from
SOLID THINGS
Poems New and Selected

LIFE INSURANCE

(The dreamer, a young woman, has been hospitalized after the crash of a small, private airplane on its way to a sales workshop.)

*

That sky was blue, was baby blue and solid.

Nothing stirred,

except the crackling of the plane,

the sough of trees —

a sort of smoke

that vanished from the singed grey earth

around me like a steam from stones.

Bob tucked the orange space blanket down,

weighting the light foil.

A branch

leans on my chest like a fallen tree.

Its needles and the bright foil twitch

in the tiny wind.

He said, he said:

               Don’t blow away.

The wind turned white, turned darker, turned

to coarse white curtains like a tent.

It fell against me, closed my eyes. A strap

around me weighed me down. . . .

He coughed.

He didn’t. Ivan’s dead.

An icy thorn digs in my hand. The sun

sags in scrawny leafless trees

like a small red dial.

A thumb

counts numbers on my wrist.

Clouds

rattle like metal. Their blanketing

stifles, weights me,

holds me down.

*

I wanted to fly the plane myself.

He could teach me how.

To take the surging engine in my hands.

To pull her over the scratchy trees

into the soaring ecstasies. . . .

The shadows dart across the fields, the clouds

dotting the winter-scalded earth

sun-spangled under their crescent tips.

The cockpit clamorous with light,

and Ivan laughing when she bucks

and shivers in the rattling wind.

               Hang on! he says. She’s a rocking horse!

               Rockabye baby!

                                        She drops.

He did that on purpose.

He pulls her up.

Drilling into the brilliancies

higher and higher.

*

               Just Bob from the office, you and me,

               and Sandy, if he makes it out.

               A weekend learning to suck eggs.

               Nothing we don’t know already, kid.

               And maybe, later?

                                        He wasn’t sure

I’d answer.

               That was my big mistake,

               letting these other guys come along,

               but they knew I was flying up, you see.

He waffles, worries what anyone thinks.

Big Ivan, uncertain of everything.

I’m your man, he says,

                                        he hopes.

He wants to boast to the other guys:

               Best little salesman that we got!

               SalesPERSON, he says.

               These little redheads!

               Don’t get a divorce for me, I said.

I should have said no.

It didn’t mean that much to me.

He knew I’d just been trying on.

They make so much of it. Too much.

He made too much.

               Not me, I said, Don’t count on me.

I couldn’t tell him my freedom is

no strings. No strings.

My mother was

all strings.

*

Insurance, my trade. But to be alive,

to fly —

free of the tugging, aching earth,

its sores, to be free of my mother’s hands,

of the room where my mother waits for me

all night, awake, in her rocking chair,

like a clock, like a nurse,

like an open wound. . . .

               Later on, he said. I want to fly. Now.

               Says, Later on.

The white light bubbles around us, higher,

higher — He swoops:

               Whoopee! he cries. Hang on!

We dive.

We drop like a hawk’s collapse

when it strikes for fish.

The show-off, Ivan, showing off.

She snapped. She snapped. Some muscle broke.

She buckled like a plastic toy. Fell,

as if shot.

I heard the trees

breaking —

               and

               Bob. Can you get the door?

He hauled me out.

               Gee Christ, he said. Old Ivan.

               Ivan’s bought it.

                                        Christ.

*

But this is a dream. I see my life:

a passive seed in the fairy books,

never myself but the “good girl”

all wrapped up in a neat cocoon.

Papoose — a woman in a bag

carried about

by a woman in —

another bag.

I want to fly but the clouds close in,

their heavy winter closing in,

glazing the windows. I want to fly

before the winds and the waters close.

I flew. Or in my mind I flew.

I fell.

*

My spirit like a dew drop lay

like Thumbelina on her leaf

that tugged against the current, chrysalis

upon the fluent waters, to escape —

until my muddy mother drew me in.

Her mouse hands cribbed me, tied me up.

She rocked me in a walnut shell

under the ground, the stones, the roots,

said Sleep, said Sleep, all winter long.

*

Oh to be running the woods again

skiing alone, or in my car,

the white ice skidding against my tires

as I take the corner:

               Red! You little redheads sure are tough!

               I’ll race you if you want.

                                                  I’ll win.

Thinking he’s something.

On my own.

I want to take the plane myself, control

the hawk’s bright soaring, take

the downhill skier’s rush, the twist,

the turn —

               but the t-bar crowd

makes grabs at me. It holds me down,

that long rope straining up the hill —

               Be a good girl, someone, worrying

               says. Shh. Says, Go to sleep.

*

You can’t catch me. I’m the Candy Queen.

I’m fine. I’m fine.

Just hold that thought.

When they rev their motors after you,

their bright lights hurtling after you —

white lightning on the slick —

Steering into the icy hill,

the swooping hilltops of the night,

the white rock pylon ledges. . . .

Like a hawk

threads through the bristle boughs,

flicker of wing dust, lights:

on the snow where the trail breaks red —

the frantic mouse hands scrabbling —

then white.

*

She worries a lot. As if her pain

were something that could hold me down.

She’s sick. My mother’s sick.

She’s dead.

*

A red light flickers through the twigs,

a fire crackles, somewhere, beyond my feet,

stinking of metal.

The wind that bellies the glittering foil

can’t lift me up. I hang

under it strapped in a lead cocoon.

Weighed down. Weighed down.

The branches broke.

Great tree boughs hold me down.

*

Log walls, the antlered curtain rods,

the wolfskin with its musty smell,

and my arms tied down — it felt like that,

zipped up in the stinking sleeping bag,

its singed grey serge,

the grey bark flaking from the walls—

I must have been only six years old.

My sharp nosed father grins at me

stark midnight, with his glassy eyes . . .

a dead dog at the highway’s edge

raising its head.

The wolfskin flattened against the wall,

the glittering marbles of its eyes

scratched, the pink mouth gaping —

dead.

          Only the red dial of the fire

rustling, my mother in her chair,

her bruised eyes like an owl’s.

Tick tock.

               You never knew him, Mother said.

               You couldn’t adjust to it, she said.

               You were much too young.

*

Mary had a baby. What did Mary do?

Put it down the elevator. Shame on you!

First you call the doctor.

Then you call the nurse.

Cry Baby. Cry Baby. Tell me where it hurts.

*

He was warm, poor shabby, velvet thing,

poor mole.

And cosy, at first, like an old nest.

But his breath was stale,

panting above me. . . .

                                   gasoline

charring the peat where the snubbed

plane —

the dark sludge trickling from the wings’

crushed tinfoil —

                              shredded,

still shuddering. . . .

*

I’m lying in a hospital.

Far down the darkened corridor

the huge floor waxer drones,

drones like a pilot overhead,

speck on the sky-ball —

Does he see the tinfoil spattered on the trees?

Ice leaking, freezing, leaking —

ash? My flaming plastic flaring?

                                                       Don’t

rockabye baby,

                         rock the bed —

                                                  but Ivan,

stone weight

                         leans on me.

                         Hey Red, he says.

He holds me down.

The bedsprings creak and rattle with his weight.

*

The hot cocoon grows soggy, cools,

and Mother, dark earth, gathers me.

I lie in mud, in stony mud,

tangled by grasping, corded roots.

I lie where I fell, a tiny girl

the fairies dropped, forgetful.

Mole, the tender visitor, Ivan,

who thinks I’ll marry him,

gropes for me underground.

His humid smell spreads over me —

a whole life —

underground. . . .

*

I dream, I dream of the upper air,

of the forest of unborn animals

disembodied, nameless,

free. . . .

The fur thing strolling at my side

along the charcoal fringes of the wood:

               You’re a human child!

It winces. Flees.

To take a name, a body.

No.

*

She’s out there in the snowy night

at the dark edge of the parking lot

standing under the street lamp’s steam

as if I’m supposed to come out to her.

And I can’t. I can’t.

I’m the best they’ve got.

The best damn salesman that we’ve got.

*

But the prince with no weight carries me.

His soft, leaf-coloured, shadow wings

outstretched like vapor carry me.

His tiny, moth head bears me up,

a worm in blossom, a fragile thing.

Blind as a candle-dazzled mole

he bores into the probing sun

that burns

               his brittle wings

                                        that flake

like dust,

               like dust in the brilliancies,

break,

               and he falls,

                                   a damaged thing.

And I fall down.

What shall I do?

The fairies said:

Receive like a gift your mother’s wound —

through which my life emerges,

               red —

                         trailing

a corded string.