Yesterday: went and had a look at the Globe theatre then went to the Tate Modern. I found some artists I like —

• Natalia Goncharova

• Josef Koudelka

I feel a bit odd today, pants too tight.

Reading Melville by Jean Genet.

Last night we got Pizza Bun (basically a calzone) and watched About a Boy. Oh, and we saw the Tracey Emin exhibit. I could imagine Cat doing something like that — very raw, multi-media madness.

I think I’ll get my period today, which could be why I feel off.

“the problem in writing poetry about a cause is how to remain yourself” — Kenneth Koch

Book Shops visited:

• Donlon books

• Broadway Bookshop

Some British things:

• Tesco’s Meal Deal

• Select Kilburn Chicken Shop

• See it. Say it. Sort it.

• Ladbrokes

On the train to Edinburgh

A horse in York is black on green.

Spindly black trees SHEEP brilliant yellow fields — rapeseed?

The sheep lay down like shaggy door rugs.

Yellow gorse by the roadside, reddish soil + black crows, deer curled up by the hedges and the sun has come out and then the sea appears in the window

unexpectedly

I feel so excited I could throw up

The sheep have daubs of colour on them (pink, blue, green) like easter eggs. I saw a strange reddish rabbit sitting under a tree.

Day 3 of Edinburgh

Arthur’s Seat yellow gorse — “sharp April morning”

Yellow and orange — orange sweater & Irn Bru

orange buddhist monk robes — there was a missing monk on the news last night.

Yellow turmeric latte— anti-inflammatory yellow for my uterus.

In the Edinburgh Larder.

I got my period while wearing white underwear & a white skirt at Roslyn chapel. Cramps were bad.

More orange — Jaffa cake.

Fair complexions are made violet from yellow, blue from orange.

National Museum of Scotland

Chicken skin fan

Dolly the sheep rotating ‘round on her platform looking out with shiny black eyes.

Seaweed ash — Carnelian bead (Brough of Birsay)

Highlands

False summit

Glencoe massacre

Black houses — white walls, thatch roof w. stones at ‘eaves’, cats & dogs would hide in the thatch and get washed out with the rain

Hills dun-coloured, mossy globs down to the sea

Passing place

Mussel hot pot at the Stein Inn, thinking of Vashti Bunyan, Elspeth Barker, wayward women

Maychang soap

Gorse smells like coconut

YELLOW — Gorse

/ \

Daffodils Window sills

My secret goat

there has been no real fire to sit by

RED — Tracey Emin’s bedroom shadows & bloody belly

/ \

My hair Tomato in full English breakfast

Balinderry, Northern Ireland, at Auntie T’s

“Bless your cotton socks”

To Some I have Talked with by the Fire—

while I wrought out these fitful Danaan rhymes,

my heart would brim with dreams

(Yeats)

I like the dark green glossy Holly leaves. Auntie T says their neighbour tries to cut them away. In the winter they get the little clusters of red berries. I imagine walking the laneway in the winter. Auntie T:

Walking home after school in the dark, down the long laneway, she always felt better when she could hear the thump of her Father’s walking stick and the barking of the dogs come to meet her

Auntie T and I walked down the Cott Lane and over the bridge. Gentle cows and a lone horse. Auntie T says she would come down to the bridge to drop her worries down into the water.

I ran down the Cott Lane later by myself while listening to Óró Mo Bhádín.

'S nach breá í mo bháidín ag snámh ar an gcuan
Óró mo churaichín ó
Is na céaslaí á dtarraingt go láidir is go buan
Óró mo bháidín

I followed it to a broken down old farmhouse and then down to a hedge wall where the path splits. A bee went right so I followed it and it brought me out onto the road, the church across the street. I found Grampers grave and said hello. There was a bottle of whisky there and a little bagpiper statuette, and his watch which mum had left there years ago…

Day of my 30th birthday

Auntie Theresa has painted the house purple— the trim, the fences, the barn roof. Her jacket matches the blooming cherry blossom tree. Violet Ray, Saint Germaine. She reads the Tube of Light after the healer (who smokes cigarettes between sessions) pulls crystals from her sore jaw.

Purple. In Derek Jarman’s Chroma he speaks more of pink than purple in the Purple Passage. He quotes Rudolf Steiner “Only when a soul withdraws does a person turn green” — soul muddle. Withdrawal of blood— “souls do not have colour”. Mary the healer says that at her meditations sometimes she perceives black clouds around people. I saw some blackish mould spots on the bathroom ceiling.

Auntie Theresa’s birthstone is amethyst and she carries a small one in her pocket, in the other pocket she carries a grounding stone. David’s birthstone is amethyst, too—Aquarius. I would say the shade of purple in the house and on the trim, etc., is a light violet or periwinkle. I tell her lately I’ve been attracted to orange and she says not to say that ‘round here but with a chuckle, then no, orange is good, orange is vitality.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale

Auntie Theresa’s name is actually Therese but the registrar misspelled it. After the Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. The Little flower of Jesus. Childhood and little holinesses. Above her bed is a portrait of Saint Brigid dancing with animals in a field.

Cousin Anne puts blackcurrant cordial in her Guinness. Cousin Colin wears black gloves when he drives and tells me about eel fishing, Gaelic sport and rugby, his German ex-wife calls the people of Balinderry Bridge “curtain twitchers”. He was training to be a priest but quit because he didn’t think single men who’d never married or had kids should be telling women how to live. When we sit down for tea they talk about the British searching the house and finding a rifle. Uncle Terry hiding a barrack bomb in a van. Bombs in footballs sent over the fence and into the barracks.

Auntie Theresa’s favourite poet is W.B. Yeats. There are some framed poems on the wall and she can quote him from memory.

Evening—

We went to the cemetery this morning to visit the family— Little Nan is buried there. Auntie T had a special day planned, to go out for lunch, to take me to a wee shop. In the cemetery, after we’d said hello to Nan and went to see Colin’s sister, Auntie T fell face first onto the sidewalk. It felt like slow motion and so fast at the same time. Blood quickly started pooling around her forehead as I tried to put my hand under it. She was very still but somehow more calm than cousin Theresa & I. I looked up at cousin T and said should we call 911? She said there is no 911 around here. We slowly got Auntie T up to sitting and she had a gouge above her eyebrow and below her eye and was shaky but cracking jokes. We walked her to the car and drove to an urgent care but they sent us to a farther one. I soaked some paper towels in cold water there and pressed them to Auntie T’s forehead.

At the hospital we waited for hours. I think we got there around 12 pm and we left at midnight. Auntie T had a fractured orbital bone and as we sat there her face just got bigger and bigger and her bruise was so violent it hurt to look her. Her eye disappeared into folds of blue and black and purple. She kept saying, imagine! on your 30th birthday! We had cups of tea and a lemon cake. A man in handcuffs was taken out for a cigarette and tried to do a runner and everyone in the room was shouting and looking out the window. We ate a Chinese when we got home and Auntie T wanted some whisky. I said it's probably not a good idea because of the pain killers and she said oh you spoil sport. When I took my skirt off to go to bed there was blood on it.

Belfast

Writ 2 Days after my 30th birthday—

after Gregory Corso

No baby hurts: my hips stretch wide and wooden

across cards which have told me to choose:

Birthstones of amethyst or burial.

Some kind of stone that sits heavy in the

hand

Dream of a pale breast on some blankface

woman, Irish mothers and their

thick-headed boys hairy wrists and

quiet-voiced am I to want it all or will it

slip out from me? Easy

Coins in the wishing tree: Years ago I

thought the key to a happy marriage is

to be afraid of everything and openly

and not to love yourself too much

I will eat my vegetables in honour of

her

Dublin Museum

Cloudbuds burst

Bog butter

all the bog bodies have hair that looks like mine and their skin looks like scraps of fabric burnt or dirtied on a roadside

to Grogan’s take a right on Duke, left on Grafton, right on Johnson CT and William St

Cavan

Last night the light coming in from the streets was orange my history was

shining up at me all blackish and like two pools that I could

fall into

My heart has been with me though I tried to bury it with a tourmaline

in Theresa’s back garden so

I have tied it to the trees here with white cloth

Last Day: Dublin April 28

• Upstairs Bookstore

• Xian noodles for lunch w. tofu

• Stokes Books— antiquarian — met bookseller Anne and discussed the troubles both here & in Montreal. Her marriage was a disaster and she thinks Higgins is a closeted bisexual. Told me I look Irish Catholic. Bought Ulster from the Railways. Regret not buying Gaelic Seamus Heaney…

• Coffee at Kaph

• Secret Books + Records

• Trinity College Dublin: Long Room Library + Book of Kells — many books missing for conservation… could’ve done without all the techno parts of the exhibit. Just wanted to look at the old book and stand in the library.

• Grogan’s Pub— “they were only dead things” (museum) reading Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Old fellow next to me (name of Graham) asks me where I’m headed as I look at bus schedule. Says Joyce is too difficult.

Swans
Nan

Berries

Cemetery

Dewlaps— under the chin of the cow & good for petting

Armchair republican

Bus home from Dublin Morning fog over the lakes of Cavan

Gemini

Bernadette came here before and after her stroke. Kayla and I swam to the meeting point, the black-green belly of the crossing, and I laid on my back in the water. The tips of her braids became pointed like paint brushes as they dipped into the creek. I wondered if Bernadette swam here after her stroke. Kayla thought not– it would be too difficult to get in, what with all the uneven, slippery stones, the rushing water. She must have sat on the bank and watched it flow, written poems.

I recently read a book in which a blind priest, while performing his first baptism, baptizes the feet instead. When someone shouts “Wrong end!” he flips the baby over to dip the head and considers the baby better for it– “double baptised”. In the same book, a baby dies before her baptism and the church refuses to bury her in daylight. The family must creep into the churchyard like graverobbers and bury her in darkness. I was baptised when I was five, wearing a white satin dress, white tights, and Mary Janes. I even had a beaded wreath of paper flowers around my forehead that itched and left behind an imprint.

I am convinced by the stillness of a gold chain hung from a hand. I will it silently to swing but not even the slightest breeze comes. At the house there was a table with books laid out. I picked up a small, square book by Jean Frémon, with drawings by Louise Bourgeois. The drawings are in bleeding watery reds:

“It is said that He made man in his own image. Or was it, in fact, the other around? And, in fact, it was a painter, a maker of images, who managed to achieve what all the Evangelists could only suggest: to declare divine, in the form of a child, this species that hates itself so much as to impose on itself such martyrdom, and which, like all species, dies and is reborn”

When we walk back from the creek I ask Phil if Bernadette still swam after the stroke. He says oh yeah, she’d use her cane to get in then throw it into the brush to retrieve on her way out. I can imagine it easily.

Andrew Wyeth’s dead crow 

in Maine at least

     Shut-up oyster

Tiger-eyed and

Carrying a large rose-red apple in my bag



Aboard the HMCS Iroquois

A buffalo in the kitchen, waiting for dinner

    Fleeing the oncoming wave 

Miserable and mossed slung

Over the closet door



With arrows thru my chest making 

The perfect bedroom on Microsoft Paint

I woke up with the word lagoon stretched like taffy across my tongue

and wondering about beavers, how powerful is their bite? like if you had to measure it 

and of Florida. It felt like home in a way

the oranges on signs everywhere so fragrant and welcoming 

roadside fruit stands offering jams and pickled okra 



The geranium made another bloom in the night

and now I remember! The abortion cactus jumped

off the windowsill, I tried to understand what it was telling me—

I left it on the floor and fell back to sleep



I woke up again some time later to

cat feet thundering across the roof so many

omens in one night and I looked out the window

the cat was still and staring at me then vanished

down the tree 



There was being stuck at the bus station 
and stepping out into the panhandle night to try and see
the ocean
while avoiding seagull poop dried on the roof
looking down into very blue water to see the soft
shapes of otters swimming 

the wavering touch of fan air across my 

bare legs 

and always a small fear like a kernel stuck

between the teeth of a man crawling 

through my window

No baby hurts: my hips stretch wide and wooden 

across cards which have told me to choose

keep the stone in hand or bury it.

Irish mothers, their 

thick-headed boys hairy wrists and 

quiet-voiced 

In the corner booth creamy Guinness sweetened 

with blackcurrant syrup

Anne drinks it that way

A grey-haired woman squints at me

        I hope this doesn’t offend you but you look Catholic

Old coins embed the wishing tree at Ardboe: Years ago I 

thought the key to a happy marriage was

to be afraid of everything, openly 

and not love yourself too much 

Now I don’t think about 

except by

accident

indulging in happiness—

Asters — Gentians —

—gathering such little flowers!

The risk is taken —

Why not, I am a beautiful woman

— a big cloak!

I am my gesture

I don’t speak — its that—

it’s the white star-shaped flower

I have been looking for

smelling of dry hay…

— Now forget me!

I enter the bar first. It is full of people I don’t recognize, eating and laughing, leaning into one another. I think it’s a perfect bar, but when I try to look farther in I see darkness and I know this place is not for me. I turn to leave, pushing aside people coming in. I am back in the alley, where the neon light sign is pulsing. I go closer. I can look back and see where I came in, a familiar street with a restaurant I’ve eaten at, but snow is falling so I go in.

Women are sitting, doing each other’s makeup, waiting for their turn to have their cards or palms read. Or whatever.

I am with my boyfriend’s best friend. We’re walking on the dark highway. I have a hotel for the night. He says with a laugh he could join me. He leads me to a low wooden wall, filled with glass cases like honeycombs, yellow light. Through the glass, a rabbit, entirely still except for if you watch closely, you see the shiver of its nose, the ripple of its fur as its heart beats, sat upon green moss. A black cat with yellow eyes. Silver buttons, necklaces. These are your children, he says.

You must control your image. You must not let anyone draw on your face. Since I was young I knew what I wanted. I bit the hands of women who came close to me with their shadows and sticks. If you’re going to be a fool you’ve got to be your own fool.

all the sing songs of

      britishness

on the so-claimed

      2nd day of spring

Women in red slippers

      dogs off-leash 

the houses all

      squashed like— 

jangling of keys in

      gate

A refrigerated truck pulls up

to Hill & Szrok

     an elegant neon-signed

     & navy blue butcher

throw open the backdoors     

whole pigs hang like fresh caught

fish closed sunshine on pink skin

is tender to you

May I ask how you are?

         I guess not 

The geranium on the window sill

has lost its bloom again 

I know you have forgiven me the way

I am always a shovel stood in a

bank of snow, a job unfinished and

half-buried

When I woke today it was because

something stung and I knew

I’d been dreaming of you

my turquoise energy in to

in to what? your energy is inflamed

that’s why you have bruisy eyebags

and dry skin

This is a rare cosmic reset, Taurus

you are about to be torn WIDE OPEN!

to prepare you will need

a mirror a bowl a sprig of rosemary

and $10 monthly subscription

The sky could be seen swirling and dark like

a Bosch painting, the feeling not the strokes

I could be seen running alongside two

boys was I trying to keep up or somehow

getting ahead?

Sandstone walls up calling us in

The nuns in their flapping wimples are

yelling into their bullhorns

We are supposed to make you feel safe!

But what if I know something you don’t know?

I saw the fastest boy in school and he was

walking in the other direction

onion      carrots celery seed

clay bones and sand

grease brown blacked salty hotdogs2

coffee jugs of coffee

                  the yellow of Dobe & Andy spring rolls 

lamp oil                Rosy

a net which holds the hair

beautiful elbows

The truth is what works3

for paper crafts

      a globe with her little kitchen inside

tube glue and seashells to a frame

little hearts of plastic glitter shake inside

all over everywhere

and terrible with straight lines

      there is nothing more perfect

than never making a mistake 

because all my fingers

are wings

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

    were-wolf never died 

but sits beside you

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

                             any time at all

Lenore Kandel “Were-Poem”

Sitting at a table you can only see

one half of a person

And sometimes when you eat you look down at your plate

to take a moment

and listen to the sounds of

              laughing scraping pits spat into small crystal cups 

I look up and there you are just the same but

your skin silver in fine flakes

When you eat you swallow the fork too and

now that I think about it

beneath the table what I can’t see

are your feet I remember running from

big-boned and gristly they wouldn’t fit in sneakers and in the morning

everyone had forgot but at breakfast a

             dream rolled over for me with a shiver 

as I looked up

I dream of Ellie in the living room

I dream of being trusted to help an old man bring his groceries home 

it’s just around the corner I think its Christmas

I dream of looking for the best taco in Mexico

and being offered chicken wings instead (they do look good)

I dream of wearing a wedding dress with wet hair 

and jumping off a roof into snow

I dream of Laura throwing

a towel on me as she explains

I dream of being very sexy and running

away 

Sit very still like you are smelling something

NEW

wait 

Sit on top of someone 

With closed eyes

listen very closely— for an unusual wind

Try to be less human 

more orchid at night defending

oneself from slugs

asleep in your closed petals

A wind that is vibrant as a moon

will find you 

I had hoped to see a man there in a long dark coat, with his head down and his hands in his pockets. It was dark and the stray cats were like dust bunnies in corners, low to the ground, moved as if by a little breeze. Plane trees in the distance. It was just before the war. The thing was I had to cross the river to get there and it was a very hot day. A few hours away Vesuvius was puffing black smoke on its sides. The cars were not on the roads. People milled around everywhere, drinking from the taps, their cheeks blotchy red. Men in black vests shouted and waved paper menus.

I was in Trastevere. The cemetery was in Testaccio. To get there I would have had to walk across the bridge. It was almost 5 o’clock and the cemetery was closing soon. I thought it was funny they should close a cemetery. In Montreal, people go into the Mont Royal cemetery at night and take acid or shrooms and lie in the grass next to Leonard Cohen’s grave. But the cemetery was closing so I would have to walk very fast, over the Tiber, as the evening began to settle hotly on the travertine. I’d start down Via Marmorata wearing embroidered black silk slippers. I’d be very sweaty already, a little sick to my stomach. Luckily I’d see a tap gushing with cold water in the street, a man filling a tin cup. I’d wait for him to finish then take off my bandana and soak it so it becomes dark green like an overripe lime. I’d retie it and the water would cool my forehead and drip down onto my chest.

I’d know I was close when I saw the Vigili Del Fuoco. Across the street there would be a coffee kiosk with thin red stools tucked under the counter. People standing with their elbows on the counter sipping espresso despite the heat. I would order a lemon soda and take it in the can, I’d press it under my chin and behind my neck and under my shirt.

I’d walk back across the street to the entrance next to the Piramide Cestia. They forgot to mention the pyramid, it’s very strange here, like a castle plopped down into a suburb.

It would be mostly empty in the cemetery. Maybe a few other people wandering soberly in white linen shirts. Then the man in the long coat. And it’s dusk. Angels sleep with their hands tucked under marble cheeks next to overturned urns in the long grass. Pomegranate trees, wild strawberries, an orange cat perched atop a weathered tombstone that’s probably hundreds and hundreds of years old. The plants are very green, the tombstones very white against their fronds and leaves. There is the grave of the young poet, carved with a relief of a broken-stringed lyre. The man is sweating in his coat, pushing his glasses up his nose. He is waiting for a woman, or a sign from her. He is thinking of his poor wife who he left on the train.

Blue and silver coats on the buildings and whiskery

grass on the pavement as if upside down

I wish I was a blanket on a chair for my dog

or silver charm on a wooden tray

The old year flakes away

with the fat squirrel

How far could a squirrel go, if she really

wanted to go somewhere?

I guess she stays here because of the bird feeder

or a lace scarf thrown over a lamp