Apropos Nancy Cunard (ca. 1929)
I.
Wind twangs through rigging, sifts through hair,
thwacks through canvas capping lifeboats.
Smoke, dark and silver, smacks against iron stars,
smirches a half-ass moon.
The ocean groans like a train.
(All roots are sea routes—
the roots and routes of rain.)
I can smell the bow slinging brine
as the liner jackknifes currents,
this sable Atlantic whose ballast is lumps—
clumps—
of ice that seem to swoop up at us outta fog.
(Vast, silvery explosions of churn
at the stern.)
Cap’n must exercise Caution,
if we’re not to be spiked by broken glaciers,
downcast in murk,
slid down to sea-bottom silt,
like doomed, damned Titanic.
II.
As Samuel Cunard’s granddaughter—
heiress to a shipping-line fortune,
it’d be a right, ironic headline,
were I to plunge to th’ass of th’Ethiopian Ocean.
But though I cross often from U.K.
(oh, the Grief that is England’s shoreline)
to U.S. and back,
though never pausing in Halifax*, Nova Scotia,
whence Grampy Sammy hailed,
out that damp, clammy climate,
“Decadent,” I’m no welcome descendant.
III.
The scandal is: I’ve been, I am,
engorged with Blackness….
My grandee clan protests my “incisive filth.”
But our Wealth is an embalming miasma.
My Abundance is Henry—
Hank—Crowder—
Negro saxophonist,
jazzman,
whose laughter burps claps of Joy!
His lily-white “concubine”
(as you may denominate me)—
I find nothing iffy about us.
Exasperatingly sensual,
Hank is built like a god.
A voluntary “Negress,”
I feel guiltless, faultless Joy.
(Treason of Love is Loneliness.
Porn is Comedy of Selfishness.)
My peers cruise the rosé Mediterranean,
snap every amber horizon,
but I love it when I suddenly feel
a moth’s uneven fluttering,
and Hank spills me belly down in silk,
then kindly parts my spindly gams,
and feeds his “ebony aristocrat”
into my “ivory guillotine,”
and so we enter a bluesy, earthy Zion.
Aye, I feel like Lady Chatterley,
when Hank’s fingers scurry over me,
and I yield instinctively,
while he, black groom, snorts,
trampling down his white bride.
We white women are asked to accept
spindly, cinematic boys,
as wan as light.
But I prefer “unpardonable Carnality.”
Why should I back my clan’s Krugerrand Apartheid?
I am a sullen traitor
to my class and colour and church.
IV.
High up now, a star smashes down.
The vessel smacks through squalling, brawling wet—
salty perfume all about.
I’ve known the salons of Paris—
the saloons of Paris (Texas),
the swishy whores of London,
the irritatingly greedy capitalists of London (Ontario)—
all as heartless as a helmet.
I thank heaven for a dark man
who proves my true patrimony:
Rutting!
Now I traverse the pewter slew,
awaiting the moon-purging sun,
and to leave the curvaceous ocean
and cleave unto a different bucking
as Henry’s “Harlem bitch.”
Lo! The see-through “dusk of dawn”!
[Edmonton (Alberta) 28 septembre mmxii]
