China Blues (2 page)

            These days I want to work all morning

until I’m tired,

                  and then sit in my blue dojo pants

like somebody back from a holiday in Tibet and watch the traffic

go past.

       The weather looks good for the next few years.

I miss Church Street

                         (and the way it empties east of Yonge

south through the city and into the Lake) sometimes

                                                                                but

in a fairly abstract way. Postcards. The things

I love most are like pale green fruit, papayas, sour-sop, pale green

mangoes.

       
Touch them to my face in the warm Toronto sun, and

                                                                                   say,

thank you. That was nice. The roast lamb was fantastic. The

rosemary was sweet & bitter & my whole mouth feels fresh

  again.

China Blues is a song that Miles Davis never got around to writing, & Oscar Peterson hasn’t written yet. > John A. Macdonald, Yukio Mishima, Billie Holliday. People whose names will be written on the subway walls as far south as Massachusetts, where you can garden as late as September, or as far west as Great Slave Lake – where the big-eyed Loons sing cold & clear. > You might think of John Lone in Bertolucci’s film
The Last Emperor
, the scene at the afternoon party where he sings a slow 30s Gershwin song with English vowels & just a trace of Chinese accent.

Or Molly Johnson singing “Cry Me A River” at a small club on Queen Street West late at night before we walk up to Massimo’s on College Street & get a large
primavera
from the young Thai kid on the front counter. > Or those long sad notes on the Chinese cello I heard from a young Chinese student, shaven head, good musician, from Burma, what was Burma, in the subway at University & Queen. > Isn’t this what Bessie Smith talked about when she first started to record? She had a stars&stripes earring in her left ear, & she said, I’ll slow your boat down, & I’ll send us both to China. > Of course it’s a metaphor. But it does make you think of Mrs. Bedford Stuyvestant-Fish, & Ben Johnson, the fastest man in the world, & of Walker Evans, & of Li Po, who wrote such beautiful poems about early morning air & light on the Niagara escarpment. If you look north on a clear day you can see as far as Thunder Bay.

               It’s funny, though, that I should

think of Ava tonight. How she used to walk through hotel

lobbies in dark mink & heels

with nothing underneath.

Apparently she had hearts embroidered on her underwear.

Those hearts & lime green shoes & the black floor

& walls of this club shine up through the soft

indirect lighting that Billie

seems to be singing about while she gives Cole Porter

a nudge in the short ribs. Billie was always friendly,

whatever group she was working with she set up a good

rapport. I’m hot these days, the writing is good,

we’ve got Ontario garden peas in the stores,

Mexican garden peas, & California garden peas. The summer

weather rolls in & there don’t seem to be no reason

why it should end. All I really want

from the world at this exact moment, before we leave

& I go home to sleep with M with one leg sprawled

over her ankle is some cappuccino

&,

if I can get the waitress over here,

another play of that tape which begins

with an atypical cut of Joan Armatrading singing, “You

Give Me Fever.” You do. Yes you do.

for Russell Smith

           The Surgeon General has told us firmly,

in that clipped voice,

                                pushing out his impressive beard,

he looks almost like a Mennonite

except that Mennonites are not so articulate

& they do not have a Yale accent,

                                                  we must throw our cigarettes

away, & we must put on condoms.

                                                   So here we are, okay,

world of wonders?

                           standing naked

although Paul has a pair of running shoes

& Neil is wearing red&yellow Argyle socks,

                                                                out in front of

Mrs. Smith’s Cocktail Party, across from The Bovine Sex Club

on Queen Street West,

                                  it is a Tuesday afternoon

& it is sunny, the temperature is about 23°

& the barometer must be at least 102.5. We have thrown

our cigarettes away, hurled them, various garbage cans

over the last month, & we are restless. We are all wearing

condoms; put on a condom soft & walk around – it looks

amusing, I think, & affectionate; & we have all sorts

of different colours: charcoal grey, noir, natural, raspberry,

cerise, chromium blue, butter yellow, you name it, the boys

have gotten dressed before dinner.

      We are not the hottest

kids to ever come out of the U of T graduate school,

but we are not

oafs, we are open minds. Frank comes out of the restaurant

& he says, “I can’t stand it. I’m going to open up a Walter

Raleigh,” & he lights up a rich Virginia cigarette, inhales

& blows the smoke out gracefully. He is tall with a shock

of flaming red hair & an angular body.

                                                         Elizabeth I, she

had flaming red hair also, she was crazy, sometimes,

Frank is not crazy, & sometimes they had to chain

her to the bed. Then Alvin comes out & sniffs the air

& winks one blue eye. “Wonder when,” he says,

“they will get around to issuing us those neat handkerchief

& elastic strap face-masks you see guys wearing in Tokyo?”

               We all laugh, standing with our hands in our pockets,
sic
,

leaning against the warm tiles & glass of the front wall

with our hands behind our heads,

                                                  resting on our hips,

or on each other’s shoulders. We are waiting to see

what new car designs & Mies van der Rohe buildings

the 90s will bring. “Bet you some crab & 2 Double Diamonds

that the Jays win a pennant this year.” “I’ll bet
you
,”

he says, “a double crab & 2 Double Diamonds

that Jay McInerney never brings out his next book.”

We all laugh, standing around in the sunshine.

We are waiting for the 90s.

Most newspaper articles are not as clear as Thomas Wolfe or Margaret Laurence talking about how you don’t know who you are until you go away, and stop and look back, and see the stone angel in the town you come from – the house where you lived, the smell of the grass, tar on the gravel driveway. The large front windows are lit up, circa 5:30, it must be around 1950; your mother walks from the car up the front steps with a large brown paper bag of groceries and closes the large white front door with its 3 window panes behind her. A flash of gold wedding band, and she doesn’t look back over her shoulder. > I feel that I have lost a large chunk of time. Ontario time I guess, the 40 years or so before I was even born. It has fallen out of my pocket like a grey rock with patches of inside colour. > I think Laurence is very good but she focuses too much on the family as a social unit; Thomas Wolfe is a truly great writer, the unfolding of a giant camera, I’m not saying this because he was tall, good-looking, or because he wrote on top of a fridge at one point. > Open
Look Homeward, Angel
at almost any page and you will see what I mean. The stone comes back into my pocket. > How can we talk about what Ontario was like 40 years ago without talking about the general mood of idealism in America as a whole at that time? > Why do we persist in the belief that Marilyn French OR Bret Easton Ellis are talking about anything of any significance? > I think it’s amazing that so few people read Thomas Wolfe these days. I think it’s amazing that so few people read Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson. These days.

            We’re in late spring or early summer now

in Alliston. Last night

it began getting dark around 8:30.

I have been a little melancholy for the last week,

& Alliston has been a relief.

                                     Love’s like that.

I had eaten supper, some fish & a mixed stir-fry of bell

peppers, & I began to think about how beautiful

the dark is.

             So I went outside & stood with my back

against the wall of the house

                                      & let my eyes play over

the dark backyard

smudged poplars & elms, soft dark late-night hawks

& distant voices,

                   to watch the darkness doing nothing

except being itself.

                       But after a while

I began to feel that our little affair was foolish;

in fact I began to feel our affair, your underwear,

your reddish golden hair,

                                 can I be gender conscious,

thank you,
grazie
, your perfect sweet-tipped pair,

wash slowly out of my
kopf.
It’s hard to be serious

about an imagined resentment

while you’re staring at a whole Milky Way full of

stars.

          Probably a couple of rabbits down at the end

of the garden

               don’t think I noticed them

squinting a bit to see the colour of

yellow zinnias

or the shiny bounce of small light

on a steel trowel left out from the afternoon.

No light from my friend Duck Moon. Should be a

fine dark yellow fingernail paring in another

week or so.

            And then I will write about you

as a woman I meet on a fall day in a train station,

in Zurich, or in Kansas going all the way south

to Texas to see your aunt.

                                You Chinese goldfish,

you sexy bitch, full of planning your first child

with your black tie stockbroker husband,

you English crumpet, look at me in the dark,

I’m blushing like an Italian schoolboy

with fistfuls of change who can’t find his handkerchief

for the sake of looking.

             I have been thinking about Madonna

on this blue April morning,

about how pretty she is, & how good she is

at faking defiance.

                      I like the Madonna video

called “Justify

                My Love.” I think Gaultier designed

the cone-nippled bra she wears

with a clear & full perfection, but nobody wrote

a Persian Gulf video for her to bop to.

                                                   Although

all she ever does is tilt her head back

& grab her crotch.

                      But when she

does that

         she does me, what can I say? there is something

extraordinarily beautiful about her eyes, blue

                                                     blue

blue, like Neil

Young singing “… there is a town in north Ontari io.”

Don’t mistake me.

                      I don’t want to pick on Madonna.

She’s terrific. She flaunts a form

of fundamental sexuality with a beautiful arrogance.

But it’s a mistake

                     to assume she’s defiant. We’re

just talking about having a good time. What

does she defy?

                And as for singing

let’s tell the whole dangerous truth.

She hasn’t got a good voice. Madonna can’t sing for beans.

            There’s Norman Schwarzkopf across the street

short hair raw slab face dark glasses,

                                                big 60 lb. beer gut

hanging over his twill pants. He has a short-sleeved

Hawaiian sport shirt

                          on; and is signing autographs

as he moves through a crowd of people in Boston,

                                                                   I think;

or perhaps it’s Philadelphia. He was a good student

at West Point.

               Maybe somebody will do a photo of him,

if this is Philadelphia, or Windsor, or maybe it’s Detroit?