Stranger Music

unremembering
and it is aimed at us
(I am sleepy and frightened)
it is upon us brothers
DISGUISES
I am sorry that the rich man must go
and his house become a hospital.
I loved his wine, his contemptuous servants,
his ten-year-old ceremonies.
I loved his car which he wore like a snail’s shell
everywhere, and I loved his wife,
the hours she put into her skin,
the milk, the lust, the industries
that served her complexion.
I loved his son who looked British
but had American ambitions
and let the word aristocrat comfort him
like a reprieve while Kennedy reigned.
I loved the rich man: I hate to see
his season ticket for the Opera
fall into a pool for opera-lovers.
I am sorry that the old worker must go
who called me mister when I was twelve
and sir when I was twenty
who studied against me in obscure socialist
clubs which met in restaurants.
I loved the machine he knew like a wife’s body.
I loved his wife who trained bankers
in an underground pantry
and never wasted her ambition in ceramics.
I loved his children who debate
and come first at McGill University.
Goodbye old gold-watch winner
all your complex loyalties
must now be borne by one-faced patriots.
Goodbye dope fiends of North Eastern Lunch
circa 1948, your spoons which were not
Swedish Stainless, were the same colour
as the hoarded clasps and hooks
of discarded soiled therapeutic corsets.
I loved your puns about snow
even if they lasted the full seven-month
Montreal winter. Go write your memoirs
for the Psychedelic Review.
Goodbye sex fiends of Beaver Pond
who dreamed of being jacked-off
by electric milking machines.
You had no Canada Council.
You had to open little boys
with a pen-knife.
I loved your statement to the press:
“I didn’t think he’d mind.”
Goodbye articulate monsters
Abbott and Costello have met Frankenstein.
I am sorry that the conspirators must go
the ones who scared me by showing me
a list of all the members of my family.
I loved the way they reserved judgement
about Genghis Khan. They loved me because
I told them their little beards
made them dead-ringers for Lenin.
The bombs went off in Westmount
and now they are ashamed
like a successful outspoken Schopenhauerian
whose room-mate has committed suicide.
Suddenly they are all making movies.
I have no one to buy coffee for.
I embrace the changeless:
the committed men in public wards
oblivious as Hassidim
who believe that they are someone else.
Bravo! Abelard, viva! Rockefeller,
have these buns, Napoleon,
hurrah! betrayed Duchess.
Long live you chronic self-abusers!
you monotheists!
you familiars of the Absolute
sucking at circles!
You are all my comfort
as I turn to face the beehive
as I disgrace my style
as I coarsen my nature
as I invent jokes
as I pull up my garters
as I accept responsibility.
You comfort me
incorrigible betrayers of the self
as I salute fashion
and bring my mind
     like a promiscuous air-hostess
handing out parachutes in a nose dive
bring my butchered mind
to bear upon the facts.
CHERRY ORCHARDS
Canada some wars are waiting for you
some threats
some torn flags
Inheritance is not enough
     Faces must be forged under the hammer
of savage ideas
     Mailboxes will explode
in the cherry orchards
and somebody will wait forever
for his grandfather’s fat cheque
     From my deep café I survey the quiet snowfields
like a US. promoter
of a new plastic snowshoe
looking for a moving speck
a troika perhaps
an exile
an icy prophet
an Indian insurrection
a burning weather station
     There’s a story out there boys
Canada could you bear some folk songs
about freedom and death
STREETCARS
Did you see the streetcars
passing as of old
along Ste Catherine Street?
Golden streetcars
passing under the tearful
Temple of the Heart
where the crutches hang
like catatonic divining twigs.
A thin young priest
folds his semen in a kleenex
his face glowing
in the passing gold
as the world returns.
A lovely riot gathers the citizenry
into its spasms
as the past comes back
in the form of golden streetcars.
I carry a banner:
“The Past Is Perfect.”
My little female cousin
who does not believe
in our religious destiny
rides royally on my nostalgia.
The streetcars curtsy
round a corner.
Firecrackers and moths
drip from their humble wires.
NOTHING I CAN LOSE
When I left my father’s house
the sun was halfway up,
my father held it to my chin
like a buttercup.
My father was a snake-oil man
a wizard, trickster, liar,
but this was his best trick,
we kissed goodbye in fire.
A mile above Niagara Falls
a dove gave me the news
of his death. I didn’t miss a step,
there’s nothing I can lose.
Tomorrow I’ll invent a trick
I do not know tonight,
the wind, the pole will tell me what
and the friendly blinding light.
FRONT LAWN
The snow was falling
over my penknife
There was a movie
in the fireplace
The apples were wrapped
in 8-year-old blonde hair
Starving and dirty
the janitor’s daughter never
turned up in November
to pee from her sweet crack
on the gravel
     I’ll go back one day
when my cast is off
Elm leaves are falling
over my bow and arrow
Candy is going bad
and Boy Scout calendars
are on fire
     My old mother
sits in her Cadillac
laughing her Danube laugh
as I tell her that we own
all the worms
under our front lawn
     Rust rust rust
in the engines of love and time
THE BIG WORLD
The big world will find out
about this farm
the big world will learn
the details of what
I worked out in the can
And your curious life with me
will be told so often
that no one will believe
you grew old
THE LISTS
Strafed by the Milky Way
vaccinated by a snarl of clouds
lobotomized by the bore of the moon
he fell in a heap
some woman’s smell
smeared across his face
a plan for Social Welfare
rusting in a trouser cuff
     From five to seven
tall trees doctored him
mist roamed on guard
     Then it began again
the sun stuck a gun in his mouth
the wind started to skin him
Give up the Plan give up the Plan
echoing among its scissors
     The women who elected him
performed erotic calisthenics
above the stock-reports
of his and every hero’s fame
     Out of the corner of his stuffed eye
etched in minor metal
under his letter of the alphabet
he clearly saw his tiny name
     Then a museum slid under
his remains like a shovel
PROMISE
Your blonde hair
is the way I live —
smashed by light!
Your mouth-print
is the birthmark
on my power.
To love you
is to live
my ideal diary
which I have
promised my body
I will never write!
FOR E.J.P.
I once believed a single line
   in a Chinese poem could change
     forever how blossoms fell
and that the moon itself climbed on
   the grief of concise weeping men
     to journey over cups of wine
I thought invasions were begun for crows
   to pick at a skeleton
     dynasties sown and spent
to serve the language of a fine lament
   I thought governors ended their lives
     as sweetly drunken monks
telling time by rain and candles
   instructed by an insect’s pilgrimage
     across the page — all this
so one might