E. Martin Nolan
After Austin Clarke’s “When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks” and “Sometimes a Motherless Child”
This place does not rumble with your ghost,
Austin. That’s the construction next door.
Just as you knew, this city’s under the drill.
I’m in the building you were in but it’s in
a different place now. No one wears silks.
Or maybe they do wear silks here. Under the drill
in Yorkville, in silks. The drilling in the wall keeps up,
and no one pays it mind. Because it’s empty.
Because of the drilling. You sang in that long poem
that romance was fleeting. That you had it
in here, in a building that was in another place,
in this city that crushes steady and slow,
so gradual, the ease passes unnoticed,
dust in overpriced coffee on a sidewalk patio
kicked up in the rush by the gigging so much
they pass with a sound like distant wind.
White boy, white country, another great white north.
I’m a few days at the retreat, looking out on pale yellow fields
of almost ripe rye, striped green over the gentle hills down
to a shallow lake dense with lilies. So far from Bathurst Street—
so far from your Bathurst, Austin, is our Bathurst. Toronto
tears it all down before it’s old enough to keep around.
Like the falling forests of MacGregor Park, doomed in the rocky, shallow soil
against Lake Huron. MacGregor: a Scottish name. Clarke, Nolan: Irish.
That doesn’t bind us more than an airport Irish pub
where only the rich or stupid can get drunk.
A Black man drove the cab we took after arriving off the ferry in Helsinki.
Two white families ahead of us passed him by and went
to the white drivers behind him. Austin, a good white man
in your story is the Finnish landlord. I’ve read that far, and I believe
in coincidences. Granite is everywhere here, like Ontario.
Austin, I’ve been reading further. The PDF cuts off
the last pages. BJ and Marco are spectres
in the story’s imagination, locked away from me,
floating, distant as the kindness of the landlord
from the back seat of the Toronto PD cruiser.
I go online, but cannot find it. No one here
is allowed online but me, as I leave early.
And so, I am the only one who knows
about the shootings in El Paso and Dayton.
No barrier can be put to human violence. Austin,
I’m full of it, and I spray it toward your ghost like soft bullets.
Bathurst, a British name. A Lord. Dundas, British. A Lord. Bloor, Eglinton, King, Queen,
British, British. The museum the cop drives BJ past: Royal. Spadina—
“slow rise” in Algonquin—Ontario, these English butcheries
of Native names the only respite from the never-ending British
of the names of Toronto, the routes of BJ’s torture, his mother’s torture.
Still haven’t finished the story. Still the cop rides those kids around, trying
to decipher the history of hate he holds in his unprepared soul. Hate loves
an unprepared soul. I’ve come to the new central library, and sit on a terrace
looking out onto the giant beautiful harbour. They don’t have the book.
They have five of your other books. They have them in the “Black Fiction” section.
That’s in the back of the fiction section, which is not called “White Fiction.”
The terrace is full of kids. A laughing racial mix. One little girl turns to another,
sitting alone, just off to the side. The first girl pauses, and freestyles a song. Goes:
“you’re a small child sitting on a table,” even though the other girl sits on a chair,
clearly. They laugh, because this is a funny way to be wrong. A good way.