A Woman Clothed in Words Read Free Page A

daughter here;
    She lies beside me, and I grope to find
    These fragile curves of tiny hollow bones
    Holding her to me till our dust is mixed.
    •
    Am I to believe
    This hardly human creature had a face?
    Only a mirror buried in the darkness
    Reflecting nothing. All I see in her
    Is part of my death and crumpled to decay.
    I heard her first and only cry. My ears
    Are blocked and deaf and cannot hear again.
    Dead eyes can’t read her name though it is printed
    A hundred times on this last folded page.

Biographics I
    In labour
    A child cried out
    “Stop – stop speaking.
    Stop shouting;
    Stop asking me who I am.
    Can’t you see, feel, hear
    I am busy being born?
    I am busy tearing my mother.
    My mother is busy being torn.
    I am splitting her flesh:
    She will have to be sewn up
    Like a botched sockhole.
    She is squeezing me out of her narrow aperture,
    Squeezing me like a toothpaste ribbon out of her.
    Oh my ribbon-shaped head!
    Oh her dented pelvis!
    Is it any wonder that after this
    We want only to listen to each other?
    Silence please spectators,
    Your blurred faces are of no more interest
    To either of us.
    We are alone in a crowd of open eyes
    And faraway klip-klap, trip-trap tongues talking.
    I shriek at her touch:
    She dribbles drugged tears on my neck.
    Lullay, lullay cry out the nurses.
    I hear them singing like a chorus
    Applauding at a distance.
    I hear them singing as they tie cords
    And dispose of placentas.
    Is it for this I slid howling from the hole?
    To see and despise? She to worship
    And find me a great hefty lump,
    A burden all day long, all life long?
    Lullay, lullay she caresses my wet black hair,
    Watching the impression of her labour disappear
    From my head, from my face. How long before
    She hates me because my birthmarks are eroded
    To shadows of scars?
    After a few years of asking her
    Why she didn’t love me enough not to have me,
    I will grow old enough to stretch girls
    In the mud and the cinders. Then am I free of her?”
    •
    When I went away she left, and wherever she is
    She’s not thinking of me now.

Cicatrice
    Entre nous deux la crevasse,
    Vaste et pro fonde.
    Entre le nez et la barbe
    Une cicatrice énorme.
    •
    Le long de talus fleurissent
    Jonc et glaïeul.
    Qui peut lancer
    Un caillou à travers
    D’une telle rivière?
    •
    Barbier: ‘faut porter une fausse-moustache.
    $1.98 – plus taxe.’
    •
    Femme: ‘vaux pas la peine!
    Tu sais car même la cicatrice
    reste là – entre nous deux.’

Lovers and Choosers
    I am tapping my body like a typewriter
    I am playing my body like a piano
    the tune is lost in my flesh
    sounding a distant low hum of waves
    but there still are tinkly bits
    my stony toenails
    my small nipples
    the curling ends of my hair
    •
    my mother is sitting up in bed admonishing me
    “by now you should have forgotten
    all that” she says
    “by now you should have put on a costume
    that covers the worst parts
    •
    why don’t you get some man
    to dye your hair to the colour of stuffed foxes?”
    •
    I type a note on yellow copy paper
    •
    “you who incline your head
    like a girl listening
    you whose eyes are green as
    Viking seas:
    •
    there is too much distance
    between us
    I cannot shout back at you
    words bitterly die in me”

Beginnings
    Many years ago – anyway, more than twenty – I stepped off a transcontinental train onto the extraordinary soil of Saskatchewan. It was May 21st, early summer in the old country, but snow still lay cold in the low spots of this
enormous landscape.
    Having received an education with a heavy list to litword (lovely ships and boats and seas goodbye) I jumped off that train with words ready on my lips to greet the first poet I should meet in this poetic land.
    •
    The train has stopped for no apparent reason
    In the wilds;
    A frozen lake is level and fretted over
    With rippled wind lines;
    The sun is burning in the South…
    (“En Route,” Duncan Campbell Scott)
    •
    Gull Lake set in the rolling prairie