A new poem by Jason Heroux
Museum of Summer Months
Summer thoughts, flower petals
lie on the ground, expired coupons
clipped from the garden’s flyer.
Sunlight inspects each window,
an airport dog sniffing suitcases.
Clouds sit motionless in the sky
like cars after an accident
waiting for the police to arrive.
At noon our shadows shorten,
dark trains pulling into their stations.
A butterfly interrupts the air’s program
with a commercial for the here and now.
A Slab of Imagination
Mom died in June. Since then Dad reminds me once a week that at seventy-four he may live another ten years. I’m relieved to hear him say that because during her illness they’d discussed the possibility of killing themselves together. Watching him kneeling beside her corpse in the bed they shared for almost fifty years, for the first time in my life I saw him cry. A few weeks ago we were having lunch and again he cried. He said it happens often these days. He said he lives in a state of constant confusion, especially home alone, where he talks to her. “What do you say?” He cleared his throat. “Oh…I’m terrified she hasn’t gone.” Yet as far back as I can remember he’s loathed the “religious cowards” too afraid to admit that death and oblivion are “biological facts.” I mentioned his contradiction and he murmured, “There’s nothing logical about grief.”
My grief is logical. I seem to feel none. I neither miss Mom nor think about her. I cried throughout the day of her death then shut her out. On the other hand, like Dad I scorn those who croon their faith in an afterlife, though I do feign interest, wanting to be liked and accepted. I feel a chill of envy for those who have what I want, be it a superior intellect or a handsome pair of boots. Dad and I share a commitment to stating (the illusion of) cold facts. His words might have drained from my mind into his when, during lunch, after the tears had stopped, we discussed the news and he judged the motives behind the recent eruption of philanthropy among the rich as a mere public-image campaign: “It’s all about business. They’re all just looking after their money and power. Even David Suzuki. He made a life for himself. So fuck ‘em.” He took a long exhausted breath and whispered, “Fuck ‘em.”
My inheritance of his unaffected cynicism provokes mostly ambivalence or anger, and sometimes a great urge to overcome it, a condition akin to one found in Theodore Roethke’s great poem, “The Dying Man.” On one level the aging poet self-elegizes but he filters his voice through those of his biological father and poetic father (W.B. Yeats), the poem conveying three voices that at once merge yet remain distinct. The triple-elegy confers what the dying son learns from the worst mistakes his fathers made. He inherits Yeats’s hatred of the idea of human progress and corrects it by reimagining the phases of his life from youth to senescence, his “sensual eye” leaning “across a sill to greet the dawn” of his last day: “A breath is but a breath: I have the earth;/I shall undo all dying by my death.” He chooses to include himself in his vision of the world’s imperfect unity, unlike Yeats, whom George Orwell impugned as a “great hater of democracy, of the modern world…above all, of the idea of human equality.” I’m trying to revise the negativity in me that mirrors Dad’s and to aid in the process, “The Dying Man” provides a metaphysical schema for overcoming the anxiety of inheriting filial defects.
On the brink of adulthood in 1956, Dad had no ambitions or any idea what he wanted to do with his life. None of his mom’s three other children wanted to study medicine and since she’d long dreamed of having a child who’d become a doctor, she told him he had no choice but to become one. On entering medical school he fell for the sickly sweet smell of formaldehyde (a poison used to preserve corpses). With a firm push from his mom, he stumbled into the pit of his calling and became a family physician.
Over fifty years later I asked him what he enjoys so much about his work and he said, “I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it.” He admits he came out of retirement after Mom’s death to keep his mind distracted from grief, and I imagine he’s liked being a doctor all these years because it keeps him busy thinking about anyone but himself. As one who more than once has expressed relief that I haven’t had children—civilization in inevitable and permanent decline where they likely wouldn’t have a world to grow up in—by committing his life to curing the sick he can flip an unconscious finger at what he’s diagnosed as a terminal disease (origin and purpose unknown) in the human condition. Before he retired he worked ten, often twelve hours a day and felt restless during vacations. His patients adore his devotion to every minutia of their well-being, his kindness and generosity and self-sacrifice. Like the virile old man in Yeats’s “The Choice,” Dad rejects the world for his work and sees nothing in the present or future but a void:
The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
However, the son in “The Dying Man” meets a darker fate:
A ghost comes out of the unconscious mind
To grope my sill: it moans to be reborn!
I found my father when I did my work,
Only to lose myself in this small dark.
An old man hovering between life and death still laments that all his accomplishments bear the spectral imprint of his father labouring in a tomb. Only after long and furious resistance does his own “spirit raging at the visible” wall of “perpetual night,” unlike Yeats’s “raging” at the “empty purse” of all his “toil,” enervate to a “careless solitude” as he surrenders to the inexorable pull of eternity. Now that his “heart sways with the world” he becomes “that final thing,/A man learning to sing.” The remastered song of his life lightens his father’s “old perplexity” of “vanity” and “remorse” into a state of mind where “he breathes alone until my dark is bright.”
Even so, at poem’s end he remains anxious about his inheritance and continues yearning for transformation:
The edges of the summit still appall
When we brood on the dead or the beloved;
Nor can imagination do it all
In this last place of light; he dares to live
Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings
Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.
The multiple meanings of “brood” reinforce that while he identifies with his fathers, he has his own carefully constructed identity, enlarged beyond a Yeatsian view of existence spinning its predestined cycle of self-destruction, where even “the wisest man grows tense/With some sort of violence/Before he can accomplish fate.” The broadening occurs in the final pentameter line that stretches out and almost doubles in number of syllables; the assonance of “i” and “e” evokes the defiance of a dying man inspiring death with a joyous resignation to its inevitability.
It may be futile to remind Dad how rich in love and luck his life has been: having shared almost fifty years with a woman who loved him and her children far more than herself; having performed with distinction in a profession whose definition is that of nurturing and prolonging life. Talking on the phone recently, trying to make him laugh (though unconsciously prodding him too), I said, “I haven’t read the news in two days and can’t imagine what I’ve missed…world peace?” He didn’t miss a beat. “The solution to peace on earth is kill all the humans.”
In spite of grief he retains his sense of humour, which in fact is less his than Mom’s, her mind having been swollen like a tumour of malignant wit. Days before she died, when I mentioned the box of family photographs in their basement and my interest in keeping some, she advised, “There is nothing to be saved. Destroy everything.” To the last thing I said to her, “See you in a few days,” she replied, “At my funeral.” She had a softer side. Not long after their fortieth anniversary Dad went away on a five-day trip to his native Serbia. On the second day I called her and found her crying. “What’s wrong?” “I miss your father so much.” It seems she now resides in Dad’s mind, her spirit incarnate in his most cutting lines, as if selected from his conversations with her ghost. I’m terrified she hasn’t gone. In terror he may imagine her disembodied and inert in infinite solitude, yet somehow present in the house to observe his suffering, knowing too that he wonders if she can miss him or need him, if she feels without her body.
And since for now on certain matters we think alike, I imagine he also conceives his own consciousness of human life surviving beyond death, only to shudder at the thought of enduring (possibly) centuries of his former species repeating their cruelties before dying out.
Canto 20
Even so, Pamela, and she used to say, as we watched the silent flicker
In the privacy of her hallowed boudoir,
That here, here’s a proper evocation of history,
Her gin-dark eyes popping out of her head
At a silly girl slipping the mask off eminence
Only to cringe in horror as well the girl should.
For now it’s revealed – grisly countenance:
“Feast your eyes, girl, glut your soul on my accursed ugliness!”
It was the phantom, caped and worked up who
Had remarked thus—and it is what we do –
We feast and glut and call it beautiful,—
And then later, and the Bal Masqué de l’Opéra
(And can Apollinaire be far away?) ensues,
Or life, the perpetrators kicking up their heels
At the grand soirée, and still later, and history,
Costumed panache, is nervy splendour, is a police matter—
I, Aginthorpe, soft in my memory of Yvette.
Top of the year in Quebec and we’ve had
The thaw and now the snap.
A new poem by Richard Greene
Oils
Black and white and notionally portable,
a TV occupies half the kitchen table,
gives off The Edge of Night or Coronation Street,
as my mother, among copies of Vogue
and Chatelaine and The Daily News,
lays oils on the rough side of masonite.
The paint brushes seem to last forever
and the tubes of Winsor and Newton going
from year to year, the same ones never empty:
manganese blue hue, phthalo turquoise,
cobalt chromite, viridian, and terre verte,
purple lake, raw umber light, and Payne’s grey.
Her gardens are decorative and terrible
as vined or beasted letters of a manuscript,
and undersea, whales and plankton and octopi
of equal proportion, as when sleeping
shortens the gap between dead and living.
Mind always elsewhere—on Adam Trask
and Mike Karr in mobbed up Monticello,
on Ena Sharples and Elsie Tanner,
the Barlows, all that marriage and murder
at Rover’s Return—her automatic
touch making intricacies on the board,
shapes of memory from which she can
never turn away—a tiny brother
throttled by whooping cough, her father
weeping in the pantry, all the dailiness
of death in 1941. Thirteen then and never
right afterwards, except perhaps in oils.
A new poem by Eric Ormsby
J.A. Dimling’s Shadow
His master’s name was J.A. Dimling too.
He dwelt in the shadow of his master’s name.
His own original name, now unpronounceable
in his own mouth, had been misplaced somewhere.
But J.A. Dimling resided in his name,
not merely took it as a moniker but
moved right in and set up housekeeping
the way a cuckoo confiscates the nest
of some lesser fledgling and will spread itself
until it has usurped the whole abode,
so J. A. Dimling in his hand-me-down name
assumed full occupancy. He basked
in a dignity no poorer for being used before.
His manners had a burnished gravity those
initials, meaningless to him, conferred. The
owner of the name, and of the slave, old
J.A. himself, in his nondescript, pale
persona, faded next to his bought and sold namesake,
the rumbustious, jocular J.A.
Dimling who took glory in his once-
worn appellation; who had those initials
whitewashed on his tilty, dirt-floored hut,
bestowed a lineage on his skinny kids,
(the eldest, J.A. Dimling III, in deference
to his pallid faded boss and creditor.)
As J.A. paled and thinned, his more
substantial shadow darkened and became
macadam-black, alluvial, black as
the backside of an old man’s tears,
until his well-fleshed shadow blotted
out the sunlight on the sorghum fields.
I am J.A. Dimling, he proclaimed
without surreptitious swagger. As J.A.
dimmed, a Dimling diminished to
the finest wisp, his darker
double flourished and grew thick.
A new poem by Grant Buday
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Dead Sea Afternoon
Eager to glitter the dull plush
of royal routine,
Antonia the Younger,
widow of Drusus,
conceived an idea
to ornament the fish
in the courtyard pond
with gold and silver rings
to glint in their fins,
thereby exciting the eye,
bemusing the mind,
and easing the crossing
of Dead Sea afternoons.
She spent a fun hour splashing
in the pond, with the fish
scooting as slippery as squids,
before snagging them between shapely thighs
and piercing their fins with a fork,
fitting the rings just so,
then freeing them to the murk.
On all fours like a deer drinking,
she smiled at the gliding sunken lightning,
recalling a solstice cruise
in the imperial trireme,
sweet drunken Drusus eloquent
and the living phosphorescence
awakened by the oars
smouldering in the night sea
inciting cries of delight among the pissed,
even as a hairy-eared senator
droned that it was merely
a phenomenon of nature,
a ruling not nearly so impressive
as the rumour that it was in fact the gods,
envious and eager to play,
who had come down from the sky
to join a better party.
