Always Die Before Your Mother: Poems

Always Die Before Your Mother Patrick Woodcock

poems

Always Die Before Yo u r M o t h e r

Always Die Before Yo u r M o t h e r

Patrick Woodcock

ECW Press

Copyright © Patrick Woodcock, 2009 Published by ecw press, 2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario, Canada m4e 1e2

416.694.3348 / [email protected] All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ecw press.

library and archives canada cataloguing in publication Woodcock, Patrick, 1968– Poems. “A misFit book”. isbn-13: 978-1-55022-862-5 isbn-10: 1-55022-862-5 i. Title. ps8595.o6397a79 2009

c811'.54

c2008-907561-7

Editor for the press: Michael Holmes / a misFit book Type: Rachel Ironstone Printer: Coach House Printing The publication of Always Die Before Your Mother has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada, by the Ontario Arts Council, by the Government of Ontario through Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit, by the OMDC Book Fund, an initiative of the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and by the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp).

printed and bound in canada

Contents 13 Executions 11 12 15 16 17 18 19 20 23 24 25 26 27

The Saddest Ink Admiral Adrift Aja’s Education Reform The Peasants of Brazo’s Bend Editing Howard Aster Flood in Nizwa Did I Sleep in the Jewish Cemetery Last Night? Keith and the Kirkjug Kimici’s Mikica Cracked Cups Solidarity’s Shoes The Final Stand

Dead Horses 31 32 33 34 36 37 38 41 42

Her Eyes Were Like Unwashed Hospital Windows The Burzhuika The Bridge After Watching a Gypsy Girl Crying in a Cemetery A Drunk Old Man Wanted an Audience and Found Me Grandmother’s Corpse Stare at Horses Thinking of St. Jude’s From Far Away The Great Transgressors at the Falaj Daris Hotel

Shotguns and Accordions 45 49 50 52 53 54 57 59 60 61 62 65 66 67 68 70 71 72 75 77 78 80

Suicide Dogs The Chiva Accident New Rivers, Old Clothes The Toilet Song It’s the Little Things No One Dies Gracefully Bricks Paul Durcan Wants a Taxi in the Chaparral Los Magnificos The Tumour Jungle Slaughter Thud Grandmother’s Dance Eyes Gull Dreaming of Canada with the Colombian Pin Boys Shotguns and Accordions Tied Dogs Fashioned Out of Rust Small Helicopters: Cockfight at Mirolindo Swimming With Pink Dolphins and My Dead Mother Isla de los Micos

83 Acknowledgements 84 Endnotes and Locations

13 Executions

THE SADDEST INK i n m e m o r y o f S e r g e i Ye s e n i n

I don’t know what was used to leach the ink, how flesh was made word, or how much of it was needed to write eight lines of vermilioned verse, but I do know an old Russian woman whose museum has abandoned it to dust.

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ADMIRAL ADRIFT for Admiral Mahic

He’s built like a mountain that’s been tunnelled for trains, like a valley where all trees lean left to reach for sunlight, that deft hand of God, which clobbers him daily then vanquishes pain. Mistakenly named like ‘The Righteous’ ‘The Holy’ he stands by the river, fleetless, and sings The Redress of poetry, that old floating city, that run-aground folly is landlocked and torn! And toasts, If you fear it, just tunnel beneath it — then drinks till he’s captured and all he knows sinks. But while his body may waver, his spirit keeps digging, without their consent to lead others to war. Admiral’s decision though marred by elision was to call those unwilling to suffer his seed, and close to their river to remind these infertile in the ‘house between houses’ where old sailors weep: Remember I care more about your redemption than the puerile whose sails never suffer a tear . . . Only then could he dream. For months he would dream.

12

A J A’ S E D U C AT I O N R E F O R M

I will tear away its branches and enwrap it in barbed wire. When you touch a rotting tree, you must masquerade as loving while the monstrous acts you dream of collide and spark within you . . . I will cleave away its trunk so it cants eastward in shame. When you spy a rotting forest, must you move within its currents while the monstrous acts you long for transform and sail toward you? Will I dig within its borders? Will I open up its rivers? When you sense a rotting country, you must feign a mother’s spirit while the monstrous acts you tend to ignite and blaze . . . I will seed again this valley and pray its earth is fertile. I will sleep and die upon it so it’s of my blood and soul.

15

THE PEASANTS OF BRAZO’S BEND

My tongue receded from the Seducer’s Sabbath toward a fear that rose and boiled and fell from His machicolation onto the pebbles below . . . Look at the little peasants swimming in it — oil fear — missile fear — an alligator can topple their Kingdom by lowering its head — Cut water can sound like children in chain-mail sacks being dragged across planks, and when they sleep El Lagarto will become a drawbridge from which ignoble scutes leave the skin to hiss and dance and drum the death roll.

16

E D I T I N G H O WA R D A S T E R

Let me wrap this line around my waste, twice. Sarajevo: An orphan sits in a building with no windows or doorframes through the hair of his mother tear two roseate palms. Let me detonate this line when you are closer than err. Delhi: An orphan runs at a taxi with locked doors and closed windows the radio asphyxiates the screaming and her malnourished thud.

17

F L O O D I N N I Z WA

Beware of the stone that’s a dog by the river. Don’t enter while touching the ritually unclean, for it’s caution that places one’s heart in the pillar in the shadow of faith while shadowing spleen. Don’t plead for those willing to jump in the river. Don’t grieve for the drowning, smitten and scourged. Let water rush over both goat legs and silver, past camels in car parks where men’s souls float purged.

18

DID I SLEEP IN THE JEWISH CEMETERY LAST NIGHT?

Did I wander from the mountains past cobbled snails Did I light cigarettes that others left on the ground Did I hide in the shadows beneath a bridge, drinking Did I curse the rain and stomp in its mirrors Did I walk along an unlit road humming Le Mort Joyeux Did I find a fence and support it like a drunken friend Did I think of returning home, the older one, alone Did I lift my legs above my head, cut my hands on glass Did I look around, drop the cardboard, then look around again Did I sit upon the ground for hours and watch the city fade? Did I sleep in the Jewish cemetery last night? Did I lie down and watch the clouds until sleep arrived Did I sit on a mule in Mexico with Antonin Artaud Did I rest beside Charles on his mother’s brown couch Did I rest upon Jacobsen’s balcony and sigh Did I hold Anna’s old man when he was kicked in the face Did I hear a knock before Seamus said, It’s no one. Leave it be Did I hear Moraes say, In this cave I smell your blood Did I hear the clouds say, Barrie died in the autumn of ’ Did I rise with mud upon my face, a broken Ishmaelite Did I cower when I felt the sun and pray for the curtain’s click?

19

KEITH AND THE KIRKJUG

It was near the centre of Reykjavik in a cemetery, where people would later dance and sing upon a mattress of moss, that they found the Kirkjug. There were even trees, yes, and an upright bass lumbered through the graves like a ship’s hull dragging land to water over land. Do you believe in their trumpeting? They were building song out of stone and lead. They prayed hard that chanting long live bins who court the dead, long live bins who court the dead would suffice.

20

KIMICI’S

And through a window you could see Pope John Paul on a postcard And four men at a table raised their glasses and sang And we sat near the fence where their dogs chased the chickens And the waitress kept pouring and singing and laughing And four men at a table raised their glasses and sang And two men smiled at my friend — that menacing smile And the waitress kept pouring and singing and laughing And a small boy with one arm threw a stone at our car And two men smiled at my friend — that menacing smile And the tallest man attempted to sing for a crow And a small boy with one arm threw a stone at our car And the neighbourhood widow shovelled coal in her basement And the tallest man attempted to sing for a crow And my friend, touched with terror, just looked at his glass And the neighbourhood widow shovelled coal in her basement And through a window, on a postcard, you could see Pope John Paul

23

MIKICA

There is a woman standing by the concrete staircase. When she breathes it sounds like a whale coughing furniture, like an old bureau being belched into heaven. When her lungs approach silence, she divides the alley’s architecture with her shadow and says, Unbearable music is bearable when burped. She glides across the bar singing, A shadow can dance if latched onto quickly! Beside the old staircase she stands, Quick, to the staircase, before the gypsies throw another!

24

CRACKED CUPS

Sitting on a park bench, I watch the old women walk in circles within a swollen foot of one another. Their breath is half soot half lament and weakening with each lap. Their lung-clocks tick with each cough and chime hourly like a backfiring ambulance. Like the kolkhoz woman suffering the indignity of having a ladder thrust between her legs, these sculptresses embody the declining. They float within a dreamscape where the Working Woman on the Rostrum stares at a white Lada dripping sheep’s blood. Who am I to drift through their history while still shaking from last night’s excesses? Why do I make them wait for nickel after nickel? Will I drink until a flood of shiny gravediggers can be dropped into their monstrous, chapped hands? Will I fill all the cracked cups born of their revolution? Later tonight, when they are returning my empty bottles for enough money to purchase the dignity of dying in a car on Lenin Street, I will be dreaming of the State Porcelain Factory: Down with the Bourgeoisie! Down with Kitchen Slavery! She Who Does Not Work, Neither Shall She Eat!

25

SOLIDARITY’S SHOES

He carved “Solidarity” into the soles of their shoes. Francis Sak, father of three daughters, husband and engineer. He could spend hours talking over a bottle of vodka, a plate of tomatoes and carp in jelly. A Polish– English dictionary beside his turtle on the floor. She looks different before your body . . . her eyes take flight and . . . is your bond unbreakable? Now, one last drink before we bayonet the typewriter . . . He was attempting to build another power station the last time I saw him. I stood in one of the pipes and bellowed like Majakovsky in an empty wine vat. He carved “Solidarity” into the soles of their shoes, so when they stepped in mud they would continue the campaign. He took the same rain that washed away his visions and made enough electricity for the printers to visit and celebrate. Leave your shoes at the door, he begged. He carved and carved until dawn.

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T H E F I N A L S TA N D

He was the only mammal. Along with the wind and snow and steam, along with the food cart where the caricature of a hot dog smiled at legs emaciated by the embalming caress of the circus, life’s mouldering fair. He fell sideways and caught himself at the umbrella’s base with his left hand, while his right hand fell between his legs. He tore at his fly and pulled out his penis. No man begs for food when he can piss on a capitalist’s face.

27

Dead Horses

H E R E Y E S W E R E L I K E U N WA S H E D H O S P I TA L W I N D O W S

Her eyes were like unwashed hospital windows, of that same haze one finds drifting above a bowl of soup or a bad sermon. Each held a notion of sadness close to the twilight His insufferables like to hide within. Her body was full of darkness. It was both pathway and portfolio, an unapologetic guide to all that lay before us. Her teeth were like broken lightbulbs no one could unscrew, awaiting time’s anvil to let in the air. Her right hand held the ligature around her neck, the throbbing crucible. She wanted to hide the place where Christ tried to break free. When she asked for a cigarette, I gave her my bottle of wine. Anything to make you radiant again.

31

THE BURZHUIKA

He was sitting with his family. How many years had it taken him to collect all those books? Stories of blades and mushrooms, villages and coastlines. How many years had he spent reading these stories to his children? They all knew them by heart by now, but still liked the sound of their father’s voice and the look on his face while he read. His wife used to say, He smiles like a windowpane being battered by hail, for a windowpane knows loyalty, knows when it has been victorious. A windowpane is a soldier that never sleeps. But tonight the burzhuika was low. The luxury called for more fuel. How many years had it taken him to arrest the courage needed to write down his rage? And now the words again would save him. He asked his children to enter the room. After each poem was finished one of his daughters would throw it into the fire. Your mother used to say, As long as we have his books we do not need hot water or heat. As long as we have the books we can live without fear. For there is always a thaw approaching. After his children had fallen asleep, he opened a bottle of vodka and spit into the stove.

32

THE BRIDGE

He wanted a wife and told his father of this desire. Fetch me the hook, said the old man, your sister and my gun. His sister, the most beautiful woman in the province, had never left the house. When his son and daughter returned their father sat them down. To his son: You will tie this rope to the hook. As I shoot them, you will throw the hook to the other side of the river and drag their bodies through the water towards us. By the time they reach our side of the river, they will have . . . I’ll do the rest. And to his daughter: Go put on your nicest gown and stand near the riverbank. It took only minutes for the first boy to arrive. And only seconds for him to fall and be pulled into the river. Over half of the village’s young men were used in the building of this bridge. When completed, the son walked across the bodies to find his wife. Hours later he returned to his father’s house with her, sobbing. Their wedding night was spent pushing bodies downstream. The next day, while the new bride was washing her sister-in-law’s gown, the most beautiful woman in the province was taken to the river. Her father held the rope. The hook piercing her lower lip.

33

A F T E R WAT C H I N G A G Y P S Y G I R L CRYING IN A CEMETERY

Years ago, I was told of a secluded village in the mountains. A village of perpetual daylight, where the air was always cold. You can read a man’s thoughts by the way he breathes, they used to say. Or, never look into a woman’s eyes, her mouth shapes the real answers. And it was true. You could understand villagers simply from the shapes that came from their mouths. Children were taught, before they could walk, the importance of all that came from within. When they were in the terror years — those between childhood and adulthood — they were sent higher up into the mountains to study at the University of Every Time You Speak a Work of Art Should Be Produced. It was there that our two lovers met. He was studying to breathe like a poet, and she was studying to breathe like a sculptress. Obviously, they fell in love and spent hours dreaming of the years of joy ahead of them — the years of art ahead of them. But one day, when they were walking home, a jealous peasant, who had only learned to breathe ropes, still angry for being banished from school

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for his stertorous ways, dropped a noose from a tree and hanged the young man. That is all there is to say. The girl can still be seen to this day, beneath where he sways, her mouth shut, needle and thread in hand.

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A D R U N K O L D M A N WA N T E D A N A U D I E N C E AND FOUND ME

YELLING: What will be sold to pay for this theft? And why at this time of year? I thought I’d seen it all but . . . twenty-five heads! “They were mine!” I’ll say to the judge . . . [spits] THINKS: I can roll a cigarette out of thin air, but look into my eyes, they are not fathomless, there is no magic. No one knows the ghosts that build this volatility in me — my ability to stand up in nothing, see beyond nothing. I am not like them. I am old, hunched, and crippled. My neighbour’s shadows are false. MUTTERS [looking down]: What will be in my soup now that my cabbage has been stolen?

36

GRANDMOTHER’S CORPSE

Sarajevo is an open casket and like my grandmother’s corpse they’re dressing up the parliament building. Soon there will be pulleys, scaffolding, and men working on it like they did my grandmother’s dress and hair. Soon it will rest with its mouth sewn shut, a reflection, cold and dead, of what had been.

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S TA R E AT H O R S E S

Her husband sat on the sidewalk like a dog that deserved to be beaten. They were not joined by love, but by a string of saliva — from his mouth to her left shoe. I am Copernicus. I am watching small comets of sausage shoot from one mistake to the other. I could be God and walk over to them, purchase one pack of cigarettes and destroy the cosmos. And now enter the police: one of them with arthritic fingers that look like calcified commas holds his nightstick at the ready. I could be God. I could walk over and say to the old couple, “Stand up and say to them what I command you, or I will terrify you before them.” I could say, “They need you,” and remind them that each piece of sausage separates light from darkness. But I don’t. They bore me. I turn and stare at horses.

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T H I N K I N G O F S T. J U D E ’ S F R O M FA R AWAY

Nothing is more terrible than snow falling in a mosque, no white upon white, no hollow cotton. Beyond Arafat and Bialik — white and frozen — falls something damp and starved — I know I’ve seen it. Nothing is more terrible than snow falling in a church where The False Parade of Cufflinks recite The Psalm of the Slipped Disc. Nothing is more terrible than snow falling on bookshelves where charlatanry sighs between statuettes and bookends. For the sluggish illiterates who cannot repair a ceiling, and for the minaret and steeple, nothing is more terrible than snow.

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T H E G R E AT T R A N S G R E S S O R S AT T H E FA L A J D A R I S H O T E L

The lights spin the girls spin the men have forgotten the meaning of their words. And when the singer stops and the drums fade, they all walk out innocent and chaste.

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Shotguns and Accordions

SUICIDE DOGS

1. Nothing is enormous. It’s manageable and glides past the suicide dogs who wander these streets, through one throbbing mass of scrap metal that only rides in half-circles, in semi-swerves. Time limping is still time — it has too many eyes and a monument’s dress and prides itself in its single-leggedness. 2. The plight of the trembling is someone else’s to contain. It is always the other’s architecture that melts us. Never our own. What pulses within our veins isn’t some amateur’s conjecture. Flames are of no importance to the suicide dog whose eyes are stoned lament, hoarsened fog. 3. Concrete like whimpering floorboards — concrete like rusty sewing machines deafening the houses with their metallic choruses. Concrete singing “We the street pass judgement today — we the street let lice walk no more.” Concrete can comfort the tick-ravaged pylons in the labyrinth of transport. 4. Horsemen who were robbed and never thank fan or impress an architecture that can only tell two stories. Taxi drivers who shepherd rank capital like Virgil spar and joust through this hell while they sit on the road and curse the shops, the thwarted river and moon-cut crops.

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5. Here they come. I won’t shrink. I am not hollow, hollow. I am sharper than the half-yawn insult. I am of a mesmerizing raw material. I am a vulture reminiscing, circling, reminiscing, circling. A hemisphere of blood and bone, I am unmovable. 6. Suicide dogs, Christ, I understand your progression, your undarkening eyes. I’ve imagined coaches and horse dung and the scraggy-headed succession of order. I’ve pawed at Him for years while the roaches after flying through my window stopped beating their wings and wondered acoustically — fleeting?

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T H E C H I VA A C C I D E N T

Forgotten was the rainbow’s glow when it decided to carve and carve and carve. And when it chose to butcher, then bloody, then throw, it chose a baby to cradle and the same baby, starve.

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NEW RIVERS, OLD CLOTHES

I’m sitting across from the old cemetery in Chaparral, in a tienda called The Final Tear. It is about twice the size of my uncle’s old tool shed and smells like an abandoned hunter’s shack. I’ve watched cows and mules limp by for the last half-hour. I ordered rum and cigarettes and now sit watching an old woman struggling with a flower arrangement twice as big as she is. Two hours ago, I was in that same cemetery taking photographs of graves and burnt crosses piled upon each other, like those who couldn’t find shelter in Armero. I saw the bleakest of portraits — humidity can twist any smile into a scowl. I found the rain -stained letters of the living taped to headstones. They were too faded, and my Spanish too limited, for me to read. Right now, I am thinking about the children I met this morning. The desplazados in need of books, teachers, walls, calm. I have a picture in my head of the men who delivered the ultimatums, who burnt their homes. They arrive at night. Enormous anacondas who coil around the entire family, squeezing the life out until they fall unconscious. They swallow everyone and carry them away. Inside, the family waits to be regurgitated into a river, a new river, in a new town, 50

in old clothes. Today, I don’t believe in miracles anymore. I don’t believe there is a fire big enough to burn away this humiliation. I don’t believe that when I retch my ghosts, an old woman will bring me a monument of flowers.

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THE TOILET SONG

There is no wall to hide your junk, no ceiling and no seat. Just a trough and cigarettes sunk and urine at your feet. The smell is like the tongue of a corpse dragged damp across your face. Like being slapped by their great lord, then buggered by His grace. It is dark — a black nightmare dark, her father’s chasing me. Simply because I left this mark, seed and apostasy. It is white, a cold padded white, I’m shackled to my bed. Each tooth a phosphorescent light, each question answered: “Dead.” But powder formed and powder shaped can shock me from my gloom. Let triangles warp, and brightly drape my urine across this room.

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IT’S THE LITTLE THINGS

There is nothing tender about an airport. All the sundering; all the uncertainty. All that skin and lustre enjoying the fall of mortality’s uneven feedbag. Sadness and temerity. Sadness and “let death diminish us all.” Sadness mumbled under a flower-wilting breath. But in Bogota, I stumbled upon an old woman selling cigarettes, each wrapped in cellophane, with a box of wooden matches. As she shook the bags like maracas, she sang and tapped like she was auditioning for the asylum’s “Oh, Holy Virgin!” She wore a diving mask.

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N O O N E D I E S G R A C E F U L LY

A man fell on the sidewalk and was asked, “Who are you?” The man thought, Sidewalks can’t talk, and went to sleep. The sidewalk didn’t want to be greater than it was, so it swallowed him. And then the man became the sidewalk. * A child was taken from her parents then became a parent. One night she decided to photograph her children. “Let’s hide from her at the bottom of a lake beneath coconut shells.” At their funeral she wondered why her children were so common. * A woman hid in a tree trunk and then became a tree trunk. She made insect mittens and debated how to die gracefully with her own tremulous echo. When they cut down the tree they found her laughing, “May I sing of hollowness one last time?”

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BRICKS

Tally the starving, tally their egos For the umbilical of beggary is tied to them now The bricks have moved, been carried away Abandon your bibles, burn all your bibles Shake the delirium of chickens on coffins The bricks have moved the bricks have moved Cardboard the city, corrugate your country Sit on your rooftops while hayfields float by The bricks have moved, been carried away Drink to your mother, drink to the hungry Drink to your children and all that is sunken The bricks have moved the bricks have moved Bring me your iron, bring me your mountains Bring me your wisdom and all not of bone The bricks have moved, been carried away Dance with the fleshless, dance with the sluggards Dance in the moonlight beneath broken glass The bricks have moved the bricks have moved Who has no money, Who has no family Who has no children or none within sight The family has moved, been carried away I started off green, but now brood black and blue Blunted and cheated and left here to rot The bricks have moved the bricks have moved

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Now there’s no blood, now there’s no bone Now only skin only fragments of skin The bricks have moved, been carried away At night there was laughter, and maudlin dissent At night there were windows far too many windows The bricks have moved the bricks have moved Yes, we were poets, not blacksmiths but poets Yes there was wonder wrung out of our landscape The bricks have moved the bricks have moved But now I’m seditious, and now, I surrender To the god of consumption conducting me home My bricks have moved, been carried away

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PA U L D U R C A N WA N T S A TA X I I N T H E C H A PA R R A L

Take that one — mourning until dusk — what a great rock! Ghostly like Chaparral’s laughing taxi stand. Take that one — he smokes like a hairdresser — eyes full of sunshine and all that teaboy scurry. And him — drunk and reeling like a whirlpool . . . he could silhouette even the finest Catholic vision. Okay, I have been drinking, but I still think their horns sound like a harpsichord shitting a cat.

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LOS MAGNIFICOS

I am watching six men create fire: in a perfect arc they lob halved leaden balls at two triangles of gunpowder. I sit below a corrugated metal roof that is being battered by rain — it is leaking in three places — always on us. No women will come in here except the wife of the owner. She has been pregnant since I arrived. Fifteen months and holding. Vallenato is what they play. Names of drug lords, names of enemies, plantations and dead crops. But I have left them again. Poland in the 1940s: the fire, the star expiring in mud. A Pole, a Jew, a Gypsy, a Queer? This is how it happens now. My travels have altered the game — I can arc even the purest moments into hell.

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THE TUMOUR

I first saw the tumour resting on Fifth Avenue. Its host, a pleading vessel for two decades of stubbornness, godlessness and cowardice, admittedly relished the attention it drew to the nervous rattle rattle of his tin can. (Wasn’t a second head proof of an ancestry growing still? Was there an article of clothing that could contain them?) Skin from without touched the sidewalk everywhere — every hair darkened. He could walk — walk upon the two filaments dangling from his torso — but there was no air, only shadows resting upon a thorax, concave and ribless. Well, I wanted to offer both of them food again but his brown eyes, Sienna it said, wanted none of me. And then, to make one buckle, threw a wrench into the kindest of gestures, by smiling.

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JUNGLE SLAUGHTER

Sadly, I am convinced that when their bones are no longer of use, flotillas of penitents will venture into the jungle and marvel at their defencelessness. Reluctance and tenderness will pass, transforming into nothing less than blood metaphors for psalmists from Stockholm. Simplicity is at the core of all great jungle slaughters — and human flesh knows, adores and adorns this proudly. We surrendered to this arrogance when we let our graveyards become art without artists.

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THUD

1. “Last year at this exact spot,” she said. “It fell on her. She was beneath this same tree, resting on her back, eyes closed. It knocked out her teeth.” 2. I lament the butchered, the lynched left to rot. The poets who thought poetry was leaping distraught. The kidnapped, tortured, caned or shot. But guillotined by a goddamn coconut?

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GRANDMOTHER’S DANCE

You would think this land indivisible, but even a jungle knows paradox, the incontrovertible wish to dance, and to grow moderately.

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EYES

I sat for hours watching the suicide dogs running after one another. Their eyes are my eyes. Even that one, dead at the policeman’s feet, his eyes are my eyes.

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GULL

On the bus to Santa Marta I watched an injured gull shuttling from land to sea. It was bleeding, hull to mast, and plummeting downward. One pendulous wing, like a metronome, clicked the diminuendo. Crows and vultures never pilfered for life like this, never had to carry so much art, only to be knocked from flight by a child wanting to breach the fierce immensity of the sky. But who made the first cut? Who pledged to open the gleaming door? No one else on the bus saw that gull. No one else but me and he who pierced its chest. And now I dream of branches and salt and the witless charitable rut

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we’ve fallen into. Tell me who can float when continents of hate eddy like a noose around your throat? Who cares to soar when broken and spent? Imponderable combustion and the mammoth wonderment we’ve hushed have become this. When it struck, I will wager, not even the ants gave a shit.

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DREAMING OF CANADA WITH THE COLOMBIAN PIN BOYS

And with one ball you can crack an ankle, warping it far beyond the treeline. I doubt the limping boy has ever heard of Baker Lake, and when hobbling home will mumble nothing of Duncan Campbell Scott’s betrayal. I doubt he understood why I sang Is he crying for himself, I’m a wonderin’. But if Canadian lumber is used to fashion his crutches, his hands will need no visas to become the first of his bloodline to leave Colombia. So maybe I helped him when I aimed the bowling ball at his ankles, or maybe that sound wasn’t what I thought it was. I hope the Pin Boys are laughing at the closeness of our game — for even the firing squad and the fired upon must enjoy the pageantry of it all.

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SHOTGUNS AND ACCORDIONS

Once a year, a dozen brass bands play in the graveyard so the dead can hear the fusion of indigenous, African, and Spanish music. But sometimes it isn’t safe, even in the cemetery. Colombian Gold brought the Mafia and the Colt 45. It took women from their homes and left them on the streets. The American dollar changed the towns. Men left. They took their guns. The indigenous musicians lost the flutes that controlled the course of nature, distracted their opponents, and drove out the missionaries. Instead, they were given accordions so they could sing of their lost gods and their lost land. They were raped by the Mafia who wanted to grow coca because the marijuana trade had dried up. Counterfeit dollars paid for weed cut with horseshit and twigs. Vallenato became macho, just a song written for Jeeps. The new folk heroes were marijuana men who deserted their families for gold. Once a year, someone in the cemetery sings: while the scum die in the burning sun, the victims grow old.

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TIED

I walked through Leticia trying to find where the noise came from. Dirt roads and tiendas, my damn imagination and that sound. I walked past people earthed, wingless, no longer neutral. Blurred in the sun’s haze below a canopy of sand and stench, wandering aimlessly while the squeal expanded and transmuted into a choking nightmare. The two-storey buildings absorbed the sound muffled its echo or let it pass. Faster and faster I walked. Terrified by the immensity of it all I turned the corners while its crescendo soared over all barricades, pirouetted around the siren of a crippled ambulance and fell at my feet. Unearthed by its spectre, raised aloft I finally saw the city for what it was. Sad, poor — an endless labyrinth of annihilation. Immured by shit — everything could be washed away. That was the beauty of it. I sailed toward the river and discovered it hidden beneath a wooden staircase. The pig’s legs were roped together; its snout wasn’t — kill me, it squealed, fucking kill me.

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D O G S FA S H I O N E D O U T O F R U S T

Irritated and muddled on the gravel road, six of them sit. And soon they’ll explode. There is no self-deception, no unconscious confidence. Their reception is shallow and oppressively trafficked between mountains, mud holes, and the kicked few. Always a hurdle, always a hair unfondled. They’ve suffered it all without indignity. The suicide dogs’ dexterity knows no limits — retreats from no one. Their eyes plunge the sword, shake the sun, and kill the unexceptional. They are incontrovertible, move of their own accord. Fashioned out of rust and rust’s impassioned thrust. They walk past the pothole’s abyss while taxis honk. But tin catcalls and metallic corpses silence no one. They were not trained in patience. They learned it in the basements where they sleep and fuck and self-destruct. There, below the tienda where rain grows, carries, flows — transporting the stain of languagelessness — all the sprouts of dissipation — the taught shouts from the last dogs of poetry — those travelling beyond sympathy away from innocent, fog-festooned eyes. The non-threatening offer no surprise, and walk dispassionately headless. But can the legless and blind redress the wrongs of those who surround us? The murders, rapes, the rhythm-bus pomp of alcohol paraded through their streets and masqueraded in a metal rainbow — a horizon of cattle so dilated and exuberant they vomit luxuriant streams of Christ-like adequateness. Dogs don’t swerve, rattle, or repress — they walk and crawl, limp and founder.

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Within all that grows unsounder they move. The roofs, the streets, the walls, the pothole puddled with puke that calls for the unattended to rise beyond metamorphoses. Eyes are never forever darkened. Blue and green can rise from the blackened. They are dark brown. They are crumbling saints scorched by the sun, robbed of the faint hope that their right ears will grow back onto corpses, bloodied and cracked. Matted fur and pink, ballooned stomachs — six bus stop shrines marooned between small Colombian towns with photos of the dead — the frowns of these missing are nailed to their eyes. The bloody, the ruddy, who never surprise. The pains of the missing are nailed to their eyes.

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SMALL HELICOPTERS: C O C K F I G H T AT M I R O L I N D O

Behind the gas station, last Saturday night, we were given sunflower pins for three thousand pesos. It would have been eight thousand if we sat inside the ring with the shirtless, tan-bellied, and chain-smoking clientele, all the characters from Cannery Row. After we paid the bulbous ticket-women, we purchased beer and empanadas and started asking questions. The fights are fifteen minutes at most — something like a factory punch clock hangs from the ceiling. Both birds have spurs that can wound the other fatally. If one cannot stand, the death clock, a large red hourglass, is turned over. The bird has one minute to begin fighting again or be declared the loser — or worse. But what they didn’t tell us is that, when the birds fight, they sound like small helicopters; that there is blood, but it is rarely seen until it is on your shoes; that when the dead bird is carried out, its head hangs backwards, like a Russian Grand Duchess after fainting at the ball. That one of the owners, who had bet his whole month’s salary, looks like Prince in 1978. That there is no music, just the yelling of the names, Culimbo, Camaguey, Chaspeado. The yelling of dale, dale and mátalo, mátalo. The fights continue until six in the morning. I guess that’s why a group of young women showed up at ten and sat in the stands putting on their makeup. It’s odd to think that amongst the noise, the money, the death and blood, I could have found my cuidadora, and danced all night with her to the sounds of Hit it! Hit it! Kill him! Kill him!

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SWIMMING WITH PINK DOLPHINS AND MY DEAD MOTHER

We are all illuminated differently when older. You changed colours more than once. I remember when you were beige, I remember when you were white — far too white. The pink dolphins I am swimming with used to be blue, green, and grey. Maybe pink is the best colour to be when we die. I don’t know what colour I will be — a skin rash could give me a tweed jacket. You always liked me in my Irish suit. I am still swimming as I think about this. We first saw them about an hour ago. According to the museum in Puerto Nariño, the dolphins have attacked swimmers and fishermen. But I am still treading water and thinking about our different worlds. The dolphins are circling and our guide is yelling, “Get back in the canoe!” But I don’t want to — I feel closer to you like this. Treading dark brown water and letting my mind wander . . . It is dark tonight, mother, and I am walking down to the river. I don’t want to be alone anymore. If they can do it, so can I. As soon as I am in the water, I am one of them. I am following them, I am impregnating hundreds of them, thousands — I am making an army of dolphins to carry me from my world to yours. On the backs of my children I will arrive. Mother, when I awoke in the morning the spirit of the Amazon was rushing from my mouth.

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I’m back in the water again, but the sun is out. I have legs, and I am trying to find them again. I can’t wait all day to see my family. I need someone. I can’t be alone anymore. Mother, one is in front of me, such beautiful eyes. I know about the lifetime of nightmares, but these beautiful eyes are the last thing I remember. You sat up in bed. You knew you wouldn’t ever again. You cried. You changed colour. I looked into your eyes, and that will always be my nightmare. I failed you the day you fell into your coma. I should have opened the back door and carried you to the lake. You were changing, you were leaving my world for one I don’t understand. Please, mother, let one of the dolphins circling me be you. Tear off one of my arms. Do anything. Just exist with me here.

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ISLA DE LOS MICOS

When the trees move for miles and miles as if they were being dragged downward to catapult the fruit upon fruit far beyond and continually beyond the reflection of oar and lake. When the trees move only inches above you and the fruit now has eyes and teeth and a communion of hands — forgetting becomes a mountain, and everything drains into stillness.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would first like to thank my good friend Paul Vermeersch for all his editorial assistance. Although I was in Colombia and he was in Canada, we made it work. I would also like to thank: my father, Colin Woodcock, Andrew Webb, Keith Daniel, Adam Levin, Loreena Ann Lloyd, Mitch Mackay, Mark McCabe, Kevin Mittelstadt, Emir Salihovic, Gaye Facer and Tim Irwin, Tom Preston, Jason McCargar, Thomas Komurka, Armando Castro, Janna Campbell, Damon Campbell, Jane Buchanan, G, Eric Normann, Michael Stewart, Hernan Vivas, Kmilo and Fabian, and Johanna Carreño Rangel. Earlier drafts of some poems have appeared in The Delinquent (uk), Rampike, Columbia Review of Poetry (usa), Atlas (India), CV2, poetrymagazines.org.uk (uk), Diwan (Bosnia and Herzegovina), and Prometeo (Colombia). 13 Executions was originally a chapbook printed for the 3rd Yugoslav Association of Canadian Studies conference (October 19–21, 2007): yacs, Belgrade, Serbia. Drafts of a number of poems from Dead Horses were originally published as prose poems in Controlling Mastema (Belgrade, Serbia). All of these poems were translated into Spanish and read at either the 16th International Festival of Poetry, Bogota (May 2008), the 18th International Poetry Festival of Medellin (July 2008), or Ibague en Flor Poetry Festival (October 2008). The cover photograph was taken during Christmas, 2007, at Casa de los Micos (Monkey’s House). It is a place of refuge in the Amazon region of Colombia for monkeys orphaned by hunters. In memory of Susan Elizabeth Woodcock. 83

E N D N O T E S A N D L O C AT I O N S 13 Executions

The Saddest Ink — Moscow, Russia. Admiral Adrift — Sarajevo, BiH. Admiral Mahic is the first poet I met in Sarajevo. He is a good friend, a wonderful reader and a steamship of a drunkard. The “house between houses” is a small, hidden bar in Sarajevo where older playwrights and poets sit, drink, debate, and challenge one another. Aja’s Education Reform — Sarajevo, BiH. The Peasants of Brazo’s Bend — Houston, Texas, usa. Editing Howard Aster — New Delhi, India. Flood in Nizwa — Nizwa, Sultanate of Oman. Did I Sleep in the Jewish Cemetery Last Night? — Sarajevo, BiH. Keith and the Kirkjug — Reykjavik, Iceland. A Kirkjug is a large plastic waste bin. Kimici’s — Koszalin, Poland. Mikica — Sarajevo, BiH. Cracked Cups — Moscow, Russia. Solidarity’s Shoes — Koszalin, Poland. The Final Stand — Moscow, Russia. It was 35 below when the old man pulled out his old fella – God bless him. Dead Horses

Her Eyes Were Like Unwashed Hospital Windows — Sarajevo, BiH. The Burzhuika — Moscow, Russia. The Bridge — Reykjavik, Iceland. After Watching a Gypsy Girl Crying in a Cemetery — Vilnius, Lithuania. A Drunk Old Man Wanted an Audience and Found Me — Moscow, Russia. Grandmother’s Corpse — Sarajevo, BiH. Stare at Horses — Moscow, Russia. 84

Thinking of St. Jude’s From Far Away — Nizwa, Sultanate of Oman. St. Jude’s is an Anglican church in Oakville, Ontario, Canada. The Great Transgressors at the Falaj Daris Hotel — Nizwa, Sultanate of Oman. Shotguns and Accordions

(All written in Colombia.) Suicide Dogs — Ibague. The Chiva Accident — Tayrona Park. New Rivers, Old Clothes — Chaparral. The Toilet Song — Los Magnificos Tejo Club, Ibague. It’s the Little Things — Bogota. No One Dies Gracefully — Bogota. Bricks — Ibague. Written after a flood washed away numerous homes in one of the poorest areas of Ibague. Many of the people were educated desplazados who had to flee, or were forced by farc to flee their homes. Paul Durcan Wants a Taxi in the Chaparral — Chaparral. Los Magnificos — Ibague. The Tumour – Ibague. This poem was my entry for CV2’s 2008 2-Day Poem contest. The words that had to be used in the poem were: vessel, filament, proof, article, thorax, wrench, buckle, sienna, rattle, nervous. Jungle Slaughter — Leticia. Thud — Tayrona Park. Grandmother’s Dance — Macedonia (a small village in the Amazon). Eyes — Leticia. Gull — Santa Marta. Dreaming of Canada with the Colombian Pin Boys — Ibague. The italicized lyrics are a slightly altered version of a line from Gordon Lightfoot’s “Ballad of Yarmouth Castle.” Shotguns and Accordions — Medellin. Written after watching a 85

documentary of the same name. Tied — Leticia. Dogs Fashioned Out of Rust — Bogota. Small Helicopters: Cockfight at Mirolindo — Ibague. Swimming with Pink Dolphins and My Dead Mother — Amazon River, Colombia and Peru. Isla de los Micos (Monkey Island) — Amazon. It was my first Christmas abroad since my mother had passed away. On this island there are hundreds of little maizero monkeys that will jump from the trees and crawl all over you if you hold a banana. It was here, covered with monkeys, that I, for the first time in 15 months, began to feel a sense of calmness and acceptance.

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LIKE AN EMBEDDED JOURNALIST, Patrick Woodcock writes from the front lines of experience. Cities reeling from the trauma of siege warfare, the stifling heat and politics of the Arabian Peninsula, the darkest corners of the South American rainforest — his poems bear witness to a world that is equally immediate and remote . . . and far more complex than we often imagine. In Always Die Before Your Mother Woodcock is like a photographer; using the changeable lenses of image and idiom he reveals detail and contrast in the all-too commonplace, transforming them into explorations of human failures both public and private — those of our societies, our politics and our religions — as well as his own failures as a son.

PATRICK WOODCOCK is the author of six books of poetry. He was the poetry editor for the Literary Review of Canada and has had numerous poems published over the last year in countries such as Canada, the U.S., England, India, and Colombia. Because travel is so essential to his writing, he has lived everywhere from Iceland to Russia, Bosnia and Herzegovina to Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Colombia. He currently lives in Erbil, Iraq. Most of the poems in this book were read at the 18th International Poetry Festival of Medellin in July 2008.

ISBN-13: 978-1-55022-862-5

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