Intentionality
Hauling off short w/
your hands in the air stupid
w/ beer torn walls implode & your breath
stoppt in the odd man’s arms
& you’re mad
so you grab his tie & twist
it taut across his neck muddled
w/ the thought that
you shouldn’t stand up so fast—
Brain circuits short out steamed
smell burns the astonished air
you jerk harder trapped in his grasp
& whining let me go still
turning your wrist & watching
it turn all your muscles shorted out
till walls collapse &
the aftermath begins: you saying
its okay
& meaning sorry
the odd man stung w/ angry confusion
insists its not okay
meaning its not okay
so you shrug/ arch downward thru the blistered
void retrieve staggered glasses
watch the broken circuit of walls
continue breaking bodies trapped
& burning in the sullen air—
§
Tonight My Body
Tonight my body
won’t come home to me, it won’t
hug me at all
It huddles naked three blocks away,
on the roof of the stone Chinese church
by a belltower
How its lungs howl out its anger,
its heart fizzes in the dark
rain!
Tonight I am faithless & wayward, I am
my cousin & my aunt
sitting on the shoulders of my body three blocks away,
both of them howling
fit to burst my ears, & me stupified & cold.
My insides are smeared with warm sperm,
don’t talk to me!
Tonight it’s my body, I’m stuck with it, don’t
talk to me, I’m finally out of the woods
& off the ferry-slip
over the Lion’s Gate &
into Vancouver,
my skin lonely as a sail,
I’ve climbed up the wall of the Chinese church
& left my body angry there
When I cringe
it shudders three blocks away, I can’t
comfort it, or coax it out
from under its relatives, to come nearer
to home,
& hear me, who cries for it—
§
Fifteen Years
I am in a daydream of my uncle,
his shirt out at his daughter’s wedding
white scoop of the shirt-tail bobbing
on the dance floor.
When I think of it.
When I think of my cousin, or otherwise,
shooting the BB gun up the exhaust pipe of his motorcycle,
behind the garage.
It is the softness of a puppy we have brought home from the farm,
& set on the grass to fall over crying,
sleeping in a boot next to the heart-tick of the alarm.
I am wondering how we live at all
unable to replace these images.
The green space beside my parents’ house in summer
where we lay down on our stomachs to keep cool.
My uncle’s shirt-tail beneath his suit jacket, dancing.
The flag of that shirt-tail.
His daughter married for fifteen years.
§
Thirteen Years
I am in a daydream of my uncle,
his shirt out at his daughter’s wedding
white scoop of the shirt-tail bobbing
on the dance floor & him in it, no,
his drunk friend pawing me, it was his shirt dangling,
I forgot this,
my youngest cousin in his dress pants downing straight whisky,
& me too, tying tin cans to his sister’s car.
The sour taste of it. Drink this, he said.
I am wondering how we live at all
or if we do.
The puppy we grew up with came from the same uncle’s farm.
His shirt-tail beneath his suit jacket, dancing.
The friend of the family touching my new chest.
They told me not to say so.
I’ll drive you to the motel, he said, his breath close.
No. Be nice to him, they said, & waved me off from the table.
I was so scared.
Everyone had been drinking. Including me. Thirteen years old.
Who the hell did my cousin marry. I don’t even remember.
I tell you.
§
#metoo
This is a moment new and not new, all at once. It’s too much and yet it’s always been there. Women have always been speaking up, even publishing poems out loud, decades ago, rooted in anguished or unsure responses to predatory behaviour that involved some kind of unwanted sexual component, coercion, or assault on a female body trying to flee. Or, as it was once known: the right of a man to simply grab at a woman without consequence.
“Intentionality” is a poem that appeared in 1979 in my first book, Empire, York Street, articulating a defense from an unwanted embrace from a man in a bar, and then being the one who has to apologize! In this case, the man was a famed poet, and we were in the bar because we were his students at the Banff Centre summer program. I had already learned to defend myself from bullies, so when the teacher grabbed a 19-year old me in an unwanted embrace, I defended myself till he let me go.
“Tonight my Body” is from Wanted Alive, 1983. I’d forgotten all about it. It breaks my heart. A 24-year old woman wrote this.
“Fifteen Years” and “Thirteen Years,” are paired poems from Furious (1988; thanks to Anansi for permission to use it here). In the first, the narrator asks how we can live with the images in us, and one of those is of her uncle’s shirttail out at a wedding fifteen years earlier. But the flag is out on the play: that dancing shirt-tail brings up another memory, depicted in “Thirteen Years,” correcting the first poem when it dawns on her that it wasn’t her uncle’s shirttail but that of the “friend of the family”—who was stalking a 13-year old girl and no one helping. A wedding, and everyone was drinking. The good news not in the poem, is some other ladies hid the girl in a bathroom and chased the man away till he went home alone and the girl could return to the hall and wait for her parents to be ready to leave. I added a sentence to the poem here, as the words “who did my cousin marry” don’t mean to blame her but just iterate that the narrator couldn’t even remember who her cousin married on that happy occasion, only remembered being touched by the “friend of the family” and too young and frightened to cope.
It’s not that women have not been speaking up. It’s that no one has had the ears to hear us, and we have been too scared or sad to realize the potential of a collective noise. And there was no social media, no “gone viral.” Now you hear us. What hurts most to me today is that women still have to live through what I did half a century ago. May the world change! So many men-beings are respectful; we need #youtoo to not tolerate bad behaviour from peers and colleagues, friends and family.