history as wallpaper
urgently selected clipped and pasted
but the room itselfnowhere
gone the addressthe house
golden-oak banisters zigzagging
upward, stained glass on the landings
streaked porcelain in the bathrooms
loose floorboards quitting in haste we pried
up to secrete the rash imagination
of a time to come
What we said then, our breathremains
otherwhere:in mein you
2
Sonata for Unaccompanied Minor
Fugitive Variations
discs we played over and over
on the one-armed phonograph
Childish we were in our adoration
of the dead composer
who’d ignored the weather signs
trying to cross the Andes
stupidlyI’d say now
and you’d agreeseasoned
as we areworking stretched
weekseating food bought
with ordinary grudging wages
keeping up with rent, utilities
a job of living as I said
3
Clocks are set backquick dark
snow filters past my lashes
this is the common ground
white-crusted sidewalkswindshield wipers
licking, creaking
to and froto and fro
If the word gets out if the word
escapes if the word
flies if it dies
it has its way of coming back
The handwritings on the walls
are vast and coded
the music blizzards past
2004
IN PLAIN SIGHT
My neighbor moving
in a doorframemoment’s
reach of her handthen
withdrawnAs from some old
guilty pleasure
Smile etched like a scar
which must be borne
Smile
in a photograph taken against one’s will
Her son up on a ladder stringing
along the gutter
electric icicles in a temperate zone
If the suffering hidden in plain sight
is of her past her future
or the thin-ice present where
we’re balancing here
or how she sees it
I can’t presume
… Ice-thin.Cold and precarious
the land I live in and have argued not to leave
Cold on the verge of crease
crack without notice
ice-green disjuncturetreasoning us
to flounder cursing each other
Cold and grotesque the sex
the grimaces the grab
A privilegeyou say
to live hereA luxury
Everyone still wants to come here!
You want a Christmas card, a greeting
to tide us over
with pictures of the children
then you demand a valentine
an easterlilyanything for the grab
a mothersday menuwedding invitation
It’s not as in a museum that I
observe
and mark in every Face I meet
under crazed surfaces
traces of feelinglocked in shadow
Not as in a museum of history
do I pace herenor as one who in a show
of bland paintings shrugs and walks onI gaze
through facesnot as an X-ray
nor
as paparazzo shooting
the compromised celebrity
nor archaeologist filming
the looted site
nor as the lover tearing out of its frame
the snapshot to be held to a flame
but as if a mirror
forced to reflect a room
the figures
standingthe figures crouching
2004
BEHIND THE MOTEL
a child plays bullfight with a torn cloth
hemlocks grieve in wraps of mist
a woman talks on the phone, looks in a mirror
fiddling with the metal pull of a drawer
She has seen her world wiped clean, the cloth
that wiped it disintegrate in mist
or dying breath on the skin of a mirror
She has felt her life close like a drawer
has awoken somewhere else, bare
He feels his skin as if it were mist
as if his face would show in no mirror
He needs some bolts he left in a vanished drawer
crawls out into the hemlocked world with his bare
hands, wipes his wrench on an oil-soaked cloth
stares at the woman talking into a mirror
who has shut the phone into the drawer
while over and over with a torn cloth
at the edge of hemlocks behind the bare
motel a child taunts a horned beast made from mist
2004
PIANO MÉLANCOLIQUE (extraits)
par Élise Turcotte
N’emporte rien avec toi.
Essayons de croire
qu’il n’y a rien dans mes poumons.
Qu’aucune maladie ne noircit
tes yeux.
Que je t’écris de la mangrove
pour te parler des palétuviers
qui sont les personnages
les plus mystérieux que j’aie vu.
Fantomatique, comme les
arbres, je reviens aux paysages.
Vapeurs et reflets.
Et petites racines aériennes
fixées au bas de ma robe.
MELANCHOLY PIANO (extracts)
from the French of Élise Turcotte
Take nothing with you
Let’s try believing
there’s nothing in my lungs.
That no sickness clouds
your eyes.
That I write you from the swamp
to tell you about the mangroves
the most mysterious
presences I’ve seen.
Spectral as the
trees, I return to landscape.
Fumes and reflections.
And little airy roots
stuck to the hem of my skirt.
Je me décris comme un animal
à plumes.
Je décris. Tu regardes.
Tandis que poussent mes plumes.
La nuit, tu cherches un motif fragile,
un relief aussi précis qu’un visage
aimé.
Des insectes occupent la chapelle cachée
sous le sable.
Beaucoup d’années ont passé
jusqu’ici.
I describe myself as a feathered
animal.
I describe.You watch.
While my plumes grow.
Nights, you search for a fragile cause
set in relief, precise as a loved
face.
Insects dwell in the chapel hidden
in sand.
Many years have gone by
until this moment.
C’est la nuit qui parle,
dis-tu.
Mon poème sans mot.
Ma fuite en terre sauvage.
Le corps est léger quand
il est pris pour ce qu’il est.
Composé de murs et de
fenêtres.
Prêt à brûler.
Avec des petits drapeaux
flottant au centre.
Je te caresse avec le secours
du vide.
Une ode à la survie.
Un dictionnaire d’herbes folles.
Pour guérir, nous sommes prêts
à tout.
Night is speaking
you say.
My poem without words.
My flight into wild country.
The body is light when
taken for what it is.
Formed of walls and
windows.
Ready to burn.
With little flags
flutteringin the center.
I touch you with the help
of the void.
An ode to survival.
A dictionary of wild grasses.
We’ll do anything
for a cure.
2004
II
ARCHAIC
Cold wit leaves me cold
this time of the worldMultifoliate disorders
straiten my gaitMinuets don’t become me
Been wanting to get outsee the sights
but the exits are slick with people
going somewhere fast
every one with a shared past
and a mot justeAnd me so out of step
with my late-night staircase inspirationsmy
utopian slant
Still, I’m alive here
in this village drawn in a tightening noose
of ramps and cloverleafs
but the old directions I drew up
for you
are obsolete
Here’s how
to get to me
I wrote
Don’t misconstrue the distance
take along something for the road
everything might be closed
this isn’t a modern place
You arrived starving at midnight
I gave you warmed-up food
poured tumblers of brandy
put on Les Barricades Mystérieuses
—the only jazz in the house
We talked for hoursof barricades
lesser and greater sorrows
ended up laughing in the thicksilver
birdstruck light
2005
LONG AFTER STEVENS
A locomotive pushing through snow in the mountains
more modern than the will
to be modernThe mountain’s profile
in undefiled snow disdains
definitions of poetryIt was always
indefinite, task and destruction
the laser eye of the poether blind eye
her moment-stricken eyeher unblinking eye
She had to get down from the blocked train
lick snow from bare cupped hands
taste what had soared into that air
—local cinders, steam of the fast machine
clear her plate with a breathdistinguish
through tumbling whitenessfigures
frozenfigures advancing
weapons at the ready
for the new password
She had to feel her tongue
freeze and burn at once
instrument searching, probing
toward a foreign tongue
2005
IMPROVISATION ON LINES FROM EDWIN MUIR’S “VARIATIONS ON A TIME THEME”
Packed in my skin from head to toe
Is one I know and do not know
He never speaks to me yet is at home
More snug than embryo in the womb …
His name’s Indifference
Nothing offending he is all offence …
Can note with a lack-lustre eye
Victim and murderer go by …
If I could drive this demon out
I’d put all Time’s display to rout …
Or so I dream when at my door
I hear my Soul, my Visitor.
He comes but seldom, and I cannot tell
If he’s myself or one who loves me well
And comes in pity, for he pities all …
Victim and murderer … Vision’s
bloodshot wandering eye engages and
the whetted tool moves toward the hand
scrapes down an impassive skydebrides
the panicked faceerases or redresses
with understrokes and slashes
in smeared roughed-over surfaces
false moves bad guesses
pausing to gauge its own
guilty innocence, desire
to make it clear yet leave the field
still dark and dialectical
This is unpitying yet not cold
—And Muir I wonder, standing under
the bruised eye-socket of late-winter sun
about your circling double-bind
between indifference and pity
your dream of history as Eden’s
loss, all else as repetition
—Wonder at your old opposite
number, Hugh MacDiarmid
his populated outraged joy
his ear for Lenin and for Rilke
for the particular and vast
the thistle’s bony elegance
the just, the wild, the urge, the cry for
what must change what be demolished
what secreted for the future
bardic or technological
together dialectical
2005–2006
RHYME
Walking by the fence but the house
not there
going to the river but the
river looking spare
bones of the river spread out
everywhere
O tell me this is home
Crossing the bridge but
some planks not there
looking at the shore but only
getting back the glare
dare you trust the river when there’s
no water there
O tell me is this home
Getting into town seeing
nobody I know
folks standing around
nowhere to go
staring into the air like
they saw a show
O tell me was this my home
Come to the railroad no train
on the tracks
switchman in his shanty
with a great big axe
so what happened here so what
are the facts
So tell me where is my home
2005
HOTEL
I dreamed the Finnish Hotel founded by Finns in an olden time
It was in New York had been there a long time
Finnish sea-captains had stayed there in their time
It had fallen on one then another bad time
Now restored it wished to be or seem of the olden time
The Finnish Hotel founded by Finns in an olden time
There was a perpendicular lighted sign along its spine:
THE FINNISH HOTEL and on the desk aligned
two lamps like white globes and a blond
wood lounge with curved chairs and a bar beyond
serving a clear icy liquor of which the captains had been fond
reputedly in the olden time
In the Finnish Hotel I slept on a mattress stuffed with straw
after drinking with a Finnish captain who regarded me with awe
saying, Woman who could put away that much I never saw
but I did not lie with him on the mattress, his major flaw
being he was a phantom of the olden time
and I a woman still almost in my prime
dreaming the Finnish Hotel founded by Finns in the olden time
2005
THREE ELEGIES
i. LATE STYLE
Propped on elbow in stony light
Green lawns of entitlement
out the window you can neither
open nor close
man crouched in den flung trembling
back on failed gifts
lapsed desireA falling
starDim, trapped
in the narrow place of fame
And beneath the skin of boredom
indecipherable fear
ii. AS EVER
As ever, death.Whenever, where.But it’s
the drawn-together life we’re finally
muted by.Must stand, regard as whole
what was still partialstill
under revision.So it felt, so we thought.
Then to hear sweep
the scythe on grass
still witherless and sweet
iii. FALLEN FIGURE
The stone walls will recede and the needs that laid them
scar of winter sun stretch low
behind the advancing junipers
darkness rise up from the whitening pond
Crusted silver your breath in this ditch
the pitchfork in your hand
still stuck to your hand
The northern lights
will float, probe, vacillate
the yellow eye
of the snowplow you used to drive