Read an Excerpt
The Real Made Up
By Stephen Brockwell, Michael Holmes ECW PRESS
Copyright © 2007 Stephen Brockwell
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55490-305-4
CHAPTER 1
Inconsistent Machine Reproduction
You can't imitate
anybody really
and the extent
to which
you can't is
enough originality
— A. R. Ammons, "You Can't Imitate"
Scarecrow
You want to tell the cane-swinging codger
to get off the plywood in your backyard
and find trash of his own to fall down on,
but in this neighbourhood the arteries
clog with identical mansard-roofed red
brick houses, identical driveways cracked
by the relentless crush and stretch of freeze and thaw,
blue carbon-copy hydrants on the south
side of the street, street lights that perfect eyes
could not distinguish. You stoop to lift him
while his daughter apologizes with
such humility you'd think falling on
someone else's trash was a kind of theft.
And your thoughts turn, like a crow in flight,
to his surprising weight, say, four twenty-
kilo sacks of P.E.I. potatoes
stitched with enormous skill into the shape
of an old man, a monument for some
forgotten autumn festival, or prop
for the Halloween play at an abandoned school.
It's at that moment you begin to fear,
"This may be me in another forty years,
wetting my pants in someone else's yard,
failing to grip with the tip of my cane
a neighbour's discarded plywood scrap,
unable to recall my daughter's name,
flailing for my woollen cap to cover
the white relics of my remaining hairs,
groping for glasses that could never fall
from my broad fat nose, demanding to know
why I'm propped up by a stranger. Give me
this old man's humour and his wit; let me
curse the taxi driver and the barman."
Bill McGillivray's Cap
I may not yet be
fifty but the field
underneath this cap's
not growing taller.
I can't imagine
going to the barn
without it. Someone
would have to sneak
into the shed and
steal it from the nail
it's hung on since Dad
brought it home for me
from Illinois before
I'd forget to
put it on or take it off.
If it weren't there?
I'd stand as dumb
as a November field.
I've had this John Deere
cap near thirty years.
It wasn't the last thing
he brought me home.
It was the only thing
he brought me home.
Randomized Oxford Exploration 17
Under
the aegis
of envy
hectic faiths
pack tin mirrors
with sunlight strips.
Sorus
With fiddleheads, silent mimics,
a chef balances the delicate
palate of the unfurling ferns
with the taste of salted butter.
The sorus, I'm told, trellises spores
that cling like fruit to the frond.
Roving the forest for deer, boar
and such large game, the Saxon
must have lacked the Latin ear
for minutiae that would give
the tongue a name for this
tiny heap of fertile green.
Joanne's Medium Format Camera
Let's not talk about
what I want to keep.
Too many things
ask me to let them go.
My dog, my Hasselblad,
my job. Too much?
Ok. But I'm not
where I want to be.
My camera, then.
I always loved
taking pictures of dolls,
stuffed animals, Lego
castles, Hot-Wheels,
me in my best
dress with my hair up —
pictures out of focus,
underexposed,
or posed mirror
shots, a brilliant flash
where my face
should have been, snapshots
my mother always
stuck to the fridge
as if they were taken by
Karsh. High school:
not my favourite
place, but Camera Club
kept me there long
enough to graduate,
and for graduation
I couldn't believe
my father bought me
an old Hasselblad.
It must have set him back
about two thousand,
money I'm pretty sure
he didn't have.
I worked that summer
at Paul's Studio.
You'd be surprised what
people used to pay
for wedding pictures. Or
how they'd schedule
the ceremony to fit
Paul's schedule.
I developed
negatives and proofs
and even took
outdoor shots in June.
Paul thought I had a
pretty good eye.
I skipped college and shared
my time with him.
We never married
but we lived together
eight years — despite
mom's objections.
I'm stretching this
story like a roll of film.
Thank God I'm
only twenty-eight!
The eight years
between us didn't bother me —
I loved his smell and
how he moved as if
everything he saw
was there to be seen.
He has such attentive,
generous eyes.
I was his last apprentice
but not his last
fresh student out of
school. I can't believe it.
Is every man so self-
absorbed? I'd had enough
of chemical baths and
working in the dark.
Karikura Gives Advice
I walked up to Karikura and asked,
"Karikura, how can I write a poem
that touches people's hearts?" Karikura said,
"You cannot write a poem that touches people's hearts.
People touch a poem with their fingers when
they pick up a book. If it is not bad they
might read it. If it is better, they might
mumble one or two words to savour it.
If it is good, maybe they will remember
the day they first read it when they read it again.
Perhaps they will recollect the taste
of the apple they were eating that day,
or they might remember
the breath of the wind in their mothers' hair."
Sieve
Thunder is as far from the nomad's thoughts
as mud is distant from his camel's path.
He'd smell the rain for miles were it to fall;
without it, his mind relaxes: a plumb line
that dropped its bob an hour ago, slack string.
The prints his camel's hooves make, breathed over
by the wind, filled with sand, would hold their shape
a little longer in the mud, but here
the water's lost without roots to hold it.
The water's in a bladder on his saddle
and in the fat of his slow camel's hump.
Mark Bradley's Plasma TV
This is the best, the most
advanced plasma
TV you can get for
under 10k.
Look at it. You wouldn't
see brighter red
if you fell in a
five acre rose bush
and survived. The screen's
so flat it could pass
for a picture if it
weren't moving.
It might be hanging
in a museum.
But I guess they
don't watch the PGA
at the National
Gallery, do they?
Have a look. What do
you want to watch?
I have that channel
locked because my son's
a curious kid like
all of them.
Something artsy-fartsy?
Guys like you watch
sports too, I'm sure, or
other regular stuff.
This monitor will
last me — what did he say? —
forty thousand hours.
How many years is that?
It has to be a
lifetime of TV.
There's my son, now.
Hey, Philip, don't be shy,
come say hello
to the historian.
Untrained Machine Voice Recognition: Joanne
The storm what a daughter
has had a little water for half an hour.
And were and what of the four
at a file not a time when the Allan Whitten,
out what a whim, how not a data has wind.
What a neat and what a little downtown.
At a little into it. And at a time
that a lot of what has the Lind in
did not a sound in the wind it up.
And who this mess that are intended as a high wind
is at a site has ended up where
what had been found in a letter a.
And whiz and that ended. To deter a time
and in and what end in a water
and if that and it not a one
and in the water and
Socratic Communication Problem of the Twenty-Second Century
Do you remember
the word for
what I'm doing
scratching
the surface
of whatever
it is we call
this
with the tip
of a stick
that leaks
sky
it reminds me
very much of a small
what are they called
those small things
on a shelf
with so much
of whatever
this is
in them
Peter's Complete Shakespeare
I cherish it. She
gave me the book, back
long before I knew
I appreciated
literature. I was a
bit of a fake.
It was faux appreciation.
I wanted
to be fancy. I
often pick it up
and thumb through it.
Someone had interspersed
little notes here and there
throughout the pages,
brief, hand-scribbled
character descriptions.
Every once in a while
I'll thumb through
and find one of the
notes and open it.
It's as if I've found it
for the first time.
Whoever owned old Bill
was smart enough,
or thought enough
of his book, not to write
in the margins. The
onionskin pages have
deteriorated just
enough that the old
engravings underneath
show through. I worry
that I haven't taken
care of it. It gathers dust
on a shelf, right.
Four Electronic Handwriting Recognitions
snow squall on the 401
ten cars piled up
like beer cases
near Brockwille
cartwheel daugh4R
nut the sack
like flags gentle
genetic flags
graci would he green
all winter if it weveiitfor
snorselfi5h snow
Suckn9 an the
light enl- of ThiSun
zagermcn leased a
bail ding to the lawers
got juicea csvith the cash
crashed hos Cadillac
and got a discount
on his fees
Antique Silver Box
I've begun to collect your skin. I brush
the sheets to keep the mites from finding it
in their blind hunger. I gather the silk
from the towel after your morning shower
and collect the constellations of stardust
fallen on the shoulders of your black wool
sweater. Filling an antique silver box
with the white dust of you is not as strange
as it may seem. Snapshots of you have faded
under my fingers. The hotel telephone
is perfumed by the breaths of other mouths.
The memory of your voice rings in the mind
not in the ear. I carry these drops of you.
Their scent is faint. They are too small to hold.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Real Made Up by Stephen Brockwell, Michael Holmes. Copyright © 2007 Stephen Brockwell. 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.
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