BOOKS BY STEPHANIE BOLSTER
White Stone: The Alice Poems (1998)
Two Bowls of Milk (1999)
Copyright © 1999 by Stephanie Bolster
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Bolster, Stephanie
Two bowls of milk
Poems.
ISBN 0-7710-1557-7
eBook ISBN: 978-1-55199-654-7
I. Title
PS8553.O479T96 1999 C811’.54 C99-930013-X
PR9199.3.B64T96 1999
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
McClelland & Stewart Inc.
The Canadian Publishers
481 University Avenue
Toronto, Ontario
M5G 2E9
v3.1
For Patrick Leroux
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Disclaimer
COME TO THE EDGE
Come to the edge of the barn the property really begins there
Many Have Written Poems About Blackberries
Seawolf Inside Its Own Dorsal Fin
Life and Death in the Conservatory
Assorted Flora
Red Stiletto
Assonance
Lost Things Poke Through Melting Snow
This Is the Week of Dead Things
Edge of the River
Poems for the Flood
Two Bowls of Milk
PERSPECTIVE IS AN ATTEMPT
Flood, Deer Lake, B.C.
On the Steps of the Met
Natal
Perspective Is an Attempt
White Rock
Chemistry
Luggie
Virginia Woolf’s Mother in the Blurred Garden
How in the Inversion of Dream, Saw Becomes Was
Fargo in Flood
Noons
Flood, near Joliette, Québec
DEUX PERSONNAGES DANS LA NUIT
poems from paintings by Jean Paul Lemieux
Intérieur (1930)
Le Train de midi (1956)
Les Beaux Jours (1937)
Le Far-West (1955)
L’Orpheline (1956)
Le Champ de trèfles (1971)
La Floride (1965)
1910 Remembered (1962)
Deux personnages dans la nuit (v. 1989)
Les Beaux Jours, reprise
INSIDE A TENT OF SKIN
poems in the National Gallery of Canada
Flap Anatomy
Still Life with Braid
Out/Cast
Dog-Woman
Waiting Room
Six Nudes of Neil
Garden Court
The Beheld
Sum of Our Parts
top Motion
Blood
Three Goddesses
Notes
Acknowledgements
This title contains long lines of poetry. The line of characters below indicates approximately the longest line in the text:
cold winds already lifting the hairs of your arm – you’ll forget your feet,
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COME TO THE EDGE
Come to the edge of the barn the property really begins there,
you see things defining themselves, the hoofprints left by sheep,
the slope of the roof, each feather against each feather on each goose.
You see the stake with the flap of orange plastic that marks
the beginning of real. I’m showing you this because
I’m sick of the way you clutch the darkness with your hands,
seek invisible fenceposts for guidance, accost spectres.
I’m coming with you because I fear you’ll trip
over the string that marks the beginning, you’ll lie across the border
and with that view – fields of intricate grain and chiselled mountains,
cold winds already lifting the hairs of your arm – you’ll forget your feet,
numb in straw and indefinite dung, and be unable to rise, to walk farther.
My fingers weave so close between yours because I’ve been there
before, I know the relief of everything, how it eases the mind to learn
shapes it hasn’t made, how it eases the feet to know the ground
will persist. See those two bowls of milk, just there,
on the other side of the property line, they’re for the cats
that sometimes cross over and are seized by a thirst, they’re
to wash your hands in. Lick each finger afterwards. That will be
your first taste, and my finger tracing your lips will be the second.
MANY HAVE WRITTEN POEMS ABOUT BLACKBERRIES
But few have gotten at the multiplicity of them, how each berry
composes itself of many dark notes, spherical,
swollen, fragile as a world. A blackberry is the colour of a painful
bruise on the upper arm, some internal organ
as yet unnamed. It is shaped to fit
the tip of the tongue, to be a thimble, a dunce cap
for a small mouse. Sometimes it is home to a secret green worm
seeking safety and the power of surprise. Sometimes it plunks
into a river and takes on water.
Fishes nibble it.
The bushes themselves ramble like a grandmother’s sentences,
giving birth to their own sharpness. Picking the berries
must be a tactful conversation
of gloved hands. Otherwise your fingers will bleed
the berries’ purple tongue; otherwise thorns
will pierce your own blank skin. Best to be on the safe side,
the outside of the bush. Inside might lurk
nests of yellowjackets; rabid bats; other,
larger hands on the same search.
The flavour is its own reward, like kissing the whole world
at once, rivers, willows, bugs and all, until your swollen
lips tingle. It’s like waking up
to discover the language you used to speak
is gibberish, and you have never really
loved. But this does not matter because you have
married this fruit, mellifluous, brutal, and ripe.
SEAWOLF INSIDE ITS OWN DORSAL FIN
Seawolf Inside Its Own Dorsal Fin, Robert Davidson, 1983. Screenprint.
I sleep in the red of my rising
arc, curled tight and finned
within fin, rocked by
black
water I rock. I learn this one part
of myself, each degree
of its curve, how the water
foams against warm skin.
My fin learns me, the thing
it is part of but does not
belong to. We make each other,
my fin and myself, myself
and the taut water.
When my fin breaks the sea’s
skin, through shut eyes I glimpse
wave within wave, stone
through all the layers,
my own incessant crest.
LIFE AND DEATH IN THE CONSERVATORY
This dome opened
the year of my birth.
My whole life stands
on this wooden bridge, arched
over water.
Below, plump and golden
fish ripen.
Foliage, hushed as silk, encroaches.
ASSORTED FLORA
Nasturtiums
Always plural,
rampant.
Edible because
something must be finished off,
your unflinching
ruffled orange and gold,
your tart leaves.
Even aphids will not
do the trick.
Even inclement weather.
Even in October
you assert yourselves,
outdoing the leaves,
the smug pumpkins.
Iris
Your spine is a secret grief.
Rooted in inconstant mud,
you manage to stand, proud
though purple marks the perfect
white of your throat.
But cut, left
alone in a vase, you will lean
away from light, shrink
into your crippled shadow.
Beach Sweet Pea
Tenacious as cat’s claws
you cling to the salt
grit, mark your place
in roots and the innermost
pink of anemone’s
tentacles. Beside that dropped
starfish with its guts to the sky,
that branch bleached
and sea-worn,
you are the one
who holds brine between your toes,
tide in your teeth.
Oriental Poppy
The truth is in the red of you,
the black centre wide
as a pupil in a blind-drawn room.
Bloodshot, you stare
into the sky and will not squint
until the sun does.
RED STILETTO
“Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.”
– Charles Simic, “Our Angelic Ancestor”
Something here –
Nike runner with its arc
of dreamed flight, feathered
bedroom slipper, red
stiletto with the pointed toe,
arrows into darkness.
The bodies have hopped between
dumpsters, between these bookshelves.
Hissing cats, torn pages, milk
cartons licked blank.
They have unwritten
their other legs. They believe in silence
and the striving after balance.
Somewhere in there
they stand like resting flamingoes,
tuck around them
the memory of the other leg
like a cruel friendship
lost in childhood. Phantom phrases still
caught in their knotted tongues.
ASSONANCE
Hurt bird in dirt – she writes
for sound, and a sparrow
that hit the window of her childhood
too hard. Because of how the ear
takes words in and holds them
to itself, how they strike
those bones: hammer, anvil
and stirrup. Words that conjure
machinery, weight,
horses, that morning her leg
caught and the mare dragged her
for miles. From the first,
each word she’d learned
a hoof just missing her
temple. It is all pain,
the reddish shell the side
of the head cups, and hears
itself, hears itself.
LOST THINGS POKE THROUGH MELTING SNOW
Stunted remnants of plants, months-old dogshit, a single red mitten that belonged to a girl who’d been punished for the loss, one hand made to go bare the rest of that winter. When her mother, tending tulip shoots, found the mitten, she pinned it to the girl’s chest, broke the skin so she would not forget. The next winter they found the girl’s heart, grey and hard as stone, in the centre of a thrown snowball. It nearly blinded the boy. In the kitchen they set the heart beside the turkey wishbone, meatless and saved for later. Microwaved on low, stroked with new white towels, it thawed into the pumping of nothing through itself. In the hospital they returned it wrapped in sheets and anaesthesia, stitched deep, a gift she could not return. The next year she went walking in her red rubber boots until only a trail of hollow exclamation marks was left.
THIS IS THE WEEK OF DEAD THINGS
By the lake I find a mole unearthed, mouth raw as supermarket steak. Its body is a cylinder furred with the passive half of Velcro. Its feet curled pink as a bird’s.
A friend says he has killed two mice in as many days. He wakes to the snap and finds one caught behind the eyes, dancing its last dance. Afterwards it’s hardly a heft in his palm, less than a skipping stone.
I find the fish plucked eyeless and scaleless where the tide has left. It might have been perch or flounder, might have been angelfish. Wind stirs no inch of it. Sand sifts around it. This is the longest its fins have been anywhere.
When I visit my friend, a car hits a crow, and the street’s a sudden gathering of crows. For half an hour outside his window black eyes watch the curb and that black unflapping thing. Then they’re gone. I leave behind my half-drained teacup.
This evening each thing dies before me. A bundle of muddy newsprint is a chewed raccoon’s tail and those distant blown shreds of tire by the roadside, what’s left of a bear.
How could I not turn away from the precious bald head of that man waiting in the bus shelter?
EDGE OF THE RIVER
Tamarack, shamrock,
black water with a stone in its throat. Black willow:
Very shade-intolerant. Branches brittle and breakage
frequent. Limbs under water. Black ash: Neither as strong nor
hard as white ash wood. Black hawk falling. Squirrel call. Teeth against
teeth against hunger. Variations of predation. What’s swallowed
still warm in the throat. I don’t want the names of vegetation
in my mouth, only his tongue, his different speech. Variations
of flight and flighlessness. Crows are rooks, but rooks
are sharper and still blacker. Nettles can make healing
teas. Bluebells by the river ringing someone’s
gone too far.
POEMS FOR THE FLOOD
Hills are islands, waiting. Mountains
will wait longer. This valley
was once a lake, until we made it land. See how the rain
against the windshield turns to fishes.
Each puddle a premonition. The woman’s face
is clearer there. When I peer in,
the trees shift. The sky is bluer
than the sky and when I look deeper there is the sun.
Any rain is enough to make all the colours
come out. The fuchsias sting my eyes
and the bees shine. The lawn teems with drops
that might be diamonds, might be frogs.
The first time I ran inside and shut my house. The second
I let it all wash over me. The third ti
me I went looking
where the clouds were and weeks later
waded back with minnows in my boots.
Between storms: a segment of train track. A red
block with the letter O. A mouse the colour
of bread mould. An ace of spades. Three steps going down
and who knows how many underwater.
I keep a canoe on the back porch just in case.
Each morning I listen for the lap against the bedposts.
Each morning I imagine my legs floating down the steps,
my hair seeping back from my face.
Watering the garden, I call the earth thirsty
and then cringe at what I’ve said. The way things are
is simpler and more difficult to understand. My throat
and the columbines open for the same water differently.