Civil Elegies: And Other Poems Read online

  Civil Elegies

  By the same author

  Kingdom of Absence

  Civil Elegies

  Wiggle to the Laundromat

  The Death of Harold Ladoo

  The Gods

  The Difficulty of Living on Other Planets

  Riffs

  Civil Elegies

  AND OTHER POEMS

  DENNIS LEE

  Copyright © Dennis Lee, 1972

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by

  House of Anansi Press Limited

  1800 Steeles Avenue West

  Concord, Ontario

  L4K 2P3

  (416) 445-3333

  An earlier version of Civil Elegies appeared in 1968

  This edition published in hardcover and paperback in 1972

  Reprinted February 1994

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Lee, Dennis, 1939-

  Civil elegies and other poems

  2nd pbk. ed.

  First version published under title: Civil elegies.

  ISBN 0-88784-557-6

  I. Title.

  PS8523.E3C55 1994 C811’.54 C94-930648-7

  PR9199.3.L44C55 1994

  Cover concept: Angel Guerra

  Cover design: Brant Cowie/ArtPlus Limited

  Cover photograph: Stephen Quick

  Printed and bound in Canada

  House of Anansi Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council, Ontario Ministry of Culture, Tourism, and Recreation, Ontario Arts Council, and Ontario Publishing Centre in the development of writing and publishing in Canada.

  Contents

  I COMING BACK

  400: Coming Home

  Glad for the Wrong Reasons

  Brunswick Avenue

  He Asks Her

  High Park, by Grenadier Pond

  The Morning of the Second Day: He Tells Her

  Recollection

  When It Is Over

  Night

  In a Bad Time

  Thursday

  More Claiming

  Heaven and Earth

  Sibelius Park

  Coming Back

  Words for the Given

  II CIVIL ELEGIES

  Notes

  I

  COMING BACK

  Illisque pro annis uxore

  400: Coming Home

  You are still on the highway and the great light of

  noon comes over the asphalt, the gravelled

  shoulders. You are on the highway, there is a kind of

  laughter, the cars pound

  south. Over your shoulder the scrub-grass, the fences,

  the fields wait patiently as though someone

  believed in them. The light has laid it

  upon them. One

  crow scrawks. The edges

  take care of themselves, there is

  no strain, you can almost hear it, you

  inhabit it.

  Back in the city many things you lived for

  are coming apart.

  Transistor rock still fills

  back yards, in the parks young men do things to

  hondas; there will be

  heat lightning, beer on the porches, goings on.

  That is not it.

  And you are still on the highway. There are no

  houses, no farms. Across the median, past the swish and thud of the

  northbound cars, beyond the opposite

  fences, the fields, the

  climbing escarpment, solitary in the

  bright eye of the sun the

  birches dance, and they

  dance. They have

  their reasons. You do not know

  anything.

  Cicadas call now, in the darkening swollen air there is dust

  in your nostrils; a

  kind of laughter; you are still on the highway.

  Glad for the Wrong Reasons

  Night and day it

  goes on, it goes

  on. I hear what feel like ponderous immaculate

  lizards moving through; I call it

  absence I call it silence but often I am

  glad for the wrong reasons.

  Many times at 6:00 a.m. there is a

  fiendish din of cans, like now

  for instance and we

  lunge up punctured through the

  blur & the broken

  glass of last night’s argument, fetching up

  groggy on a landscape of bed, well I can

  taste our dubious breath and look it’s

  me, babe, I wabble my neck and lounge the

  trophy from my dream across your belly, your

  body slouches towards me, jesus, there is

  something about our lives that

  doesn’t make sense, tomorrow

  I’ll fix them up, remind me, the garbage

  cans have stopped now but the room is

  bright too bright to

  fix I mean ah jesus I burrow slow

  motion back to sleep; and the

  lizards resume their

  phosphorescent progress, I crowd towards them but I should

  not be here now, swallowing fast & doggedly gawking &

  staying put and glad but glad for the wrong reasons.

  Brunswick Avenue

  We are in

  bed, the dark is close to my face. Hilary

  moans in the crib. It is getting

  warm in here, the covers are

  close, I am going

  into it.

  All the long-legged suns have clotted again

  in my head, and only keyholes know a song.

  Emptiness is my alibi, but it is pitted with syllables like

  caterpillars moving hoarsely across the face of the Bible.

  Outside, the rasp of a snow-shovel

  grates in the dark.

  Lovely

  sound, I hang onto it. In the

  stillness I feel the flakes and the heft of

  that man’s left arm, and the sudden

  twinge as the shovel lets go of the wet snow I am going into it

  Many spaces no longer belong to the ones who once filled them.

  The air keeps striding through.

  Pinholes arrive & open like sprayguns, and always

  the long-legged suns are combining.

  Beside me on the bed the woman with whom I did

  great violence for years, preserving

  dalliance and stigmata, stretches

  easy in her after-pleasure, sleeping.

  Clothes and our wetness load the air.

  Her hair is on my shoulder.

  The covers lift and fold, and the shovel scrapes and I hear the

  endless holes in the night hang down and the snow and our fragile breathing.

  He Asks Her

  What kind of

  pickle were we in? Every

  piddling triumph I dragged into the house —

  by the ears

  (“I fixed the washer in the outside tap.”)

  by the snout

  (“I sold another book today. That makes eleven.”)

  or by the curly Q of its little pink tale

  (“I seduced Madame Nhu this aft. In the John at Eglinton station.”)

  — they all became weapons in the stockpile

  Sometimes I trickled under the door to tell you

  sometimes I walked thru the wall, all shucks & left-handed

  somet
imes I’d bound in via the second-storey window, hanging by my

  canine incisors.

  But what kind of

  pickle were we in? You had to

  turn and finger the miserable little feat,

  testing the cutting edge on your own flesh,

  and I would savour the way something

  closed inside me and fondled itself,

  knowing that soon you’d be

  cast down again, that I would be rejected.

  High Park, by Grenadier Pond

  Whatever I say, lady

  it is not that

  I say our lives are working — but feel the

  ambush of soft air —, nor that our

  rancour & precious remorse can be

  surrendered merely because the earth has taken

  green dominion here, beneath us

  the belly of grass is real; and lady

  it is not that

  lovers by the score come sporting

  fantasies like we had strolling

  bright-eyed past the portulaca — we could

  whisper messages, they would be

  snarls in our own blood;

  and I am

  bitter about our reconciliations, we panicked, we

  snowed ourselves each time. So lady

  it is not that

  I hanker for new beginnings — confession and

  copout, we know that game, it’s as real as the

  whiskey, the fights, the pills.

  And I do not start this now because the grass is green,

  and not because in front of us the

  path makes stately patterns down the slope to Grenadier and all the

  random ambling of the couples hangs

  like courtly bygones in the shining air;

  the old longing is there, it always will but I will not

  allow it.

  But there is

  you, lady. I

  want you to

  be, and I want you.

  Lie here on the grass beside me,

  hear me tie my tongue in knots.

  I can’t talk brave palaver like

  I did 10 years ago — I

  used up all the words — but now I

  sense my centre in these new

  gropings, wary, near yours lady,

  coming to

  difficult sanities.

  I want to be here.

  The Morning of the Second Day:

  He Tells Her

  How will you handle my body?

  What will I do to your name?

  New selves kept tramping through me like a

  herd of signatures, I mislaid

  sentences halfway, the trademark was ummm … ?

  Which one of me did you want?

  Hey but that was another life, and donning the

  one-way flesh, now glad and

  half at home at last in the set of your neck,

  the carriage of your thighs, I believe I sense

  the difficult singularity of the man I

  am not ready for.

  But how will you handle my body?

  Some day ten years from now we’ll both

  wake up, and stretch, and stare at somebody’s ceiling —

  our own, sweet jesus our very own ceiling! — and boggle, with

  ten-year thoughts in mind.

  Look out, I believe we’re married & lap your

  hair across my face, this must make sense but what will I

  do to your beautiful name?

  Recollection

  I remember still

  a gentle girl, just married, how she

  drew her husband down, they had

  no practice but she gave him warm

  openings till he became a

  cocky simpleton inside her,

  coming like kingdom come for the excellent

  pleasure it made in her body.

  When It Is Over

  The low-light recedes, the records recede, skin

  empties. Under my eyes

  your eyes recede, I brush your cheek you feel what

  touch what clumsy much-loved man

  receding? Your body is full of listening,

  exquisite among its own

  Shockwaves. So. What

  space are you going into?

  Over & over, love, what other

  music? Your

  eyelids will be here for

  centuries, do not come to.

  But flicker, come deeper, let be — the jubilation

  eases through your

  body. So. What

  space have you gone into?

  Slowly, love, beneath me

  your breathing returns.

  Now it is over, the flesh and resonance that filled that

  other space do not come to and

  try to tell me where, for it is over.

  But drowse off now; as the after-pleasure settles

  gently into our lives, it is over and

  over, and over, and over, and over and over.

  Night

  Night one more time, the darkness

  close out there on the snow.

  Goddamn war, goddamn smog, close the blind.

  How many times have you

  stared through that window at darkness?

  Come on over here, lie on top of me, let’s fuck.

  Good men would think twice

  about it, they would

  not be born in this century.

  Night one more time, great

  lobotomy. Come on over here with your body, lie down, tomorrow

  it all starts again.

  In a Bad Time

  So much is gone now, bright and suicidal,

  so much is on the verge.

  What good are words among the

  rock, the glittering wreckage?

  Fallout falls; the empires breed

  the nightmares that they need.

  The only words are lives.

  Friend. Friend.

  Thursday

  Powerful men can fuck up too. It is Thursday,

  a mean old lady has died, she got him his

  paper route and there is still that whiff of

  ju-jube and doilies from her front hall; a stroke; he can

  taste them going soggy; some in his pocket too, they always picked up

  lint; anyway, she is dead.

  And tonight there are things to do in the study, he has a

  report, he has the kids, it is

  almost too much. Forty-five years, and

  still the point eludes him whenever he stops to think.

  Next morning,

  hacking the day into shape on the phone, there is still no

  way — routine & the small ache,

  he cannot accommodate both.

  At Hallowe’en too, in her hall.

  And I know which one he takes and that

  night at six, while the kids are tackling his legs with their small tussling,

  how he fends them off, tells them “Play upstairs”; one day

  they will be dead also with their jelly beans.

  In her kitchen, she had a parrot that said “Down the hatch!”

  More Claiming

  That one is me too — belting thru

  school to the rhythms of glory, tripping,

  blinking at vanishing place-names

  Etobicoke Muskoka Labrador then Notting Hill Gate but he could

  never keep them straight,

  though as they ran together they always had

  people in them, like ketchup on his shirt.

  Extra-gang spikers and singalong, I believe that was

  Labrador? Teachers. That

  girl in Stockholm — Christ! what did they

  expect? the man was otherwise engaged.

  For there were treks, attacks and

  tribal migrations of meaning, wow

  careening thru his skull, the doves &

  dodos that descended, scary

  part
nerships with God, new selves erupting

  messianic daily — all the grand

  adrenalin parade!

  He was supposed to wear matching socks?

  It was a messy pubescent

  surfeit of selves but there were

  three I didn’t know about,

  the sabotage kids.

  They never budged.

  One was perpetually leaving his

  penis behind in garbage bags. One had a

  bazooka stuck in his throat, hence had some

  difficulty speaking.

  The third would sob all night in the lonesome night,

  crying for something damp, and close, and warm.

  I came across them far too late.

  They kept on dousing

  epiphanies, misdirecting traffic.

  They kept on daring me to

  break down, like a carburetor with a passion for wildflowers.

  Heaven and Earth

  Ordinary moving

  stoplight & manhole

  maple tree birch tree oak

  dandelions crabgrass

  ferry boats Andromeda

  fathers and mothers, and

  heaven and earth and all

  vivacious things that

  throng around a man

  will not approach until he

  hears himself pronounce “I

  hate you” with his body.

  Sibelius Park

  I

  Walking north from his other lives in a fine rain

  through the high-rise pavilion on Walmer

  lost in the vague turbulence he harbours

  Rochdale Anansi how many

  routine wipeouts has he performed since he was born?

  and mostly himself;

  drifting north to the three-storey

  turrets & gables, the squiggles and

  arches and baleful asymmetric glare of the houses he loves

  Toronto gothic

  walking north in the fine rain, going home through the late afternoon

  he comes to Sibelius Park.

  Across that green expanse he sees

  the cars parked close, every second licence yankee, he thinks of