Canadian Raising
My father’s father came
with songs in seven tongues
and no-one to sing them to.
His Polish elbowed German, Dutch
and Yiddish to hear a flat vernacular
push liver pills on sidewalks,
while his children learned his language
but picked up English
easy as fielders scooping ground balls.
I have no accent.
I’ve never felt my face
go fresh ingot hot
from being laughed off buses,
from money found no good
for a box of ten penny nails.
I was never patronized by little dogs
and the phonemes
at the end of the leash.
I don’t know what it means to sing
with rags crammed in my mouth.
And I don’t know what I’d do
if I found myself rigid
on an X of coloured tape,
condemned to projecting forever
in a darkened hall
in all the keys at once
to ushers fast asleep.
In Lieu of
You’ll know a mother’s love by the stains
on her apron. So what does it mean that hers
is bleached clean? Maybe just that she can roll
a tabletop of dough or chop an armload of beets
or halt a desperate chicken to feed her children
with minimal emotion, a talent shared with cats.
She sighs up the stairs from the cellar,
sack of spuds an obvious cross.
And there she is, beating confessions from a rug
on the porch or scrubbing baseboards and floors
till dirt’s a half-remembered slight.
And you, staring, always the dreamer, mouth open
like a turkey, she says, a turkey drowning in the rain.
When she’s had enough she sends you out
to fish for marlin, to moil for gold, to follow
Jim downriver. Wells has summed up history
and Britannica’s bit on Poland is dog-eared and worn.
There’s no evidence that she understands or will.
But she accepts and that is enough. Sometimes love
is a thing you catch with bare hands, carefully,
so as not to crush it. A thing to raise in a crate
lined with straw. A thing to feed and feed
though it doesn’t grow, or do more than hunker
in the furthest corner of its blanket-covered box.
Plank, Nail and Slowness
Mother was from a town called Alfred,
where love sounded like
the creaking boards beneath a rag rug,
the horror vacui of fiddles
or Montréal crackling through a Bakelite cathedral.
A place where young women
knew enough to boil Eden’s apples
down to sweet-tart jelly
and young men saw the serpent
as a worm on a hook
meant for soft white catfish lips.
A place with a plain church and ornate Jesus,
where faith was smoother
than the polished face of a tombstone.
A place where the first pink of dawn
was raspberry stained from that morning’s picking
and the last red of evening was a spark
that lit the soot that clogged your chimney.
A place where you rose from bed
knowing that dreams were for the sleeping,
your not-quite adulthood jabbed awake
by a sun that pecked like a hen
when you hesitated gathering eggs.
Lumbering
i.
My heart was the first thing
father built me out of wood.
The work of a master,
as if the tree had grown it.
It was shaped like a drawer
he liked to open, proud
of how neatly it would shut.
ii.
Drive a screw with a chisel
he’d say
and when you need a chisel
you got a screwdriver.
Just to be safe
I also keep the latter
impossibly sharp.
iii.
So many reasons
why the actual size of love
is different from the nominal.
So many reasons why
a cut into the grain
tends to bind,
why we call it a rip.
Evening Rabbit Kittens
Evening rabbit kittens
have empty rabbit thoughts
like this one
with the mushin no-mind
of flight from the window well.
He doesn’t know
the neighbour’s dog is blind,
there’s no fox for miles,
and from my reaching glove
he’s expecting death,
not an act of love.
He squirms free twice
to land where I grabbed him
then rockets from my hands
toward the hedge.
He doesn’t know
that people are confined to bed
and wheezing through plugs and hoses,
that statues are coming down
in gestures to the dead,
that weeds are being planted
for pollinating bugs.
He trains in the Zen of dread,
like a boy whose father’s touch
conceals the strength of two big men
when one
is more than enough.
