A Woman Clothed in Words (3 page)

Hang on my breast once more. This percipient one

Who has refused all syruped rusks, Pablum and cow’s milk

Preferring the bitter truth of malnutrition

To all false sweetness.

•

Who with erupting fangs

Pierced the blue nipple of piety

Until the blood flew.

Theo’s Mother

Wizened and black I rocked
and thought – another age

Past, and all our heroes over. Gone are they; hung down

Like withered creepers purple and yellow still.

I heard – I think – the voice of a hot tired woman

With dust on her skirts calling through the window;

Telling me what doors the mind has. Open them all:

All doors: all windows until the draught blows

A whirlwind in the flood.

•

This Sister had old feet in black shoes. She was the one

The only one, saw woman as the mother of daughters.

When I was baptised she called me Anna – mother of one daughter.

Arm in arm we walked; between us small black Theo

Sulky in white – we meant to bind her God’s.

•

Oh God I know I shouldn’t have brought her up to learning

Last week she was married in town with cakes and carpets,

White forks and tripping dainty girls in heels.

Mother of humanity! I said – Theo I’ll bless you

Set a wand in your hand – What did she do?

She lifted up that hand and laughed behind it

(I heard her). Sniggered like a wild girl at Sister’s big black feet.

•

Well, what can a mother do?

I’m far too old to curse her.

Climacteric

Curled within the coiled leaf the thin gallworm

Like a priest in his hole; while glorious without

The towered house: breasts of the crinolined girl

Innocent and perfect. The cornices of dented plaster trace

The lineaments of her brown impassive face.

•

All hot pavements are walked by such young women

With curved spiked feet and inward earholes plugged.

While at their shoulder panting the insistent breath

Of persistent pursuing humanity: all

That is within forgotten as the gall.

•

Yet hidden deep the worm – priest of an alien cult

Demanding sacrifice and sustenance. Thin folded bread

Stuffed under doors. And through a pipeline of grey glass

Like blood the pulsing wine must pass.

•

But let the face pock and crumple: the thorn-foot thump:

The wasp-worm turns within the belted waist.

Like chafer or cherub fourwinged he flies

To her face and through her opened eyes.

•

He rubs his thin hands together chanting and singing

Highmass pontifical in the whole world’s sight,

While bowing the unaccustomed congregation

Blinks in the sun’s blaze; in the candle’s light.

Designing

Within the bud the bear,

And not the woolly-caterpil
lar kind either.

A provident thought of cells: square cells like

beeswax lithographs.

I see this pattern printed on fruits and trees:

What use is it to them? But if I were a bee I’d want it

For my little beegrub to lie down in.

The dented crust that rinds a world scuffed up

With a come and a coming. Histories obey the foot that spurns

The spiral force of life.

A whorl, a cell, an imprint, a design

Upon the eternal will.

Lion in the Salt Mine

(In the winter who can know

Which is salt and which is snow?)

•

Bank where the swallows come to nest in the cliffy holes

Not forgotten after four years away,

And the garter snakes coiling their slow way in and out

Stealing the swallow’s eggs.

•

Dust on the prairie road printed with lion’s toes

And crossed with a line or two of rusted blood

Limp lifted paw and rolled in the dust:

Run over by that blasted truck last night.

The Pit

It’s not enough that ivy cracks my tomb?

Or leaves blow
in the cracks? Bury me shallow

Without a box or sheet. Spade up a trench

And fling me face downwards in the seeping earth.

Thin roots must split my limbs to splintered threads,

Roots of a tree whose flowers are flakes of fire

Until they fall and wither on the grass

To brownish scabs. I have a daughter here;

She lies beside me, and I grope to find

These fragile curves of tiny hollow bones

Holding her to me till our dust is mixed.

•

Am I to believe

This hardly human creature had a face?

Only a mirror buried in the darkness

Reflecting nothing. All I see in her

Is part of my death and crumpled to decay.

I heard her first and only cry. My ears

Are blocked and deaf and cannot hear again.

Dead eyes can’t read her name though it is printed

A hundred times on this last folded page.

Biographics I

In labour

A child cried out

“Stop – stop speaking.

Stop shouting;

Stop asking me who I am.

Can’t you see, feel, hear

I am busy being born?

I am busy tearing my mother.

My mother is busy being torn.

I am splitting her flesh:

She will have to be sewn up

Like a botched sockhole.

She is squeezing me out of her narrow aperture,

Squeezing me like a toothpaste ribbon out of her.

Oh my ribbon-shaped head!

Oh her dented pelvis!

Is it any wonder that after this

We want only to listen to each other?

Silence please spectators,

Your blurred faces are of no more interest

To either of us.

We are alone in a crowd of open eyes

And faraway klip-klap, trip-trap tongues talking.

I shriek at her touch:

She dribbles drugged tears on my neck.

Lullay, lullay cry out the nurses.

I hear them singing like a chorus

Applauding at a distance.

I hear them singing as they tie cords

And dispose of placentas.

Is it for this I slid howling from the hole?

To see and despise? She to worship

And find me a great hefty lump,

A burden all day long, all life long?

Lullay, lullay she caresses my wet black hair,

Watching the impression of her labour disappear

From my head, from my face. How long before

She hates me because my birthmarks are eroded

To shadows of scars?

After a few years of asking her

Why she didn’t love me enough not to have me,

I will grow old enough to stretch girls

In the mud and the cinders. Then am I free of her?”

•

When I went away she left, and wherever she is

She’s not thinking of me now.

Cicatrice

Entre nous deux la crevasse,

Vaste et pro
fonde.

Entre le nez et la barbe

Une cicatrice énorme.

•

Le long de talus fleurissent

Jonc et glaïeul.

Qui peut lancer

Un caillou à travers

D’une telle rivière?

•

Barbier: ‘faut porter une fausse-moustache.

$1.98 – plus taxe.’

•

Femme: ‘vaux pas la peine!

Tu sais car même la cicatrice

reste là – entre nous deux.’

Lovers and Choosers

I am tapping my body like a
typewriter

I am playing my body like a piano

the tune is lost in my flesh

sounding a distant low hum of waves

but there still are tinkly bits

my stony toenails

my small nipples

the curling ends of my hair

•

my mother is sitting up in bed admonishing me

“by now you should have forgotten

all that” she says

“by now you should have put on a costume

that covers the worst parts

•

why don’t you get some man

to dye your hair to the colour of stuffed foxes?”

•

I type a note on yellow copy paper

•

“you who incline your head

like a girl listening

you whose eyes are green as

Viking seas:

•

there is too much distance

between us

I cannot shout back at you

words bitterly die in me”

Beginnings

Many years ago – anyway, more than twenty – I stepped off a
transcontinental train onto the extraordinary soil of Saskatchewan. It was May 21st, early summer in the old country, but snow still lay cold in the low spots of this
enormous landscape.

Having received an education with a heavy list to litword (lovely ships and boats and seas goodbye) I jumped off that train with words ready on my lips to greet the first poet I should meet in this poetic land.

•

The train has stopped for no apparent reason

In the wilds;

A frozen lake is level and fretted over

With rippled wind lines;

The sun is burning in the South…

(“En Route,” Duncan Campbell Scott)

•

Gull Lake set in the rolling prairie –

Still there are reeds on the shore,

As of old the poplars shimmer …

(“At Gull Lake: August, 1810,” Duncan Campbell Scott)

•

Lorsque le blanc Hiver, aux jours tièdes mêlés,

Recule vers le Nord de montagne en montagne…

(“Terre nouvelle,” Albert Ferland)

•

And yesterday had I not murmured under my breath as we left Manitoba behind on our westward journey?

•

Farewell to Winnipeg, the snow-bright city,

Set in the prairie distance without bound.

(“Farewell to Winnipeg,” Roy Daniells)

Later I was surprised and disappointed to discover that this was a country that did not know its own poets. In vain I might cry out names like Smith, Birney, Choquette, Hertel, Livesay. Canadians seemed to have been brought up in the conviction that there were no Canadian poets; they would counter feebly with Wordsworth, Tennyson, and (sometimes) Dylan Thomas. Thank goodness all this has changed now and we are beginning to appreciate our own writers. Sometimes their works even appear in English classes in our schools.

•

For four years I lived in the wild south country of Saskatchewan, “Down on the Muddy,” as they say there. It is a country of salt lakes and desert and rolling boulder-strewn prairie. Only in the green coulees are there songbirds, for that is where the trees grow. Heroic memories of those times remain with me. Life was hard and isolated. Some of our neighbours still lived in sod huts or even in basements with roofs of turf. Once we tried to race a prairie fire while we were driving into town; it easily beat our sixty miles an hour.

•

As long as I can remember I have always composed poetry. I don’t say ‘written’ as I often used to recite my own verses before I could read or write. I can still remember the various methods I would use to ensure that my spoken poem would not tail off, would come to the satisfactory dramatic ending. When I was five years old I learned to read, and that was the end of that part of my career as a poet. I have never been able to accomplish a satisfactory extemporary poem since.