The Cartographer

I have navigated your open roads
and travelled your uncharted territories,
kicked around your back streets
and slept under your warm night skies.
But ever since we tore down the highway
between my new city and you,
the map of you in my mind
is growing blank spots and losing lines.
I forget some of your shortcuts and
the exact trails of your bus routes.
I ask about a street name you never had
and you turn away from me,
disappointment in your streetlight eyes.
In me you expected a permanent resident,
an archivist, not a tourist.

In Silence

You took me to a ravine,
where snowy hills
rolled up on either side of us.
They stilled the wind
and hushed the city noise.
In their presence
I could not speak;
I passed my words
in telegraph pulses
to your hand.

Los Angeles

Original assignment, from September 2007: write a poem about a place you have never visited, using intimate detail to show that the speaker knows the place.  This is the edited version, after it was put through a workshop.

Los Angeles
I wanted to go out,
to cruise down Sunset with the top of your car down,
past silicone shopping malls and mannequin girls,
waving my feet in gold mules out the window.

I wanted to go to the beach
and watch the surfers and the sunbathers,
slice into the salty water
and eat melon on the boardwalk.

I wanted to slam with punks and college kids,
wearing our leather jackets and striped shirts,
drink a bit too much cheap beer at the bar,
get burritos so we could fall asleep.

But you were dreaming of going home again,
to an island built up like a fortress,
stacked up and nervous,
where you can’t even see the water.

You couldn’t remember Gene Kelly’s feet in cement.
You forgot about parrots perched in jacaranda trees.
You just saw the smog and the money,
zombie movie stars under our feet,
gangsters done up like blue and red clowns,
trees burning down in the Santa Ana winds.

I wanted you to stay here
in a city of canyons and palm trees,
open roads and secret alleyways,
mirrored pools and sunsets and happy endings.
You just smiled bittersweet and said
you didn’t believe in angels.

New assignment: take a poem that involves a person other than the speaker and write a poem about the same event from the other person’s perspective.

Los Angeles
Emily, I wish you would come back to me.
Leave the Pacific Ocean,
wash the salt out of your eyelashes.
Let me wrap the Hudson River
around your bare, tanned arms.

This city can only poison you with
oleander and silicone,
smog and Crip cocaine.
And you know, they lied to you, Emily,
because none of the feathers on the beach
belong to any angels.

But Manhattan doesn’t play pretend;
it knows the rain as well as the sun.
You’d love it there, Emily:
the snow and the subway,
Chinatown and Central Park,
three-chord Bowery sonatas.

So close the picture book, Emily;
you know angels don’t really exist,
except for the statues in Forest Lawn Cemetery
for the ones who couldn’t survive.
Leave the canyons of failed dreams,
chemical sunsets and acid blue pools.
You’ll only suffocate, Emily.
Come back to me.

Writing Challenges: November

This month’s writing challenges to myself:

• Not NaNoWriMo.

Theme:

• a happy poem.
• race
• gender
• darkness, without cliché.

Structure:

• villanelle
• title first, poem second
• mimic other poets
• don’t use “you” or “I”

Rewrite/Rework:

• “Seeds” (November 2006)
• “Motel” (November 2006)
• “Inheritance” (September 2007)
• “Paul Banks” (October 2007)
• “Liam Ross” (November 2007)

Moving In

Assignment: Write in third person from the viewpoint of someone under 10 years old doing something completely new to him/her, focusing on sensory detail to overcome the difference in vocabulary (cf. Clark Blaise, “Broward Dowdy”).

Allie’s aunt Clara was a tower of a woman in a slim taupe pantsuit, with brown hair cut in a neat, severe bob. She had to lean forward a bit in order to fit her door frame. Aside from her long, narrow nose, she looked nothing like Allie’s mother, her sister, who always wore her long hair down and hated wearing shoes.

Upon seeing the two of them in her doorway, Clara did not smile, but looked them up and down in a brisk nod. Allie looked up at her warily and took a bite of the sandwich her mother had given her in the car.

“Well, girls. Won’t you come in?” Clara’s voice was deep and low, not like Allie’s mother’s at all. Allie tightened her grip on her mother’s hand as Clara leaned down and took the small brown suitcase that sat at Allie’s feet, then turned around and went inside. Allie’s mother tugged on her hand and led her into the house.

Inside, the house was as enormous as it was outside. Allie supposed it had to be, in order to accommodate Clara’s height. It was draughty and smelled like nothing, except for the conspicuous aura of her house that still clung to Allie’s coat and her mother’s sweater. The foyer was rectangular, with one doorway on each side leading to another room. The room was empty except for a round, dark wood table with a thin plaster statue standing atop it, and a long, narrow painting of a yellow field of wheat that hung on the back wall. In the corner, a tall, spiralling wooden staircase went up through the ceiling to the next floor. The walls were marbled white and looked smooth, but Allie did not rush to touch them – the whole place felt precariously arranged, as if one touch would send it crashing to the ground.

“Would you like something to drink?” came Clara’s voice from the next room. It sounded faint in the silence that overpowered the house.

Allie’s mother let go of her hand and walked away, but Allie did not follow her. She stared up at the staircase, at the steep wooden stairs that led to nothing and the rails that looked like polished bones. She took a bite of her sandwich and chewed it slowly. It was bologna and mustard, her favourite. It was the only thing that felt anything like home right now.

All Mad Here

Assignment: Take a situation from your own life involving 3 or more people, then substitute characters from the same movie for characters in the situation.

Second draft.  I may expand the fourth verse.

They all went to the Hatter’s party:
Caterpillar, March Hare, Tiger Lily, Dormouse,
the Cheshire Cat and his crazed teeth,
even the White Rabbit,
finally out of the house.

They had taken tea many times before,
these six, laughing and clapping hands.
They pondered and schemed,
played riddles and chess,
and drank to their dear Wonderland.

But this tea time, there was no laughter.
Something in the forest had changed.
They did not drink to their happiness now,
but passed the tea with shaking paws,
and shuddered it down, feeling strange.

They drank and they drank and things got worse:
The Caterpillar and March Hare duelled, and both lost;
the Dormouse spilled his tea and fell asleep;
the Cheshire Cat’s grin grew wilder-eyed,
and the Tiger Lily flapped and raved in disgust.

And even the staid and stern White Rabbit
drank much more than he was able;
he forgot his engagements
and ticking pocket watch,
and he slid straight under the table.

206 Rue Bernard Ouest

Today I ventured to Mile-End for the first time, to a café to see Neil Smith, Zoe Whittall, and Jon Paul Fiorentino read as part of the Blue Metropolis Literary Series. All three were good. I stayed afterward because I didn’t want to leave – the place gave me a feeling I couldn’t quite put my finger on, and I tried to write it out. This is an edited version of what I wrote when I was there.

6:15 pm: I can’t help but feel like a speck of dust that has chosen to materialize at this exact moment in this exact place: insignificant and lonely and right in the thick of it.

7:30 pm: Maybe I’ll stay in Montréal after university. Live north of the mountain, write in cafés, work in a bookstore. By then my French will be good enough. Know the people who give the readings I attend. Think about going back to Toronto, never commit until 5 or 8 years later when I decide to go home in a grand and cosmic moment of “this city is fucking me up”. Realize that my eternal idea of Toronto was formed in 2006: secret swings and mashed potatoes, sushi and Queen West in the summer. Try to live with a city that I adore that has moved on without me.

7:50 pm: (After reading a bit of Bottle Rocket Hearts): I read so intently it makes my jaw clench somewhere around my ears. It feels like gripping the railing at the edge of a cliff, and if you let go you know you’re going to get that butterfly tightness in your gut that means falling. Is this what it’s like to find something perfect? (I almost wrote “love”. I can’t pretend I know what love is. I can’t pretend I don’t know what love is.)

The piano is sitting in the corner, cool and James Dean casual. I want to fall asleep in the arms of this warm wood room, rest my head against its solid brick chest, feel it nestle its jazz and mirror ball lighting in my hair, wake up in a loving old-souled embrace.

The Rooster

The original assignment was to write the beginning of a short story to the “then” moment (see Clark Blaise’s essay, “To Begin, To Begin”). This assignment was to rewrite it, having received notes on it. I’m not going to bother with the original version because I don’t like it, but the second one came out twice as long and light years better. This is the beginning of the beginning.

For the summer between her second and third years of university, Stephanie Chau had decided not to go back to Halifax. Instead she stayed in Montréal, where she could hold her job at the supermarket and where her boyfriend Ryan came over every night to make dinner and water the cacti on her windowsill.

For two months it had been absolutely perfect. Stephanie hadn’t missed the salt water or the beach, or her sister, or drinking at the Marquee until 3 AM. She had found a sort of Zen in carrying crates of milk cartons and in the mysterious pink and orange flowers her cacti sprouted. The dinner wine tasted sweet and full. She couldn’t remember what it felt like to sleep alone.

Then Ryan stopped coming, and she wished she could forget what it felt like to sleep with someone else beside her. The cacti, grieving, shrivelled into themselves. Stephanie started eating instant noodles for dinner every day, alone in her apartment in front of the computer or an endless stack of books. She cut her hair to her chin and stopped drinking. She considered getting a cat, but knew she would only kill it.

One in three don’t make it/Long Distance

THE CREATIVE PROCESS
The assignment was to write a poem of no more than 20 lines expressing something real and authentic, using only the words found in a given advertisement for Liebherr refrigerators – no changing tense, no pluralization. After making lists and many failed attempts, this is what I came up with at 2 AM:

One in three don’t make it
it’s not as easy as it looks
to be committed, to comply and be good;
in a new environment,
restriction can be hazardous.

you want to look at a choice not in your reach,
and to be the other one can make you green;
all that restriction can be healthy
if you can delight in the good you are given
(that is not easy to keep here).

 

Afterward, now free of the restriction (and I think all the words in that sentence were in the ad), I decided to edit in a few words that I had wanted to put in there but couldn’t. One edit led to another, and the final result is this poem, which I actually like:

Long Distance
when you’re let loose in a brand new backyard,
you just want to run and feel the grass under your feet;
the last thing you think of is putting up fences
and what you left behind indoors.
you want to taste the apples just out of your reach,
and missing that chance makes you green;
but not having a ladder is good
if you are happy with the fruit you already picked
(which is hard to remember in
so ripe an orchard).

Begging

hungry dogs on street corners
don’t bother dancing for biscuits
they just lie on the ground
with dead puppet stares
as if
once they hear the clatter of coins
their eyes will light up
and their flat ragged bodies
will remember how to chase tails