Poem: Postcards from Canada

My mind affixes to this image I have of you
Drawn years ago now, penciled in over countless meetings:
The shape of eyebrows, the curve behind ears,
The meeting places of skin - knees and underarms,
Stray hairs on thighs, the arrangement of moles.

Notes that assembled into something that became
You:
your skin,
your eyebrows,
your thighs.

But since it all ended, I have been assembling you
Out of words cramped into postcards from Canada
You tell me only the general now - you tell me:
I've dyed my hair blonde and bobbed it short
I've lost my tan, I've bags under my eyes from lack
of sleep, I'm smoking again, but I'm going to they gym,
Things that scare me, unknown things,
Not additions to my sketches but erasings -
Not news, but things I no longer know about you

Reminders, two or three every month, that you are gone
In the most essential way; that you are dissapearing
Day by day, even in my mind. A long, slow departure

Rite (a short story)

Susanne’s mother wielded an enormous cleaver at her. “Honestly! Do something useful or get out of the kitchen. And stop nicking the cheese.”

Sue smiled mischievously and lifted another handful of the creamy cheddar to her mouth as her mother turned back to the chopping board.

She loved being in the kitchen with her mother, while the menfolk sat in the lounge drinking watered-down whiskey, making loud jokes she didn’t understand.

She began to peel potatoes. They felt comfortingly solid in her hands. She peeled away the skin to expose the powdery flesh, and then peeled off bits of the flesh just for the joy of the slicing. She dug out the dark eyes with her fingernails.

“Sies, Sue,” her mother chided her. “Wash your fingers before you do that.” She grabbed the potatoes from her, and began to scrub them roughly over the sink. Sue watched her enormous buttocks jiggling beneath her flowery skirt. She sidled up to them, and rested her head against the rough fabric.

Her mother smiled at her over her shoulder. “If you’re not going to be useful in here, go and ask Uncle Tommy to get more ice. And see if you can find the bottle opener.”

Sue padded into the lounge. Uncle Tommy was conducting a sermon from next to the heater.
“It’s like I said to him, boys, I said to him, you’ve got to give employees boundaries, otherwise they feel they’ve got to test you. They’re uneducated, you know, I said to him, they like to know the rules. Lets them know where they stand.” He took a swig from his glass, and smacked his lips.

Her dad, a planet of a man, to Sue’s eyes, stretched his arms out over his fat belly and crossed his hands together, like he always did when he was about to say something funny.
“Ja, Tom, applies to us husbands too, doesn’t it. Got be disciplined.” He winked over at Auntie Rosemary, who giggled and blushed.

Uncle Tommy laughed. “Ja, Rosie knows how to keep me in my place. She’s got the key to the dogbox hanging on her belt.”

Everyone laughed in a happy chorus. Finally her dad noticed Sue. “What is it, little poppit?”
“Mommy said to tell Uncle Tommy to get more ice and to find the bottle opener.”

Uncle Reggie looked at her from the couch, his nose red and his eyes bloodshot. “I think I saw it in the back room, Susie-Lou.”

Sue ran off at once to get it. She loved any excuse to go into the back room. She’d been forbidden from going in there when Grandma was lying on the bed, and it had acquired the mystical aura of a church, or of her mother’s dressing room.

The room was dark and quiet as she pushed open the door. Even the air seemed perfectly immobile. She stared at the bed. It had been stripped. Sue idly ran her fingers into the grooves of the mattress.

The room had a faint smell that she could not name. Something bodily, and warm, and dry.
Sue walked over to the dark wooden bureau. On it was a collection of delicate porcelain figures. A shepherdess. A boy with a large head and watery eyes. A couple dancing in old-fashioned clothes. A naked woman playing a harp. They were all covered with a film of grey dust. Sue wiped her finger over the naked woman’s breasts, making them white and smooth again. Then, she cleaned off the rest of her, so that no-one would know she’d wanted to touch the statue where it was naked.

The bottle opener was perched on the end of the bureau. Sue grabbed it and left the dark room. She wondered why nobody had thought to open the curtains.

Sue returned to the pleasant noises and smells of the living room. She curled up in the corner, next to the couch, and pretended to be invisible, so that she could drink in the chattering voices and the affectionate laughter without being sent on any more errands.

The men spoke about women, and banking policies, and her daddy told them about the new car he was going to buy, and they all turned miserable when they started speaking about the rugby team that wasn’t doing well, and then cheered up again by making rude jokes about the other teams, and then they spoke about Uncle Reggie’s new business, and then about women again.

Auntie Rosemary wasn’t saying anything, but stroked Susanne’s head gently. Sue felt her body relaxed and weightless, and wondered if she could still be Sue without having any body at all. Although, the delicious smells from the kitchen reminded her that having a body was nice, too.

The sun set as the conversation marinated the room, becoming increasingly hearty with every round of whiskey that went around. Her uncles began so sing a song they remembered from when Grandma still made them go to mass.

Eventually she was called to help bring supper to the table. Everyone was so hungry that they began eating the first course without even saying grace. Sue’s hands were soon sticky, and her mother fussed over her with a napkin.

Very soon the first course was cleared away, and the conversation became suddenly muted. Her Uncle Reggie, sitting across the table, was staring at her again, his eyes even redder than before.

Her mother came from the kitchen, carrying a heavily-laden platter. Everyone watched her lay it on the table. It made a thumping sound like somebody falling.

Her mother brought through a steaming jug. “I hope no-one minds, but I made gravy. I didn’t know if it would be appropriate, but the meat is so dry…”

Everyone loaded up their plate. There were not the usual squabblings over who got the most; Sue thought it must be because there was so much meat, and everyone like meat better than potatoes or vegetables.

Starving, Sue began to eat. She had taken four forkfuls before she realised that everyone else was looking at their food without touching it.

Uncle Tommy cleared his throat. “I feel … we should say something.” Her daddy, always the man to fill a silence, rose ponderously to his feet.

“She was a good mother.”

“The best,” Aunt Rosemary added, dabbing her eye with a soiled napkin.

“Yes, the best. And I know we’re all going to miss her … particular ways of doing things. I know that some of you weren’t in favour of this,” his eyes singled out Uncle Reggie. “Reg, it was what Mom wanted.”

He raised his glass, the broken glass that had a chip out of the rim, half filled with thin whiskey. “To Shirley. May she live on in all of us.”

They all lifted their glasses off the table and murmered, “To Shirley.” Susanne had already resumed eating. The flesh felt grainy in her mouth, and it was already getting cold. She wanted to tell her daddy about something she’d learnt at school about hippos, but he was eating with the look on his face that meant he was concentrating, and didn’t want to be disturbed.

A Length of Chain for Paul Muldoon

This silly exercise was inspired by the following poem by Paul Muldoon:

Something Else

When your lobster was lifted out of the tank
to be weighed
I thought of woad,
of madders, of fugitive, indigo inks,

of how Nerval
was given to promenade
a lobster on a gossamer thread,
how, when a decent interval

had passed
(son front rouge encor du baiser de la reine)
and his hope of Adreinne

proved false,
he hanged himself from a lamp-post
with a length of chain, which made me think

of something else, then something else again.


This little piece is made up of the first lines of various novels I was reading at the time, and is just a bit of postmodern fun.

As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place, where was a den; and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and as I slept I dreamed a dream of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste brought death into the world, and all our woe. There was no possibility of taking a walk that day; I had just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. Midway through the journey of my life I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost. Here we have reached the remotest region of the earth: a few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hill-side bank and runs deep and green, a wide plain, where the broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to the sea, and the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an impetuous embrace. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen; on that first Monday of April, 1625, the market town of Meung, birthplace of the author of the Roman de la Rose, seemed to be in as great a turmoil as if the Hugenots had come to turn it into a second La Rochelle. The sun had not yet risen.

This is a tale of arms and of a man. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap. My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing more explicit than Pip, but call me Ishmael. My father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire; I was the third of five sons (happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way). I’ve studied now Philosophy and Jurisprudence, Medicine, and even, alas! Theology. I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria. I am living at the Villa Borghese. Except for the Marabar Caves – and they are twenty miles off – the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary. The rustic’s proverb says that many a thing is despised that is worth much more than is supposed.

I learned about the other Philip Roth in January 1988, a few days after the New Year, when my cousin Apter telephoned me in New York to say that Israeli radio had reported that I was in Jerusalem attending the trial of John Demjanjuk, the man alleged to be Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka. It was Apollo, Son of Zeus and Leto, who started the feud, when he punished the King for his discourtesy to Cryses, his priest, by inflicting a deadly plague on his army and destroying his men. The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking as it seemed from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well, although it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

In the days when the spinning-wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses – and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread-lace, had their toy spinning wheels of polished oak – there might be seen in the districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain pallid undersized men, who, by the side of the brawny country-folk looked like the remnants of a disinherited race. Indeed, as Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. “O gods! grant me release from this long weary watch!” he cried.
“Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow, but you’ll have to be up with the lark,” Alice replied. Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading. She was about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveller.