Only the Ghost Has Lasted

By the author of Ninety'seven Posts with Heads of Dead Men

poems by Nancy Dembowski

INSOMNIAC PRESS

Copyright © 2000 by Nancy Demobowski. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from CANCOPY (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), 1 Yonge St., Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5E 1E5. Edited by Jill Battson. Copy edited by Melanie Morassutti. Designed by Mike O'Connor. Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Dembowski, Nancy, 1956Only the ghost has lasted Poems ISBN 1-895837-65-0 I. Title. PS8557.E466O54 2000 C811'.54 PR9199.3.D45O54 2000

COO-930471-1

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council and Department of Canadian Heritage through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program. Printed and bound in Canada Insomniac Press, 192 Spadina Avenue, Suite 403, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5T 2C2 www.insomniacpress.com

For your dedication, talent and hard work in bringing this text to fruition, thank you so much Jill Battson, Peggy Lefflier, Melanie Morassutti, Steve Venright and Mike O'Connor.

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For Violet Eloise Burgess

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Living with Shirley in Georgetown 11 Despite Everything 13 The Other Night 17 Sweets 19 It Wasn't Until Later 21 Tenor Sax 23 Ghosts 25 Trash 27 If Only I'd Known 29 Mirror Writing 31 Never 33 Saint John the Baptist: 7:30 35 Abstractions of Atlantic City 39 Fragment 41 PlusZero 43 Alien 45 Spectres of the Historical Subsconscious 47 A Picture of You 49 That Summer of 1990 51 For Me 53 Peace, Love & Dope 55 Talking to John 57 Dear John 59 Collateral Damage 61 Bookmaking 63 Anything 65 Virginia Peace Officer Spring 1997 67 Fences 69 Seventy-Six 71 Dark Chocolate Ice Cream 73 Autumn's Surrender 75 Life on Venus Avenue 77 You'll Never Get Them Both in Bed 79 My Brother's Daughter 81 I was just thinking 83 Avant-Garde Immigrants Capture Organ Grinder Beauty Queen & Pope 85 Signs 87

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5$Wg^ith Shirley in Georgetown Turbahed guy keeping guard outside that Indian dive, bubble gum hymns sailing in, through drapeless windows, care of Winstons, and some kid still sleeping in the basement when we moved in, but we were lucky to be living in Georgetown. She was dancing at the Good Guys, turning tricks on the side. I worked a respectable lie. Still wonder how it was she could foretell that night, speaking in the low light of some middle-class cafe, of her friend and how that happens sometimes. Must have been her pricey shrink, had that fancy palace on the M Street side. Kept a teenage junkie girlfriend, always bringing home other men. Invited us to porno parties and she went. Lots of people coming through our doors those days, although Andrea was the only one who stayed, with his androgynous ways and hopes of getting laid. About the time I took up, with that sage I'd picked up, I began to stay up all night long. Used to pull my hair and watch her bare upon the stage. And then Walt lying on the couch for three whole days, with his magic mirror and fifty dollar straw, eating all those boxes of my Christmas candy. I supposed, that didn't help. Or those friends of Andy Williams', we met at the Four Seasons. Sent their limousine. Where we'd change our hose, gossip long distance on their car phones, always ringing off the wall for her. Making dates, and breaking dates, and they somehow thinking it was my fault, when she didn't make them. But then I did go that one time. Joined a Latin businessman in his room at the Sheraton. Afterward, hanging out in the lounge, bartender took me for a pro the way I acted. But when we went to celebrate, I no longer liked to eat. Lived on aloe vera juice and multi-minerals from the Herbal Life girl.

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Doc bringing me to sex nights at that Eighteenth Street bar, big fat women squirting breast milk into jars, little ugly guy with the scar wanted to make me in the toilet. Shirley swapping spit with some waiter worked in Connecticut. Lucky I met with God. Shared his secrets. Took me on a shopping spree. Bought me all those ugly dresses and a used car. Shirley asking what was wrong with me. Why I didn't like her any more. Crying on her bed, saying she never wanted sex with all those men. I took Lithium. Checked myself in. Andrea claimed he was my kin, let him in to see me at the hospital. Brought me some of his balloon dolls. Although in the end, he wasn't a friend at all. And she called. Gave me back the key, and that was it for Georgetown, Shirley and me.

/£

Despite/Everything Up-trying over you and The Wisdom of Insecurity4:/read all night long. Finally found you in the morning, in some alleyway, all my money gone. Not a cent left, from the sale of my Datsun. Spent on Quaalude. Lining the pockets of some criminal dude. And you took 60. Thought if you died, you'd repay me. Couldn't even pump your stomach clean. Fed you charcoal and sent you home to your brother and his fans. Filled you full of lies about me. Said I was a witch, when I loved you so much. Baked a white vanilla cake. Staged a catfight in your honour. Threw a steaming cup of coffee on her patronizing face. After all, she had been dumb enough to hand it to me, while accusing me of talking your friend into my bed. Ended up going out to the coast with him. Guess we thought we could escape them. Still had to listen when your father called me a whore. Made me leave his house. You standing out there, not a word of shade to spare. All those days and nights the three of us, in that sputtering truck. Nearly two days of wide open plains. Thought I was in heaven when we came upon those sparkling lights against the barren desert night. Morning, bringing deep blue mountains silhouetting the slate Nevada sky. Afternoons spent shooting pool in dark little dirt ball halls, Watching the best hustle balls. And we did love the same things. And we did share some good things. Lived in that little shack. Not much you could have done with that, but tear it down. Me always curious why my tabletop was smeared with some mysterious grime. Caught that filly licking on my salt shaker, my tacky banana sugar bowl, And I worked downtown.

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Kept the books. Fought my bosses' looks. Always trying to get me to go off to some cheesy double-X motel room. And he hated you. With your blue-collar dirt and your smirk. Never did keep a job. Used to run away for days, I'd be looking out our rickety screen door, watch you riding off on that motorcycle you bought. Didn't once ask you to stay, ask you where you went, or let you see all the pain I was in. Put on my lipstick instead. Seduced our roommate into claiming what he won by default. And then one day you told me it was done. You were taking me home to my mom. I couldn't touch you. Couldn't touch you. Went out to that old ranch in the desert with your horseshoe friend, and his sixteen-year-old lover, with her endless curves, and her clairvoyant dreams, and her cats the coyotes liked to eat. Gave me that dingo puppy. Rode on my lap, the whole eight days, on the back of your 550. Finding partners on our travels. Sleeping on park benches in Kansas. Waking up with bug bites on my face. Got that old man to haul the bike. Let us ride in his cab. He looking down at me with his piano-key smile, Rubbing his oily fingers on my twenty-year-old thighs. The whole time me counting every joint we toked, every cigarette we smoked, blowing me further away from you. My God you broke my heart. My God you broke my heart. I was never the same after us. Had no idea what I was giving up. Even today, I lay in bed with my husband, see you then. I want to be the same. But I never was. I never was. Still can't decide what it was.

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Thought so little of me? Wanted too much from someone that I loved? Or just that us, was nothing more than lust? And we did make love every chance we got. And there were some times I felt that was enough. It wasn't always worthless? Was it? Wasn't always worthless? And that dog we never named was motorcycle trained. Sat right up on the gas tank. Went wild to the sound of a motor starting up. Should have left him with that Indian man, describing all his plans for keeping him. Cause when you got him home, you chained him anyway. Just like me. Just like me. And you're still doing it. You're still doing it. Despite everything.

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Jhe GtfrerMgKt x I dreamed of my old man the other night. We sat very close, and spoke, as though we were still tight. But the place was all wrong. It was nothing like us, with leather upholstery, plants and such. He seemed the same in his worn-out jeans with a beer in his hand and though I can't quite remember the things that we said it got me to think about all those people we knew back then. Maggie, who lived at the laundromat, with her bed in the back closet and her shepherd tied to the heavy-duty dryer. I'd wait for him among her plastic pictures of Jesus, soap opera blondes in skin-tight jeans arguing with fat black women over washing machines. Wore those kidney-coloured tiles out dissecting his affair with her, wondering what it was he found to like, although she always was polite to me. And that mother-daughter team. Lived in that old house in Annandale. Just his type too I guess. Liked having sex with the same man. The mother in the morning with her nails unglued, drinking cooking sherry before breakfast. Or those girls he went to high-school with. All night long they moved from rig to rig and in between he'd bring them coffee and shots of Virginia Gentlemen in little paper cups. Or that guy whose wife just had twins. Went out for a pack of smokes and a cherry-cola Slurpee, never did come back.

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Don't meet people like that today. Cons named Killer don't come knocking at my door any more. Even his queen brother couldn't handle that. Watched him do his lover on the couch one afternoon. Poor Allen died early on. All those evenings in the park sticking his sex through a drilled-out board. Coming home from the cafe in my hot pants to the iron bars of my red light room, I was followed, asked what a white girl was doing round there. His dad who called me a Jew. His mom with her bingo games. They're both dead now too. Wasn't much good at that life. Liked my things tidy and my drinks on the rocks. His people knew I'd read books, wasn't genuine. Couldn't find a way to live that sin down. When I stole those clothes at the Hechts and got a job, it was only a matter of time after that. Then my mother sent her rescue cheque, and he knew damn well I wasn't coming back. Until I dreamed of him the other night, he looked the same but the setting wasn't right.

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.#• ... The waiter cracks an egg: our salads sit we take the stairs our room is a museum he's dressed his gift of chocolates in his Sunday shirt I wear it open and alone the skin of his eyes, his cheeks, sweet with apertif I drink quickly, and think he is the lover of my life this is the most elegant room I have ever been in in my life. My mother's house was simple: butterscotch in coloured glass no chandeliers to dress me in rainbows only brother's prisms on the windowsills in some way equated with his love of symbols. My husband calculates our travels: I wait outside the door I am mad for Japanese lanterns and American flags summers, thieving ice creams and pencils minus brother's brilliance in my hands words were nothing next to numbers. I keep my lover's chocolates in my bag and find a place where I am close enough to watch like a movie: There is blood on the sidewalk and bars on the window I count, to the flicker of cars while his hands undress my chocolates and the money tumbles out.

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It Wasn't Until Later <,.. Tried to die once for this. Makes me smile now to think of it, the overacted artlessness, the desperation of my spirit then, though I can't recall the pain I must have been in. How it felt to be in love with him. How it hurt to know I wasn't wanted. Enought to put a razor to my wrist, sit by the ocean door and wait for my life to end. And a dying man, a young, sick, dying man, came to comfort me. Would have traded him my ace for his jack, even then I knew you were in store, for what was left of me. The magazine girl in our bed had made it all come clean, with her cigarette and her fashion sense, she'd been certain what it was he really needed. I knew then, how cold I'd have to be and I just didn't want it. Couldn't tell you why it was I changed my mind. I was probably just afraid to die. And I laughed out loud at the fat nurse and her sadistic grin, judging me by a picture of him. And I knew I'd live.

And I'm glad I did.

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Though he showed no pity for me, took no interest in my bandaged limbs. It wasn't until later he was sorry. After I'd been gone awhile. Suffering counted then, now it was his instead of mine. And now I'm through with you no doubt you'll change your tune, be as broken as he was then, as certain it was all your fault. And I'll be as faultless, heartless, bored with you. Though I wanted to explain, I didn't want this end. I'd wanted to be dead.

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£' Made a whore of me when I was still a child. Dancing in that dive for the lust of those young boys. Jazzy, bluesy notes singing what I really am. It's no lie you're the brandy of the damned, cause when I'm high on you I put Jack Daniels back, swirl like a stripper on a dim lit stage. Long slow fucks on too hot summer nights, skin dripping with the sweet sweat of your sound. Those dark brown faces I love so much, reminding me of home. All the joy of a woodwind world. Ain't nothin' alive moves me the way you do. Reached right in and took my soul is what you did. Made a whore of me when I was still a kid.

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Ghosts I find her in the kitchen, waving a paper fan; his letter, a love story, psychologizing her personality. We toss the coins, and here he stands: the one who tore her dress and his friend, who stalked at night through tombs, and dug, with sticks, her childhood, buried in toys and poppies under the willow tree. Weeping, he coaxed her into the office and made her research graves late into the night. He thought her brave, face down, his breath against her back. Liquid scalds her scalp. She laughs, she cannot help herself. And now, across Formica, she takes my confession, as she took the Sunday bus. A girl in blue velvet, me in my best, daring the hung over chalk, the one who tore her dress and his friend. Closing the morning's coffin with cinnamon and prayer, I find her in this place. She rests, amid roses, dead weeks, and pedals in her hair. Have you seen my father, mommy dear? I toss her high, the way she likes it. Laughing, laughing, we search the wicked earth in morbid detail. It's been years; it's been years. And she's the sign he is returning, coming to find me, in this ghetto, this black hole: wired windows, wired women, women burned with cigarettes, blood in a fruit juice glass; collected, thus industrialized, collaged somehow with absurdities of: childbirth, girlhood, womanhood, on billboards containing a breast, a thigh...

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Car pulls up for a prostitute. I take the ride. At home, in her bed, God is a Bullet on full blast. I play the recording twice. He is annoyed...afraid I am abducted....face down in an alley or worse...reminding him what I mean to him. I'm hurt. He's cold. He's hurt. I'm cold. Drugged and sleeping he lifts me up like a romance novel and there, along the creases of his skin, is no part of him I would not touch with a part of me. He has distorted my industrialization. He has made me. We crash her grave and she is here, my child, deserted in a borrowed van. Out-of'rhythm, we drop the stalks in ash, and here the hexagram falls short. Write the sins you don't remember, he once told me, and turned the key, and left the motor run. Ashes spilling over empty letters, barbaric sticks twirling on fire, another strange psychology of unending stories...

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TrosK Thought I saw your face on the back of a cereal box, and I knew what to do with you. Emptied you out and filled you up with the bottle of Aspirin I bought 'cause I don't own a car and have an electric oven. Then I flattened you with my butch boots. Dumped you out in the dumpster behind the Yes-I-Will bridal salon, kitty-corner to the whole food store, where I went to see the 90-year-old psychic healer who fondled me for two hundred and seventy-five bucks of my own money. Then again, I've been fine for seven months now. So I guess my money was well spent and I'm not such a fool after all. Felt good seeing you laying in all that lacy garbage. I'll feed our children from trash cans if that's what it takes being that our daughter carved dead bodies in the sand at the McDonald's Playland. Thought I found Jesus in a man, but then I got the idea God must be a woman. Always was a rebel. Forgot that somewhere between our vows and the booze I've been leaning on lately. He took me into Eliot and opera and somehow his kisses against my tears and my eyes staring into that stale box of Cheerios helped me see your face carved in sand.

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, ]fOnlyTdKnow% Heard it on the news today Eighteen hundred women Are raped in my country every day. If only I'd known of all this company When I was seventeen And learned first hand from a wandering man Of little consequence to anyone but me. The common lies of our contorted lives Spilling into each other From his stench and desperate loneliness, As if love could be stolen. If only I'd known in the black of that desolate dugout How little of my life would be spared his tragic revision, I would not have sat so patiently Listening to his quotes from True Love magazine. If only I'd known how many times I'd wake in the night, How many years before I could bring myself to write, How many times I'd try and take my own life. If only I'd known of all the ink unsold, The reems and reems of brilliant idology Ripped away from my eighteen hundred sisters every day, I'd have shown him how to use that hunting knife, And finished his pathetic life. If only I'd known.

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Mirror,Writing* I have begun to live in fear of nothM^, certain my death has been revealed to me, pouncing up, paranoid, not of ghosts, but of the sleepless, the literal, and dreams of my right breast, your finding a lump, the size of a small apple you believe me now (about the numbers being transposed and my daughter's mirror writing) no symbol of free-floating anxiety having joined my brother's wife, what is left of my sister's friend, "but she's had seven children" and Kelly, in her wisdom, "we must cherish that which gives us life" both the globe and the apple of Eden, the sickness that feeds a whole planet, healed with radiation, a figure [of the end] of everything...

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-Nwer^ The beginning was November. No dog to die I guess. And it's been a week, this last of you, I take against the bridge. Where Vegas Falls on comic books and postcards write we'll never give. "Never is a long, long time to buy" I said. The waitress at the Elbow Room serves tissues, wipes the greasy cowboy songs on tapes of all your gospel tunes. Our sawdust in my sordid cup, "Hands down, hands down, worst drunk." And wonder things I did, as winter evening settles in and this prelude I begin. Because you liked his vacant lot, because you liked it best, this prayer at midnight comes to crawl from fingerprints on safety glass. The trucker at the Hitching Post bums a smoke. I curl south as pink flamingos steer my rear-view from this shoulder bend.

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Saint John the, Baptist; 7:30

i I've been writing this letter for a few years now: a wave of indifference while passing the salt, tears cried through a boring movie, enough of a reminder to forget how fragile you are. How much I wish we could still be the friends we were when you were married. Regardless of this, it is dark what you are doing. The clock melts your St John the Baptist calendar, bought from a nun when the store keeper wouldn't give her flowers. Letters you've been meaning to send: that twenty-year-old tart with her pictures of Jesus bleeding on plaster of Paris, forgetting to mention the H I sent you. And he's dead you know, As endearing as he was, he's dead none the less. What is left is only a bunch of hippies, their letters lost in transition.

II And what was it you were doing this morning that brought you naked wandering in the fog, preaching intertextuality and muttering an odd translation of the fables I have told you? The story of my dramatic friend dying young, and these twenty Christmases never having healed her leaving.

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The hangman, hanging on her closet door two winters. Her own parents certain of her witchcraft, sure her children demons. But I'm thinking only of her forgetting things, of the fact that she was always out of money, not enough to eat and all her beautiful children acting strangely, her goats gone the next winter. Her garden of bones not quite so enchanting now the neighbours bringing dinner.

Ill But is it really the case that you are interested? Would you go home to your laundry and your wife? Would you drive off in the middle of the night take the car, some money, a few Christmas decorations drop off a pile of boxes wrapped in cranberry and forest green Santa paper, muiitcoloured ribbons, clever cards with Japanese printing?

But we were speaking of your wife and your laundry, and taking a long drive in the middle of winter, past the frozen river, past the small town she never could remember the name of, through the snow to a friend's vacant cottage, a fire burning that first evening.

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IV So simple a signature the signature of one man in one place spawning souls flying about listening to Super Nice Hippie Pants and flogging a copy of Temperature of Ineptitude. But the story is all wrong. She was supposed to live in the city and drive to the country; the gifts were merely empty boxes, she didn't have the money for real presents and they never would have known the difference.

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. Abstractions of. Atlantic My pregnant neighbour came into my messy apartment to look at my broken oven kept on too many winters. Shortly after she left there was a knock at the door which I assumed was my landlord. Feeling betrayed, I peered through the screen but heard only the voice of a South-American male coming from a white limousine. I opened the lock and was immediately rushed by a hoard of gypsy children who excitedly pushed their way into what was now the house I grew up in. The man held out a vice made of plastic and steel, as my neighbour appeared, this time to seduce me.

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Fragment §<5mewhere between the Peacock and the Shoe Museum you interpret Derrick's theory as + 0 Madame de Maintenon reads the future with a wicked pack of stalks. Here, she said, the yin line of the I Ching is broken and all these years you never noticed: the girlfriend of situations, in fishnets and feathers, frames the spaces of her bruises etched in cybernated windows. She looks in vain; the receptive brings no shelter, the creative are no rulers.

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PlusZero And at once Derrick's cloud burst rained vitamins and no one took them. Outside of this prison she has sex in a television set and plus zero is infantalized correctly. But in the newspaper, deceased Madame de Maintenon bites her nails for the yin line of the I Ching is broken and all these years she never noticed. Girlfriend of situations frames the spaces of her bruises [knitted holes of fishnet fracted onto cybernated windows] as ghosts etch webs of witches sweeping arbitrary zeros: Freud laughed and cast a backward glance.

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Alien I learned to take this away with me when I cried all the way home on the bus. The people are warped. Their bodies conforming to their environment, their toes pointed inward, the injustice of boarded buildings weighing them down. And I am afraid in this place that I am supposed to belong, to this town, a place of refuge that is no place.

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Spectres of the. Historical Subsconseious I was in a basement (a pile of meat and a wasp hive, 101 Dalmatians and a new screen door). I was waiting for someone and walked away, leaving behind my son sitting on the steps. When I walked back, a man came toward me with a huge block of ice. He threw it at me. It is a stalker, who comes to me now. I ask him his name, and he won't tell me. When I go home, someone has been in my apartment, has left me notes on bits of writing from the Cantos. Downstairs, in a restaurant in my building, a metal gate comes up and down.

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A lecture,Q/Tw Going through your mess oft'omic books, And coloured penciled superstars, I came across a picture of you: a paper crown, sitting cross-legged, the tree as a backdrop, smiling. And you, my darling, a little nervous, your right hand fiddling with your hair. I can still remember your five-year-old voice over the phone that year, bleeding in with the Christmas noise. I doubt I would have remembered the details. Not the way I remember your not being there. Not the way I remember Susan, my one visitor, her seemingly endless chatter, my own silence, that gift she gave me, an embroidered dress from China. The accounts of her travels bled into the brightly coloured threads. In her village they wore masks, the water black, the only bird in two years a good-bye gift of sparrow soup, no trees, no grass. It isn't the sort of thing I'd wear.

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yiM^^c^^^j^J&M4^ When I was pregnant and got so sick I had to quit my job at the Wildlife Federation. And all summer long I lay on that tattered couch with the broken springs retching and watching TV. Dolled-up blond with a singsong voice telling me he died. Telling me they found Mitch Synder hanging in the shelter. And I knew, right then, as the lone voice of compassion lay dead, that D.C. was, at last, lost to me too. And I was right, of course. Cause the rest of the summer I listened to that bozo's trial, watched his video, the one where he was smoking crack with some little-known cover girl. And I thought of how Mitch gave that stupid old movie star a run for his money. Recalled him ranting about the Jews being dragged from their homes, lying on metro steam grates, carrying the black casket of a homeless woman found outside in the cold, insisting she be buried properly. For a while there, I guess, I really must have thought he had a chance, if only barely. And even though he lost, I respect his courage and like the way he played it out to the end. So early in Ninety-one, when my son was born in Ontario, I named him Mitchell.

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For Me For many years, when I thought of you, I saw your Irish anger and the hurtful things you said. But leaning over the stainless steel of my double-sized kitchen sink, knifing away the brown spots of a peeled banana, I remembered you, and how you always did it that way. And what morning meant in our house. You asking me what I'd like to eat and no matter what it was, sunny side eggs and bacon or overdone French toast, you'd prepare it for me. Or the days when I felt sick, lying on the sofa watching TV all day long, you'd enter intermittently bearing offerings of flat Coke or dry toast. And Simplicity would never do. No, it was Butterick and Vogue for you: the deep purple cotton with the long, long ties; the two-piece mini with the heart-shaped pocket on the left-hand side; and the pretty, pretty room you and Daddy prepared for me; once a month re-dying the only curtains we'd found ruffled just so. I think I was ten years old when you cried over the scar on my thigh and the K, for Ken, I'd carved out on my upper arm. I was caught off guard by this rare display of tears. Of course I didn't know back then what it was like to birth a flawless child and watch her marred by life. It took a long time for me to see, no matter how it is I live, I'll never know anyone, who would do for me, all the things you already did.

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f^^ipve&Dape Seventy BurkeVirginia was nothin' but wilderness and care-worn farmhouses. Daily we cruised those curvy roads, marijuana blowin' white into the summer air. Our own little piece of heaven some moccasin-infested swimmin' hole. The war was still on then. Poorly written poems on red checkered walls, young boys only half a leg or arm, our own lettered wristbands, so familiar, hardly noticed anymore. Yet every bulldozer, every For Sale sign, was cause for conversation. We were doomed, as was the land, and so danced naked to Pink Floyd cryin' outta some stolen car radio. Downin' Christmas-trees and cocktails, we enjoyed each other swingin' from vines, drownin' in murky water, the love of another still swimmin' our organs. As though some high, some orgasm, brought peace ta earth. The war did end. None of us, havin' to go. And those farm families, unable to pay their taxes, moved to Florida for lawn bowlin' and square dancin'. Ain't a lick a heaven left in BurkeVirginia no more.

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<X/ I was drearritrig about puppets and rusted stars. Woke up to the phone. It's John saying Pete's jacking off on stage. I say, "Hey, he's a confused Napoleon. Leave him alone. He's kind of charming." Look over at the New York Times with the picture of President Clinton and the caption about racism. Tell John, "What the hell does this white guy know about racism? We giving the country back to the Indians? He should shut up and stop making a fool out of himself." My daughter asks why men used to be able to do everything fun and women weren't allowed to. Wants to know if they fought women, if they killed them. "Yes they did. They still do. And your father is an asshole." Walk over to a poetry reading that is seriously deficient in anything you'd want in a poetry reading. Cry cause I feel like it. David asks me to lunch. Stan lets me use the phone. I go home with John. I'm sick all over his futon. He tells me my writing is too lyrical, I should speak in my own voice. I tell him my husband raped me on Saturday. He tells me to go to sleep, Peter's coming over first thing in the morning.

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^&fejohr> When you came by that sad anniversary, breathing your strange forgiveness, I admit you took me in. This does not mean that I sleep in your soil, any breeze ripping at my roots. It is here that you break my heart. Because you are not, to me, just another life, but your life. And yes, too full of sadness. And yes, poverty and loneliness as well. But I did not ask you to leave your beautiful wife. Nor did I say that slavery was good or right, just that nothing is only bitterness. Love and birth and tenderness were also living in that time. And from that ugly place, Africa America became. I am not ashamed that I am grateful. Too often you forget that she is my country, and that possibility is always equally alive.

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Collateral Damage I had a sad dream the other afternoon. Tara was angry with me, livid; she wouldn't speak to me. I had voted the wrong way between the French and English. I tried to explain that I've always just liked that they've voted at all. Although I don't know what good it is voting. Working for David Orchard, the Tories were sending out official records with purposefully inaccurate times and phone numbers. And later, when I spoke to friends, it was no surprise. Sometimes I listen repeatedly to Jann Arden singing "It's Time for Mercy". But mercy is not what NATO is up to with the bombing of Kosovo. They remained indifferent when Muslim women were herded into rape camps, murdered standing naked with children in their stomachs.

Virginia Woolf watched the planes over London, and so she would not have to see them again, walked into a river with her fur coat on.

Jann's sweet voice sings we're angels from the breath of god. Does this include the dogmatic, the petty, the greedy, the killers? Mercy never came into it. People are having babies in this war, teaching their children, cooking, falling in love.

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Bookmaking I have found myself glancing*at your marbling all day. Imagine a lettered edition in blue language, a page or two folded crosswise, a combination of Coach House leftovers and 21st-century red and yellow. Dennison maybe, or Peter? Perhaps I'll even spring for that flower paper in the art store on Bloor. Wallpaper or cardstock cover, hand sewn or stapled, this is what I like about Canada. This is a country where the people are not afraid to contemplate the small: where groups gather in the afternoon to read each other, where your son's softball game merits attention, where the filming of television shows looks embarassing on local merchants, where people understand, there is a price for glamour. And yet, these same people, these same sad people, have chosen to clean out battered women's shelters, rape crisis centres, programs to help male abusers, daycares, schools, hospitals, and handful after handful of delicately crafted children's programs, the old women who were teaching art or music along with them.

It is almost as if the people have been praying for the eagle to swoop their nation away. "We're tired of details" they say, "we're up for auction." And so, tonight on the six o'clock news, the Organized Criminal Association hosts a Casino Rama send-off party. Another sort of bookmaking.

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And the small yellow sign in the corner store reads: "Megacity, Megataxes, MEGAMERICA." Where a gang of teenagers drive their truck through a storefront window, pelt the cashier with half a dozen cans of dented tuna, and rifle through the pockets of the damned.

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//' .. ••'/' now this is the&pace i can do anything i want with a political tract some species of overdrive unbelievably haunted at seeing you speaking out and this will be silenced because it isn't profitable it is not that we must remain here we could leave if we wanted to it is that we don't out of a sense of injustice and the remaining few the republic of america

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^m^,&al^^m^S^g I §97 'You came to the door in your uniform, while I stood there ironing, and lied, when you asked if I was OK.

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fences ;,v You say I don't have faith in your plans. But just today, we sit on this bench, a little too cold, Mitchell whining for a push and both of us sad. You want it easy. Well, I don't blame you, It's just it doesn't seem as difficult as you make it. There isn't space between myself and my children. Your mother, so anxious for duplicity, is right about this. I grew up in the sixties, I can't divorce myself from wanting you at dinner. I'm lonely. It's as boring as all that. Mitchell says the moon is hot, and Kelly knows the sun is cold. I play the battered angel with a garden hose. Listen, as the fan turns round. You got it in you, just not now.

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My dreamy ghosts kiss Cupid's breath and bring you pictures of the snow. While the birch across the street wonders how we ever saw her as a noun. Go and find your childless woman, disappointing as I am. (And I did give you a gift, you don't see a thing the way you did.) In between the spaces I wish that I had begged.

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4^e^fe>^ I am in the Kitchen, playing Scrabble with Mitchell, when I hear John, over the radio, asking me to write a poem about Jefferson. And I answer that the sun, in her great periplum, leads in her influence, and that the I Ching and the TaO'Ta-Ching are never wrong. Then we walk to the comer, where an old woman holds a magazine featuring a barefoot girl who murdered her child. In a cage now, reading prejudice and praying for sincerity: anything that is opposed to the values of bricabrac and seadrift, anything opposed to going to the cake shop and buying some bubble gum, or some stickers for his notebook. And it was Pound who wrote so well about Jefferson: "in civilizing the Indians the following that has been successful: first, to raise cattle whereby to acquire a sense of the value of property, second, arithmetic to compute that value... and here they begin to labour." And the rain fell all night long and the wind blew over the place where the three roads cross.

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And in sight of the castle, there is wind space, there is rain space, and no more an altar to Mithras. A sense of humour seems to prevail now in the buying of fields in meter, yard or measure, as there is no labouring before arithmetic.

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Dark Chocolate Ice Crmm / My friend, Rachele, has skin the colour of dark chocolate ice cream. Her son sleeps over so she may steal a night out. We have put the children to bed. Before she leaves we have tea, share a cigarette. Tonight we discuss Sister Souljah. "She is young. Her hard words are innocent," I say. Not because I am white or because I am shamed (although I am shamed) but because I've lived in anger and understand its fruitlessness. "Even Malcolm turned at the end." Rachele is not convinced. "It always takes blood," she tells me. And our children, their heads joined like Siamese twins, sleep peacefully.

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Autumn'$ Surren^^ Pumpkins were gracing the fruit stands when my grandfather died, leaving only a handkerchief bunny as his immortal gift. The previous summer he had sat stubbornly beneath our overripe cherry tree tho such a hive of bees had taken over, even the beekeeper was taken aback. Tonight, Cassiopeia winks at me, her moon against the endless black-blue sky. The cold is welcoming. And it was autumn too when I surrendered. My husband laughing, offering up some anecdotal amusement, the intimacy stood awkwardly against our past, compassion came over me. 1 wanted to borrow grandfather's courage or Bonnie's, her slow body unable to care for any of her five children: "Here's my Maggie," she says, "a little chubby in the cheeks like your Kelly." The girl's dimpled face smiles up from the cheap plastic photo album. I do not know Bonnie well. Her death will only graze me. Her death will fall away as brown leaves surrender to the winter night.

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^^a}^ws^em^ 'Ran out or gas. Stuck with a cold coffee and two kids fighting in the back. Make it to Rachele's. She is watching Life on Venus Avenue, We decide to drive to High Park. Loading the trunk, a Latino in sunglasses posts himself to the mailbox in front of the Donut Cove, arms and legs cross he's enjoying the view. High Park looks like a back-home cemetery. My daughter stands in line for the slide, chickens out at the last minute. A woman - rhinestones, painted fingernails, no sunglasses calls out to my girl who's hanging with one hand. Her voice sounds like a poem. Not Whitman or Plath, but one of those poems that push the line, one of those poems nobody likes, nobody prints, unless the writer is famous. Sound too much a speech. I love them in secret like the New York sound of her voice. I'm brought back to rappers and ghetto blasters, a drunk in the next apartment begging "Come to me baby, come to me." She flies down happy. The diner is littered with geriatrics. Twelve bucks buys drinks and to-die-for muffins with a slice of carrot for decoration. I head home to ten different ingredients, new and improved and the good old American blues.

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You II Never Get Them Both in'Bed* Mom is Mom & Jesus is Dead

My back to a navy blanket. The planes come down on me like my foot to the gas, Wild Turkey, you. And last night, as I pranced deadpan from one tavern to the next, that same wind blew off those friends of yours: bits of frozen pea, corn, lima beans shooting out of their mouths. I have more in common with people who surround themselves with mechanical trash. Corner a boy sweating in the dank light his dark eyes locked on top button of my blouse his sheets drenched in everything about you I'm glad to be rid of. I paint the walls orange and dress like a pilgrim. I'm not with the program. I don't have a clue. I'm not your mother or your saviour Jew.

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M^rother*$ Daughter From now on I write the history of my people. I record every event as it unfolds: the glances across the room, the myth of western Utopia, the argument Louise had with her science professor about metaphor, the boredom I felt this afternoon. And this is for you Mitch. My crib on the fifty-forth floor of what used to be a decent building, a cocktail in my hand, a cigarette, and I'm not angry, at anyone, anymore. I'm busy keeping quiet now. No longer attempting to work within a formal constraint everyone else had given up on for centuries. I hide in the attic these days, beneath the fox collars. The cover of Frankenstein swims in my fish bowl. The lilacs look as they did in your mother's yard. And yes, my dear, she was smashing. At nineteen, she knew everything.

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1 v$$%i£tjdmJty Money is 6nly an idea, like sushi and sake, or buying vegetables at the Chinese market or taking the TTC. They had reasons behind it, children that needed to be fed or work that had to be done because someone else had another reason. And it is always lonely at the point when you see it. Money being only an idea and it being basically gambling and you realizing that the banks own the country and that our politicians are only merely gangsters.

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Amnt^Gar^lmrr)igr^nts Capture Organ Grifidef, Beauty Queen & Pope A pathetic street-corner organ grinder and a freshly crowned Miss Liverwurst were kneeling at the feet of Pope John Paul II when a band of Mexican immigrants, in studded black leather playing avant-garde accordion music, advised them to stay cool. The band then sprayed six million pounds of aerosol cheese all over them. Hauling their catch into escape-proof holes, with transparent plastic walls built to resemble ant farms, the avant-garde immigrants had the idea to keep them alive for months. The immigrants are said to gather strength by drinking motor oil straight from a can, but their strength was no match for Pope John Paul II who is the only man to have mastered the techniques of The American Arm Wrestling Association. Following the avant-garde immigrants onto a playing field of artificial grass, the Pope gripped 160 space-age globs of ghastly black chewing gum and bounced them onto the band so hard they travelled around the world. The pathetic organ grinder was once the king of artistry in denim; his signature invention was the rhinestone-studded country-western jacket. The 1945 Sears catalogue listed his pieces next to novelty ashtrays, which included a ceramic female rear emblazoned with the sentiment "Put Yer Big Butt Here." Ever suggestive of a maudlin circus clown, Tammy Faye Bakker bought herself one of the organ grinder's rhinestone jackets from Shoppers World in Orlando. This original mall rat molded herself on the image of a Western Barbie Doll.

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The prettiest baton-twirling blonde in high school, Miss Liverwurst molded herself into the image of Tammy Faye. She had been perfecting her beer-drinking Master of Ceremonies image since spring break, but resisted the fashionable bell-bottoms worn by bohemians and artists as she was looking for the perfect man. One heyday in the sixties, wearing his signature jacket and riding among bikers on a fat-fendered hog, came her devoted organ grinder.

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Signs f$r: Ann Lauterbach If the market gamblers are so smart, Then why do babies wear diapers? On a scale of nine to eleven In which three is a death In a basement? You can't see.

I/s, ands, huts Evoke the broken pottery from its passion. To parade sleepwalking: one person on television, Another jumping over a woman in a wheelchair, Where what she has done for five years, Brings trama to the context. As when you first request, "Some substance please?" Your world, stretched like cloth, is What you step out on And are pulled along Away from the entrance Not so much pacified as fastened, Onto the long sad question. Under surveillance, not finding a thing. Not knowing the reason for what is not there. But the notability of an influence is not its reason. After all, you doze among cryptography And rise to its affliction. If we would be inattentive to their point Theory could self-actualize. Yet then an additional affiliation is produced While a strange chorus of masculine prater Carries the note elsewhere/bouquet Of hyacinths delivered to a girl/her corpse 87

Materializing from the saga as a fresh juncture On a spoiled page/foolish Single desire of one shinning example attending to Others but not attending To this autumn's hurricanes. Typically only the women address peace, this is also a sign. "The best thing she was, Was her children," She might say at the end of the same old story. The library takes its place in the disarray: Registries, rosters, inventory lists, parish rolls. And so to fanticize on The Eve of St. Agnus May make one gone and gone only. Due to the interpretation, The Cuyahoga River caught on fire. And why is part of the hyacinth Mentioned at midnight When she finds these word knots In another nightmare she can't recall? And around the serpentine rope The physican with his knife Carves a line into her belly Like the general in the yellow room With his yellow map and stick, His ugly game exposed to the stark light Of history: Heidegger, Hegel and whatever Students might make an example. Gangrenous yellow note, A wide array of choices on the menu. C'est la vie, she now realizes Why she would prefer to forget the election. But what was voted about the plural? The wrapper could be a border of an interior compartment If anything gravitates toward reality. It's true; I was tired all day 88

For no clear reason like an errand that slipped my mind Fixed to too many adjectives: Accompanying, backward, postmeridian You get the message. Only the final curtain of lyricism On which to demand, lyricism as sole representative. Now the astute poet becomes a drug addict As she leans against the bathroom door Under a smoky, damp light. Nothing is as efficient as the representation. We are not situated on this earth But in its events: Let sleeping dogs lie; If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Subjugation comes intuitively to the demented That was the precarious darkness Specified by the writer And copied by his daughters onto the pages. The wound disclosed, the hair deminishing Close but no cigar. Apathy Decays what is truth, this is its honesty. So we locate ourselves in the surplus Of what is here until now And aim to hasten the good times along. Some meaninglessness is alluring, like hip-hop, The discourse of the disenfranchised, But virtue laments and falls to ruin Under a soaked tarp And we confess to being defeated, at least once. Its weeping heals the vacant eye. If you hoard all that has caused you pain You may find yourself worshipping it, Handing the collection plate along, Cheating the memory of the vapid place From which you just stormed away.

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Then remaining might be a nonexistent place Where what could be rekindled Has been reduced to ruin, To the toothbrush in your travel case. "If I have to tell you one more time..." Is anything in girlhood reciprocal? The raised limitations of affection, another way of putting it, Amalgamated with the mauled, as when reaching up Above sunflowers to the sorcery of a different time of year Which could be tranquil. They waltzed Under an dull light, and her jewellery, her cocktail dress Shimmers like a spectre, only the ghost has lasted. The mark of his cheek on her neck, is an indication. The fringes of the passageway were voiceless But were creased below Where damp tendrils were out of rank On the hard deck. The first line of defence carried their prayer beyond A teeming house of cards, slid Into business and a desire to live longer than the author of authors When whatever hyacinth left would flourish And pass on its fragrant scale. On this side of the tracts The boys were regularly keen But the back doors were perilous and padlocked. To defend what is popular, to be in stitches Without decoy or caricature; to rest secure. It is only a matter of eavesdropping To ascertain how to absent ourselves from this. What lingers late is a noise Which is not open to interpretation As suburbia harvests and harvests As emerging what will always be prosaic.

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Sitting in the stadium Things appear to be authentic, but conditional, like an afternoon In which newspaper kites flaunt themselves in the wind And ultimately blanket the city. Unwrapped and spread out they uncover Photos and stories in black ink; War, business, special interest And other provisions of our time. And possibly the gamble is finished Due to the weather Which is the lone surrogate Playing hookie From greed. The fans Smolder with passion and bluster And Mom cleans the cages Makes the souffle Pulls the putrid yogurt That was supposed to be eaten Last week for lunch Out of a corner of the room. Her job is to continue No matter what appears before her. Seasons show up like a big mouth Hero, not so much earnest and true As demanding and foolhardy, good at working the room Full of restless affiliates. Getting them on the bandwagon Sans any information on the topic, that's the ticket. She thinks how snow Does blanket the earth As she lights the fire. By now the kites are pulp And the players have left In their two-tone uniforms 91

And helmets. It's odd to think Each has a place to be, and some won't make it. When at one time all stories seemed honest Now they seem deceptive; the order

Was arranged. This location, this dollar. She twists to the spectre of her gasp Like a snake in a cage. Leave me alone was how she heard it From across the Astroturf: a sheet Ripped from a notebook in which she admitted She could delay no longer, writing her delay. Perhaps all present should be forgiven. The picnic, at all costs, was tedious; It drizzled all day But stuff drops As a matter of course, primarily in autumn. At times we see them, leaf by leaf, As when we open the chest Where records are hidden away. Be sure not to put that knife In the dish water or it might cut Your hand; there is blood on the linoleum and in the dirt. Even the pillow is stained And, like dirt, depressed With the weight of spectres. This is an example of a century of imagination Which should be thrown in a bag or Tupperware container And mailed to a fashionable recipient: odd How the bones and blood and flesh carry memories Like a civilzation lying under decades of debris Never to be discovered. Odd, too, How what is and what might be 92

Form a visionary rope Which, like weather, is endless Regardless of what we create To calculate alternatives. Snow again today. You may hear it as well, falling on the roof Like a braid of silence. Rather than giving up You could march right out of the house Onto the solitary highway, but be cautious And take your snowshoes: Don't forget, the road Won't give a damn. It's a straightway.

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