BEVERLEY BIE BRAHIC
The Hotel Eden
Only a garden can teach gardening.
Douglas Dunn
Contents
Title Page
Epigraph
Acknowledgements
Madame Martin and I
All Souls
The Hotel Eden
Landline
A Community Garden
Olives, Endives and Mallow
The Builders
Roller Skates, a Snack, a Book
Crouching Woman (Camille Claudel)
Monday Morning, Croissy-sur-Seine
Future Perfect
Hornets
Collateral Damage
An Ancient Art
Across from the Apple Store
Gypsies, On the Road
Real Estate
In the Luxembourg Garden
An Eternity
Pelouse Interdite
The Fête du Miel
At the Museum (Fantin-Latour)
The Queens of France
In the Orchard
Défense de Pisser
Autumn Song
A Stone Bench
You Never Know
Four Seasons (a Draft)
Provisional
Red Berries
Courtly Love
The Lady and the Hollyhock
Exotic Perfume
Off Frenchman’s Road
Aubade for a House Exchange, Summer 2003
Moon with a Supermarket Trolley
Herbarium
Life
On The Existence of Doubt
For Now
Old Women
A Happy Ending
Happy he who like Ulysses
Winter Pears
Three Fragments
Many Moons
Behind
The Sand Dollar Inn
The First Memory
Lost and Found
On the Naming of Hurricanes
After the Quake
Letter Home
States of Siege
Long House
H. Erectus
First Snow
Answering Machine
Land’s End
Scope
The Back Road
About the Author
also by Beverley Bie Brahic
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to the editors of the following journals in which some of these poems first appeared, some in earlier versions: American Journal of Poetry, The Hudson Review, Manchester Review, Mantis, Poetry Ireland Review, PN Review, Poetry Daily, Poetry Review, Queen’s Quarterly, Recours au poème, Shofar, Stand and La Traductière.
Indra’s Net, an anthology published by Bennison Books in support of The Book Bus Charity, published an earlier version of ‘The Sand Dollar Inn’.
‘Letter Home’ is adapted from Bill Rawling, Death their Enemy: Canadian Medical Practitioners and War.
I am grateful to my first readers for their spot-on criticisms and encouragement, especially Nina Bogin, in France, and Chana Bloch and the other members of the Berkeley Poetry Group; and to Marilyne Bertoncini and Brigitte Gyr for their translations of several poems into French.
Madame Martin and I
Madame Martin will throw back her shutters at eight
One arm will scoop up sun
She will brush her hair on the stoop using a small pane as a mirror
Cap of hair like a well-scoured pot
Bouncing a little
Like the branch the goldfinch just quit.
Monsieur Martin died last summer no
Last last summer
A quiet man
Who liked to do chores round the yard
Spray the roses
Who liked to paint his garden gate green
Every summer
Leafy leafy forest green
She’ll rake the gravel – he would do that – and pull some weeds
Like a seascape with sails
across the vanishing point
She’ll tie an apron about her waist
Fingers doing that brief couple dance
Over and under and bow to your partner
He was sick all of a sudden
He was dead
And now he’s gone
She says she thinks she hardly knew him.
All Souls
They have their backs to the altar
The concert-goers bundled into their overcoats.
They face the music
One freckled fist knuckled on each knee.
Which hand? God asks. Which hand?
The Hotel Eden
after Joseph Cornell
Fragments of a life, protected under glass:
A parrot on its perch. A crock of corks. Butt-end of an egg.
The spring from a gutted clock.
This poster for Eden
Scorched and brittle as a boy’s treasure map.
On the tip of God’s tongue, the bird waits to be named.
Profoundly silent, the taxidermist’s shop. ‘If only,’ thinks the bird.
If only what?
Against survival. Against feathers. Against corks-in-bottles. Against the pathos of stuffed birds. Against against.
From laughter to slaughter the house of objects is repossessed.
The knife recalls the flint flakes.
The flint nodule dreams the chalk cliff.
There’s a key to it somewhere. Break the glass?
Landline
He disliked the phone, that hard-shelled crab
Hunkered in the den.
If he had to pick it up he’d say,
‘Hello, I’ll get your mother,’ or
‘Your mother’s on the other line, goodbye.’
Took me years to notice
We’d never had a conversation on the phone.
Retired now, he fished, gardened, read
Paperbacks borrowed from the library,
The ones that make time go by. He dreamed.
Yes, I think he dreamed. Visiting in summer
I’d catch him, a tool dangling from his hand,
Staring at the mainland across Georgia Strait,
One foot in the sun,
The other in the shade – the watered lawn.
As if he’d forgotten what he came out for.
‘What’s with the phone?’ I asked him.
We were picking oysters. The tide low –
We could walk to the rocky outcrop
We called our ‘island.’ My imagination’s
Prime waterfront, and origin.
Stalking the tide-line, a heron watched us
Warily. I still try to sneak up on them,
You only get so close before they bolt.
He thought for a moment,
Then – half-jokingly – that was his way –
Offering me an oyster
He’d shucked to slurp – replied,
‘I guess I’m afraid
That when I pick up there’ll be somebody there.’
End of conversation. The tide had turned:
Water was lapping the purple sea stars
Clumped in fissures,
Favelas of mussels and barnacles.
We sloshed back across the shingle
With our bucket of oysters,
The silence not uncomfortable.
A Community Garden
Me pascunt olivae, / me cichorea levesque malvae
We’re weeding the raspberry canes
When we notice them – three couples
Snapping selfies, who disappear
Into the rows of corn, and reappear
Later,
near us, talking in a language
None of us knows
Although we have several languages between us.
In the background, clucking,
The hens forage and brood.
The youngest couple – diffidently –
Question us,
Translating our answers for their elders,
Grandparents
I’m assuming, round-faced as sunflowers,
Nodding, too, especially
The old man, laugh lines
Converging towards the corners of his eyes,
Serge trousers wrong for here.
California drought. The ground is baked,
Pulling weeds
Without breaking the roots is slow, repetitive work;
Hands grope, minds wander…
It’s a recipe for peace – of a sort.
You need to water, he mimes,
Soften the ground. We agree, and go on weeding
With our hands and small tools.
We’re water-thrifty, we explain;
The young couple translates. The old man nods
And goes on weeding.
After a while – You need better tools.
He stands and makes a foot-on-pitchfork motion,
Squats back down.
His wife and children grow impatient.
He ignores them. He is happy weeding.
We are happy too.
The raspberry canes
Are looking cared for
(A plot of ground is being tended).
Behind, the corn shoots straight up;
Summer squash swell under fat leaves;
The earth is warm, brown.
Later we’ll collect the eggs.
The old man stands. He stares
After the rest of his family who are walking off,
Backs turned,
Abandoning him like a stubborn child.
He grins at us and trails
After them for whatever else they’ve scheduled
This already scorching
August Saturday afternoon.
Olives, Endives and Mallow
after Horace
What does the poet ask of Apollo?
For what does he pray as they pour
The libation from the clay bowl?
Not fertile Sardinia’s fields of rich corn,
Nor the herds of sweltering Calabria;
Not the ivory of India
Nor the fecund acres the slow
Liris eats away in its quiet flow.
May those on whom Fortune smiles prune their vines
With high-end Calenian blades;
Let the trader guzzle the wines
He gets in exchange for Syria’s goods –
Friended on high, doesn’t he go scot-free
In every port, no matter how
Indignant the winds? – As for me,
I feast on olives, endive and mallow.
Grant me, Apollo, calm and contentment,
A healthy body, a mind clear,
And let my old age be spent
Without dishonour nor the sound of my lyre.
The Builders
Clink of a spade chipping dirt.
Voices of labourers
Sinking posts into wet cement.
Sibilance of aspens rustling.
Soft-spoken voices speaking
Spanish under soft-spoken aspens.
Shriek of a chainsaw ripping wood.
Click of an empty stapler.
Shovel thunk against aspen suckers.
Ripples of laughter
Racing like water
Down a bed of loaf-shaped boulders.
Sound of a gate bolt shot.
Thud of a tailgate dropped.
Sigh of the gathered up tools.
Roller Skates, a Snack, a Book
I stopped for traffic yesterday
By the entrance to the playground
On the wooded edge of town,
Louis Something’s hunting ground,
When a kid flashed though the gate
Down the dirt path with her pup,
Her dad – I guess it was – right
Behind, trying to keep up.
Park and woods are close to school.
I’d go there every week
With roller skates, a snack, a book
To read, the kids of course.
Girl and dad (I guess) trail off –
Not precisely hand in hand –
To the clearing where sandbox,
Seesaws and zip-line stand
Among benches set for parents –
All things I could not have seen
Where I sat, impatiently
Waiting for the stop light to turn green.
Crouching Woman (Camille Claudel)
In old age she thinks it would be good to squat at the side of the road writing in the dust with a stick.
What will she write?
About giving birth. Facing death. Sleeping under the stars, which are very big (and some not there at all any more), and she is small.
A message, say, like the child who finds a piece of driftwood and squatting, heels flat on the ground, centre of gravity close to the sand, prints some words in block letters on the foreshore of a beach. Words only gulls and pelicans can read.
A few lines in the dust. Or the wet sand of a beach before the tide turns. Five, or six lines, say, like a child’s drawing of a house.
Monday Morning, Croissy-sur-Seine
Car locks zapped
I exit the underground
Garage, a borrowed mystery
Under my arm.
What am I thinking?
Trying not to think.
Not trying not to think.
Not thinking.
Doing laps in the cool
Pool of myself.
Gut-freezing din.
Shocked, I spin
To the splotch of green
Where the river bends
Past the football pitch
Where a skein of geese
Bursts brush and weeds
And lifts
Like a single mind
To the November sky.
At the delivery dock
A driver offloads pallets
Of drinks: shrink-wrapped
Water bottles, soda
In desire-red cans.
See those geese? he asks,
No sign
Of them now
Though
To riddle our allotment of sky.
Future Perfect
Yesterday he thought le futur
Was a tense they taught you in school
Where if you make a mistake
It’s not the end of the world.
Well he learned his lesson
God now give him
His book bag back
Let him be on his way home again
No big boys at the construction site
Taking his back pack
His brand new anorak.
And no telling Dad
Who 1) won’t go to the cops
For what’s just one more case of extortion
Between a boy from Martinique
And some fairer-skinned toughs;
2) Won’t go to the construction site
…One brick another brick
Another… till Dad’s balled-up on the ground
Like a test you failed
Yesterday – only yesterday
God let him be on his way home again
With a little pocket money
To buy a treat at the bakery.
Hornets
The hornets are polishing off the grapes
That ramble over the south-facing wall.
A season’s vine leaves are turning yellow;
The hornets and the hornets’ reflections
Plunder the overripe pulp.
What do hornets do with all that nectar?
I sit in a white plastic garden chair.
My coffee mug steams on a boulder.
The leaves cast tremulous shadows.
The hornets shuttle cluster to cluster,
Glide crosswise, down: helicopters –
That’s what I think of – the way they hang
Motionless over the clusters,
Pinpoint a target, home in, sidle off.
Collateral Damage
It listed east, liable, the arborist warned, to topple
Into the street, rumple a car,
The neighbours’ shipshape house and flint-brick wall,
So Friday, first thing, in hard-hats and gloves,
They fell it – chainsaws wailing – beginning
With the high branches and dream-catcher leaves.
By quitting time the ash tree is strewn
Groin-deep in the yard,
Limbs and brushwood prepped for the mulch machine,
And a rabble of garden birds surveys the debris
Where this morning
Their homely nests and high lookouts had been.
An Ancient Art
To keep the darkness at arm’s length
We adorned our walls
With storybook animals stick figures
Brandishing toy weapons
Images firelight may have lit
Sequentially
Producing the illusion of motion
To while away winter evenings