Your Absence Forms a Shape in the Air

            During song practice on Thursday morning my denture didn’t feel as loose, though I made sure by pushing it into place after every song. I felt pretty strong while singing even though I was weak when I got up. This was the last day of my fourteen-day fast.

            In the afternoon I took a siesta and though I hardly fell asleep at all it was enough time to dream that I was working for this young plain-clothes executive type who was pretty casual. We were driving to his place in his white van to do the job he wanted help with. Driving through the alley he saw his wife just coming home from shopping. She was lifting a load up the back of their home with an open elevator with an undisclosed mechanism and so the lift looked basically like just a platform. She had a wagon with a large green bag in it and he waved to her and she waved back but turned away and then he saw the wagon starting to roll off the platform when she was already almost up to the second floor so he shouted to her and she grabbed it just in time. I looked heavy and I thought that it might pull her over the edge but she managed with a lot of effort to pull it back. She was a redhead with short hair and neither slim nor large just slightly larger boned than average. She was wearing a red top and a green skirt but more dark tones of those colours. He seemed to own a large section of the block because we started working on another property a few doors away. I was on a lower balcony and he was standing in the alley. He wanted me to fill up a canister with water. The green hose was hooked in a curve along a wall behind me but the container was over the railing towards him. I climbed over the railing to get the yellow plastic container with the spout and we had a conversation about me climbing over things rather than walking around them. We were next inside of a large empty room where we were about to work and he commented without complaint about how casual we were being in our professional relationship when I’m really supposed to call him “mister”. I was about to respond when I woke up. I spent less than an hour in bed.

                I finished my last poem for the final project in my Canadian Poetry course. This one was inspired by Susan Musgrave’s style. She usually has a strong image in every line so I tried to spice it up as mush as I was able within the short time I have left until the deadline:

In those times when your absence forms

a shape in the air in front of me

that I could almost throw my arms around

and embrace instead of you, I wish you were here.

I seem to know exactly what

to do with that ephemeral matrix -

my molten imagination

is poured into its mould – with no mysteries

to confuse me. But I wish you were here

even without being food or sweet

suffocation. Even when sitting near

I want you here instead. I like the way you laugh

at my jokes and I like the way you speak

your thoughts. I wish I could hold you all night long

and talk with you but then I would start

going down on you as my daughter

suddenly began shouting at the window

for me to come down and open

the door and then I’d groan oh no

as I got up to put my pants on

and then you’d comment how

we were stupid to bother to try

to make love since we knew she’d arrive

soon. Then I’d let my daughter in and you’d

stay for a polite few minutes

before going home. You would worry me

with your sullen mood the next day on the phone

repeating what a waste of time

trying to have sex had been and then you’d leave

for Calgary and so I wouldn’t see you again

for a week. When you returned your mood would be back

to normal and we’d talk and laugh until you realized

that you were late and you’d say goodbye.

Starting that week I’d agree to set aside

more time for repairing us. I’d call

you every night instead of watching Northern

Exposure and I wouldn’t threaten to go

when I’m at your place and you’re mad and you want to sleep

apart from me. I wouldn’t bring up

those things that don’t fit in your listening. I would

agree not to drink so much that it interrupted

the flow between us. I would look you straight in the eyes

and refrain from hording my heart in the distance

where I either sulk or embrace daydreams instead of you.

Then you would agree to shut down

the distances you practice and call me

more often. You would stop aborting

and amputating our ends

of the week by driving me

home when we’ve hit a roadblock

or instead of returning me

to sender, going to sleep

in your bed alone, or you’d threaten to break up.

I don’t like it when you torture me

by saying that I hurt you on purpose,

when you claim that you know me better

than I know myself and so you understand

my motives and you will teach me

how wrong I am if I will only listen

when you tell me that we’ll never live

together. I hate it when you tell me to grow up

when I’m crying from something you’ve said.

I feel run down when you give me a cold

vagina. I think that it’s vicious for you

to say that I’m evil, to say that you aren’t

confident in me. When you don’t come

on to me it makes me feel unloved. Your anger

feels a lot like my father, your complaints

about my clothing and my housekeeping mess

up the calm of our romance. When you berate

me by declaring that I’m not perceptive, it grates

on my cool. But I do tend to crash-land on a heavenly body

that is flighty, incontinent, inhumane, self

serving, adversarial and boiling,

who floods me with frustration because she does not

fathom that I mean no damage with my irons

in the fire. I hunger for you

to always come on strong, ungoverned but downright

neighbourly so that I can have armistice of mind. When I do not

have these desiderata I get the picture

that my I has been blackened so I boomerang by eating

my heart out, getting in your face, shooting off my mouth and tuning

into my nethermost worry, which is that, I am good

for nothing and left out in the cold.

Drunkaholism

            During song practice on Wednesday morning it felt like my denture was a little looser than it’s been since I first got it a month ago. I started thinking that maybe I need to go back to the dentist to see if it can be adjusted.

            I spent most of the day updating my journal.

            I watched an episode of Leave it to Beaver in which Ward gives a handyman with a reputation for being an alcoholic a second chance by letting him paint the trim on their house. Ward and June, when talking about Andy in front of the boys, simply refer to “Andy’s trouble” because they want to protect them from the ugly truth about alcoholism. Because of this, when Beaver is home alone and Andy comes in asking for brandy, Beaver gives him his father’s bottle because he has no idea that drinking is Andy’s “trouble”.

            A guy came to our house one time asking for a drink. I was about 10 and I knew from my experience with my brother that the man was an alcoholic. All we had in the place was rubbing alcohol and he wanted to drink it. I took the bottle and poured it down the sink right in front of him. My mother was shocked that I would do that.

            In 1967 we drove up to Oshawa, Ontario to spend Easter with my brother, my sister in law and my infant niece. One time while we were there Allison asked Ann for money to buy a drink and when she refused he hit her. I was 12 and he was 23, but I jumped him anyway. He threw me across the room.

Shawinigan Handshake

            On Tuesday morning I finished re-memorizing Serge Gainsbourg's “Poupée de Sire, Poupée de Son”, which is one of the first Gainsbourg songs I learned. I was surprised at how easy it was to get the lyrics back into my head after a few years, so good on my memory, though the song was probably hanging around in there in the shadows anyway.

            I had an appointment that afternoon with George Elliot Clarke so I took an early siesta. I got to University College about fifteen minutes early. I stood outside the Senior Commons Room and the building was stifling hot, so I opened the side door and leaned on it to cool off until 15:15. When George arrived he was only one minute late but he thought he was later than that and apologized.

            I showed him my last two essays and asked him to point out the writing flaws that caused me to drop to a B+ from an A- on the latest paper. He assured me that my writing was good and that I almost had an A- but that there were just a few more peccadilloes and that if I'd had more commas in place I would have gotten an A-. He said that to get better than an A- I should just keep doing what I'm doing. He liked my phrase, “ … moitié-moitié melange of Black and White …” I told him that learning to write essays is like getting used to dancing in a very tight suit. He laughed and told me he liked that comparison.

            I've been watching the Leonard Cohen documentary, “Bird on a Wire”, which was shot during his 1972 tour of Israel and Europe. It shows Cohen in a much darker light because he was going through a personal crisis at that time. I recommended it to George. I assume it’s available in some video stores.

            We talked about the last class next week and he told me that he was going to allow any poets that wanted to read one poem. I said that I might read my translation of “Un Canadien Errant” which I’d brought in for the second class but hadn’t read because we were behind in time. I suggested that I could bring my guitar and he threw open his arms enthusiastically and told me to by all means bring my guitar. That means I definitely can’t come late to the last class like I have for all the other paper hand-in dates. George stood up to shake my hand when I left.

            It was way too early to go to the classroom and since I was in a good mood and had a fair amount of energy I decided to ride to the bank, to the Freshco in my neighbourhood and then drop the groceries off at my place before heading for class. That would save me from having to do all of that on the way home after school.

            On the way home I passed the big construction site at Peter and Queen where for decades all the venders sold their crafts. It’s definitely dug a big hole into the character of Queen West.

            On my way into the supermarket, a guy standing outside called my name. He looked familiar but I couldn’t quite place him until he told me his name. It was David Fontaine, one of my daughter’s teachers when she was in Grade 2. We chatted for a while about my efforts to learn French and his to learn Spanish. We also talked about French songwriters. He was already familiar with Serge Gainsbourg but hadn’t heard of Boris Vian, so he said he’d look him up.

            I bought grapes, oranges, tomatoes, avocados, cucumbers, sun dried tomatoes and two jugs of juice. On the way out, someone else called out my name. It was Margaret, one of my fairly regular yoga students at PARC from three years ago. The first thing she told me is that she didn’t know what I was doing but my energy is amazing right now. She asked if I was still teaching the class and I told her that I’d stopped after two months of no one coming at all. She shared that she went back to visit Portugal a while ago and had a great visit. Since she uses a walker I wondered how she got around while she was there. She explained that she has walking poles and so she was able to go to cafes and socialize but the time was way too short before she had to return to Canada. We chatted for a good ten minutes but then I hugged her and left.

            Because of all of the conversations I’d had, after putting my groceries away I only had three minutes to spare before it was time to leave again for class. I had a lot less energy climbing Brock Avenue than I did coming home on Queen Street. Because of riding downtown, home again, back downtown and finally home, this day would have the most bike riding I’d done all winter.

            I spent more than half an hour with my laptop writing about my earlier meeting with George until he showed up to begin our last formal class. George announced that for our final class next week everyone was invited to bring one poem to read and that after each person reads he would read one of his own and then we’d have a movie.

            He also stated that if we wanted our essays or projects back we needed to provide an SASE, that is a self addressed, stamped envelope, which he pronounces “Sassy!” because the office no longer holds onto our papers. Since he’s encountered students in the last few years that have never sent anything by mail, he drew a diagram so they would know how to address and stamp an envelope. He added that if any of us couldn’t get an envelope in time then if we would just give him our address then he would pay for the envelope and postage.

            Our final book of the course was “Tell: poems for a girlhood” by Soraya Peerbaye (pronounced Sare eye ah Peer bye yay). George said that it’s easily comparable to the other books we’ve studied in the second half.

            Soraya speaks both French and English but her mother tongue is French and George wanted us to guess what countries other than Canada have both French and English as the official language. I guessed the Congo but he said no and I see now that the official language of both the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of the Congo is French only. George said that Cameroon’s two official languages are French and English, but the other, where Soraya was born, is Mauritius, where also was once found the dodo bird. Many Canadian embassies are staffed by Mauritians because they are fluent in both of our official languages. English is the official language of government, French is the cultural language and the language of the marketplace is Creole. The country flies a rainbow flag that symbolizes its diverse culture. When the British conquered the island they did not suppress the French language and since a couple of decades after that they abolished slavery they needed cheap labour to work the plantations so they brought in a lot of people from India. A student piped in that there is also a significant Chinese population there. George added that Mauritius has the highest number of Miss Universe winners, suggesting that this is because of the multiracial mixture in their genes, but my later research could not find a single Mauritian having been crowned Miss Universe. I offered that there must have been an indigenous Mauritian language but George informed me that it was totally unpopulated when the first Europeans arrived. George told us the dodo bird became extinct because it was delicious and stupid. According to Wikipedia though, humans only indirectly killed off the dodo by destroying their habitat and by introducing dogs, cats and pigs to the island.

            Soraya writes about not feeling racialized until arriving in Canada when she was a teenager. She was othered and a victim of othering. A section of her book entitled “Who You Were” may be autobiographical and has several poems about a suicide attempt.

            Somehow George got associatively sidetracked to talking about the FBI warnings against copying at the beginnings of US videos and challenged, that if they tried to cross the border to arrest us the RCMP would stop them. I reminded him that the CIA did cross the border to experiment on Canadians with LSD, but George argued that was before our current prime minister was in power.

            Most of Perrbaye’s book has poems about the murder of Reena Virk in 1997 in Saanich, British Columbia and of the subsequent trial of her teenage killers. Eight kids participated and even more looked on. There were four trials and Soraya’s book uses realism and creativity with the trial language.

            George mentioned that there was also a book about the event, called “The Lynching of Reena Virk” by Tessa Chakrabarty. What I found is that it’s actually an article entitled “Reckless Eyeballing: Being Reena in Canada” by Tess Chakkalakal, which declares that Reena’s murder was a lynching. I was surprised by this because I’d always though that lynching referred specifically to hanging. George corrected me that a lynching is any mob killing as punishment. I see now that the word comes from an American Revolutionary named Charles Lynch, who served as an unofficial judge against loyalists.

            George said that “Tell” is also a kind of “Types of Canadian Women” with a racial element addressed. This is poetry that seeks the truth like Dirksen and Riccio. Trials are searches for the truth and the whole book is a kind of victim impact statement on behalf of Reena. Some of the descriptions are visceral and grisly. In the suicide poems she is specifically channelling Sylvia Plath. The poet is called to witness.

            For the third time in a row, George made his argument for putting George Bush and Tony Blair on trial at the Hague for war crimes and repeated that all he’d need to testify against them is a stack of Globe and Mail newspapers. He affirmed again that he would like to see them behind bars for the rest of their lives because he’s against the death penalty, though an argument could be made for it in this case.

                Crime shows the fault lines of society by magnifying class on social dysfunctions. He cited members of the Sûreté du Quebec raping indigenous women in the north. Crime is how we learn about power and how the underclass gets it. Sometimes only a criminal trial can dredge up social information as to how and why a crime happens.

                George told us that when he was in Brazil he was robbed by a Black, Brown and White trio that yanked his gold chain from his neck and ran away. He ran after them shouting “Cowards!” but he was glad they didn’t come back and beat him up.

            The Marquis de Sade wrote that crime should be permitted because it was a way for the poor to acquire property.

            In the 1980s a Canadian senator went to the police to make a complaint and was arrested for disturbing the peace.

            “Judge a society by its prisons.” – Dostoyevsky. George has visited prisoners in Kingston.

            The book uses random patterns of lines, showing the influence of Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” as well as TISH and the Black Mountain Poets. There is also imagism.

            The first poem we looked at was “Autopsy”. The entire book is an autopsy on the martyrdom of Reena Virk. Martyr is Greek for witness. Reena also fits the definition of a scapegoat, which takes on the sins of the community that killed her. Someone pointed out that Reena was also a Jehovah’s Witness.

            During the break I told George about being arrested at the age of eighteen when Toronto police officers planted drugs on me. He asked if I disputed it in court and I answered that my lawyer assured me that I would go to jail unless I pleaded guilty. I had a good job and a girlfriend that I was living with and I didn’t want to lose that so I lied and said that I was guilty.

            We talked about the legalization of pot next year. George said that he’d tried some marijuana muffins once but nothing happened. I told him that one has to build up sensitivity to pot.

            After the break we returned to “Autopsy”. There is an interplay between the poet’s descriptions and the court reports that is very Canadian. Peerbaye found poetry in the prosaic. I affirmed that I found the attempts to make poems with the technical language of the Reena Virk case to be contrived and distant but that the poems in the section, “Who We Were” are actually quite beautiful and tactile because it feels like the poet is writing from her own experience. Neither George nor anyone else agreed, with some arguing that the coldness and contrivedness of the language was necessary for effect.

            George said the book channels various cases of drowning in literature such as the death of Ophelia in Hamlet. There is also Li Po, who drowned after drinking too much nice rice wine and then tried to embrace the moon in the water. As they would say in the deep south of the United States, “Po’ Li Po!” Another literary drowning is the suicide of Virginia Woolf. Milton’s “Lycidas” and T. S. Eliot’s “Death by Water” from “The Wasteland”. George mentioned Delmore Schwartz as well, but I found out he died of a heart attack. He additionally brought up James Dickey’s poem, “Falling”, which is an elegy to a flight attendant who was sucked out of a plane in flight and fell to her death. “Tell” is also an elegy.

            He got sidetracked again to tell us about participating in the Canadian Geographical Society national bird debate. He said that since he is not an expert on birds he had to bring his poetic powers to play. He defended the black-capped chickadee and attacked the loon as being a psychotic viper and a tormented tarantula. I asked what bird won and George claimed it was the whiskey jack, but the website says it was the grey jay.

            Peerbaye’s descriptions are cinematic. Some of it is almost unpoetic. There are certain points where she adds French to stand as a counterpoint to testimony.

George helped her with the editing and asked her to read “Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei”, which uses deconstructionism mixed with several other diverse literary techniques and forms. She modulates between registers of speech and when she brings in French it is implicitly autobiographical, and a violent bilingualism. 

We looked at “Tendre la Gorge” which is partially a found poem.

Perhaps the word “gorge”, which means “throat” reminded George of former Prime Minister Chretien’s “Shawinigan handshake” when he grabbed a protester by the throat and threw him to the ground. I had gotten that incident mixed up with the home invasion at the prime minister’s residence in which a mentally ill man decided to try to assassinate Chretien. They locked themselves in the bedroom while brandishing an Inuit sculpture of a loon with which to hit him if he broke through. Of the handshake, George said that Chretien’s explanation to the press was an example of unintended free verse: “Some people came my way … and I had to go, so if you’re in my way …” George added that it helped that he had dark glasses on when he did it, which added to the cinematic effect.

We looked at the section “Who You Were”, which is prosaic, expository and giving of evidence. In the poem, “Skin”, the prose moves plainly forward. The image of the word “Paki” spelled in the snow compels the narrator to perfect the English oppressors in order to fit in. The irony is that she was probably richer than those that tried to treat her as third class.

George told us that when he was studying for his PHD in Kingston he wrote his thesis in one month. I don’t know much about it, but that sounds pretty impressive. He was on his way to the A&P one day when a black car slowed down and the guys inside shouted “Nigger!” He ran after them with a rock and threw it, but he was glad he missed because they probably would have beaten him up. George is one of the few people from his community in Nova Scotia to have earned a doctorate.

I read the poem, “Safety”. The line, “Nothing, I didn’t, I’m not” in response to questions about an attempted suicide are self-annihilations in themselves.

I thought George said that the word “tell” is Arabic in origin but it’s Germanic.

As we were packing up, George asked to clarify that I was bringing my guitar next time and he seemed glad that I was. Of course, he hasn’t heard me play.

Wet Traffic

            On Monday morning I finished another freefall poem:

The traffic is wet and sucking along the street where it has sounded the same in the city for so long that it’s familiar as the names of kin and its sonorous chorus comforts when it’s steady and flowing and builds musically with a rhythm and pitch that soothes the nerves unlike when sirens pass in daytime but at night with the breathing shushing traffic it comes from a distance and rises to an elastic crescendo below my window then fades away and when several vehicles are doing the same thing but starting at different times it’s like a symphony of polyrhythms and tones like that of the deep voiced truck that just grumbled by or the thundering streetcar and then the soft cars are alone again with the resonance of  hurrying ghosts dragging their damp ectoplasm along the road.

I had to work at midday so I took my laptop along to work on a poem during my long break. On the way there I passed a homeless Chinese woman sitting on the curb at Spadina and Dundas. When I was on the street I was young and I kind of enjoyed it but I can’t imagine being out there all the time in middle age. She seemed like she might be mentally ill and that some connections had been severed between her mind and the world. There don’t seem to be any safeguards to keep the mad from sinking into the depths of the city.

            I was early getting to OCADU as usual and when I signed in I was surprised to see that I would be working with another model whose name I didn’t catch at that time. We used to have two models to a studio fairly often back in the 80s before they decided that the best way to save money at the art college was to have less people to draw. I found the instructor, Echo Railton, who is replacing Diane Pugen, writing the assignment on the blackboard with her back turned. I said hello and then so did she. She explained to me that the students would be having a test at 13:20 in which they would be drawing portraits of both me and the other model on the stage, but until then they would have us both to practice with. She had arranged some drawing horses in a circle around a space on the floor and asked me if that would be enough for one model to do short poses. I asked if it would be naked and she said “preferably”. I reminded her that the floor is cold, so she went and got some pillows.

            Shortly after starting time the other model arrived. When Echo asked which of us wanted to do the short poses, the other model said that she only sat for portraits. I didn’t know that a model could be on the payroll at OCADU and be that picky. So I got the job of doing short sittings until the test, except that there were no students in that section so she told me to just have a seat and wait. I felt uncomfortable just sitting there while the other model worked. Twenty minutes went by until a young blonde woman came and put her stuff down on one of the horses. I went over there and stood while she spent more than five minutes getting her things ready, then she stood up with her sketchpad and went over to take a seat in front of the stage to draw the other model. Echo was doing a portfolio assessment with one of her students and when she was finished she announced that I was available for short drawings. At first only the guy she’d just assessed wanted that option, so I posed just for him.

            This gig had originally been listed as all nude, but last week the model coordinator had emailed to inform me that it had changed to just a costume portrait of the head. I joked back to her that I was glad she’d told me because I’d planned on showing up naked and headless. With that change in mind I was looking forward to not having to remove my clothing this time, but it turned out that I had to after all.

            A little later another student sat down to draw me but only for one ten-minute pose. After about an hour it was time to start the test, so I put my clothes back on and sat in the chair beside the other model. She kept a different time than I did but it didn’t really matter because students were either drawing her or me. She posed for 25-minute sets while I always follow the fact that our contract states that we don’t have to pose longer than 20 minutes without a break.

            When we were finished I turned to my colleague and exclaimed, “We did it!” Then I introduced myself and found out that her name is Valeria.

            I looked at the work of one of the students and it was very well done but I told her that it was much better looking than me. Echo declared, “It looks just like you!” The student told me not to be so hard on myself.

            I stopped at Freshco on the way home to buy as many tomatoes as I could get for the $1.05 that I had in my pocket. I found the two smallest ones and weighed them very carefully. I walked away with ten cents.

            That night I watched an episode of Leave It To Beaver in which Eddie Haskell, after every time he did something shitty, started singing, “C’est Si Bon”.

The Long, Warm Thread Between Us

            On Sunday the things I wear around the house were getting a little cheesy so I washed them in the sink and put them outside to drip before drying them in my hot apartment.

            I was running out of fruit on the tenth day of my fast and so I couldn’t wait for my cheque. I headed down to the bank and when I noticed it was raining I resigned myself to not having dry home clothes in the next few hours. I took the minimum amount out of my account because I still wasn’t sure if I’d have enough for my rent when the direct deposit arrived later in the week. I went to Freshco and picked out a few things, adding up the prices as I shopped. I took a bunch of globe grapes; two mesh bags of avocados, a trio and a duo of hothouse tomatoes on the vine and a jug of orange juice. You can’t get that much for $20.00 when you’re living on fruit. The express checkout was closed because one of the senior cashiers was doing some paperwork there, so I stepped in a long line behind a couple of late middle aged women of East Indian descent but maybe from Guyana. For some reason they let me go ahead of them. When my items were tallied it turned out that I had slightly miscalculated and so I had to take back the duo of tomatoes. But the cashier had to weigh them all in order to deduct the amount and she seemed annoyed about that.

            When I got home I started another ghazal called “The Long, Warm Thread Between Us” and finished it later on:

I feel the tug

of the long, warm thread between us.

Interesting things materialize.

Firemen lift up a man on his knees.

I don’t ask for much.

Just one slow-healing touch.

That streetcar. I want to be on it,

though I don’t know where it’s going.

There are lots of discarded parts

to Frankenstein for the cause of art.

Abundance is lush.

It’s just too much.

Now is an adventure.

A random circus of moments.

The ego is a person too,

though there’s so much pimpin that it do.

            I watched an episode of Leave it to Beaver in which Eddie Haskell tried to cheat on a history test by putting the answers on paper towels in the boys room dispenser. His plan was that he would ask to use the washroom during the test and then go there to look at the answers. But early in the test Wally Cleaver got ink on his hands and he had to go to the boys room to clean them. While he was drying his mits he found a cryptic message on one of the towels, but shrugged and then tossed before going back to his test. Later when Eddie went there he couldn’t find his cheat sheet and suspected that Wally had used it. When he later saw that Wally got a 92 on his test while he only got a 62, he concluded that Wally had definitely cheated, so he sent an anonymous note to the teacher to rat on him. To instructor called Wally in early the next day to talk to him about it but he knew that Wally hadn’t cheated because he had actually gone into the washroom before the test, removed the answers and left the note.

The Lotus Hotel

            Saturday was my first almost normal morning of playing guitar in a week. My thumb only felt a little tender a ways into practice.

            I finished my poem, “May Basket” using the focused stream of consciousness technique of freefall:

Growing up in rural New Brunswick was like being exiled from my dreams in a low security prison for which the warden was boredom. But within its walls made of distance, age and frozen progress, no one followed me around and I had the sweet freedom of benevolent neglect. Looking back on how I was allowed to wander by myself when very young into the cedar forest seems like I once had the ability to fly. I caught bright, beautiful sunfish in the little quicksand lake behind my friend’s house. I lay on my back on a truckload of hay while watching meteorites fall. I saw the northern lights shimmering icy pink and humming like a transformer in the sky. I remember the snow: how deep the powder was when its crust broke beneath my feet. It delighted me when fresh, but I was impatient for its death every spring. How culturally starved our little low-hilled, wooded humdrum pocket of nowhere seemed. But there were little traditions that shone through, like the now forgotten ritual in May of mothers making bright coloured baskets out of tissue for boys and girls to hang on the doorways of other boys and girls which signaled one to come out and chase the other for a kiss. 

            For the first time in about three years I remembered to shut my lights off for Earth Day. I lit candles in all my rooms and it was nice and not hard to live with for an hour. When I looked out my window though I saw that a lot of people had their lights on.

            I started working on a longer piece inspired by Susan Musgrave, called “Lotus Hotel”, and telling a story of something that happened in Vancouver in the late 70s, and I think it’s done for now:

I know that I didn’t personally break her

neck, but sometimes I wonder if I should

have let her in that night

because it might have saved her

from an unfortunate fate.

She had the room next to mine in the Lotus

Hotel, where we had a view

of the back airshaft

and of all of the other lucky windows

that looked out upon the rear

of the building, and down to the concrete

bottom, which showed the viewer

all of the things that were thrown or had fallen

out and down from all of the floors

like the top one where we lived

on different sides of one corner

of the lightwell, and divided

by the men’s washroom, which had a window

on my edge, so when I looked

outside, the closest thing I saw was her porthole,

which was always open,

even on cold days. But I had not seen her yet

and didn’t know that my neighbour was a woman

till once when I was reading

by my open window and I heard her

laughing next door. I glanced

across and noticed that someone was throwing

a party and I caught her

face and saw that she was the loudest

of them all, but then I ignored that and returned

to my book. Suddenly though a beer stubby flew

in through my window. I picked it up and heaved

it back in theirs and resettled

in my pages, only to have

the bottle bonk me

on the noggin this time. I shouted out

“You hit me in the head!” She looked out

at me and then went away. Everything was quiet

until abruptly there was a knock

on my door and it was her coming to apologize

to me for being so deathly

rude as to toss her empty

into my fenestra so as to strike me full

against my skull. She asked if she could come in

to my chamber and I

said yes. She sat down on my bed

and then we started to shoot

the breeze about my life and hers. When she got

more comfortable she stretched

out and looked at me

in a very friendly way as she told me

that she’d inherited

her own boat and that I was invited

to come out and sail with her

sometime. She was Haida and I did find her

attractive, though she was twenty

years older than me. We talked

for a while and then she went back

to drink some more.

I was in bed

when she knocked on my door again the next

night and asked if she could come

in. But I had to work in the morning and told her

I needed to get

some rest, so she went away.

I was pulled from sleep

an hour or so later by the sound of cops

in the hall. I went out

and learned that my new friend had locked her

key in her room and gone

into the men’s washroom to try to climb out

of the window in order to get in

but she’d been drinking and so she fell

head first to the bottom of the lightwell and broke

her neck when she hit the concrete.

I never saw her again but I wonder

if something could have happened between

us if I’d let her into my room that night instead

of turning in bed away from her,

falling asleep while facing the window that she reached

for drunkenly but failed to grab

and then tumbled to death.

A Type of Flight

            On Friday the cut on my thumb was officially downgraded from painful to sensitive during guitar practice. It’s definitely starting to heal over and it’s interesting how suddenly the change seemed to come.

            I finished writing another ghazal, this one exploring a more upbeat mood. It’s called “This Is a Manner of Flight”:

Learning to surf on the updraft of a sigh

through tunnels to lights and sometimes the sky.

I’m just curious about how it all ends

and what sweet crash-ups I might be involved in.

I manoeuvre my oeuvre over and around the bumps

every so often with gambolling jumps.

Voices delight me from every tongue

with a sound of sunshine worth waiting on.

Even the wooden floor is charming although it’s dirty

because the groove that I’m in is outside of the groove but groovy.

I dance a no touching cha cha with hope

because there are still stirring things to write about.

I have learned to lean on the fact that I am still learning

and enjoy a lean cut of daily singing.

Arrival doesn’t thrill like the highway

just like getting old is so much better than dying.

This feeling of relaxation may live in

the very heart of my lack of ambition.

It’s a type of flight to avoid landing

on things that deep-freeze understanding.

            I started working on a free fall derived poem called “May Basket”, about growing up in New Brunswick.

My Mind Whispers Blindly

            Thursday guitar practice seemed like it was slightly less painful for my thumb than it has been. Hopefully it’s not my imagination and the slice is healing.

            I needed more fruit for my hungry fast but I only had about $23.00 and I didn’t want to take anything out of the bank until I was sure that my social services cheque was going add to what I had and make enough to pay for my rent and phone. I decided to take the two large bags full of beer cans that have been sitting here for months to the Beer Store to cash them in. I got $5.80 then rode up Brock and up the next street to Dufferin and turned south. I wanted to take the next left so I looked behind me and saw that I had time to get into the middle lane. After I’d done that a car blared angrily at me from behind and then with even more venom, gunned his engine and swerved past me on the right side. I guess I could have mistimed my lane change but it seemed to me I hadn’t.

            I picked up grapes, a package of Red Prince apples, avocadoes, vine tomatoes and two large jugs of Simply Orange because they were on sale for $4.00 each. The express checkout was free but it was piloted by this cashier that I don’t like. I don’t know why I don’t like her. She’s never done anything to me to warrant my feeling but I find her manner annoying. She is so robotic and superficial in the way that she says loudly to each and every person in the exact same tone every time, “Hello how are you?” and you know she doesn’t really want to know how you are. Of course they all say “hi” and sometimes “how are you” but it doesn’t sound as fake. She may very well be the nicest person that one could possibly get to know but her chemistry just rubs me the wrong way.

            On the way back I almost got doored by a young guy getting out of a cab.  He was wearing bright red lipstick though he wasn’t in drag and when he said, “Sorry friend!” I just told him to look back.

            I finished my poem, “My Mind Whispers Blindly”. I now have thirteen pages of poetry in my manuscript for the final project but I still need nine more.

She would not settle for the limits

of satisfaction but rather left

herself open to being swept away

as a piece of the machinery

in the vibrator of Mother Nature. She

rode the orgasm of situation

all flux, as she was a victim of fate

waiting patiently for her promotion

to destiny. To her, being raped

while making her way home from a night

club was no different from being caught in a rain

storm. Hers was an indiscretionary

hedonism with a mutated coat

of many Buddhas thrown over it.

She had the stuff to be a guru

when she wasn’t like a crumpled poem

found on the streetcar or on the curb side

on garbage night. She was beautiful

enough to get away with it

and she wasn’t crazy but was good theatre

because she didn’t know how to act

and so people always paid her since

there is nothing quite as mysterious

as a person that refuses

to conceal that she has no plans

and so others made plans for her. She

never landed on an orgasm

although her pleasures mounted so much higher

than the average climax she had one

gee spotless reputation

and was so passive that she would fuck any

body for nothing. But women don’t seem to

flirt with madness as successfully as men,

meaning they tend to need a handle

to handle insanity, like Jesus

or democracy or else they lose

their way. My mind whispers blindly

a hallucination of her

has been delivered to my head without

the usual condom, because I am

no one if I don’t display the blind

contours that illuminate the wonder

of  animal magnets that don’t

need a leash but merely a polisher for their poles.

My wounded heart needs nourishment in sweet dreamland

so that’s where I’m going and won’t be back.

            I watched an episode of Leave It To Beaver that had an interesting statement from Beaver and Wally to their father. They told him they’d rather him punish them with hitting than to have him call them stupid. They said that the pain of a spanking just lasts a little while but the pain of the words would stay with them a long time.

Waiting for a Wounded Highway Tool to Heal

            Wednesday was the sixth day of my annual two-week fast. I’m living basically on orange juice, grapes, oranges, avocados and tomatoes. I only sleep twice a day as usual, but I enjoy it more.

I guess this thumb wound that I have is bigger and deeper than I’d perceived. At first had thought that it was just a little prick but it’s really a cut that’s almost a centimetre long. So even if it’s healing it’s still going to hurt because it will heal from the ends first and so the middle will continue to be touching stuff, like a guitar pick when I play and it hurts just as much every day. I have to strum very lightly to diminish the pain, which turns down the volume on my guitar, which makes the notes sound different and causes me to sing in an unusual way. It would be a real rip off if the thumb that took me down so many highways across Canada and part of Europe were to end up stinging permanently after settling down.

            I spent a lot of the day working on updating my journal and finished it that night. I tried to work on my latest poem, “My Mind Whispers Blindly”, but I got tuckered out.

            I went to bed half an hour earlier than usual.

Giovanna Riccio

            On Tuesday my thumb was still smarting during guitar practice from the little cut it got on Sunday.  I assume it's healing though since it doesn't look worse and because it's the thumb, which is a heavy blood flow appendage.

            I worked on another poem that I'd started the night before, using three older pieces and the technique of using lines that are complete in their meaning but that flow also into the next line. I brought it with me to school in case I had time to work on it there.

            I walked out into a beautiful afternoon and removed my winter gloves to place them in my backpack with the extra scarf that I might need later since the temperature was supposed to drop very fast that night.

            In Koreatown a white guy was crossing the street with some Korean women and when three of them veered right he followed the younger one. She turned to sort of gently push him back and told him that she was going to work and that the others would show him where to go.

            Just past Bathurst there was a bicycle locked to a stand but it had fallen away from it so that it was lying halfway into the bike path. I decided that I had time to stop and prop it back up. A cyclist coming up behind me thanked me but it might have been just for getting out of his way.

            I had planned on leaving home half an hour early so I could renew my french exercise books at the OISE library, but I ended up leaving only fifteen minutes ahead of time. That turned out to be pretty much perfect.

            After OISE I went down Devonshire and then around the back of University College. There were only two students in the classroom, probably because it was such a nice evening. I mostly had time to update my journal before George arrived with a surprise guest, though it wasn’t that much of a surprise to me. Our focus of study that night was Giovanna Riccio’s book, “Strong Bread” and George had brought Giovanna to read for us. When I said to George, “I had a sense you were going to bring Giovanna tonight!” she looked over and saw me then said hello. I greeted her and told her it was good to see her and she said, “Likewise!”

            George announced that it was the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and World Poetry Day. Giovanna added that it was also the International Day of Happiness. I found out when I looked it up later that she was a day late on that one.

            George told us that Giovanna would be reading for twenty minutes just before our break at the halfway mark. She said she didn’t want to torture us for that long. He mentioned her involvement with the Shab-e She’r reading series and also another called “The Not So Nice Italian Girls”, which George said he’s read at and so he must also be a not so nice Italian girl. Giovanna corrected him that the series is called “The Not So Nice Italian Girls (and Friends). I asked if that was anything like The Friends of the Black Panthers.

            George described “Strong Bread” as a very fine feminist unity of various interests and subjects. He asked for a volunteer to read the first poem in the book, “Mondays in Hell”. Giovanna said, “Great reading Christian!” It’s a revisitation of girlhood and the Puritanism and oppression of a Catholic school. It contains a train of metaphors that refer to heat both of hell and lust. It invokes the hijinx of youth outside of the reach of parental probity. The lines: “God’s love? Yes! / We wanted it” are ironic in that god’s love and carnal love are equated. George added that as an African Baptist from Nova Scotia he could confirm that there is not much difference. Giovanna explained that the poem is not based on her own experience but of other girls who had attended Catholic school. I offered that the allusions to hell call to mind the very scary description of hell by the priest in James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”.

            The next poem we looked at was “Libby”, for Libby Scheier, who was a prominent feminist Toronto poet of the 80s and 90s. Giovanna writes about having suckled strength from her. There were a couple of words I didn’t know. George laughed when I asked what the “pudendum” was. Giovanna explained that it’s the vagina. Another word was “lupanars”, which were brothels in Pompeii. I think that’s what they were called throughout the Roman Empire. George said the poem reclaims the female genitalia and that the description of a lunar crescent as “that lip of the moon” serves to humanize our satellite. The imagery is welcoming and clear.

            Her poem “Night Shift” adds a dimension of class. The book overall is about strength and makes a space where it’s okay to be an Italian Canadian.

            Her poem “Runaway” is about a woman running from an abusive relationship and it has a social dimension because it is also about survival from being treated as second class because one is either an Italian woman.

            At this point it was time for Giovanna to read. She told us that she was humbled by all of the intelligent comments the class had made in response to each poem. She informed us first of all that “Strong Bread” is not a themed book. She said that she was once part of a collective in which some of the members wanted to be post-ethnic, but she said, “We’re not there yet”. Some immigrants leave their country of birth but they never quite arrive at the new place. She told us that her sister is like that. Of her previously read poem, “Night Shift”, she asked rhetorically, “What is more invisible than someone who works at night?”

            She read her poem, “The Pull of the Tide” which describes her sister’s relationship with her home in conflict with her desire to travel. Giovanna declared that Italians are obsessive cleaners of their homes. She says she liberates her sister in this poem.

            Giovanna’s father was severe and her mother worked in jewellery factories painting bobbles. She brought lots of necklaces home to her daughters until a series of strokes put her out of commission. Giovanna shared with us that she had a difficult relationship with her mother because “she never understood me”.

            Of her poem “Snow Globe”, she pointed out that the publisher made a typo in printing it as “Snow Globes”. The piece is about the death of her mother.

            The idea of “The Not So Nice Italian Girls” reading series came out of the trend of a lot of guys wanting to marry a “nice Italian girl”. There had once been a reading series named “The Nice Italian Girls” but when it was rebooted they decided to change it.

            Before reading her last poem, “Under the Covers” Giovanna explained that she has tweaked it since it was printed and indeed, some of the words were replaced with others. After she went back to her seat, George asserted that “Under the Covers” was a metaphysical poem that calls to mind John Donne.

            We had a fifteen minute break and I had planned on getting Giovanna to sign my copy of her book, but so many people approached her to either buy books or to get theirs signed, while others engaged her in conversation and so there wasn’t time. I instead informed George that he’d gotten his castles mixed up last week. I had found out that Hawthornden Castle in Scotland is not the one owned by Queen’s University as he said, but rather by the publisher of the Paris Review and that the castle owned by the Kingston school is actually Herstmonceux Castle in Sussex. I didn’t remember the names of either castle but someone else looked it up and confirmed that I was right. He appreciated the correction.

            I made an appointment to meet George next Tuesday at 15:15. He said he could spare me half an hour and then he’d go back to reading articles about Donald Trump. I told him that I’d watched an interview with Dave Chapelle, who said that he disagrees with the trend that claims that Donald Trump is good for comedy. He said the fact is that Donald Trump causes a lot of comedians to write the same jokes.

            After the break we looked at Giovanna’s poem “I Imagine Myself As Mrs. Hale”. The word “torte” is not just a cake, but also a legal term. He stated that this is another poem with metaphysical imagery. It’s from the perspective of a young Italian woman engaged to an Anglo Saxon man who takes her to visit his parents in Peterborough. George started making fun of Peterborough. It turns out that Canadian troops ran Italian prisoner of war camps during world war two. In the poem, the father of the woman’s fiancé shows her a bronze plate that was carved for him by an Italian prisoner. I commented that there is an interesting contrast between the prisoner’s plate and the later reference to “ … Ghiberti’s bronze doors / and the chain of figures carved / on the Palazzo di Giustizia in Florence …” because one was made in captivity and the other is the result of a flowering culture. Giovanna pointed out that “Palazzo di Giustizia” means “Palace of Justice”.

            George confirmed that Canada also had interment camps for Italian men both in Petawawa, Ontario and in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Of the Fredericton camp, he informed us that the interns had to live in tents, even in the wintertime. He disclosed that it was Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie, the one that ran the country with séances and by talking to his dead mother through his dog, who approved the internment camps, despite the fact that he was a big “L” Liberal. Up until the war he actually admired Hitler and there are photos of the two together.

            Patrick asked Giovanna about the lines: “feet firm on familiar territory, you / could afford to quote Dante …” She explained that the woman’s fiancé was trying to use an Italian quote to compel her to be detached from the anti-Italian behaviour of his bigoted father.

            George observed that the poem is like a Robert Altman film in how it portrays a surface politeness with a context of hostility.

            The poems of the book work in sequences. For example one poem ends with someone looking down while the next has a character looking upward.

            He mentioned again his wish of putting Tony Blair and George Bush behind bars at The Hague. He insisted that he would be able to testify and the only evidence he would need is the speeches of Jean Chretien.

            We looked at the poem, “Namesake”, which George stressed is about finding one’s voice. He insisted that every poet has to write a poem about finding their voice. He pointed out that there is a tension in the attempt to find one’s Italian voice in English because it also resists English. He stated that the piece is cinematic and also a mini-odyssey. He called us back to the title and presented us with the image of bread rising being a metaphor for the rising consciousness of the poet as a result of returning to her roots. In contrast to the previous poem the protagonist marries herself in Italy rather than an Anglo Saxon guy in the Cawarthas. Of the reference to Queen Giovanna of Naples, our guest inserted proudly that the monarch reigned for thirty-six years. The lines: “the teacher unrolling my “r”s / clipping my name – Joan” led to a long conversation about the forced Anglicization of the names of immigrants. The young woman next to me confirmed that it happened to her. I interjected though that people also do it to themselves and then related how I’d once known a guy from Kenya named Ibrihim who wanted me to call him “Brian”. I said, “Why would I call you Brian if your name is Ibrihim?”

            George brought forward that it was the mini-series, “Roots” that started the trend of Black people taking on African sounding names or of young African American mothers giving such names to their children. He also confessed that he has considered changing his own name but he feels the urge to keep in touch with his familial roots. Giovanna asserted that he was too famous now to change his name. Staying relatively on the same subject he pronounced that the next poet that he would be putting up on the parliamentary website is Saskatchewan poet Stephen Brown who he let us know now lives in Mexico City and that “Stephen Brown” is not his birth name.

            We looked at the poem, “Plastic Arts”, dedicated to Gianna Patriarca, who is also an Italian Canadian poet. The piece begins with a quote from Piet Mondrian’s essay on the plastic arts. The poem is in two parts, with the first a background to the second. The subject is the reputation that Italians have for putting plastic coverings over their furniture. Giovanna revealed that other immigrant groups did the same thing but Italians got stuck with the stereotype. In the last section the question is asked, “What’s it like to grow up / with plastic on the furniture”. The implication here is that the question is a rude and superficial one and the answer is that it’s the same as growing up without it only there’s plastic on the furniture. I argued that it’s an unsatisfying answer since any question could be answered that way.

            There were a lot of comments to this section, but I would add that the class responded more to Giovanna’s book than to any of the others we’ve covered. Perhaps the immigrant experience is close to home for a lot of people.

            George had wanted for us to hear Giovanna’s long poem, “Vittorio”, but we were down to the last few minutes and so he only had time to talk about it a bit. He pronounced that it reminds him of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Wasteland”. Owning words puts one in a higher social class than a landowner. The poem is elegiac.

            The last poem we looked at was “Catalogue 1 – Stuff”. George vouched that it’s epistolary in that it was written in the form of a letter. It contains lines from Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma”.

            In conclusion, George told us that “Strong Bread” is a testimonial to survival; it’s epigrammatic, cavalier, metaphysical and imagistic.

            His final statement was, “Immigration is class warfare!”

            I asked Giovanna to sign my copy of her book, and while she was doing so I recounted to her about my trip to Italy back in 1987. She asked how I found the Italians and I related the sad tale of my getting ripped off for my camera and passport. I offered her my theory though that places with a lot of thieves also have a lot of exceptionally generous people, as I can attest to with examples of people in Italy giving me the equivalent of a hundred dollars on more than one occasion without me asking them for anything.

            She told me that she enjoys my music and my morbid sense of humour. I seem to have a reputation for being funny without that being my main intention. What Giovanna wrote in my book was very nice: “To Christian, Thanks for reading, and looking forward to hearing you sing and play. Warmly, Giovanna Riccio, March 21, 2017.”

            The temperature was starting to drop when I left University College, so I was glad that I’d brought along my gloves and my extra scarf.

            I stopped at Freshco on the way home where I needed to get toilet paper and paper towels, and I also stocked up on grapes, tomatoes, avocadoes and mangoes. I would have liked to get orange juice but I hadn’t bothered to keep track of how much everything was going to ring up to so I didn’t know if I would have enough. It turned out that I did but I’d just have to go back for that later.

            I had a late dinner of tomatoes and avocadoes with no dressing with mangoes for dessert while watching an interesting episode of “Leave It To Beaver”. There is a character that has appeared from time to time named Benji, who is younger and more naïve than Beaver and his friends. In this story Beaver and Larry are on a magic kick and they go halfsies on a little coin-switching device from the local magic shop but none of the adults are impressed. When Benji shows up talking to a container full of ants they try the trick on him and totally blow his mind. Then they decide to try a bigger trick on the younger boy. Larry holds a blanket in front of Beaver while Beaver hides in the woodbin. Then he removes the blanket and tells Benji that he’s turned Beaver into a rock. Benji shouts, “Turn him back!” but Larry gets called home. Benji picks up the rock and takes it home then when his mother finds him sleeping with it he insists that it’s Beaver. The next day she takes Benji over to the Cleaver house to prove to Benji that Beaver is not a rock, but Beaver has gone away to spend the weekend with his Aunt Martha. In the end, to allay Benji’s trauma, Beaver’s father has to drive the long distance to bring Beaver back early so as to give Benji peace of mind.

            It reminds me of a story that a cousin of mine recounted about a dirty trick that my mother and her younger sister played on him when they were kids and he was a few years younger. They whitened his older brother’s face with flour in the barn and had him lie very still, then they called my cousin in to say, “Look, your brother is dead!”