The North End Poems

With The North End Poems, his always vivid new collection, Michael Knox has further honed his lucid, accessible style. In the tradition of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Michael Ondaatje’s classic book-length poem, this at once gritty and tender lyric sequence creates a desperate but surprising narrative that’s reminiscent of David Adams Richards at his very best.

Channeling the beliefs, passions, fears, friends and fights of Nick Macfarlane, a young steeltown warehouse worker, Knox creates the kind of hardscrabble, blue collar world that exists everywhere. Benders and punchups, beaters and punchclocks, give The North End Poems the means to explore notions of masculinity in both familial and social environs. Because this is a world largely without the presence of women, Nick’s perspective takes a significant turn when he meets someone from the other side of the tracks – a University student named Carla who challenges him to think about a life beyond the north end and outside of what he thought possible.

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The North End Poems

With The North End Poems, his always vivid new collection, Michael Knox has further honed his lucid, accessible style. In the tradition of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Michael Ondaatje’s classic book-length poem, this at once gritty and tender lyric sequence creates a desperate but surprising narrative that’s reminiscent of David Adams Richards at his very best.

Channeling the beliefs, passions, fears, friends and fights of Nick Macfarlane, a young steeltown warehouse worker, Knox creates the kind of hardscrabble, blue collar world that exists everywhere. Benders and punchups, beaters and punchclocks, give The North End Poems the means to explore notions of masculinity in both familial and social environs. Because this is a world largely without the presence of women, Nick’s perspective takes a significant turn when he meets someone from the other side of the tracks – a University student named Carla who challenges him to think about a life beyond the north end and outside of what he thought possible.

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The North End Poems

The North End Poems

by Michael Knox
The North End Poems

The North End Poems

by Michael Knox

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Overview

With The North End Poems, his always vivid new collection, Michael Knox has further honed his lucid, accessible style. In the tradition of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Michael Ondaatje’s classic book-length poem, this at once gritty and tender lyric sequence creates a desperate but surprising narrative that’s reminiscent of David Adams Richards at his very best.

Channeling the beliefs, passions, fears, friends and fights of Nick Macfarlane, a young steeltown warehouse worker, Knox creates the kind of hardscrabble, blue collar world that exists everywhere. Benders and punchups, beaters and punchclocks, give The North End Poems the means to explore notions of masculinity in both familial and social environs. Because this is a world largely without the presence of women, Nick’s perspective takes a significant turn when he meets someone from the other side of the tracks – a University student named Carla who challenges him to think about a life beyond the north end and outside of what he thought possible.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781554903184
Publisher: ECW Press
Publication date: 06/01/2008
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 120
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

Michael Knox is a writer and teacher. Raised in Hamilton and now living in Toronto, Knox’s work has appeared in literary magazines in Canada and internationally. His critically acclaimed debut collection, Play Out the Match, was published by ECW Press in 2006.

Read an Excerpt

The North End Poems


By Michael Knox, Michael Holmes

ECW PRESS

Copyright © 2008 Michael Knox
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55490-318-4


CHAPTER 1

    THE HARBOUR AT EVENING

    Water gnaws the shore
    industrial black blurring
    wobbling smokestacks.
    The bulk of the steel mills
    and the blotting faces of men
    who stand and smoke unnoticing.

    Clang of industry
    faint but ubiquitous
    dusk has settled shadows
    filling their songless faces.
    Life is withstanding.

    Pinched cigarettes
    three beers that interfere with sleep
    the dubious constancy
    of wives and children

    and awful fraternity
    always that.

    Mangy seagulls wheel in pursuit
    flash of a nemesis
    matching every careening
    winking out of being
    slips over the dock
    flutters stiffly to the lip
    of one of the rusted trashcans
    strung along the quay.

    Severe eye like a hard drop of blood
    a cry like a burst of hell.
    The men smoke and watch
    ships tiny in their world
    of open ocean, huge in this one.
    Hong Kong Vancouver Cape Town
    a thousand lives like theirs.


    NORTH END SONNET

    The city dives from itself floating half aloft.
    Steel-fires beneath illuminate gutted porches that watch and think.
    Barred doors and broken windows bleed the night air draft.
    Waist-high weeds poke through chain-link.

    Drinks and laughter on the dirt front lawn.
    Knees snap pool cues in cloudy halls, splintered keen.
    Glaring white kids stand in packs with open noses, then come on.
    Bass buzz lopes from tinted Cutlass Supremes.

    Discarded blankets weather against brick factories, skeletons of bikes.
    Women with sunken cheeks and slow, squalid wrath.
    Eighteen-wheelers shiver roadside weeds and houses alike.
    Railway lots seem abandoned but sprout trash.

    Fresh tattoos leak from ship cable arms, blood inside wrecked.
    Scabbing hands quiver first of the month cheques.


    ENTER NICK

    Nick squints his way
    down Burlington Street.

    Transports heavy sprint past
    rolls of steel
    beds of stone
    machines uncannily perched.
    Things that wear men's hands.

    Steel toes stump
    by industrial yards.
    The smell of exhaust
    grey belch of steel fire.

    Nick stretches a stiff bicep
    drags a key through fresh chain-link
    spits high over its barbed crown
    into the smashed skids.

    He crosses Wellington without looking
    North End swagger and long stare
    down the empty street
    before he climbs his front stairs.


    SUMMER WORDS

    Meet us menacing
    in the wide-skied evening
    with the slap of laughter
    sunset angling our squinting
    bottles amber cores
    in callused princely grips.

    Problems and solutions
    have their genesis here.

    We still cut each other's hair in K's yard
    wrench on bucket cars
    instead of second-hand bikes
    scrap with the same kids
    over new nonsense
    colonize the same steps
    talk shit day and night.

    The sound of ships inching in the harbour
    dusk off the railway tracks
    between houses
    from dockyards
    that point to Toronto and Montreal.

    The architecture of our lives
    in porch dialogue and sermons
    in the stories we spin and believe
    in the lens our talk fits firmly over our lives.


    TEN YEARS
    Jimmy

    Ten years

    dreams are ghosts
    that visit with hangovers:

    manic ciphers
    nothing or everything
    to do with her.

    She's changed everything
    even sleep.

    He is himself
    or not himself
    or no one

    and she is herself
    or not herself
    or everyone

    and the desperation
    of horrifying comedies

    sickening offspring
    of his waking.

    Absence is her epitaph

    a whisper
    across the landscape of sleep.


    WE DON'T TIP

    K's eyelids are a sprawl, in a sleeveless shirt
    he leans across the bar
    and hollers to the barman for an Export.
    Wide back to him, opportunity there
    brown bottle finds someone else's tip
    slides it home to K, a slow tumble
    from the edge to his grip.
    Smooth switch to his pocket, no metallic mumble.

    He pays the barman and walks off.
    "How about a tip, buddy!" met with a laugh.

    Not even turning, K throws back his head,
    crowing, "Here's a tip, pal: don't smoke in bed."


    WALKING THE TRACKS HOME

    The night tangible,
    the moon large and pale
    shines the rails.
    I toss my last bottle back.
    The shatter, a quick crack
    on the rods put here by Scottish hands
    connecting and creating this vast land.

    Dormant houses and dark factories below;
    a screen of silence hangs
    over siding and brick, now slowed
    the harbour whispers where today it sang.
    Cheery rooms glow yellow
    promise sleep still
    stretching over shadowed sills.

    No moon suddenly, a dream
    vanishing
    in a vault of steam
    that connects to steel mills
    cords of smoke chugging up, away
    from stacks like candles that puff
    over a toy landscape.


    CHURCH

    Spring to fall Jimmy makes the numb trek
    from the pub
    sometimes pauses on the steps
    of the Presbyterian church
    to smoke in the first or second hour of Sunday.

    His great grandfather was a professor in Glasgow,
    a theologian; everything he knows
    has the old man hunched
    in a blanket by the fire reading the Bible.

    A vulture's face,
    judgmental, hungering,
    intense and pious Scrooge.
    The fire is huge and alive,
    the family quiet about his reading,
    the night outside filled with God's eyes.

    Jimmy's lived with this image since he was a boy
    and has never tried to dismantle it,
    understand it further than he does.
    Distaste for religion learned from a father
    who hated his guilt and its reinforcements.

    Jimmy feels the nightfilled church:
    its watch of steady unwelcome.
    And walks the rest of the way home
    hands deep in his pockets.


    COFFEE ALONE
    Jimmy

    Sunday morning, the kitchen
    a tender grey,
    flutter of rain
    in the trees out back
    gently nowhere.
    No disturbance
    in the sleeping world.

    This is where loss is most acute.

    If she were here now
    we'd have two mugs at the table;
    I'd read and not watch the window.

    I stand there now
    try to marvel like she did
    hugging herself in her housecoat
    the chatter from the leaves
    quiet company of mist.

    I can't even bring myself to open the paper
    as if I'd be ignoring
    the only real traces of her.


    JIMMY AT WORK

    In the yard backhoes
    scoop slithering stone.

    Coffee cups mound inside rusted bins, Styrofoam
    crowned briefly with gulls, maniac-eyed.
    Cigarette butts seed a brown lawn.

    The lunchroom is untidy as a nursery
    fetid with sweat, dust-caked fingertips, traces in their lunches
    and on nicotine yellowed lips.

    Wrinkles, silvering mustaches and paunches
    are all they are some days. Dignity is a vice, bullshit
    that depends on diet and rest. Ungrammatical and obscene

    they know they are anecdotes to the university students
    new every other summer, who feign,
    quick to proclaim their enthusiasm for unions,
    who ride bikes home to young skin,
    to small panties and blond ponytails on pillows.
    At least that's what's assumed in silence.

    The men smoke stonily at punch-in, like teenagers they crow
    with coffee at first break, coughing by day's end
    and the evening's pints of anesthetic, shit brew

    a life of endurance
    for ideals they were told were true.
    Mistakes fathers were too ashamed not to make

    propping huge machines with their elbows, fair weather brethren
    joke most readily about what makes them most afraid:
    cancer, retirement, gay sons, women.


    BEFORE THE GYM

    losing work gear
    that will harden
    to a knot of bark
    then stretching
    on a beaten mattress
    the first ease
    Nick finds today

    he imagines

    flesh into sand
    into oblivion
    feet then shins knees

    until he is empty
    for an hour's sleep


    NEVER FORGET
    Ronnie

    Friday night's pay finds us
    beers and shots between jokes at the rippers
    pretending the orbits of hips don't depress us.
    The hypocrisy: affirming we don't care
    but spending volumes while we're at it.

    K in his glory, dusting his blond head
    a North End aristocrat twitching an occasional bicep.
    I wonder if Jen has put Cora to bed.
    Jen's ice, and like these women strutting;
    it's sex I can't touch
    the things I've lost before me
    and guilt that I shouldn't be here.

    Slipping down the rye someone's bought
    I look up. I know the stripper.
    Marianne something, lived up the street.
    The familiarity repels me.
    I wonder what happened to the baby
    she dropped out pregnant with in grade 9;
    if that bully who gave it to her stuck around.

    The place closes and we're drunker than I thought in the parking lot.
    A bouncer walks Marianne out and Nick sees her.
    He breaks away from us and approaches her disarmingly
    Marianne! It's Nick Macfarlane. Holy shit.

    They dated when we were ten;
    he still talks like she was the best girl he ever met.
    I never had the heart to tell him what I knew
    about her stepfather, why she probably meant
    her boyfriend to get her pregnant.
    People are fucked.

    A Buick pulls in

    I swear to god it's the same bucket her boyfriend used to drive
    when he wasn't kicking kids' asses or making them piss their pants.
    It pulls to the back of the lot
    and I can see Marianne heading towards it.
    Nick walks with her, still chatting.
    The bouncer, figuring she's fine, heads back to the bar.

    K's eyes get keen all at once —
    he's drunker than the rest of us —
    when he sees the Buick and the shadow step out.
    Snarls, Fuck is that? like he already knows.

    Todd Brown, somebody says.

    Guy broke my Walkman and my nose in grade six,
    laughed that my mom was dead. Fuck'n laughed.
    Alchemy in the silence that follows, leadening his words.

    You can feel hate, a vapour, rising from the pavement.
    I want to say something but he's already on his way.
    We follow at a couple of paces.

    Nick is talking quietly to Marianne by the car.
    K shoulders past, going right for Todd.
    Hey, Todd. Remember me? Thumping shove against the car.
    Said you'd piss on my mom's grave? Another shove.
    Hands come up in bewildered apology, Todd stammering.

    Hey, Todd, Scotty taunts, cracking knuckles, closing in,
    you still tough?

    We're all around him now. Steam of fury all over my skin.
    Nick and Marianne both trying to get in the way
    K head-butts Todd, dives on him when he drops.

    Scotty's in a frenzy, rabid encouragement
    holding Nick off with his back, pretending it's unintentional.
    K punches and punches and there's whimpering.
    K growls shit the whole time he unloads. You had it fuck'n come'n!
    Rape my mom's corpse? Remember? Who's the fuck'n corpse now?
    Marianne is bawling and pleading but it's like K can't hear anything.

    Nick's voice: K, he's got a little daughter.

    As though sobering, K looks at Nick,
    like it's just the two of them.
    Weak, abject, a little boy again.

    He told me once he wanted to dig up my mom, dig her up and . . .
    If you didn't have that kid,
    K says, tears coming, I'd cut your fuck'n eyes out.
    Never fucking forget.


    DEEP
    K

    His body didn't have the weight I expected
    he stooped slightly into my fist

    the hardest thing
    is not backing off
    but there was hate
    and hate is gluttonous

    you hit him like it's never
    enough
    so hard something in him shatters
    and you'd almost apologize

    but you've learned that
    there is life in this
    much as anything else

    a rapture in wrath
    in this reptilian life


    BOXING

    Summer nights Nick cycles
    through sunset streets
    to the basement gym
    on the same rusty mountain bike
    he got second-hand
    in the seventh grade.

    Nostalgic North End fathers
    pulse butch smugness
    he was born into: eager
    son with schoolyard black eyes.

    For reluctant single mothers
    the trainers become ringmasters
    with carnival promises,
    "Safest sport in the world!"
    The mothers smile
    while men just like those they left
    belly laugh from the wings.

    Nick skips then shadow boxes.
    His trainer watches, offers the occasional
    "Hitch at the waist. Hitch the hips."
    Nick winks at Lincoln,
    descending the stairs, always late.

    Cycloning the bag to stay warm
    Nick throws aggression out,
    saving the rational technician.

    Lincoln wears ease
    spends half an hour socializing.
    A flirt liked by everyone.
    Nick overhears the same jokes:

    "My head skips like my busted CD player,"
    "You couldn't hit me with a flashlight beam."
    He dances in headphones to warm up
    then screams over them
    "Yo, Macfarlane! Ring the bell,
    school's in session!"

    Nick picks headgear from the rack
    pulls the moist lump of it around his head,
    pumps two sixteen-ounce gloves together
    and slips through the ropes.

    Lincoln hasn't even got his wrists wrapped,
    he sits on a bench and doesn't look once
    at Nick's footwork while he binds them.

    The only time Lincoln is expressionless
    is sparring. The stark bell clenches his focus,
    punctuates the present,
    and he flies to meet Nick in the centre.


    LINCOLN

    Get in here, Macfarlane,
    why you gotta keep my shit wait'n?
    You know I'm a racehorse held back.
    Baby, I live to get into it.

    I want your best four rounds, bitch.
    I want to taste your whole arsenal.
    Baby, you'll feel me in your jaw
    in the morning. And know I love you.

    Fear ain't something I understand.
    My hands are clean
    and they burn for you, Macfarlane.
    Getting hurt hurts but that's all.

    People talk about this shit
    like it's all fear and need.
    Nah, baby, I'm a sorcerer;
    you, my young apprentice.

    Feel 'em thwacks, them shudders
    I'm pumping into your headgear?
    I'm just teasing your shit, letcha know
    I'm the one doing the fucking winning.

    I feel that desperation, see it in those eyes.
    That wind I'm sapping out your lungs,
    that strength out them stringy shoulders,
    where's your heart now? How about now?

    I don't even take you seriously, Macfarlane
    and I can see your soul in your pupils. Fear me.
    That's what I want. Feel that? Feel that?
    Ooo, baby, I love it when you hurt me back.

    Pray for that bell, baby. Pray.
    Ain't for nothin' I'm Ontario champion.
    I could hammer you in one numb crush,
    deliver you like a preacher from time's grip.


    K

    With sand-filled dumbbells
    K creates an imperial self.

    Paces miles in this basement
    breathing deep
    between sets, nudging
    spare plates on the floor
    squeezing gently swelling
    arms and chest,
    centipedes scuttle
    across the ceiling
    throat of cool water
    pick-tearing calluses.

    His world framed
    with dreaming
    — feeling like certainty —
    himself firefighting some day.
    Consciousness laced with
    starting to run,
    training carrying awkward objects,
    looking into courses.

    It's here he believes he is not his father,
    a man who let his mistakes happen to him.


    HAIRCUT

    K mows clippers over Nick's bowed head
    with a brother's rough love

    plants a callused hand on Nick's neck
    steadying him and talks the whole time
    like a real barber.

    They leave the hair where it falls
    let it mix with the soil.

    Nick runs the tracks home shirtless
    the breeze blowing stubble
    sparks from his shoulders and arms
    in the wash of the setting sun.


    THE TANK

    K's mud-coloured '82 Cutlass Supreme
    is a wonder of mechanical cannabilism.
    Pieces of cars his father's friends share,
    junkers that fill backyards and garage space,
    disembowelled and doled about.
    The tank rolls through the East and North Ends,
    faded brown seats and a ride like a great canoe.
    In winter the butterfly valve sticks,
    the power windows need the help of a pressed hand,
    the fan is comically meek
    hood up, the engine chuckles phlegmy.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from The North End Poems by Michael Knox, Michael Holmes. Copyright © 2008 Michael Knox. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
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.

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