209 Nostalgia poems

When last we came this pleasant way The hedgerows blossomed, high and hard, And blue with shade the violets lay In every cherry-lightened yard. Now, in commemorative rain, I walk the quiet way alone, And there are violets again As blue as I have ever known. Useless to barricade the flesh To splendid branch and flower-row: I see the cherry, flaked and fresh, And smell the violet as I go Perplexed past wetted flowerbed And boxwood glimmering into leaf, Companionless, disquieted, And fearfully as any thief— Smarting of some sacrilege Too profligate to understand, As one who disavows a pledge And treads repudiated land.

Swing and sway with Sammy Kaye Everyone at Lake Kearney had a nickname: there was a Bumstead, a Tonto, a Tex, and, from the slogan of a popular orchestra, two sisters, Swing and Sway. Swing jitterbugged, hopping around on the dance floor, working up a sweat. Sway was beautiful. My heart went out to her when she lifted her heavy rack of dishes and passed through the swinging door. She was engaged, to an enlisted man who was stationed at Fort Dix. He came once or twice on weekends to see her. I tried talking to him, but he didn’t answer ... out of stupidity or dislike, I could not tell which. In real life he was a furniture salesman. This was the hero on whom she had chosen to bestow her affections. I told her of my ambition: to write novels conveying the excitement of life ... the main building lit up like a liner on Saturday night; the sound of the band ... clarinet, saxophone, snare drum, piano. He who would know your heart (America) must seek it in your songs. And the contents of your purse ... among Kleenex, aspirin, chewing gum wrappers, combs, et cetera. “Don’t stop,” she said, “I’m listening. Here it is!” flourishing her lighter. * In the afternoon when the dishes were washed and tables wiped, we rowed out on the lake. I read aloud ...The Duino Elegies, while she reclined, one shapely knee up, trailing a hand in the water. She had chestnut-colored hair. Her eyes were changing like the surface with ripples and the shadows of clouds. “Beauty,” I read to her, “is nothing but beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear.” * She came from Jersey, the industrial wasteland behind which Manhattan suddenly rises. I could visualize the street where she lived, and see her muffled against the cold, in galoshes, trudging to school. Running about in tennis shoes all through the summer ... I could hear the porch swing squeak and see into the parlor. It was divided by a curtain or screen ... “That’s it,” she said, “all but the screen. There isn’t any.” When she or her sister had a boyfriend their mother used to stay in the parlor, pretending to sew, and keeping an eye on them like Fate. At night she would lie awake looking at the sky, spangled over. Her thoughts were as deep and wide as the sky. As time went by she had a feeling of missing out ... that everything was happening somewhere else. Some of the kids she grew up with went crazy ... like a car turning over and over. One of her friends had been beaten by the police. Some vital fluid seemed to have gone out of him. His arms and legs shook. Busted springs. * She said, “When you’re a famous novelist will you write about me?” I promised ... and tried to keep my promise. Recently, looking for a toolbox, I came upon some typewritten pages, all about her. There she is in a canoe ... a gust of wind rustling the leaves along the shore. Playing tennis, running up and down the baseline. Down by the boathouse, listening to the orchestra playing “Sleepy Lagoon.” Then the trouble begins. I can never think of anything to make the characters do. We are still sitting in the moonlight while she finishes her cigarette. Two people go by, talking in low voices. A car door slams. Driving off ... “I suppose we ought to go,” I say. And she says, “Not yet.”

Mendota, Illinois It's easy to believe you can go back Whenever you desire, jump in the car And drive, arrive at dusk—the hour You recall most vividly—and walk Among the buildings spread across the farm, Out toward the pastures, woods, and fields. There is music in the leaves, in the dense Columns of green corn. The wind lays down The tune. You can play it, too, simply By walking with eyes closed, arms Stretched out, lightly striking the stalks. Who wouldn't desire, like the children Lost in so many similar fields, To sit down on the turned earth and drift Away on the rhythms of his own First possible death? Rescuing Voices come closer, veer off. Flashlight beams Strobe over your head. You do not care. Each building you remember—hen house, Sheep shed, corn crib, barn—caved in upon itself, The walls and roofs collapsing with a final Percussive clap, since you last walked those fields. No one you will ever know works that land now. It is as green as Eden. Life rises in the roots, in the leaves.

The very flatness of portraits makes for nostalgia in the connoisseur. Here’s the latest little lip of wave to flatten and spread thin. Let’s say it shows our recklessness, our fast gun, our self-consciousness which was really our infatuation with our own fame, our escapes, the easy way we’d blend in with the peasantry, our loyalty to our old gang from among whom it was our nature to be singled out

Over the night a bull Whispers into a coal :Unmeant in the stall to sit and plate, But sixth, with all the senses, To consume— Incorporate— those signal Impressions which are (we know) its fate: In explosions, in hard strides, His coattails fly; to bits, to friends Craven and brave. Sadness undulates at their back. His lilt's a cotillion of flies. But how he charges, he commits! Each to the next. It seems unfair, a target lies Between its shoulder blades.

My notebook has remained blank for months thanks to the light you shower around me. I have no use for my pen, which lies languorously without grief. Nothing is better than to live a storyless life that needs no writing for meaning— when I am gone, let others say they lost a happy man, though no one can tell how happy I was.

As we drove back, crossing the hill, The house still Hidden in the trees, I always thought— A fool’s fear—that it might have caught Fire, someone could have broken in. As if things must have been Too good here. Still, we always found It locked tight, safe and sound. I mentioned that, once, as a joke; No doubt we spoke Of the absurdity To fear some dour god’s jealousy Of our good fortune. From the farm Next door, our neighbors saw no harm Came to the things we cared for here. What did we have to fear? Maybe I should have thought: all Such things rot, fall— Barns, houses, furniture. We two are stronger than we were Apart; we’ve grown Together. Everything we own Can burn; we know what counts—some such Idea. We said as much. We’d watched friends driven to betray; Felt that love drained away Some self they need. We’d said love, like a growth, can feed On hate we turn in and disguise; We warned ourselves. That you might despise Me—hate all we both loved best— None of us ever guessed. The house still stands, locked, as it stood Untouched a good Two years after you went. Some things passed in the settlement; Some things slipped away. Enough’s left That I come back sometimes. The theft And vandalism were our own. Maybe we should have known.

In childhood Christy and I played in the dumpster across the street from Pickett & Sons Construction. When we found bricks, it was best. Bricks were most useful. We drug them to our empty backyard and stacked them in the shape of a room. For months we collected bricks, one on top another. When the walls reached as high as my younger sister’s head, we laid down. Hiding in the middle of our room, we watched the cycle of the sun, gazed at the stars, clutched hands and felt at home.

There goes the aluminum, the antimony, the arsenic the barium, the cadmium, the cesium, the gadolinium the lead the mercury the nickel, the thalium, and the tin. There goes that job spraying lawns with chemicals, driving the Merc three-quarter ton with a tank on the back and no brakes through West Vancouver, bouncing the wheels against the curb to stop and on the steep majesterial streets that afford such views that they could hire two talentless dickbrains to weed and feed front and back and back again in two weeks. That was a heavy metal job that probably killed a lot of salmon too. There goes the shotgun pellets from the pheasants we shot out in Abbotsford and Langley plucked and hung in the concrete basement in New Westminster fresh with the stink of pheasant guts. Oily, delicious pheasants roasted always with a little buckshot after a day off. There goes those summers painting houses with my brother wire-brushing off the old paint, breathing it in on the wooden ladders white guys working on a tan and saving up for the Peugot ten speed. There goes the seventies out from my body. Led Zep Humble Pie Burning Spear, and Marley too, adidas, big E Levis from Lee's Men's Wear on Sixth Street there goes that brown house paint, broken down and pissed out. There goes those years beachcombing along the Fraser from New West to Lulu Island pulling out cedar blocks that had floated free from the shake factory booms. Pulling the blocks out of that industrial muck grey green and foamy down near Scott Paper, the mill that Larry worked in until it moved production south. Then stacking and drying the blocks to split them into shakes with a birchwood hammer and an adze. There goes that industrial mix from the Fraser from the riverbank from the bars by the river. There goes sucking on a hose to get some gas into that golden sixty-six Valiant convertible with the leaky roof and the 273 and putting it right into the carb to sputter the piece of shit to life Again. Still, pretty great to have a convertible with a radio (turn the radio on roadrunner roadrunner!) and a five-gallon gas can and a piece of garden hose and a mouthful of Regular, a mouthful of Regular Leaded from the Chevron in the strip mall across Tenth Ave. There goes working on a printing press under the sidewalk of the storefront at Cambie and Hastings that was later the Caribbean place and is now going to be gentrified. There goes that time. There goes all the shitty renos on Broadway, on Hastings, on Commercial Drive, there goes the dust from that wall Mike took down with a chain saw when Talonbooks was above the foundry and there goes the foundry dust and the sweep of chemicals that would take your head off like six beers later at the Waldorf. There goes the mystery unmarked jars of cleaners and solvents and grease that Larry nicked from the mill and we used on the cars and bikes and on our hands. There goes that job at the self-serve Shell with a car wash across from the college when it was in temporary trailers just to show that education for the masses was taken seriously. And there goes, hopefully, the dust and everything from that week in September when what was stored in the three buildings of the World Trade Centre was pulverized and burnt Into the air and Nancy and I stayed in the apartment with t-shirts tied over our mouth and nose and didn't go out until we went to Milano's where the Fireman drank for free with the IRA guys leaning at the bar. There goes that time. There goes the Aluminum, the antimony, the arsenic the barium, the cadmium, the cesium, the gadolinium the lead the mercury the nickel, the thalium, and the tin. Broken down pissed out. There goes those jobs, those times there goes those relations of inside and outside, of work and nerves and fat and soft tissue and synapses. There goes that set of relations inside and outside. There goes that body that use and surplus

before iced coffee came to town, a sump from which I’ve fished many a memory of regret and loneliness and whose misery I now understand came less from my pocked nature than from the chokehold of blue laws, and from my broken-willed Eeyore of a used car which liked to stop stubbornly in Sealy, halfway to Hill Country, and always one day after the insurance ran out, and from the paucity of public space so that we drove (locally) from shopping strip to balding park, once to a leech-infested pond; and owing also to the blinding afternoons that made invisible,