China Blues (4 page)

all become clear.

                    That’s what you want

isn’t it, Goffman. Clear?

            Their tweed jackets seduced me at a tender age,

I was about 4½, and too adorable to break your heart.

That air of being between bohemia and the establishment.

Rimbaud’s well-educated rogues in charge of history.

The average lawyer thinks Einstein was a mathematician

and Georgia O’Keeffe is a West Ireland county.

Their comfortable 19th century furniture also seduced me,

there were flowers everywhere at G’s, geraniums and azaleas.

I wanted their wives to smell of lavender and sandalwood.

I checked the pockets of their overcoats for interesting

historiographic lint and crumbs of tobacco.

Their daughters have straw hair and play volleyball.

A specialist in the history of Irish speech idioms

taught me to appreciate the phrase as a floating module.

His wife had red hair that glistened like crimson pyrites.

Their good taste in Renaissance music is often amazing.

They have so many interesting & eccentric cousins.

I have always admired their slow calm reading ability

– Fernand Braudel in a long 5-day gulp,

just like a 17-course Italian meal.

Finish it off with a 685 page book on Vico.

You have to admire them.

            Sure, I’ve got a brown paper bag

over my head

                with holes punched in the sides

for my Sony Walkman, & the eyes are drawn on

with orange & blue chalk, just casual circles

so you can’t look directly into my eyes.

That’s what high school is like these days.

The world is too big.

I only like my friends to look into my eyes.

So for the rest of Gr. 13

                             I’m studying Lou Reed,

taking him

more seriously perhaps than he takes himself; The

Cure, The

         Smiths,

Jane’s Addiction, Iggy Pop

singing about Dog Food dog food dog food.

Someone lays down a simple drum&bass line,

& you start tapping your foot,

moving your body to the music.

                                         Learning about reality

as we go into the 90s.

                           Sometimes these simple images

lift up & swirl like exploding

chickens & beat their blood-stained wings

against the folded walls of my brown paper bag;

or,

in a different mood, Living Color appear

with all that great avant vivid jazz-funk flair

or Sinéad O’Connor comes on & settles

things down.

              After all,

these are songs

about terrible & also moving things,

the car accident dealt with

in a single line by The Cars; Fine Young

Cannibals question the nature of profit; Annie

Lennox or Bette Midler’s depictions of love. With

a minimalism more extreme than Giacometti.

With gorgeous voices

to smooth the edges,

                          an ironic back-beat,

raw honey & fresh lemon as yellow as the moon,

                                                                  & music

to make your head sway.

                                 Sometimes I listen to

Sam Cooke just to get back up after the Carnegie Hall

performance; & then I listen to Laura Hubert

singing, “I’m So Melancholy I Could Cry,”

                                               which

when you stop to think about it

                                is

an extraordinarily joyful song.

           I loaf on the bank with my shirt off,

                                                              socks

& shoes off too,

                  & watch my friends in the afternoon

Simcoe sunlight moving their clear white hands

like passenger pigeons

                            pregnant with messages of love. We

have some cold pizza, 2 chickens, 1 qt. of B&G white

& a doz. cold Blues.

                        It is about 78°

                                            & some young kids

from the local high school are water-skiing – hunched

in that particular stance turning a far north logo

into a summer Ontario lake image. Their red life

preservers

          bob up & down above the choppy blue water

like red beach balls attached to Donald’s back

                                                                or

Pluto’s, or Huey’s or Louie’s or Dewey’s. We can do

absolutely nothing this afternoon about Meech Lake

or the new constitution

                              or the striking PSAC workers

or even the letter carriers who refuse to bring us

our mail.

          Although they love us. It isn’t personal. I

would have more to say about these events

                                                            but

I have a chicken leg in my mmmphmm mouth tastes good.

I am towelling my face & my eyes are full of Karen sitting

legs splayed in a black string bikini

                                                 reading

a paperback of
Lives of Girls & Women.

                                                    I have let you

see us undressed & in return you must promise me

one thing;

          you must believe me when I say that the

bourgeoisie begrudge us even this chicken,

                                                           even this

lake, even this ½ful bottle of Monnet brandy

lying on its side beside the wicker basket. They

will never give in, and we will never give in. We

are like the lake, flexible, because we are immovable.

            The desire this morning, early, still lazy

with coffee,

             a clear blue morning outside, almost Aegean,

to write a poem about how hot it was

a couple of days ago – the question mark of a favourite

big shirt which has, yes, definitely developed a frayed

collar, plus, would you believe this, a rip under one arm,

but loose, comfortable,

some 1989 copies of
Esquire
over by the door

& some recent copies of
Vanity Fair,

I want to keep the article on Jean Stein partly because

I find her father, Jules, the way those steel-rim glasses

sit so aplomb on his composed face, relaxed tension,

so interesting – yes, it was hot on Thursday, a clear

gelati limona
day seen through glass

                                                 but

a sizzling butter day outside. You could have taken

a strip of bacon & laid it on the Queen Street sidewalk

& it would have fried in about ½ an hour. Marcus & I

go to play pool at The Squeeze Club, the balls roll

slowly, the espresso makes us feel cooler; & then when

we come outside the city is still clear & even paler blue

but the temperature has dropped slowly to about 78

with a cool breeze. High pressure ridges &

low pressure troughs. Stuff we can’t do very much

about.

     This little drop in the temperature

is so pleasant, plus I won 3 games in a row & Marcus

is fun to be with, that I begin to feel balmy,

simultaneously light-headed & full of espresso. If

that piece of cream&dullred bacon you put on the sidewalk

down on Queen was up here on Dundas,

cooked to a nice crisp red, I would just scoop it up

with one easy arm as we walk along & eat it for a snack.

Instead we walk up to Giancarlo on College Street. The red

snapper with extra virgin is as good as it was

when Andrew M used to cook here,

but the veal chop isn’t as good, they don’t cut it

properly, it makes a difference to the way it grills.

You see what perfect weather & easy pleasure do –

they make the whole body into a relaxed tuning fork

for picking out accomplishments & imperfections;

too much balmy heat & espresso makes me long

for absolutes, Iraq will become a peaceful country,

Ottawa will reform a number of laws,

the missing children of Erie County will return,

& we will all live forever & be happy with the world;

if I eat ½ as much I will probably remain

just a shade critical – of the meal, the dark blue

awnings, yellow light; but I have soup, & I eat

the whole fish c/w an order of fettucine & tomato sauce,

when it passes into my system with all that lovely

oil & basil, I fall in love with the night,

the moon, although there is no moon,

Marcus, although neither of us is gay,

& all these figures passing along

both sides of College Street in the dark,

                                                         although if

I were to pass them again in the morning

while shopping, I probably wouldn’t recognize

the thick-moustached Lebanese guy

in the dark suit. Sure. Sure I would.

           I’m living downtown again, & making money,

sharing for the moment with 3 other guys.

                                                        I go to

Kensington Market about once a week. One of the stores

has free-range chicken. I don’t eat rabbit. But the fish

is good, & I buy oranges & purple black plums

& bright green avocado pears.

                                       I was very moved by those

lines about the perfume maker you murdered. Poverty can be

attractive. Presumably he was a fairly poor man,

with a wife & 3 children perhaps.

                                            Also the lime seller

out in the Jamaican market.

                                    Everything which is truly

beautiful is to some degree exotic. Look

                                                     there’s a kid

on pink roller skates curly blond hair elephant earring

& I’ll bet he doesn’t even know

what the word exoticism means. Poverty can be attractive.

Markham was boring.

                  I’m living downtown again & making money.

Sharing a house for the moment with 3 other guys.

                                                                     Likewise

the Portuguese fish handler. I used to live around

here several years ago. Or the young Palestinian boy

selling brown paper bags

of lentils & mung beans.

                     I am vaguely interested

in what will happen when the Portugese fish handler’s

daughter

          begins reading
Saturday Night

or going to French films.
Moon in the Gutter
, for

example. Or when the young Palestinian boy

discovers me

               & thinks I’m exotic. I am, after all,

don’t you think,

                   a lot more than just a good mind

& a couple of degrees from Queen’s?

We have salami and Emmenthal sandwiches for supper

fresh fruit

mangoes and oranges;

I change the sheets and read the first four chapters

of
Broca’s Brain
while you take a bath;

Broca was a man with a problem

he was devoted;

I look over at my typewriter and think about the essay

that I want to write on the autonomy of information grids;

mangoes are tropical

mangoes are universal

all mangoes are fundamentally alike;

the front brain is at war with basic ideas

but what happens when you can’t get back

to the foundations?

                       We make love in the soft blue glare

of the television set

between the night sky and the pale grey broadloom,

I almost lose consciousness until all I can hear is

your voice murmuring over a million small white stones;

your nipples are rough dark strawberries in the profile

of the empty apartment with its large windows facing east;

the red oblong PARK PLAZA sign winks back black

this stained mustard building floating on a current

of earth – clear moon overhead      young mother      innocent

moon. The smell of potato salad and musk mango and musk.

Bruce Springsteen’s beautiful New Jersey voice

singing the word streets over and over and over again.

The south is a rotten peach

these rooms in the night are cities also

where we turn our backs on bedlam and bellevue

and walk into America again – the rain on our faces

soft and cool,

               patient, unflinching. It is, after all,

the only home we have ever known.

            Charlie Parker would make a good stamp,

there should be a lot of votes for that,

& Rosa Luxembourg,

                         she’s popular in Toronto,

& Orel Herscheiser.

                        Frank Sinatra once sent Orel

a publicity picture of himself & signed it – For Oral,

like hygiene, or like Roberts.

Herscheiser – while he’s still a hero,

before he starts losing, before the fabulous golden arm

develops some infinitesimal bone chip