Snow was falling when I returned the books
to the library, closed the bank account,
drove to the minister’s house down a dirt track covered
with ice. The house was weatherworn, unpainted,
set behind a mesh fence within a garden of frozen weeds,
the curtains at the window
slithered aside
as I climbed the front steps.
A sense of pause before the door opened; a thin hard-faced man
in stained cotton
trousers and shirt, a loose blue cardigan, gave me
the plane ticket:
“Don’t forget to phone your parents,
remember you’ll have to send all that stuff home,
you can’t expect to leave it here forever in your car.
You’re not in trouble, are you?”
He takes off his slippers but, even bending, keeps
his eyes on me.
Trees, thin as starved children, stagger up the riverbank.
A motel, cream-coloured, shapeless, with a beer parlour
tacked onto one end, then a blob of pink, a drive-in restaurant,
and we draw up to the airport passenger lounge.
I give him my car keys, he helps me check in.
“Do you want me to wait? I’d promised I’d see you on the plane.”
He coughs and wipes sweat from his yellow skin, his forehead
juts out, the eyebrows brown circumflexes over
deeply set blue eyes.
“You’ve enough money?”
Yes, I’m fine.
“About the car.”
I’ll let you know.
“Well,” he says, his hands shoot out of his pockets, fly
onto my head, “the Lord’s blessing on you.” He steps away
and the automatic doors close
behind him.
On a red vinyl couch,
beside a desk, a guard,
a nurse who holds a paper cup
of the seeds Penelope swallowed:
Welcome to the circle of intimates, says Andrei.
Love?
Then:
Love is
a new dress,
thigh-high boots.
I wait,
talk poetry with George,
think of a dark room,
a red candle,
the slide of an old girlfriend
left on the bureau for me
to find.
Her black lace bra
and pants.
But the hook is deep
my heart never so whole
as when lurching on a leash, plunging
the whole way
for the first time.
Now:
“So, tell me, how you’re feeling?”
He’s a lean, gaunt-faced doctor in a black suit,
yellow skin and eyes,
a stethoscope around his neck.
I feel nothing.
“Are you unhappy?”
I take his hand and put it on my face
next to my mouth.
Here…I move the hand
to my eyes…here…I feel nothing.
“Close your eyes,” he says. “Tell me when you feel.”
The pin jabs my arm.
You don’t understand.
It’s only my face, and
who I am.
For Joy:
Are you still in pain?
Do you imagine at night
when you undress at the window,
that he will return the children?
Your heart, to him, is the shape of a coffin:
he has the key.
You look out at the trees—
every song is there,
each breath, the slippage of bone
inside you:
how long before you know
he is the enemy?
The farther that I climbed the height,
the less I seemed to understand.
—St. John of the Cross
The nurses in their jeans
smell like fresh snow.
The patients—only the “bad ones” wear pajamas—
watch TV,
cast spells of warm air with a lift of their hands.
These are the webs they live in.
Living vertically, says Andrei, is a bore.
My nurse is small,
in an overall and sweatshirt,
hair pulled back in a ponytail,
her task, she says, is to “establish contact.”
Ask her how her orbit
paints the walls,
ask her about the tears
nailed to my eyeballs,
ask her
about the food on the plate
when she leaves me in the cafeteria—
green beans like tadpoles
swim to mashed potatoes.
Two women at the table—
one prefers not to speak—
the other, a Shakespearean scholar,
cut her hair, got fat, was sent by her husband for treatment.
“It’s the plight of never being trained
to the sword,” she says.
So, what are they doing to help?
“I eat pills, next week I’m getting ECT. It’s wrong
to be depressed. Moral truth is an awning
over a dull street.”
The horizontal essence of women
floats before me.
“At least I’m not as bad off as her,”
says Ms. Shakespeare of a red-haired woman
at the next table. “She’s an alcoholic, and if she can’t quit,
she’ll die. I’m not going to die of being sad.
Am I?”
Pillars of fire by day and night—but
someone is beating a woman, and
tell me, why is the table of philosophy
set here on 3-B?
Seven a.m. shower (razor kept
locked at the desk), dress, walk the breakfast line, coffee,
slippers under heels, blouse cuffs stained. The night still has its knots
round us, long threads of sticky terror that lead back to beds,
under beds,
our human silence;
weak snuffles of us sucking up cereal.
I stretch in “the screaming room”—it is carpeted, soundproof,
empty except for mattresses and plastic clubs—
because this is what you do, during intermission,
before the main event,
because he doesn’t yet know where to find you.
Doctor’s orders:
do not imagine
do not procrastinate
do not do what you did before.
My mother is faithful,
visits each night,
her knitting in her bag,
fresh nightgowns, new socks,
her cheeks drawn in—
that trip up the elevator from the ground floor
begins with my birth,
but she doesn’t know
what she thinks she knows,
says, “I’ve heard from him.”
You didn’t tell him where I was!
She looks away.
You couldn’t have told him?
“It’s only right that he should know.”
She doesn’t know what I don’t tell.
That the miracle of escape
is an eggshell.
“We decided we should send him
his fare home. After all…”
She examines her gloves.
My head rolls back, my neck
a wet paper tube.
Four a.m. A telephone call.
By breakfast, three telegrams.
And a phone number.
And a time by which I have to call
or he will have killed himself and
everyone I know in Fredericton.
(How I wanted to tell
before he left for work,
say finish it now, kill us both,
but stopped my mouth,
somehow.)
I am not just the fly on the glass
a reflection
riddled with holes for mouth, eyes, ears,
throat.
When I can talk, I say, One is lucky, indeed,
to have no heart.
Portraits:
Teenage boy, son of important hotelier,
pulls blue thread balls from the tufts
of his terry robe, moistens them in his mouth,
flicks them with his fingers to the ceiling tiles.
Where they stick—over an area of about six square feet—
is the haze of a summer sky.
An old woman tied to a wheelchair weeps.
Another woman, Cora, middle-aged,
big, with a grey crew cut, sits beside her but cannot
summon a nurse because, after ECT, her speech is
a logged hard surface through which she scrapes.
I touch her hand. It’s all right, I’ll get someone.
She has been kind to me, and to Jesse, our roommate,
who does not sleep at night because people
pluck off her bedclothes and feed her cancer.
Jos is undergoing “primal,”
holds her black-haired baby under an arm.
Her husband, on the ward below,
comes for visits.
His eyes and the baby’s eyes are plumbed dark pits.
Every day Jos looks better
as she retreats toward her birth.
Karl, blond, muscular, fit, almost never speaks,
smashes his fists into the piano keyboard.
He tries to play, but chaos crosses the notes.
I hear, inside the web of fatal noise a Beethoven concerto.
His favourite record is Paul Twitchell singing “All Is Love.”
Raymond, English, a jeweller, draws diagrams to show me
the geometric workings of the world. Four colours
on each chart, all angles considered. A full notebook.
What about Yeats? I ask.
We discuss gyres, the Great Year.
He is about to be deported.
Hitchhiked across Canada, asylum to asylum,
to save money.
Scuttling along on his snow chains.
A girl who lived on the streets: thin eyebrows, a face like a pan
of skimmed milk. Finger-mark bruises on her upper arms,
slash marks on her wrists. The police beat her
when she tried to resist.
(Fourteen, at most.)
New on the ward: young thin woman, Colleen, with straw-blond hair,
face squashed on one side. Accompanied by boyfriend:
limp-haired, thirty, flare jeans, red string tie, checked shirt, cowboy
boots. He helps her hang up short flowered dresses,
put away pairs of white high-heeled shoes; she repairs her lipstick
before and after kissing him goodbye.
When he’s gone, she shows us where he cut her with a bottle,
scars the blond peek-a-boo hair
hides.
She has just lost a baby, is depressed, and
occasionally violent. He does not
like noisy women, I hear boyfriend tell Bertha,
a nurse with fear ambered eyes,
Bertha checks the wastebaskets for drugs,
reads our diaries, poems,
never looks
at us.
In the recreation room, Colleen removes “All Is Love”
from the turntable, puts on Tammy Wynette.
Karl, the pianist, comes in, the lights dim
I leave as she begins to have him on the sofa.
All is love,
and the urge to kill like the urge to begat,
puts on its boots and jacket.
Hunting the Hare:
Raymond, the jeweller, sits beside me on the couch.
I am waiting for my mother.
We watch the elevator.
Under cover of drawing more
diagrams, he scribbles his
escape plan. Immigration is coming
in the morning to deport him…
Problem: he has no clothes,
only pajamas, a dressing gown, and paper
slippers.
Solution: ignore problem.
He winks at me before
writing
Problem two: getting into the elevator away
from the scrutiny of nurses,
and once in the lobby slipping past the commissionaire.
Solution: go at visiting hours when patients sometimes
accompany visitors to the bottom floor and, anyway,
all dangerous patients are locked away, they won’t care
(that much) about him.
Problem three:
once outside where to go in PJs?
Solution: Jos has a friend who lives nearby.
He will wait at the bottom of the steps in his car.
Ray will stay with him until Jos
gets out and after that maybe they
will live together, fall in love, make good parents for the
black-haired baby,
return to the cabin she left?
Her Story:
Up north,
beyond Bella Bella and Bella Coola,
in the forest, at the bottom of a valley,
on top of a mountain,
in a cabin around which wolves
howled all winter,
and snow bowled nightly at the door,
a baby was born.
A man, thin and cold,
elbows out of sweater,
eyes the lost blue
of the aurora borealis but
bad at chopping wood,
finds that fair skin retains his imprint
in a way the land won’t.
Late at night
like an angel or a singer
he transforms
becomes an actor
or a soldier denied utterance
on a battlefield: his fists
speak of him, sound the note of life:
she wails, the infant, too
into the dumb frozen air.
One morning she wraps the child in fur,
wades through snowdrifts
down the mountain, across the valley,
and through the forest
to the nearest telephone. How many miles?
More than he thought she could walk when he beat her.
Help me. The air is shivered by human cries.
For a second only, while it lasted,
nature is all wonder, all silence.
Bertha is coming. “Ray!”
Ray eats the paper.
1. The elevator doors open and my mother,
straining her tired face into a smile,
gets out, carrying my laundry.
She sits beside me, kisses my cheek,
and nods at Ray. Ray takes another piece of paper
and sketches the elevator: the up/down button is given
prominence. He concentrates.
2. Bertha strides toward the recreation room.
My mother’s voice, discouraged and remote,
is drowned out by shouts.
Orderlies flash by like fleet deer.
Bertha, flushed and excited, runs back to the nurses’ desk,
returns with a long syringe in her hand,
her cap askew, on her cheek a scratch the colour
of Colleen’s lipstick.
“You sons of bitches, cunts, whores, bastards!”
Patients and visitors lower their newspapers or books,
stop talking and gaze with mild interest.
Someone turns the television down. Karl, the pianist,
is led weeping to his room. His body seems
jumbled, its pieces out of sequence and shape, shattered
within the prison of his skin.
(Oh, and not so long after, the day he is released,
he steps from the pavement in front of a bus and is killed
in an instant.)
Colleen, corn-dolly hair standing up like thatch,
is wrestled to the ground. Her pretty dress, ablaze with peonies,
screws up around her waist.
Bertha yanks her panties down and jabs in the needle.
With a last effort, Colleen frees a foot from an orderly’s hand and
kicks off a stiletto heel that strikes Bertha in the eye,
then, limp as a melted candle, she is carried
through a swiftly unlocked door marked INTENSIVE CARE.
3. “They said I shouldn’t withhold anything from you
I’d tell you normally,” says my mother.
The baby starts to cry. I pick him up and give him to her.
She has him quieted and sleeping in a few moments.
Bertha notices and takes the baby away. The baby wakes and screams.
Jos emerges from primal, at a run, to rescue him.
“I knew it would be you!” she cries to Bertha.
“They shouldn’t let you have it here.
It’s a crime to have a baby in a place like this!”
Bertha rattles her keys, retreats behind the desk.
My mother pulls a newspaper clipping from her handbag.
She says, as she gives it to me, “I wasn’t sure,
but it sounded like somebody
you’d told me about who’d gone
missing.”
Woman’s body found in river.
Bludgeoned to death,
unsuccessful attempt made to hack
her head from her body,
dumped beneath the bridge,
may have been killed in riverside park,
reports of a woman’s screams heard late at night.
That last night,
a night and a day remaining,
clouds tumbled over the hills behind the town,
mist rose from the river
and settled at the height of the bridge.
I thought I would search for the place
the poets were buried
across the river. There is no “why”
there were ghostly strangers in the dark
whose kisses scald and stay.
I started the car
and his head appeared at the passenger window.
“I wondered when you’d be going out,” he said.
Were you watching for me to leave? His damp clothing,
and red hands and face pinched with cold, answered.
I drove through the tree-softened streets.
People scurried round corners toward their homes
as snow began to fall. I edged across the narrow bridge
and through the suburb. He kept on asking,
“Where were you really going,
what would you have done if I hadn’t come along?”
So I decided to stop, so we could walk and maybe talk, and…
in a riverside park I opened the car door.
His hands went round my neck and pressed my throat.
I lay on the snow-spattered grass. The river was black
glass, the mist drawn into the sky. I could see streetlight
wands, the shimmering lace of headlights and windows
on the other side. I heard a cry come from the water,
but it must have been me, because he led me back and took the keys
and drove, reached over to pat and comfort, huge wet
rolling tears ran from his beautiful eyes.
The house, with its broken front window, took us in.
He pulled me up the stairs, put me on the bed,
reached under the mattress, a raft in a dark ocean,
and brought out a rope, tied my feet, wrapped it round my legs,
left for a moment, and returned with the rifle.
He bade me goodbye.
Then prayer like blood spurted from my mouth,
stopped him with its flood.
A graveyard hand travels my flesh.
“He arrived last night,” says my mother. “He came to the house
last night.
He asked us to let you go. He seems to think
it’s our fault.”
She is weeping. I cradle her in my arms.
It’s all right. Everything’s going to be all
right.
Why put it in words? We’re deep
into something else,
flames of cigarette lights,
tongues of sheep dogs.
I watch Ray make his way toward the elevator.
The door opens and disgorges two nurses.
Ray pulls at a thread end of his dressing-gown tie,
enters, holds the door, while I help my mother
inside with him.
The doors close and they
drop away into freedom.
October 31:
John, my old friend, and I
used to talk
about his life
above the sea
at the mouth of
a cave in Crete.
I slipped his worry beads
through my fingers
the night we walked all the way down
Alma from the UBC dance and sat, over coffee,
and he told me about the time, as a child, he believed
he’d been left behind in the Rapture, spent days, alone
in the woods, abandoned by God.
(When I lived, later, in Greece,
I used to see him like a dream, like the vapour
that streams from an icebox,
when I walked the chamomile- and thyme-scented hills.)
He was careless about tomorrow,
travelling light.
We had terrors, not love, in common
rippling deep
through the fir-tree gaps.
Raised, both, on fear of
eternal damnation,
we’d crawled
from the shadows toward iridescence:
but the brain is human
and the sensations peculiar to it,
the mischief of ice-pick assaults
on the spirit,
ring at a finger’s touch:
so, one day, not now, I will write the story
of his exile, but now, this night
I gaze out the window of 3B and think
of his work in the school
at Alkalai Lake, his compact, silver blond goodness:
fireworks glow and then the splash
as a boat tips in the lake—
his friend is drowning—
sounds travel
much more slowly than light.
What does John think, standing on the shore,
the metal of courage in his mouth,
in the moment before his death,
is he back at the cave mouth
gathering courage for the leap
from the cliff
into blue water shirred by dolphins?
No time at all, perhaps, to imagine a consequence as
he leaps into who we are,
his heart staggered by cold water
into eclipse:
one’s voice won’t carry far in the heavy air:
when the snow lifts how brilliant,
how rare.
The clock says 2:30 a.m.
Jesse pulls the blankets
from my bed, wakes me, says I had stolen them.
Cora and I settle her in,
then I take a blanket and with the night nurse’s
permission
sleep on the floor
of the screaming room.
In my dream, in my grief,
John brings a small white horse.
We ride her up a green hill.
“I am not dead,” the horse that carries us says.
I dismount at the top
and watch it run
into the blue distance of its strange country
with my friend.
Before dawn I touch my eyelids and lips, feel the imprints
of my fingertips.
A white-faced clock clicks through several minutes.
And so, I’ve left numbness.
Glass curtains over the windows,
footsteps in the
corridors:
at the nurse’s station someone works by lamplight
on patient reports.
Dreary cellars of our buried life!
Shall we attack these pictures with a knife?
The women, the men, desperate
to touch the green mist—
Not for us the song of the gas stove,
let the telephone ring it’s not for us.
Note: The passages in italics are by Andrei Voznesensky.