209 Nostalgia poems

For Judy Williams Fraser 1963-69 I lived on the corner of Yew & York on the 2nd floor above  a corner store with my sister Leni  & boyfriend soon to be husband Neap  Hoover her friend Jo-Ann Huffman & her boyfriend Mike Sawyer then  Elsa Young  (just left Robert who was with Maxine) who met her lover Jack Wise next door then my sister Mary and my boyfriend  soon to be (later to unbe) husband Cliff Andstein below us bill bissett & martina & oolya  then painter-jogger  Gordon Payne & Merrilyn  (who becomes my friend later)  then bill again then Gordon again next to us Bing Thom, Jay Bancroft & often Marian Penner, Rick Clarke across the landing John and Susan Newlove & children fathered by gerry gilbert later the Ridgeways and next to them directly opposite us: Gerry Geisler (New Design Gallery) and Helen Sturdy & children our kitchen faced theirs apple pies in my oven & stew or toast in theirs we cd smell everything like the time we fell asleep as pork hocks simmered in my big red pot charred and burned almost caught on fire would have if Gerry hadnt woken us up and that building a total tinderbox always worried bill wd start one my bedroom / study faced the Molson’s sign and Burrard Street Bridge and I could watch the west end and highrises and planetarium grow and white sheets on a clothesline across the street dry as I’d sit at my bay window and write and mark on a smooth board cut to fit exactly the sill I’d glance up and see people like  you  &  Jamie  &  Carol  &  Joan  &  Marcia  & the Trumans and the Gadds  and the Lathams  and Lanny Beckman walking up and down Yew Street open the window & shout drop by on your way back dropping by everybody did it days filled with coffee, tea, poetry, cigarette smoke crises, trips, talkedy talk talk painting hard edged  strong coloured also  intricate silver point mandalas and collages a gallon of Calogna Red one summery Saturday night became a party of 100 or even more dancing in my bedroom to one music on a tape recorder dancing in the other to another drumming in the kitchen talking in the room with the blue-tile fireplace so many bodies I couldnt hear the music from  inside the  hallway just saw the taller heads moving together to different beats in almost darkness that crazy night at the Wahs’ place if that wasnt a party of this kind everybody landing on that bed everybody kissing everybody we had to go outside to pee because the lineup for the can so long somehow to do with that small space that it was so tight that everybody had to rub every body simply to go anywhere It was gorgeous after the Vancouver Poetry Conference (1963) Roy Kiyooka started dropping by   when he left his studio there’d always be a light on somewhere in our building and he could visit  any of us separately or clustered one time he told me he had a painting he wanted to give me but it was big and heavy he borrowed a truck and someone helped him up the dusty always dirty long stairs with Hoarfrost which we hung on a wall in a room just big enough to hold my round oak table (used to be Bowerings’ they bought a whole household of furniture for $80 and when they moved they gave it to Joan and then when she moved she stored it with me) a wall that later Elsa and I tore apart with a screwdriver and hammer shouting angry hexes at Robert all the way after and during that conference-- Olson, Creeley, Duncan, Levertov, Avison, Whalen, Ginsberg-- Roy and I became friends and there were readings in my room every second Sunday red cast iron pot full of bean soup, corn chowder, spicey meatball vegetable stew simmering and then cheese scones in the oven people would come and read their new work one week and the next week there’d be a Tish meeting with Daphne Marlatt, Dan MacLeod, Pete Auxier, David Cull & David Dawson rent $60 a month didnt change and some years it was cold the wind so cold on side facing the North Shore that Hydro was $60 per month and that wall frozen behind my pillows the police were something else they felt they had a right to question anybody so Cliff would be up at the laundromat on 4th or at Jackson’s to get some hamburger and be walking back with an economics book in one hand and meat wrapped in brown paper in the other and they’d stop him and ask him what he was doing and my friend Ray Wargo would get stopped almost every second time he’d drop in to visit where are you going and why and how long will you be someone was always getting busted someone was always tripping out someone was always visiting from   or going to  Europe or Japan here is a journal entry on June 9: evening of the first ever national leaders debate on TV “I am looking forward to seeing Trudeau--hope he gets pushed into/onto answering more directly than he has in the past. I, like many others including every gay man I know, do have a crush on him: he has much more style than any Canadian politician so far. I mean style in the true sense of the word, it is him, not affected… Cliff, of course, doesn’t trust him at all and thinks he’s a sell- out. I don’t go that far, yet. But I do think that compromising is the only way a politician can work this country and I do not like all the PR, razzmatazz, fundraising, and allegiances that go into just getting elected: our system seems to be based on gullibility…” coming home at night up Yew Street whether from downtown or the beach or Paul the butcher’s or Elsie the baker’s I loved looking up at my North-facing windows goldy  gold  mesh curtains light filtering through so warm  and so inviting

At fifteen, my father ran away from his widowed mother to fight the Japanese. “I’ll come back with a PhD and serve my country with better English and knowledge,” I pledged at the farewell party in Beijing. Home — 家 —Jia: a roof under which animals live. When asked where I’m from, I say “Weihai,” even though nobody knows where it is, even though I’ve never been to the place. He lost his left ear in a bayonet fight with a Japanese soldier. Two years later, American cannons split his eardrums. The night I arrived at JFK, the Mets won the World Series and the noise on the street went on till dawn. I got up and went to work in my sponsor’s antique shop in Manhattan. The bag lady stopped her cart on the busy street and peed onto a subway grate. “Did you jump or fly?” asked my landlady from her mah-jongg table. Then she laughed and told me that her husband had jumped ship ten years ago. When he opened his fifth Chinese takeout, he bought her a passport and flew her to Queens. The only thing he liked to talk about was his old home, Weihai, its plump sea cucumbers and sweet apples, men with broad shoulders, thick thighs, and girls with long braids making steamed bread. “Back home, I had no money, but I never felt poor,” she said, shivering behind her fruit stand. “Here, if my money goes down below four figures, I panic.” She scanned the snow-covered streets of Chinatown. “I guess I really don’t want to be homeless here.” I hired the babysitter when she mentioned her hometown was Weihai. The president visited the rice paddies in Vietnam where a pilot had been downed thirty-three years ago. My father tried to return to Weihai after his discharge from the Navy. With his rank, he could find work only in a coal mine town nearby. My mother refused to go. He went alone, and got sick with TB. Mother ordered me to date the county administrator’s son so he could help father come home. “No, I’m not sad.” The street kid shook her head. “How can I miss something I’ve never had?” On her sixtieth birthday, my grandma went home to die, sailing from the island to Shanghai, from Shanghai to Yantai, then two buses to Weihai. I carried her onto the big ship at the Shanghai Port, down to the bottom, where she’d spend three days on a mattress, on the floor, with hundreds of fellow passengers. “How are you going to make it, Grandma?” I asked. She pulled out a pair of embroidered shoes from her parcel and placed them between my feet. “My heart and liver, come to 老家 soon, before it’s too late.” House — 房 —fang: a door over a square, a place, a direction. He never lost his accent, never learned Mandarin or the island dialect. Weihai, a small city in Shandong Province, on the coast of the North China Sea, a home, where my grandfather and his father were born, where my grandma married, raised her children, and now lies in the yam fields, nameless, next to her husband, an old frontier to fend off Japanese pirates, a place I come from, have never seen. It’s my 老家lao jia, old home. Back from America, my mother furnished her home on the island, bought an apartment in a suburb of Shanghai, and is seeking a third one in Beijing. “A cunning rabbit needs three holes,” she wrote to us, demanding our contributions. They swore, before boarding the ship, that they’d send money home to bring more relatives over; in return, they were promised that if they died, their bodies would be sent back home for burial. I drink American milk — a few drops in tea. I eat American rice — Japanese brand. Chinese comes to me only in dreams — in black-and-white pictures. My mother buried her husband on the island, where he lived for forty years. Room — 屋 —wu: a body unnamed and homeless until it finds a destination. We greet a stranger with “Where are you from?” When we meet a friend on the street, we say, “Where have you been? Where are you going?” 家 — a roof under which animals live 房 — a door over a square, a place, a direction 屋 — a body unnamed and homeless until it finds a destination — my tangled roots for old home.

Spun silk of mercy, long-limbed afternoon, sun urging purple blossoms from baked stems. What better blessing than to move without hurry under trees? Lugging a bucket to the rose that became a twining house by now, roof and walls of vine— you could live inside this rose. Pouring a slow stream around the ancient pineapple crowned with spiky fruit, I thought we would feel old by the year 2000. Walt Disney thought cars would fly. What a drama to keep thinking the last summer the last birthday

The dogs barked, the dogs scratched, the dogs got wet, the dogs shook, the dogs circled, the dogs slept, the dogs ate, the dogs barked; the rain fell down, the leaves fell down, the eggs fell down and cracked on the floor; the dust settled, the wood floors were scratched, the cabinets sat without doors, the trim without paint, the stuff piled up; I loaded the dishwasher, I unloaded the dishwasher, I raked the leaves, I did the laundry, I took out the garbage, I took out the recycling, I took out the yard waste.  There was a bed, it was soft, there was a blanket, it was warm, there were dreams, they were good. The corn grew, the eggplant grew, the tomatoes grew, the lettuce grew, the strawberries grew, the blackberries grew; the tea kettle screamed, the computer keys clicked, the radio roared, the TV spoke. “Will they ever come home?” “Can’t I take a break?” “How do others keep their house clean?” “Will I remember this day in fifty years?” The sweet tea slipped down my throat, the brownies melted in my mouth. My mother cooked, the apple tree bloomed, the lilac bloomed, the mimosa bloomed, I bloomed.

The thing about the dove was how he cried in my pocket and stuck his nose out just enough to breathe some air and get some snow in his eye and he would have snuggled in but I was afraid and brought him into the house so he could shit on the New York Times, still I had to kiss him after a minute, I put my lips to his beak and he knew what he was doing, he stretched his neck and touched me with his open mouth, lifting his wings a little and readjusting his legs, loving his own prettiness, and I just sang from one of my stupid songs from one of my vile decades, the way I do, I have to admit it was something from trains. I knew he’d like that, resting in the coal car, slightly dusted with mountain snow, somewhere near Altoona, the horseshoe curve he knew so well, his own moan matching the train’s, a radio playing the Inkspots, the engineer roaring.

INSIDE THE GATEWAY: 1970S RED CLOGS WITH SIDE BUCKLE The forever shoe,  which  points  homewards,  belongs to  my  mother. When our house was  being built, she stepped onto the  driveway while the tarmac was still wet, still setting. Ever since that step, the driveway, which slants upwards,  bears an imprint of her 1971 footwear. Her foot- print says,Climb!  Come with me. Whoever steps into that impression becomes,  for a moment, the leggy wearer of a fire-red clog with a pirat- ical silver buckle on the side. OUTSIDE THE TEMPLE: GOLD AND SILVER SANDALS The  sandals  which  will  make  a  female of me belong to many women. The   front  of  the  temple  entrance  hides itself behind shoe-racks. Vis- itors   enter  barefooted,  leaving   behind  the  dung,  dried frogs, spilled petrol  and  ketchup  traces  of  the  streets.  Hundreds  of  pairs  of  gold and  silver  sandals wait  here  for  the  women  who will re-emerge from the  vigil  with  the  taste of  basil  leaf and sugar in  their deep-breathing mouths  and  carpet  fibres between  their  toes.   The  sandals,  gold  and silver,  seem all alike.  How  can the women tell them apart? They do tell them apart. It  is  as if  each  pair  sings an  intimate mantra to its  owner, audible  only to  her. One day I too shall return to expectant slippers that stack  up  like the  moon  and  the  stars  outside a  marble  building;  one day I shall not have to wear child's shoes. SUNDAY BEFORE SCHOOL: WHITE SNEAKERS Seven  years  of these shoes are a chemical memory.  The Convent ruled that  pupils' shoes  must  be white: absolutely white.  Who  can  imagine a  1980s  shoe  that  was  absolutely  white,  without  any  logo,  with  no swoosh,  not  a  single slogan?  Sunday evenings, before the school week, I  crouched  down  on  the  pink  bathroom  tiles  and  painted  my  shoes into  the  absolute  of  whiteness;  like  the  Alice  in Wonderland garden- ers  repainting  roses.  This  task  was  performed  with a  toothbrush and with  special  paste that annihilated so many design features.  Purity was attained  by  the application  of  a whitener  that  stank  of scientific poly- syllables.  Convent-girl  identity.  Tabula rasa.  Toxicity  and intoxication: with  good  intentions,  getting  high on paste. BAD MARRIAGE SHOES: SILVER BALLET SLIPPERS When I met my ex, I was  already  committed to heels: black ankle  boots  with  four-inch  stacks for  walking through snow;  French  cream curved suede  stilettos for scaling fire-escape  ladders  on to  rooftops  to  admire the  winter  sky;  even after I  left him,  scarlet satin  bedroom-only  spiky mules  to  amuse myself.  Early  on, my ex  said that the way women walk in  heels  looks ugly.  And my  nails  made  unnatural  social appearances: emerald  lacquer;  cobalt;  incarnadine. Sign of a  bad  marriage:  I  began to  wear  flats. The penitential  mermaid shoes,  worn once and once only, were  a Gabor creation: distressed  silver  ballet  slippers  with netted and criss-cross side  details  which  would  make  the material  seem  to  swish with  the changes  of  light on feet that go walking.  Cool  as  moonlight on a  tourist  coastline. But the  inner  stitching  hooked  the  softness  of  my skin, which  has  always  been  too  soft;  but  I could not turn back, for we had  tickets  to an evening  of  Mozart;  but the paper tissues that I stuffed into  my  shoes  failed to act as  a  protective   lining.   Paper  tissue  snow- flecks  teardropped  with crimson  blood created  a  trail  behind  me  as  I ascended  the  many  tiers  of  the  wedding-cake concert hall. BAREFOOT: PEARL PINK POLISH Sitting  next  to someone  can  make  my  feet  curl:  shy,  self-destructive and  oyster-like, they want to  shuck  their cases,  to  present  themselves, little undersea pinks; their skin  still  is  too  soft, their  toes still too long, their  ankles still too slender, for a modern fit. But he  is not modern;  he sits like stone, and my bare feet are cool, they will not have to bleed.

NOTES FROM THE REVOLUTION During the beat of this story you may find other beats. I mean a beat, I mean Cantus, I mean Firm us, I mean paper, I mean in the Kingdom which is coming, which is here in discovery. It is also Om Shri Maitreya, you don't go across my vibes, but with them, losing the pronoun. It is Thy, it is Thee, it is I, it is me. Machines are metal, they serve us, we take care of them. This is to me, and this is to you. You say you to me, and I say you to you. Some machines are very delicate, they are precise, they are not big metal stampers, She made enough poetry to keep her company. My Vibes. You intercepted my vibes. The long shadows, the long shadows, the long shadows. My sweet little tone, my sweet little tone is my arm. On what Only: The song that girl sang the song that girl sang

One tenseless moment liquifies to be lost into the stream of static's gray light. A lapse develops him the tape but reveals the reels degaussed, emptied of ghosts. He sifts through the tissue of noise for accusative objects he could once recall as the magnetic arrows of the tape seethe out from their mound to forage. His perfect past a glacier's gray retreat looped back out of phase with itself. It's low-decibel hiss resonates in throbbing waves that mimic the present seen from behind. This present bends into an empty crease where the next phoneme fails to arrive. There, books helped him recover the echo and filter on a model of speech that crashed into twelve thousand darts roaming the field her face turns in shadow. Her face it blurs with gauzy silt of words that used to comprehend her. Their river spools through an oxbow bend above a bird's black wings smooth air.

In the warming house, children lace their skates, bending, choked, over their thick jackets. A Franklin stove keeps the place so cozy it’s hard to imagine why anyone would leave, clumping across the frozen beach to the river. December’s always the same at Ware’s Cove, the first sheer ice, black, then white and deep until the city sends trucks of men with wooden barriers to put up the boys’ hockey rink. An hour of skating after school, of trying wobbly figure-8’s, an hour of distances moved backwards without falling, then—twilight, the warming house steamy with girls pulling on boots, their chafed legs aching. Outside, the hockey players keep playing, slamming the round black puck until it’s dark, until supper. At night, a shy girl comes to the cove with her father. Although there isn’t music, they glide arm in arm onto the blurred surface together, braced like dancers. She thinks she’ll never be so happy, for who else will find her graceful, find her perfect, skate with her in circles outside the emptied rink forever?

see Amos , 3:15 A door sunk in a hillside, with a bolt thick as the boy’s arm, and behind that door the walls of ice, melting a blue, faint light, an air of cedar branches, sawdust, fern: decaying seasons keeping from decay. A summer guest, the boy had never seen (a servant told him of it) how the lake froze three foot thick, how farmers came with teams, with axe and saw, to cut great blocks of ice, translucid, marbled, glittering in the sun, load them on sleds and drag them up the hill to be manhandled down the narrow path and set in courses for the summer’s keeping, the kitchen uses and luxuriousness of the great houses. And he heard how once a team and driver drowned in the break of spring: the man’s cry melting from the ice that summer frightened the sherbet-eaters off the terrace. Dust of the cedar, lost and evergreen among the slowly blunting water walls where the blade edge melted and the steel saw’s bite was rounded out, and the horse and rider drowned in the red sea’s blood, I was the silly child who dreamed that riderless cry, and saw the guests run from a ghostly wall, so long before the winter house fell with the summer house, and the houses, Egypt, the great houses, had an end.