Mole Read online

  Mole

  Mole

  PATRICK WARNER

  poems

  Copyright © 2009 Patrick Warner

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

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  This edition published in 2009 by

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  13 12 11 10 09 1 2 3 4 5

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Warner, Patrick, 1963–

  Mole / Patrick Warner.

  Poems.

  ISBN 978-0-88784-821-6

  I. Title.

  PS8595.A7756M64 2009 C811’.6 C2008-907525-0

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2008941437

  Cover design: Bill Douglas at The Bang

  Text design and typesetting: Ingrid Paulson

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program

  the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada

  through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program ( bpidp ).

  Printed and bound in Canada

  For my mother, with love

  Contents

  I The Turn

  Precious

  Coronation

  The Interval

  Claremorris

  Picket

  II The Archives of Minneapolis

  Psychoacoustics

  Therefore: a theory of sonnets

  Evidence: there will be no evidence

  Couch Potato

  Entertainment

  The New Economy

  The Snows

  III Augur

  The Mole

  The Scientist

  The Pews

  Snowbirds

  Starlings/Waxwings

  The Hinge

  The Lost Years

  Historical

  Sermon to the Immigrants

  The Memory Warehouse

  IV The Poet

  The Touch Tank

  Basho

  The Children of Critics

  Reading

  Bibby Wonder

  The Old Neighbourhood

  Premature

  Stone

  I

  The Turn

  On a steep hill, in a house for one

  with a crooked cat and an antique bell,

  in the middle of life. This is the place

  where you made the turn, having crossed

  the line where you could not tell

  real from unreal, the climb from years,

  wood from your flesh, fur from desire,

  that silver bell from your tongue,

  which tells the tale of that lonely time

  when you thought you were ill,

  thought you could not tell unreal

  from real, your years from a hill,

  self from a house, lust from a cat,

  your talk from the sound of a bell.

  Precious

  Mouth full of straight pins she looked up over

  the ancient horse of the sewing machine;

  consonants frayed on her lips as she answered

  my questions, part of our rainy day ritual

  in which I flipped through the photograph album,

  refreshing my snapshot memories of houses

  and streets where my mother and father and

  sisters and brothers lived before I was born.

  I was working my way through the usual list:

  which dog was Scutty, which one was Dixie,

  when had they lived in Loughrea, when in Dublin,

  on what number bus was my father conductor.

  I asked and she answered, while outside

  rain piddled down on the flat kitchen roof

  ( that felt roof seamed and beetled with bubbles ),

  rain flung handfuls of tacks at the window,

  that sound drowned out when mother depressed

  the leaf-shaped pedal which sat on the floor,

  and the second-hand Singer rattled to life,

  made my belt buckle nibble the edge of the table.

  I was working toward the ritual’s high point,

  to when I’d remove from the back of the album

  white vellum and pulp-flecked miniature envelopes,

  each one marked with a name and an age,

  each containing a lock of child’s hair.

  And opening each I would pretend to admire

  the snippet of golden hair inside, but really

  I only cared about one: mine, clipped at age 2.

  Ma, I’d say, looking up, Ma, is this one mine?

  Mmm, she would say. Or, Is that not your name?

  her delayed assurances making delicious

  that time I existed but could not remember.

  Ma! I called out, this time a little bit louder,

  is this one mine? Focussed in on her task —

  flipping open the spring-loaded trapdoor,

  she unscrewed the shiny helmet-like bobbin —

  Perhaps! she’d say. Perhaps! Had I misheard,

  or was this the sound of a Yes when it’s

  slurred through a mouth full of pins? And

  do I imagine her glass lenses glimmered,

  flashed metal, when at last she looked up

  and explained to me in her no-nonsense way

  that one day one of her darling children —

  she couldn’t remember which child exactly —

  had emptied the envelopes, mixed up the cuttings.

  After that, she said, there was no way of telling

  whose hair was whose — except for Helen’s,

  because Helen’s hair was always much darker.

  Coronation

  i.

  Never-ending the journey by car, the brute

  goodbye, the flight that could not land

  at the fog-bound capital, and so by bus

  the last two hundred miles from Gander

  through a wilderness of white spruce, larch,

  white pine, black spruce, tuckamore, birch,

  rain zigzagging the lung-sponged glass,

  shocks jarring the spine’s stack of cups.

  Invasive the heat, the dank air, the sound

  of accents boxing vowels and consonants,

  the disconnects that spawn associations

  that strike the mind as questions: why

  did my thoughts keep running to Louis XVI —

  no answers, but pictures came to mind:

  a spry leghorn sprinting around the yard,

  under the eyes of sinister country folk,

  all of them clearly in on the joke, all waiting

  for one to state the profound and obvious,

  why this fit and feisty generalissimo
,

  why this broiler agog with action painting

  can’t for the life of him understand

  what his combed head beneath the block,

  what his head with its yellow, grimed beak

  opening and closing, is trying to tell him.

  ii.

  Ten years later, I remembered this trip,

  it was April the first as I rounded the corner

  to Coronation, and with those few steps

  passed by way of a suntrap into summer.

  A flock of pigeons pecked among the crystals

  where decaying snow banks slithered.

  I closed my eyes the better to feel the sun,

  to see how it turned my eyelids tangerine.

  Hearing a pigeon’s rhythmic wood-block coo,

  I clapped my hands, felt the whole flock snap

  like a hundred fans, as it became airborne,

  remaking the world as a great ballroom.

  iii.

  Such joy, such welcome opened to me

  that night I rode the bus to town from Gander:

  it was there in the form of Spruce-Up Tailors

  who offered me suits of sharp pine needles;

  in the form of demure birches turned peelers

  of bangles, sleeves, corsets and leggings;

  it was in the barren’s many-coloured eyes

  that squeezed out weak but colourful dyes,

  tendered hares to sit on my feet like slippers,

  and a spotted lynx to lie and lick on my lap,

  while spattered trout trembled and shuddered,

  regaled me with tales of salt water.

  iv.

  It was a dream, I suppose, to wake and see

  tall, lit buildings on either side of the parkway

  like a city submerged in the horizontal rain,

  textured with sleet, snow, ice pellets, hail.

  The Interval

  Each post struck vibrates with a hum,

  blurs outward, become a twin,

  before settling back into its shape again.

  From a distance I notice a delay

  between the hammer strike

  and the strike’s report.

  Scientifically speaking, this

  is the time it takes sound to travel.

  Whole lives are lived in this interval.

  Claremorris

  Drop me by dead of night in Dromineen

  with a petrol can and a Zippo lighter,

  let me find my way through unpeopled places,

  hare’s-tail sedge to mark my path,

  my compass not what the snipe avers,

  the best way there is the one unchanged.

  I am walking by night to Claremorris,

  and something is wrong with my vision

  of bar seats melting down chrome legs,

  magnums of spirits popping like flares,

  pint glasses frosting, bearding.

  The best way back is the one unchanged.

  I find my way through unpeopled places

  now the roads are all blocked

  and the obstacles mortgaged by strangers,

  or the roads don’t go where they once went,

  or new roads bypass the town altogether.

  The best way back is the one less changed.

  Scuts of bog cotton mark my approach

  through boot-sucking mud, through snares

  of heather, through drains that hold

  no reflection, through bramble and briar,

  through sheep-wooled barbed wire.

  I find my way through unpeopled places.

  I am on my way home to confirm,

  to raise a long ladder up to the sky,

  to pick a way through roof slate and rafter

  into an attic space wattled with webs

  and littered with glittering fly wings.

  I find my way through unpeopled places

  in search of a box of old school books.

  And it’s not the books I’m interested in

  but whatever I wrote in their margins.

  Now something is wrong with my vision.

  I see this as soon as I enter the garden.

  The best way back is the one less changed,

  over oxidized bed frames, bed springs,

  past a greyed mound of grass

  that hoards the heat like a crotch,

  over ground that is matted with creepers,

  with rills underfoot that feel like rough metre.

  He was the one said no looking back.

  Don’t waste your time looking into that mirror.

  He was the one said don’t raise the ladder

  to find in the eavestrough a scaltán,

  a Jew’s harp with skin, among brooches

  of waterlogged moss, hunter green,

  patina of pistils to sharpen the focus.

  Picket

  Five one-gallon cans filled to the brim

  with stain, a Doberman Pinscher brown.

  Long-handled scraper with cupboard-door grip,

  its buttoned-down blade like a hieroglyph.

  Four-inch stain brush with bristles that fan

  like recently barbered hair on the palm.

  Hammer and nails to tap in loose pickets.

  Sledge and shims to wedge posts in pockets.

  In all, two hundred and forty of them

  await a scrape and a new coat of stain.

  I begin with rote, with repetitive motion,

  work each plank with steady down-strokes,

  until self like a muscle absorbed in the task

  lifts out of the furrow of nine-to-five angst,

  thrills to the scraper, a fearsome machete,

  forearms dappled with paint chip confetti,

  a ticker tape swirl for this conquering hero

  who flays the wood to whiskers and fibre.

  But by picket one-twenty or one-twenty-one

  I feel the weight of what I’ve taken on.

  Lift comes again when the prep is done.

  The stain brush loaded nuzzles the grain

  which grizzled and parched drinks it in,

  and it’s all slap and tickle, all nudge and wink,

  as always your cover is what you reveal

  ( in the end you are what you fully conceal ).

  Against these slippery notions of artifice

  I lever the thought of simple self-sacrifice:

  now a queen and a princess saunter on in

  tapping packet seeds like tambourines.

  As a bubble jet’s ink requires the page

  the domestic life requires this stage.

  But stooping to scrape a picket I missed

  I hear only a cold streptococcal lisp.

  I’m an actor on stage, act three still to go,

  where once was technique I now see only flaw,

  to finish the last two sections of fence

  feels to the body like an act of violence.

  And then — all at once — the work is done.

  I look back, but without satisfaction,

  and will feel none until a fresh zip of energy

  pushes that labour deep into memory,

  where it will live as an excised tumour,

  with that fence as reminder, a fading suture.

  II

  The Archives of Minneapolis

  The trail gone cold. The windy streets

  of an old Near Eastern town

  once buried in ash, once excavated,

  once a splash in Life and Time,

  now fill with dust; his search for place,

  has led him here today, to this,

  the Archives of Minneapolis

  to sift through cardboard boxes,

  through slivered bricks of acetate,

  seed trays bearing mixed bouquets

  of virus, fungi, mould and yeast,

  to find these flowers eating text,

  to sigh and sift some more, to sit

&n
bsp; until his hip bone sockets blaze,

  until he learns to love the sourness,

  the stool-like, bitter leaf-stink taste

  that’s not quite yet a thought

  he passes thumb to tongue.

  Psychoacoustics

  I slip my arms into my crisp lab-coat.

  The years are quietly falling layers

  while hours, seconds, and minutes snap

  like a flicked ear against the air.

  The plug of wax I reamed will make a seal,

  bearing the horseshoe shape of my nail,

  grow hard as finger and thumb make the O

  of divas holding the goose of high C.

  Then, whip of corduroy, or my childhood

  barber who cut my hair in a bowl shape,

  whose squeaky, B-flick, black-bat scissors

  jammed with his airy tuneless whistle.

  Finger shifts — fine arcs and parentheses fall

  like gross snowflakes on linoleum.

  I would do anything to shed I, or at least

  I who thinks of himself as capital P.

  Wax hits the sullied breast-plate or

  crest of the fire-grate. The roast-pan

  stacked in the dish-rack, cooling,

  slips a wanton hip.

  Therefore: a theory of sonnets

  Therefore, if you want to write in the sonnet form,

  it’s good to understand the concept of therefore.

  ( Handbook of Poetic Forms, p. 191 )

  i The Land Before Time

  The land gets bigger from time to time.

  Time gets bigger but doesn’t get more.

  A white notched peg holds down

  the billowing marquee of everything

  that came before. Us. Animal calls —

  the woolly mammoth’s fleshy screech,

  the great black bear’s existential moan.