I am the country you meant
I am the chalk snake
fading in the remote village
I am the smiling man
who gave you water
I am the shoemaker
you could not speak to
but whom you believed could love you
I am the carver of the moon-round breasts
I am the flesh teacher
I am the demon
who laughs himself to death
I am the country you meant
As the virgin places the garland
on the soft river
I can put a discipline
across your bellies
I do not know all my knowledge
and I know that this is my strength
I am the country
you will love and hate
I am the policeman
floating on Upanishads
The epidemic burns
village after village
in a tedious daily fire
The white doctors sweat
the black doctors sweat
I am the epidemic
I am the teacher
whom the teachers hate
I am the country you meant
I am the snake beaten out of silver
I am the black ornament
The ivory bridge
leaps over the thick stream
I bring it down with a joke
I whistle it into ruins
The sunlight gnaws at it
The moonlight gives it leprosy
I am the agent
I am the disease
The world stiffens suddenly
and gravity sinks its teeth
into village balloons
and water injures the red of blood
and pebbles surrender
their rough little mouths
and you secret loving names
turn up in dossiers
when I show in black and white
exactly where your thumbs
and tickets aim
THE MUSIC CREPT BY US
I would like to remind
the management
that the drinks are watered
and the hat-check girl
has syphilis
and the band is composed
of former SS monsters
However since it is
New Year’s Eve
and I have lip cancer
I will place my
paper hat on my
concussion and dance
THE TELEPHONE
Mother, the telephone is ringing in the empty house.
It rang all Wednesday
Sometimes the people next door thought it was their phone,
A rusty sound, if ringing has a colour
as if, whatever the message, it would be obsolete,
news already acted on, or ignored
like an anecdote about McCarthy or
the insurance man about the cheque which has already been mailed.
or a wedding of old people
Did we ever use these battered pots, I wondered once
while rummaging in the basement. We must have been poor
or deliberately austere, but I was not told.
A rusty sound, a touch of violence in it
rather than urgency, as if the message demanded a last resource
from the instrument.
Harbour of floating incidental information
our telephone was feminine
an ugly girl who had cultivated a good nature
slightly promiscuous
A rusty sound, like the old girl,
never “fatale,” trying to spread for a childhood chum
just for auld lang syne.
Mother, someone is trying to get through,
probably to remind you of Daylight Saving Time
Someone must compose your number
to remind you of Daylight Saving Time
even though you’ve changed all the clocks you can reach
Answer the phone, dust
Answer the phone, plastic Message-Riter
Answer the phone, darlings who lived in the house
even before us
Answer the phone, another family
Someone wants to say hello about nothing
Answer the phone, you who followed your career
past the comfort of gossip
who listen to the banal regular ringing
and give your venom to it
enforce it with your hatred
until the walls are marked by its dentist’s persistence
like a negro’s house
with obscenities and crosses
You are a little boy
lying in bed in the early summer
the telephone is ringing
your parents are in the garden
and they rush to get it
before it wakes you up
you who used your boyhood as a discipline
against the profane –
your moulding discipline
you: single, awake, contemptuous even of exile
Your parents rush to stop the ringing
which would let you rejoice in Daylight Saving Time
or how the project is coming along
and you shall not alter your love
assailed as it is by your nature, your insight,
Time or the World,
though the ringing brocade your contempt like a royal garment
you shall set aside a hiding place
you shall not alter your love
DISGUISES
I am sorry that the rich man must go
and his house become a hospital.
I loved his wine, his contemptuous servants,
his ten-year-old ceremonies.
I loved his car which he wore like a snail’s shell
everywhere, and I loved his wife,
the hours she put into her skin,
the milk, the lust, the industries
that served her complexion.
I loved his son who looked British
but had American ambitions
and let the word aristocrat comfort him
like a reprieve while Kennedy reigned.
I loved the rich man: I hate to see
his season ticket for the Opera
fall into a pool for opera-lovers.
I am sorry that the old worker must go
who called me mister when I was twelve
and sir when I was twenty
who studied against me in obscure socialist
clubs which met in restaurants.
I loved the machine he knew like a wife’s body.
I loved his wife who trained bankers
in an underground pantry
and never wasted her ambition in ceramics.
I loved his children who debate
and come first at McGill University.
Goodbye old gold-watch winner
all your complex loyalties
must now be borne by one-faced patriots.
Goodbye dope fiends of North Eastern Lunch
circa 1948, your spoons which were not
Swedish Stainless, were the same colour
as the hoarded clasps and hooks
of discarded soiled therapeutic corsets.
I loved your puns about snow
even if they lasted the full seven-month
Montreal winter. Go write your memoirs
for the Psychedelic Review.
Goodbye sex fiends of Beaver Pond
who dreamed of being jacked-off
by electric milking machines.
You had no Canada Council.
You had to open little boys
with a pen-knife.
I loved your statement to the press:
“I didn’t think he’d mind.”
Goodbye articulate monsters
Abbot and Costello have met Frankenstein.
I am sorr
y that the conspirators must go
the ones who scared me by showing me
a list of all the members of my family.
I loved the way they reserved judgement
about Genghis Khan. They loved me because
I told them their little beards
made them dead-ringers for Lenin.
The bombs went off in Westmount
and now they are ashamed
like a successful outspoken Schopenhauerian
whose room-mate has committed suicide.
Suddenly they are all making movies.
I have no one to buy coffee for.
I embrace the changeless:
the committed men in public wards
oblivious as Hassidim
who believe that they are someone else.
Bravo! Abelard, viva! Rockefeller,
have these buns, Napoleon,
hurrah! betrayed Duchess.
Long live you chronic self-abusers!
you monotheists!
you familiars of the Absolute
sucking at circles!
You are all my comfort
as I turn to face the beehive
as I disgrace my style
as I coarsen my nature
as I invent jokes
as I pull up my garters
as I accept responsibility.
You comfort me
incorrigible betrayers of the self
as I salute fashion
and bring my mind
like a promiscuous air-hostess
handing out parachutes in a nose dive
bring my butchered mind
to bear upon the facts.
LOT
Give me back my house
Give me back my young wife
I shouted to the sunflower in my path
Give me back my scalpel
Give me back my mountain view
I said to the seeds along my path
Give me back my name
Give me back my childhood list
I whispered to the dust when the path gave out
Now sing
Now sing
sang my master as I waited in the raw wind
Have I come so far for this
I wondered as I waited in the pure cold
ready at last to argue for my silence
Tell me master
do my lips move
or where does it come from
this soft total chant that drives my soul
like a spear of salt into the rock
Give me back my house
Give me back my young wife
ONE OF THE NIGHTS I DIDN’T KILL MYSELF
You dance on the day you saved
my theoretical angels
daughters of the new middle-class
who wear your mouths like Bardot
Come my darlings
the movies are true
I am the lost sweet singer whose death
in the fog your new high-heeled boots
have ground into cigarette butts
I was walking the harbour this evening
looking for a 25-cent bed of water
but I will sleep tonight
with your garters curled in my shoes
like rainbows on vacation
with your virginity ruling
the condom cemeteries like a 2nd chance
I believe I believe
Thursday December 12th
is not the night
and I will kiss again the slope of a breast
little nipple above me
like a sunset
THE BIG WORLD
The big world will find out
about this farm
the big world will learn
the details of what
I worked out in the can
And your curious life with me
will be told so often
that no one will believe
you grew old
NARCISSUS
You don’t know anyone
You know some streets
hills, gates, restaurants
The waitresses have changed
You don’t know me
I’m happy about the autumn
the leaves the red skirts
everything moving
I passed you in a marble wall
some new bank
You were bleeding from the mouth
You didn’t even know the season
CHERRY ORCHARDS
Canada some wars are waiting for you
some threats
some torn flags
Inheritance is not enough
Faces must be forged under the hammer
of savage ideas
Mailboxes will explode
in the cherry orchards
and somebody will wait forever
for his grandfather’s fat cheque
From my deep café I survey the quiet snowfields
like a U.S. promoter
of a new plastic snowshoe
looking for a moving speck
a troika perhaps
an exile
an icy prophet
an Indian insurrection
a burning weather station
There’s a story out there boys
Canada could you bear some folk songs
about freedom and death
STREETCARS
Did you see the streetcars
passing as of old
along Ste Catherine Street?
Golden streetcars
passing under the tearful
Temple of the Heart
where the crutches hang
like catatonic divining twigs.
A thin young priest
folds his semen in a kleenex
his face glowing
in the passing gold
as the world returns.
A lovely riot gathers the citizenry
into its spasms
as the past comes back
in the form of golden streetcars.
I carry a banner:
“The Past is Perfect”
my little female cousin
who does not believe
rides royally on my nostalgia.
The streetcars curtsy
round a corner
Firecrackers and moths
drip from their humble wires.
BULLETS
Listen all you bullets
that never hit:
a lot of throats are growing
in open collars
like frozen milk bottles
on a 5 a.m. street
throats that are waiting
for bite scars
but will settle
for bullet holes
You restless bullets
lost in swarms
from undecided wars:
fasten on
these nude throats
that need some
decoration
I’ve done my own work:
I had 3 jewels
no more
and I have placed them
on my choices
jewels
although they performed
like bullets:
an instant of ruby
before the hands
came up
to stem the mess
And you over there
my little acrobat:
swing fast
After me
there is no care
and the air
is heavily armed
and has
the wildest aim
HITLER
Now let him go to sleep with history,
the real skeleton stinking of gasoline,
the mutt and jeff henchmen beside him:
let them sleep among our precious poppies.
Cadres of SS waken in our minds
where they began before we ransomed them
&nb
sp; to that actual empty realm we people
with the shadows that disturb our inward peace.
For a while we resist the silver-black cars
rolling in slow parade through the brain.
We stuff the microphones with old chaotic flowers
from a bed which rapidly exhausts itself.
Never mind. They turn up as poppies
beside the tombs and libraries of the real world.
The leader’s vast design, the tilt of his chin
seem excessively familiar to minds at peace.
FRONT LAWN
The snow was falling
over my penknife
There was a movie
in the fireplace
The apples were wrapped
in 8-year-old blonde hair
Starving and dirty
the janitor’s daughter never
turned up in November
to pee from her sweet crack
on the gravel
I’ll go back one day
when my cast is off
Elm leaves are falling
over my bow and arrow
Candy is going bad
and Boy Scout calendars
are on fire
My old mother
sits in her Cadillac
laughing her Danube laugh
as I tell her that we own
all the worms
under our front lawn
Rust rust rust
in the engines of love and time
KERENSKY
My friend walks through our city this winter night,
fur-hatted, whistling, anti-mediterranean,
stricken with seeing Eternity in all that is seasonal.
He is the Kerensky of our Circle
always about to chair the last official meeting
before the pros take over, they of the pure smiling eyes
trained only for Form.
He knows there are no measures to guarantee
the Revolution, or to preserve the row of muscular icicles
which will chart Winter’s decline like a graph.
There is nothing for him to do but preside
over the last official meeting.
It will all come round again: the heartsick teachers
who make too much of poetry, their students
who refuse to suffer, the cache of rifles in the lawyer’s attic:
and then the magic, the 80-year comet touching
the sturdiest houses. The Elite Corps commits suicide
in the tennis-ball basement. Poets ride buses free.
The General insists on a popularity poll. Troops study satire.