that blue eyed boy ace pilot from Krakow, could have crosshaired the instruments primed yet being what they were.
Out where the grass cracked runway is curtailed by scrub a trailer camp, used car lots, strip malls whose children are girls calling to boys in the language of the spared.
Late born, they will not read the score – nocturne, pianissimo –
graffitied on the radio tower's walls, the stairs that barely take our weight, climbing to shelter under its cupola of stars.
Lit up by crescent moons, the bombers' flight paths would bisect the lough.
In all of this, you ask, the fall out and the chimeless dereliction what splinter sifted from the ghostbright rubble remains to recognize?
This side the seapark, six palms and the bladed pampas grass.
Over there the bluestone shore, its coal docks inked against the tide.
Blinded, riddled, cleft, I would find you in crosswinds, in the mineral dark.
Airships
i.
Every four minutes the planes set down at Sydenham.
Their throttled engines shred your voice capsize our conversation sad longing through salt distance disquisition on the etymology of the word ship.
ii.
Who hewed and rigged the North Sea's proto scip
its hollowed hull and matrix masts alone on the cutthroat lough?
What manner man exhaled the flame of his own name into an acetylene future where bowsprit became cockpit gunwales the freighted fuselage?
How does the slippage happen?
Green, hooded, the gods draw back as earth transmutes to air, displays a stunning alchemy.
Where do you go the thousand and one days and nights it takes to build from balsa and ash the original replica, heart's ache in flight with it?
iii.
Most of them died before you were born.
Most of them had foreign accents, sound bodies pledged to women in two countries.
Most of them were gunners some of them were bomber pilots.
Most of them were not obsessive.
All of them ate, slept, breathed airships.
iv.
By twelve you'd learned to size each type to perfection sent the first – sexy silver Queen of the Sky –
out over the bay and back home safe.
At twenty two (stunts for kicks, lone flyer)
painted liberty – eight feet of canvas a vapour trail heading west.
v.
Late one summer you dreamed of Coney Island direct connection Aldergrove to JFK.
Ineluctable precession of the equinoxes.
By midday we had all shifted into a season of absolute transgressions
two towers two planes.
In the sky parlour above your bed the scale model squadron
of Spitfires and Stirlings, Hellcats and Marauders suffered an imperceptible shudder
before the dust resettled sifted pall
on wings, rudders,
each glassed in gunner's cage.
vi.
Let's talk about the genesis of the urge to describe what it means to really be in love with light, ghosts, borderlands, liftoff with going to sea in the heft of mazarine heavens.
At the close of the second day I watch you fix the final frame at one sixteenth of a second, document the way that Mustang bisects the horizon's uncompromising parallelogram of forces.
Excerpted from "Tattoo Land"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Kathleen McCracken.
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
I,
Snow Tea,
II,
Snow Moon,
Will It Fly?,
Just the Sky,
Airships,
Windfall,
Trains at Tempe,
Allen Ginsberg's Bed,
Bob Dylan's Paintings,
The Map Is Not the Territory,
At Medicine Lake,
Angelino,
The Etymology of Animal,
Totem Dreams,
Burying the Raven,
Ottersong,
Flight,
III,
The Creation of Man,
Sleeping in Your Mother's House,
Enter Tezcatlipoca,
Virtual,
No More Knives,
Leaving Azure for Jasper,
Caz,
Feathers,
Ease,
Bone Tattoo,
Ancient Twins,
Lemniscate,
What Gold We Gather,
My You,
Kilrea in Gemini,
Torr Head,
The Elephants in Ann Street,
Drinking Mojitos with Ali in the Japanese Restaurant in Belfast,
Big Yellow Boots,
Waiting for Snow,
Jackalope High,
The House with One Hundred Rooms,
IV,
Threshold,
Density/Distance,
Tench,
Hollow Bone,
Seven Poems after Frida Kahlo They Ask for Planes and Only Get Straw Wings,
The Flying Bed,
The Mask,
The Wounded Deer,
Thinking about Death,
The Dream,
Roots,
Un Hombre del Camino,
La Casa del Anhelo,
Sueño del Padre,
The Sun on His Back,
Tattoo Land,
Acknowledgements,