January 1982
Sitting at the table eating. Trudy looking pretty in her room. At the
table she worked at playing. Rhoda sat with Jam and looked at her with love.
She was well dressed, her face looked beautiful. They made outcries about
the food. I thought Jam looked ugly and like her father, she seemed congested
in her presence, dumb efforts. In the conversation I couldn't move. Rhoda
had cut me off talking about Dorothy Richardson and later she was contemptuous
about the scarf and hat Trudy brought to tell me to go home. They were talking
about parents and sex, from Trudy's mother. I had wanted excited ideas.
I overbore on Rhoda the way I do when I can't. On Trudy too. It was the
excessive loneliness. When I can't stand the way they are pretty and I don't
feel any interest in their lives. I wanted something different than how
it was, they being so interested in J's stories I know already. I would
see the Orient charming them. Being ugly about Mary and how they lie to
children about sex. I was in a rage. It was coming out and making them turn
from me even when it was interesting about being crawling drunk.
Then the shock in the bathroom mirror how old I looked, what had happened,
the deep chill. Disgust with J, on the bus and at home knowing that nothing
in the mind's protesting was real, a really awful self. Aching in the hips.
Today forehead anguish. It's waxing half moon. She says polio anniversary
but not yet.
She's talking about how I was mean to her after the show. The morning
and all day in repetitive anguish, cleaned the house on it, it is like a
big lonely appetite for company and drama, deprivation. Yesterday I worked.
It was time, bring the work, singing the --- places straight and the
rough pla ces smooth.
-
Slush walking 6th near the corner coming near girl from the school, face
in a parka hood, wide rosy calm looking, smiles. Oh who did she see.
On campus sidewalk I'm gazing, long queue, large face, how she's dressed,
walking looking down, her quality large intelligence, largely herself. Perhaps
music. She looks up and I didn't stop looking at her the way I was looking
before she looked, with love.
In the bus the woman standing over maroon coat, an Iranian head maybe.
She's alone and intelligent. Her Egyptian mouth. She looks back and it isn't
me who's afraid. But she breaks, her mouth grins. I smile too and look on.
She turns her eyes.
The African in the back seat reading the newspaper held by the strangely
scowling girl-looking boy in the corner. He's one who knows I'm looking
at him when I'm not looking at him. The side of the face feels it.
I'm sitting in the bus shelter. It's night. A girl comes with a man,
she has some comb, band, that's pulling her hair tight back off the brow,
a tight half circle. It evokes something Renaissance. Her fine face. Some
slight color or polish she's put on it. She stands facing the man, his back
is to me, she's holding onto his collar and singing into his eyes. She's
in strong delight I know. The smile she sees over his shoulder, when I've
looked away so our eyes don't meet, she knows.
I sit in the back they in the front. When they come back to the exit
door she and I are fully looking and smiling. The bus stops, in the reflection
next to the steps they're waiting to go down. I see her looking for my eyes
again. I hold away but it's only to be able to give it to her again through
the window, she closest to the bus, and completely generous and fearless,
the bus pulling past them walking this way, lifting and turning her face.
On one of the side seats sitting alongside two girls come from skating
maybe. "I call home, my mother answers, she says 'Who's this?' I say
'It's Lea-ann.' She says 'Who?' I say 'Lea-ann, your daughter.' She
says 'Oh Lea-ann; I'm sorry.'" That isn't it: it cracked me
up, she turns and says "That hit a funny bone did it" and then
clowns on purpose and badly.
And there's a melting slush chinook air. First after the holidays, their
house. The little kiss lingered, simply given. When I first had smoked the
pang came, I'm losing spirit, where's my spirit that I want instead of this.
She could see me gone and asked. I thought I couldn't speak but I began.
"It's the inwardness," pencil trembling. Then how did it come,
two stories, Tony and Penelope. "What a strange twisted way you've
-." A time disciplined. "But it's not that that you -." Oh
gladly: "No, it's not."
I love those stories so much. Awkwardly thanking.
She saw the way our heads were in the doorway and that I could look at
J in love because she'd given as she had and then when I knocked to say
goodbye she was just sitting on a chair.
-
Suspended life, no calls. I'm waiting for you. I am waiting. No outside
life, the snow and Church of the Good Sh phe. Snow changed the shape of
its tall spruce tree.
-
This nearly three weeks without heart life. In the notebook worked through,
the beauty of the happenings with you. What interests me is love. I like
the real happenings and I like them best even without understanding, when
they cross freely between what was thought of as inner and outer.
Last night smoking drinking brandy feeling the disabled mind not sure
whether I am resigned to not being able to think, continual stop. I can't
decide that - I can't know that - or whether the presence watching the calculator
unable to work is a clear being that doesn't need the terms of those disabled
calculations, that it has rejected the forms and is just holding itself
waiting for an integration to let me think differently.
The way in any work I am able to do I set against it something that makes
it worthless. Yeah. If the work moves up I move up the negative.
9 February
The man bowing over the (clarinet) formed Japanese music tings and ticks
randomly from around the walls. The instrument's voice inspired me. I was
on my heels leaning my head back against the wall, eyes closed watching
my voice get free. I'm singing quite loud. I'll sing louder. It is dependably
without thinking only by instantaneous decision coming interestingly out.
The decision is position in relation, remembering to vary, long and short.
Repertory doesn't exist as known, the parts just give themselves. I feel
free of reference.
When Maggie said beautiful I didn't like it, when Roy did, I shone.
Opening my eyes to see the young man had come close was standing some
feet away, facing the same direction I was, with an ear my way.
Stopping next to him looking, he turned his long face up, I didn't seem
to care what I said to him only to carefully look at each other. Roy's voice
"You should do something with Paul." "You mean synthesize
it?"
Throwing his arms over the shoulders of those two, Rhoda's body like
his now, "Well gang -."
When she came in with her hair down the pang oh I'm in love with you
why are you now -
Lying alongside her rubbing her back while she cries, looking in the
skirting board mirror at her face and my arm on her back. "Are you
crying because you're caught again."
At her face and say "Oh." She says "You too."
I think I can go forward and love the one I see.
I touch her with my eyes open. I want to hold her head and kiss her solidly.
"If you let me know you really want me to go away I would go away."
"How would I let you know." "You would have to just tell
me in a way so I knew you had come to a decision that was lucid."
-
What's the difference in the way it is touching - it isn't the meaning
of touching that stirs, it isn't weighted touch, it's my body's hot spots
turning on near her, felt it could begin to be (not romantic) composed.
Originating.
That twisting began a deeper welling, ah -
11th
Have I sabotaged the tape with the beautiful overlay of spaces. Moron
mind and this evening. I'm in terror somehow again, a racking. Disorder.
Could easily do the budget but was disarranged with Catherine because I
can't go straight. Oo how bad. Really disabled by indirection, I can't do
it anymore, become sensitive (artist) or weakened by having been made unsure
of.
Bin glancing back to the time first here, for the sense of having built
out from first simplicity still-clear connections, additions I'd come to
slowly and was handling, having got technology to take me past where I'd
been stopped.
This is what. In a way broken-mindedness.
These embarrassments like the person I was before I improved myself.
Yeah, and what. It worries me and not. The systems I have been not wanting
in my experience are the systems I found when I was ambitious and strong,
to get me past where other people were stuck.
-
When we'd been love-making wanting and then not wanting to say: making
love with you has been what I have been wanting more than anything. The
way I have been dug down waiting has been waiting for that, if I can't have
it I don't want any -
The way that feels is liking it, instead I said that when I was six -
for something that was myself originally, liking to be escaped from the
cautions that built me. I was seeing what it would mean to accept it, knowing
how to induce it.
She could say take it easy. The middle finger stepped in (manfully) more
briskly.
They aren't suspicious of it, they love to do it because they can, they
aren't ungrateful of what they have.
"When she read it she was a little dazed, she was a little in love
with me."
-
There are small films with numbers.
"The ice is like a membrane. The ice is elastic of a speaker. It
is set over a bowl and attached only around the edges. I wasn't touching
the camera. My heartbeat is transmitted through the ice." "Through
your boots? You mean we're all the time pumping something into the
ground?"
In the small mirror a torso. Small hands stop over the ovaries, over
the scar. Child's star hands.
"No before you put on your pants -." A small plump torso, very
little goatee. Broad limber hands come from the sides, moving oo, stroking
there. In the dry hair the not visible only touchable, both who are
looking don't see it but feel it, sentient morsel.
The core is felt. It's already live and the already bright picks up tiny
lines of vibration. It registers exquisitely the smallest breathing shift
of your thigh, as fluctuation in brightness.
Slightly ashamed of the level that's allowing us to do it but not being
ashamed of how much I wanted to do it.
The erotic of landscape. Flare. The kindled image feels the smallest
flare (and comes after 100').
-
And not being in love with anyone, or wanting to though the beautiful
and touching fine and interesting ones -
"I love my friends but they are only my friends, and I love my work
but it is only my work." "There was a time when those two things
were most important to you." "I know."
Roy sitting at the harp plucking back with his wonderful tensile hands,
koto music. I don't quite see his face.
Rhoda laying out her blue cotton panties where they could be studied
from the kitchen doorway.
"I could have known they were Rhoda's (work) from the way they affected
me." Is there something I should be seeing - the way with her also
I care less about what she says, the way she's still inaccurately superstitious,
and especially won't ask to know what she feels, and attend carefully less
frightenedly to the meaning of her touch and breathing.
Without the sense of fright - no, fright comes momentarily, what am I
doing in this emptiness.
-
Fran in the library without glasses, watching her speak to the librarian
and with her face speaking to the book. Standing at the library doors on
wet concrete waiting for the bus looking in through the two flats of glass
doors: it isn't that I love women, I love lesbians. Happily.
-
There is under my consideration, in reading this, a sense that it must
not be divided.
Try for the phenomenological description.
Use the models freely but return out of them.
I have been trying to make a position: the raft.
I want there to be deep subtle conscious momentary clear fresh language.
How to live with the unconscious.
-
Looking out of the wheelhouse onto a green tree tossing, a branch tree
parting and closing, mountains in the south lateral mirror corner. Pink
and some dark blue. Some of the branches were holding hands. I was feeling
the plenty of thoughts. It is a precious time. We are making a dynamo. You
have to go down. I look in the mirror at a dead person's quite beautiful
face. The eyes' deadness.
You come up distressed. "It has changed again." I don't know
what has happened but I know what it reminds me of and that it's the end
for me in that magic current. "Rhoda's going to buy Schwepps and that
means she wants to drink, that means she wants a slice of the action, I
mean of this kind of talk." "You've got your orders it means.
Alright."
Okay here I go. Not guessing where it would come from and the obvious
way to do it.
"It's wild out there." "Wild is what it is."
Handing out my pages is when I don't like it.
She's going to drink with her, she's drinking lots. Her legs are pointed
open at T. "Ellie is watching Jam's every move."
Reading my notes in that voice! Why that voice, what are you. Mocking.
It's to pay back the way her presence is bringing me the girl's body
some way I never had it, that I accept.
Why are you accepting to stay in those terms.
Why are you going to forgive it. Why have you already.
"I want to try to tell you something. When I'm talking to you I
think I know you but when I then look at you I'm looking at someone I don't
know at all." Touching her seems to be a kind of bravado.
- "Hello Ting." "Hi Rhida."
- Starving whore. Yes I think so too.
The machinery of social sorting, I do its work of delegation, and am
delegated. Every contempt returned.
What was in my arms was a pig body with an opened wet slit. The love
of the fingertips on its back.
The way on the bed lamp what I see is a large mother with a little animal
child wrapped in one arm. The mother-man is bare-chested, the little child
has on a tee-shirt. It exquisitely sucks away. We get up, it calculates
beautifully looking out the window.
Why did she clobber me.
There was such a beautiful overlay of spaces.
At times leaning forward intently looking. The times I was leaning forward
intently reading her face. The times I would be leaning far forward mouth
open listening watching the distresses of her face.
They slide through the exposures.
Sound of small movements in a place.
Her world of references strange to me. Sat drunk-headed. I use the self
watching from smoke to weigh her. What I see is that she's blindly longing
to travel with (them) but wants me not to go, is crazy wanting them and
is crazy not wanting to lose me. She denies and searches. I feel for her
and support her with my face and hand. She knocks back capfuls of port.
She's simpling herself and letting me contain her.
I notice theatre and real pain.
"It will just go on like this, you waiting for the axe to fall.
It will go on like that till we're seventy. Let us separate then. Shall
we lie down and talk about how we'll really manage to do it this time."
Ideal world with freedom to dive with anyone. Longing longing.
I have to speak the whole of the most of it. Seeing that some of mine
really is crazy. This morning I'm telling my sorrows. "I keep such
a big organization going." Crying about Dorothy.
This morning the way she was pinning me into my chair. She knew she had
to talk fast.
A strange raw man. It wasn't him I was in bed with before: a strange
rawly grieving and desperate man. Yes alright I'm interested to see you.
I don't understand this but I'll look as well as I can. I'm pleased to be
strangely married there but I will keep my vigilance.
"I thought she was going to kill you so I killed you first."
Hissing, "You didn't want to see them kill me because you wanted
them to see you killing me."
The faint light on the ceiling. Silver rectangle stretched on varied
sky blue. The sky had opened holes between shaped masses.
Agony of envy watching people read her writing.
Is it a clay smell from a book.
-
[We visit my grandmother in Clearbrook.] "In seven months I will
be ninety years old." Said from the size of a child.
"Yave that to yor mum." [My grandfather says.]
-
At C's pressure of crying. "Doesn't it seem to you as if there's
something out of proportion in it?" "It is as if I feel that if
I can't figure it out I have no right to be sad about it."
"I loved writing for that reading but afterwards I was stopped.
It was the last summer Luke was here." "That's five years ago!
Something made you lose your confidence."
So yellow and distraught.
Crying. That I wanted those three people to like it and they didn't and
it stopped me.
That neither she or C listened when it got to the point where something
could be found.
"I'm technically more ... I can set a rawness so it can be seen.
People have always liked my writing." [Jam says] "Rhoda helps
the production of my work. You are the enemy of my work in a way Rhoda isn't."
What Rhoda did was an attack and I couldn't accuse her.
-
- Here the door. Footsteps. It must be her. More than. It's a lot of
people.
Come out where I can see. That sensing of the light and colors around
myself which is the reversed (cone) of being looked at. Holding the blanket
up in conscious theatre. "Then I should put on some clothes."
I'll use every way I can think of to keep dominance, that's what I know.
Choose the room. Make first raids. Threaten the tape recorder. Hold eyes
knowing nothing. Let out none of the real information. Keep in the defensive
so nothing can stray out.
T offside is guessing right and I'm liking it.
J off my side is closed in a lump and if she's following she isn't going
to show. No one but T is choosing their quality over their vested interest.
T says "It can only be one thing" and no one asks her what
it is. R is making a show of trying. There are moments I feel for her.
"It doesn't make sense."
In a space: what I'm working for is our not being reconciled. That's
what I know and understanding it will have to be later. Except that I do
understand it this way, that she has got J and it's better to lose her to
an open enemy. The way she has got J is real but J may be too opportunistic
to act with her self in something so near.
If I'd said any of this I'd have been the weeping sore for everyone.
Sad sad sadness.
They're going home into the rain. There J sits. What for. Oh cause it'd
be held against her. Well I'll cooperate. There's no human company for me
tonight.
Was just pressing to have them all gone and then writhing in bed.
Under the stubbornness of this fright, its carelessness about being magnificent,
fair or clean, there's not having anything to lose.
The way at night she leaves saying it's over forever. In the morning
I blast R.
And the other doubt, that refusing the open heart position - its wash
of pain helplessness, yeah I like the sound of it - I will set the same
relation in myself, where something refuses information to something else
(because it ...).
This winter so low-down, so poor, dead-ended, suspended.
"Sometimes when I see an axe starting to fall I put my head under
it just to make it clearer that there is an axe falling." J interrupts,
"I don't see why it has to be seen as a binary, rejection or not."
No one listens.
I know you're here only to score a return and I'm determined not to let
you.
Tired out.
If I'd not been already brutalized into this winning - why aren't you
asking Jam the right questions? - program, it would have been that Friday
dusk when she came up saying Rhoda wants to drink that I'd have blossomed
out into grief. And if she could have replied it could have gone on in all
of our depth.
19th of March
What wasn't said. That what I saw last Friday, unanswerable, unfightable,
was you preferring the sense of writing you have with Rhoda. I don't like
a lot of her writing, what inspires you in it, doesn't, me. It means also
that your recent work done in that inspiration, I can't love as you and
others do. The painful contradiction is that you are still the one I love
to talk to about writing and that that love is the center of my love for
you.
This cleavage in the question of writing goes through the most of our
connection, for me. I think the center of your love is something else and
that makes it strange to you how hard I take your preference in the sense
of your work.
I've had the sense that you're so volatile now, that what I must do when
I see you is just hold quiet and watch very close. When you were here on
Sunday that is what I did, and what I saw was you. It is a question of how
much loneliness I can take, I fail to be able to bear the intensity of our
difference, and then I stop watching.
-
In the afternoon, black and brown person in the car. "I'm glad to
see you." "That shouldn't surprise you by now." "It
does still always surprise me."
Mid-April
Shame and refusing. When I speak out in small aggression at work it is
pleased at release but dissatisfied in the company, why bother in this level
to say anything but if I don't I can't have noise and action. Coupled nouns.
Why do I write them. Amateur.
A span. The way the thing is arched in the word.
What the shame's of. Nowhere's worth concentrating for. She's not careful
enough so it matters, she'll go on in a way that's no different and won't
be the world I want around, and in those friends, is that where it now comes
from, it's failure where I did hope and care, she's working adjustedly admirably,
T's tamedness with me, as if I'd by fighting it destroyed the ferocity I
wanted most, having to fight but not wanting to tame them, by having failed
to bear the strength of it, have I spoiled the time we could've used to
break further through. We did break through but only so far and now there's
dragging. It would have to be running up a challenge again. And I refuse
where there is one when it seems I'm not taken equally.
At home the mornings. Will they. Silver five thirty. What could I love
enough to wake. A job of writing. Open window. Good coffee.
It's remembering in real time and rebelling in this old form of limit,
and feeling I've failed my chance, which means: I haven't the nerve to pick
it up now. Which means: I found myself unsafe. Where would it begin: I've
decided the webbing of contradiction is where it is. But am so often in
distress of shame. "Thank you lady. I'm solly bother you. Heh heh."
What happens.
Why in here do I have to ask before I can tell. That might be a half
I've left with J.
The rebellion's so mild and taken as so outrageous, what is that, astonishment.
- An Barefoot said:
- The way what happens is nothing.
Sitting on a foot. The tight jean thigh pull, a tensed hand. Pleasure
neat on the strong flexed foot. Looking down into white shirt pocket at
green dollar bills rolled.
An Bonefoot said: I moved into a strong unusual self. If it works -
This way hasn't been working. What in it has brought paralysis.
When the words get away from the rehearsal spoken. What makes it head
into the inexact, I'm watching it speak badly, that's the shame all day,
why've I just said what I haven't thought. The thought wasn't there enough
before I spoke, it hadn't enough time, after I spoke I know it was wrong.
If I made a rule to stop first. And then never the surprise. That's what's
making me rush, I want it to get out before I've curbed it.
Down the page the pencil writing's etched, light can go far enough down
for there to be shadow on one side of the line.
At the table lit from the candle below her face without its prettiness,
the hang of thin flesh down from the eyes.
The yelling in the knowledge of position, seeing R next to my friend
and are they cutting her out of the herd away from me, did I ever want to
be with her, do I ever dare to want, allied to what we both know is important
to her, and I'm stranded with a refusal I haven't thought much about, that
all the gentry would disagree with, and it's her steadiness diagonally,
helping me out, actually giving me arguments and strength, oval face, if
you miss me will you come for me. Now it's come to small tears. It will
be done so civically I'll herd myself in didnity out the door, things laid
understood. But her gladness, in their company, when I come in the door.
-
Here after Carnegie / the red pants. "The thing about those red
pants is that they're sexy." She's from the Literary Storefront, smells
of drink. We're in the dark. While I am complaining about T she is stroking,
I get obsessed, knowing the quality, want to get back from it, is she bending
me back toward it or am I -, fretting! She jumping at the familiar explanation
that she would have made, and now I have too, "Are you wanting to make
love?" "Yes I really am, but," inside body warm (delight)
spreads approving, yes, that's it, body is patting me gratefully, but then
you stop, fallen into sadness, I'm fretting more, come on, be a man, decide
for me, do it. And a really paralyzed fret, dim, should I be mad at her
for a setup? Is there something I don't know. It intensifies in palaver.
What's the matter with you, you don't want to! After all the talk. And when
it has begun there's a strength in the brain. It's a completed sexuality,
I'm saying, I'm here in this moment, I have this possibility so strong tonight.
And then it is lost and around it is waste, the most isolated endurance,
we still don't know how to do this, why are we so immobilized, that we don't
learn.
When I'm turned away to bring myself, angry little bewildered rebellion,
if you don't I will, and it will wreck some moment in the future, but I
will not be victimed now, it comes not a pleasure but a surprising intense
electric shock like a white glow I want to say in front of my face, though
it might have been belly.
In the morning after bad sleep drained nervy an extraordinary fury thinking
what you wouldn't do and what you could release and won't, or join and won't,
or are responsible for/with and don't acknowledge. It was a blind raging,
quite blind. Having come didn't tranquilize it. It wasn't genital. You're
saying nothing would satisfy me, I know that isn't true, but it would have
to be in another sort of being I'm not reaching. I was in a powered but
stupid state that needed a navigator, and was wasted without one, wanting
to hit you, paralyzed in sadness or confusion because I shouldn't, but is
that so? "Clear off." A mild violence that I thought was correct,
you really have been harming me in an unknown way and it's right to have
someway struck you, but also this is working to send you home absolved for
something there. Then finding it was May Day, and the Argentina war broken
out.
-
Last time at your house a moment in passing, the startle and take were
inner, the stream went by as before, it was just in passing, she was kneeling
in the blue terry robe, with her hair down? I don't know, but it was for
one instant the right woman in front of me. That one is sometimes in my
ear.
A time looking at her face to wonder if it was one I wanted to be with,
she passed an expression over it, a fine irony, so it was.
-
[Robert comes into Grubstake, the Brinkman Reforestation shop where I'm
working]
- Rapid. "I've thought of you too."
- This is the moment, not enough time in it for it to be simple.
- How do you look.
- Not less. There's old age under your eyes.
- Luminous.
- It must be a wonder on my face.
- Arm to my upper arm. Is he going to - !
- I'm going to do it too. Hand at the length
- of an arm, onto your side,
- rib skin I could feel, this was like the dream, skin under cloth.
- Now I'm looking at the hands I wanted to know,
- they're thinner than -
- There's not time to know very much. It's two
- seconds. "I thought if the phone rang and there was no one
- speaking I'd know it was you." Easy
- confession. Write on the back of the card
- to give you, Vancouver Taxi, it could
- get you here.
-
- Do those people read me as easily as I read this one.
-
- He's talking fast telling out his dreams!
-
- This morning her penetrable shape. "I feel I'm transparent to
you and you can see all the little changes."
- I mean when I touched it I had the sensation of pressing into a layer
of love. I said "You feel lovely."
~
20th May
Roy [Kiyooka] come to visit my fast-talking social person, he with some
hair fallen off the side of his head, taking off his glasses, peering at
the photograph he's holding just in front of his eyeball, I'm watching his
eye go from what I want him to see, up across to the part of the picture
I'm in, he doesn't say what I want to hear: yes, naturally, that baby was
inhabited by a completely formed spirit. What he leads me off with is: "What
do you think of that spirit now?"
To telling about the Slade, credentials. Harry went to university. Edmonton
rooming house. I ask questions to be able to see it. The hide room. Three
winters. Killing floor. "Was giving my parents money until I was thirty."
Wanting to see the land. "What he's carrying is guilt about the horses."
The Scotsman who was listening behind the trees on the fenceline, and said
"If I ever catch you mistreating your horses again I'll give you a
beating you won't forget." "We were terrible farmers." "I
did all of it at the packing plant, the sow, and hung it up, halved it,
took out the entrails." "My father and I dug the well ... twenty
feet ... Opal, near Redwater ... Susie Nishima .... We had to take out twenty
times the volume." (Drew the well ballooning out.) "Casing."
He found a moment later to correct my word.
The remarkable people with a stone house. Fieldstone. The stone boat.
The hay racks' loose joints, driving like crazy around the yard, standing
charioteer beside the taller post taking jolts with his legs apart. I saw
it with him. And then the warm egg. "The one way she was different
from my mother ..." "They have very deep natures." "
... was that she never had a colt. None of our horses ever had foals. There
was one of the brown horses was going to, but it was stillborn. I could
never understand why there were never any colts." "Well,"
he says kindly, "I don't know if it was the same where you lived but
usually there'd be a stud man who'd come around once a year. Most farmers
didn't have their own stallions."
What's happened! What in me is so naïve and how did I get brought
here. How can he say these sentences. "When the mares are in heat and
service them." Skinny body tightly wrapped in his arms. "We're
coming apart as a family. I've been part of three families." Over my
shoulder the Choy lights have come off and on six times. It took them a
long time to settle. "It's Daphne who wants to see what it's like."
The movie he wanted to talk about, was David's! "It's that he lives
in such a way that if he films his life it's interesting." "Yes!
Fullness." What would I film. "There's no reason you can't do
the other too."
-
Your heart would be full, writing her, you'd hold her image in front
of you, marveling that she'd be glad to read what you were writing. The
marvelous being, her beautiful eyes, her strait spirit that can outwait
even you. "Dear spirit can I walk around with you, will you tell me
what you were thinking this morning." Her light impeccable body and
the authority it gives her.
It is alright too, you don't have to be the master anymore.
When I saw you I was immediately glad. Are you glad like that too. I
know you love me, what puzzles me is what it's like, what you love, that
makes me always uncertain. Today I was haunted all day thinking maybe you
were sad, but it could also be, how could I know, that it's moved into another
stage at your house. "For the first time I felt the preference more
than history or body."
If it isn't that your love's shifted into permission, you have to understand
how long a suspense it is.
I'm haunted by thinking I wouldn't know. Not I wouldn't know: you wouldn't
tell me, or would lie. There'd be time when you and they because I didn't
know would really have killed me. That's not exact.
What is true is meeting them and you, and speaking to other people, what
was stiffening me was thinking maybe they know something.
-
The way J with Sandy on the other side of her said something so crudely
I wondered if her quality has come from me-
-
Wednesday. Wake in the dark, agony, know it will be some days like this,
separation pain, the difficulty of no job, UIC, various cheating fright,
the haunting of being on bad terms with, seeing money put me where I'm surly,
nagging myself for not transcending, being mad at lameness for putting me
on wrong terms with everyone so I have to be surly, thinking it could be
different if I were close to my conscience not thinking of it stupidly,
lunch vegetables, greasy sweaty worn dirty red shoes. What are they seeing.
Buy new red shoes, a different overhead mirror, big dark face, white shirt.
Fit not the right ones, one too small one too large. The north room, set
into painting it, it will be quick, lonely, gnawed by wrongnesses, that
year. "But she looked at me this morning." "That's it, take
me home." Being something vulnerable to weakness confusion from what
I think of as myself, what'm I doing, describing not fighting. "Yes
I am upset." "I'm in very mixed feelings. I don't know what to
do. Do you know." Feeling this collapse, misery as payment. I didn't
like the swelling either but had it and am paying. What would make it true,
it demands to say the truth to each or suffer disliking, his way,
I could talk to young one, bruised feet from those shoes, I could come shining
out if one fine thing would happen nearby, it is suffering of being part
of the mean-minded programmed failed - adjectives help - it would be relief
to be part of something fine.
-
"The first time you took off your clothes I was shocked, I couldn't
look." [Cheryl said]
"She has a bad leg and she carries it so beautifully." [Kiyooka
said] "That that had happened to you and you bore it so gracefully."
[Trudy said]
What I want is for someone to say "If that hadn't happened to you
you would have been fantastic."
"It isn't that I'm not loved, what it is, is that you don't imagine
how I would have been different if it hadn't happened."
- Insisting that it is a halt, not nothing.
- I want to know what it is, and what in anything is it.
I remember the corner of the room, it is close to a small south window,
the color of the light in the corner is grey, when I come home from the
hospital, I am three and there is a baby in the crib. She is a stupid lump.
I complain. I am having to walk with this right leg, it's not yet smaller
than the other, in a brace, metal and leather.
The light bulb makes a room on the porch that I can write in. I can hear
that Carole's washing cutlery. Chinese music. A supper smell like tripe,
not familiar. Turpentine. Grey cat has a jowl under her belly, walks in
through my door, her will against mine. A so-big moth, a cloth flapped into
water in a sink. One of the small near houses. Her head in the window frame,
tak the light switch.
Moth white as if it's bathed in pollen.
The light bulb's white burn, red-edged, on the page just aside of the
last word written, stays behind.
In a sleigh under quilts traveling at night, in the box, under blankets,
on hay, Judy singing, small girl, still with a big head. I mock her bitterly.
She can't hear that she's not on the tune. My mother's reproving me but
do they agree for themselves, both are known as singers.
After the school bus, long dirt road underfoot, step after step, I hold
her with stories. They're stories about us rich and somewhere else, in a
girl's school. I describe the room, its furniture, the meals, our clothes.
I dress us as rich girls. There are boys and well dressed girl friends.
When I begin mystery plots like Nancy Drew I don't continue them though
she wants me to. I just like to make us rich and good looking.
We live in America or some other country. I put our actual friends into
the stories. They are not our friends because they like us, only because
our parents and theirs visit on Sundays after church. My friend is Edith
Janzen. I don't like her, she is better dressed than I am, but cautious
and pedestrian. Though I don't like her I am loyal to her at school, and
when she disowns me there I am disgusted at her mean spirit. I want to hold
her hand down the long school corridor at recess. She drops it. I know she's
ashamed of me. Judy's friend is her sister Lorraine. We make two pairs.
Lorraine is also something runty but she has more spunk than feeble Edith.
Our mother makes us matching dresses. Hers does too. These daughter's dresses
are where they show their art. We don't guess that the new dress occasions,
Christmas, Children's Day, are their group shows, though we do compare.
The pink satin, slightly different cut, same yokes, with lace and rhinestones,
she got from one wide-skirt bridesmaid dress from the Salvation Army in
Edmonton.
In church the two girl's benches, right side, front, with daughters squirming,
in sets of two to four. Intense noticing dresses. Making flowers of the
girls. Sunday morning dressed ready for church, with the house clean, sitting
on the windowsill composed, in the Sunday dress, pretty. Little Paul in
bow tie. My dad's bad temper in the tension of getting everyone ready. Sunday
morning haircuts, the scissors and clippers, he's holding the mirror, taking
the scissors himself. He has a white cloth tied round his neck over his
long underwear and workpants and braces.
We get into the grain truck. The order is always the same, I'm next to
him, jammed behind the gear stick, knobbed. Judy's next to me, jammed, then
M with the baby on her lap. Paul has to stand in front of Judy, pressed
against and holding onto the dashboard. He stands just tall enough to see
over.
The motor doesn't always start. He has to get out and make it. There
are growls in German. We know they're curses. She says they're not. We're
wanting to be righteous because he's righteous. He is our enemy. She's our
friend but not strong enough to get us justice.
We're crammed into the grain truck cab, downhill, the steep hill of the
driveway. The progression of our land, we're always interested looking at
it, I can see it now, the half mile to the hill before the creek,. The hill
down from the house and this hill up and down before the bridge are the
same hill, though we never think of it, a ridge, a long-ago lake bank, lying
alongside the road. In the first quarter section through red-brown fescue,
then in the second, Grandpa Epp's land, through cultivated black. Then curving
south to run across the road and along until it intersects the creekbank
in Kinderwater's field.
It might be we've seen the first leaves out in a stand of poplar along
the road, or at a distance. By the time we're driving home again, there
will be many more. Seeing them will unite us outside our family desperations.
The bridge our event, white bridge set not straight across, east-west
as the road allowance goes, but slightly diagonal to get the creek's curve
shorter. And was there another reason. There used to be another bridge,
unpainted, maybe it was without sides. When the first bridge was failing
and this one was being built, there were just two bare planks above the
brown water. He had to drive over those two planks, the front wheels, and
the back wheels not to slip. I was standing at the dash in those days, in
terror, approaching the two boards. On the far side it was open, flat, a
low place just near the bridge. When there was mud that'd be where the ruts
would grab the wheels and hurl them sideways. Stuck.
A bit further a sweet slope to the point at Kinderwater's drive where
we'd be able to see to the highway. A stand of bush at one place, on both
sides of the road. A grey dead tree holding our eyes through there, silvered,
with a hooked arm. Rose bushes in the ditches, water on their leaves. That
was the next mudhole, longest to dry. In winter, drifts.
When we reached the highway, nothing could stop us. Traffic, cars and
trucks on a raised roadbed, graveled. Driving fast, right to the edge of
road when we meet a truck, right to the edge of the other truck. The caragana
hedge Kinderwater had planted along the highway, why, a snow-fence. Strong
caragana planted many places, yellow flowers, snapping its pods, spitting
squared oval seeds. Their dried pea taste.
Caragana at the church too, planted near the ladies' toilet. It and the
wood walk, run over, drumming on boards. I could run.
Turning onto the churchyard. That moment was the fathers' contest. Cars
and trucks. Everyone's car known. A strange car means a visitor. Or rarely,
someone has bought a new car. Pete Schmidt's Mercedes. A social scene set,
my mother nodding, greeting, says hello out loud though the man can't hear
her through the window. There'll have been those painful greetings. Meeting
the children I don't like who don't like me. I see them now, I haven't forgotten
them, heads and bodies, voices, scrutinized, known, and in a relation of
unrelenting antagonism, in ongoing association. Before church, associating,
talking about each other's clothes, watching what regular people are like,
I'm looking at Verna Driediger knowing I completely don't like her, or she
me, but the boys like her.
What about the grownups, my mother and the other mothers in the baby
room. They can sit in benches around the room, get up, move around, their
babies sleeping on wood shelves, and they have the window across the churchyard,
and an arch through to the heater at the back of the main room. The women's
cloakroom, its shelf overhead, a mirror also too high for us. Bibles forgotten.
Sunday school papers. Climbing onto the bench to see out the window. The
wood road to the toilet. The bush. The fields to the east. Squirming down,
running out. Over the threshold a proscenium porch, wood, two ranks of step
down. It's a platform outside like the platform inside. That one steeper,
three steps up, mustard painted boards. Ed Martens on the piano bench with
his back to us. When he turns his head, his adam's apple, bow tie. He and
my father both Ed both in bow ties. Enemies, like each other. Handsome in
the same way.
Some hymns. We all like singing. There are hymns with words I don't believe.
I scrupulously don't sing them, "all to Jesus I surrender." No,
I don't. Imagery, washed in the blood, the particular imagery of every known
song, or on some unusual occasion, a song the parents know but we've never
heard.
Prayer meeting, someone, one of the fathers, leads it. We're standing.
Any one of the grownups may speak out loud praying privately. There are
men in the back and middle benches of the men's side who pray to show off.
The mothers' prayers are frightened and earnest, they've felt led to speak.
My mother praying is embarrassing though her prayers are sincere and alright.
My father doesn't pray but his enemies do. I listen carefully to his enemies'
prayers. His enemies are the other willful men. He is friends with some
of the timid men. Other timid men are his enemies' friends.
The preacher might be someone we've never seen. He might be old, or somewhat
famous, from a city or on furlough from a mission field, Africa, India,
China, South America. If he's a missionary there'll be an evening service
with slides of brown people in rows. While he preaches we're looking him
over. We like energy and good looks. If he's seedy, a type of runty unjuicy
man, we'll sneer comfortably. I am also noticing his version is not quite
the same as the last man's, there's evidence that something is wrong with
the story.
There might be a solo, the visiting preacher's missionary wife might
sing. A trio from the congregation. The part singing fascinates, it's the
best. The lines of voice moving and crossing. Anticipating them. Seeing
Mr and Mrs Seibert turned into voices.
The building. Its ceiling, long stovepipe held by wires looped down,
electric lights hung on chains. Endless time looking at the stovepipe so
high overhead, the chains dropping their lamps such a long way down. In
the congregation the so familiar persons. I saw them as being who they were,
the adult and child community of my life, almost all, with the exception
of some of the mothers, and those families with quiet men who were 'with'
my father, held in steady hostility or indifference toward myself particularly.
The men were police, dragging children out of church to give them the spanking
public opinion was asking. The energetic boys, girls in mischief forgetting
where they were. Yells from outside putting fright into all of us. The women.
They knew we existed. The men could ignore us, concentrate on each other.
The older women's appraising eyes. Mrs Kroeker. An attention given us as
social exchange with our mother, who was really thoughtful and a sincere
Christian, not liking anyone to dislike her, and on good terms with everyone.
The church community in its meanness and rivalry a complete form, tribe
life, peculiar, a stressed arena, everyone seen, intensely known, by us
coming up in it, studying. The eroticism of the religious imagery and music,
love feasts, unity, profound forever unreconciled antagonisms of rivalry,
the holding bonds, heavy training in paradox, was it the test, that lets
through those in the strongest perception or who have no social gain possible,
and holds forever those who are like each other and can belong.
My sister and brother, in on the secrets, it wasn't much different for
them: collaborators, rivals at home, but allies here, agreeing that preacher
was silly, did you see Mr Friesen sleeping in church, Mrs Willms is so pretty
isn't she, Tina Wiens's bum. We'd support each other until we could
get out, did get out.
Paul: knowing ahead some of the stories that'll have to come. I'm five,
must be, the year he's a baby. I remember the one place, the house at the
sawmill, one room, the bed along the south wall, winter outside, a room
on a bright evening, falling asleep maybe, waiting for supper guests. Is
it my birthday. I don't see Judy there. But there's a crib with a baby.
A radio on a high shelf. Sitting under it on a little bench listening to
the children's program. I know that evening sun. The radio was on the wall
facing west. Maybe there was only one room. No memory of my own bed. That
evening light. It's evening now. Chair in the corridor facing the sky in
the west. It was heat come through cold, clear cold.
A small boy screaming crawled under the house away from the puppy. The
man stands jeering, on his own yard, at a distance from his house, as if
that baby were his rival. I am watching the man's hatred, with hate. That
man is a detestable human. I am near the porch, the house is unfinished,
standing crudely, ready to move somewhere else, on four stones at its four
corners. The man built the house, physically, over time, himself, planned
it. Under it is dried mud, dust, the square cleared of trees. Chickens,
toys, find the way easy. The little boy flees there rather than into the
house. There's no one he can count on. We will all jeer at his fright of
the puppy. I don't think the young poplars have begun to grow yet. We'll
hate the man but neither will we give ourselves to imagining the dog as
it looks to the boy. I will jeer myself. We don't ask: please tell us, what
animal do you see, what wonderful thing do you know that we don't.
We live in that house but it's his, I can gather myself to hate him but
not to ask, what is it you see.
There are many buildings on the yard, at different times. Different summers,
we use different ones. There's a 'house,' hardly bigger than a granary,
Janzen's house, it isn't strange to us to think of it as a house, though
it is a one room shell, one window north, opposite the door, one east, no
inner walls. We seem to imagine a stairway and an upstairs. There is furniture
from other households, harness, heavy leather and brass rings, hung from
nails. A table is our stage. The red wooden butter churn, round, like a
pig body, with a flat plank lid, becomes the operating table. We're playing
slave. On the first day it will be Paul's turn. He'll have to do what we
say. We soon get to the real intention: or I do, and Judy follows. He lies
flat on the butter churn. I demand that he pull down his pants. "Why's
it standing up? Make it go down." Both of us staring down at him. The
little finger. "I can't." I push it. It's true, it won't bend
over.
There are plays I direct. They end in an embrace. Judy is the girl and
I'm the man. Standing on the table we look out through the window without
glass, down onto grass in waves. This back area of the farm is where, in
the long grass, things are abandoned, farming implements. The bird nests
in the twine can on the red binder. The cab of a truck, wheels and engine
removed, open doors, a playroom, flat in the grass.
There are times when Judy and Paul make an alliance against me. Run ahead
together, and are crouched in a room in the caraganas. I hear their voices.
I'm abandoned. I understand the necessity, but there's no one else.
Paul because he's a boy has to help with the chores, in the evenings,
when we have only to set the table, he has to drag five gallon pails of
chop to the pighouse, struggle with them, tilt them over the wood rail,
even onto the head of the big boar, or the big diabolic sow pushing ravenously
toward him, not a strong-looking fence, the 2x2 slabs give when the heavy
animal butts against them. He tilts the bucket, dusty chop, she shakes her
ears. Then water dragged from the pumphouse, it's further than the chophouse.
The water slops over, we don't think to help him. It's boys' work. We have
to do dishes and housework. My father doesn't think to give him pails he
can handle, no one observes him. His father curses his awkwardness. We know
our father wants to break our spirits. We know the spirit he most wants
to break is Paul's. Paulie. Is it to protect him that our mother doesn't
seem to protect him.
I don't know how this table arrangement comes about. When I'm visiting
my parents I still sit at the end of the table opposite the father. It was
males at one end, him with his back to and nearest the door, Paul on his
left with his back to the window onto the yard. The baby in the last free
space, opposite Paul, scalded his hand dipping it into our father's teacup.
That was surely the worst place to put a baby. Our mother at my left, closest
to the stove, Judy next to Paul. The two were close in their age, only a
few months more than a year between them, he small and dark, she thin, by
now, long-legged, blond, vaporous. Paul in the place furthest from his support
and next to his enemy, hanging over him, nagging his table behavior. I would
support him against our tyrant: there was the day, noon meal maybe a Saturday,
or a day in summer. Paul found his weapon: a long reproachful stare. He
held it, I dared him, I jumped in when the man turned nasty. "All he's
doing is looking." Go ahead. It was the first open challenge and we
won it. Paul's look, since then I've used a look too, that long brave ironic
reproach that said "You're a swine picking on a child: I see you. This
is the look you think you want. What you're seeing is irony. I've got your
number. You're a bully."
What she was thinking I don't know. Holding her breath. I knew, did she,
that what Paul was doing was going to save him.
It might have been that what he hated in Paul was his physical smallness.
He didn't grow. He wet his bed for years, he was sent out into a plank room,
porch, built like a pigbarn, a lean-to onto the side of the house, new wood,
but slab, a badly fitted window with a line of light around the frame, a
room for a hired man or an animal. Paul slept there alone, wetting his bed,
given rag sheets, waking in stink.
He'd be sent for the milk cows, in the evening, going the way the tree
shadows pointed, uphill, a long hill, spread visible, the field like a long
screen hung across the east. Partway up it was our fenceline, beyond it
a tiny tractor raising summerfallow dust. Paul, and Judy often, the kids,
climbing over the posts into the corrall, and then further, through the
far side of it, the pasture nearest the barn, wild grass, foxtail, a manure
compost gritty like cinder. There was a streambed, not a stream, but a line
cut by spring run-off hurling toward the road, dividing this lower pasture
from the broad field hung up in evening light in the east. From the kitchen
window or standing on the yard, the tiny cows and tiny Judy and Paul working
their way toward them. When they'd turned and were chasing the cows, or
cow, down toward the barn, they'd have faced into the sun. That must be
what he likes to remember, though the cow could evade him and have to be
chased all across the slope, making it miles.
She was in the house ready to put on his old pants and do the milking.
When the cow was got into the barn, Mama would come in with the milk, buckets
of it, metal, warm, straw floating on it, bits of what might be manure,
strained through a white cloth, in earlier times poured down through the
complex unknown towered whirlings of the separator, a thin jet of cream
springing from one long spout into a pan, an arm of milk standing into the
blue jug, or the two-quart jar. The white cloth would be held over the open
reservoir at the top. It would be left with its manure, hay, raw smell folded
into it.
I always liked the way Paul looked. He was a beautiful fine-skinned shining
brown. His head even in punishment boy's haircut was a beautiful shape,
a deep curve from the crown swirl in to the nape of the neck. It was his
disadvantage to be 'small,' it was understood he would be spoiled as a man.
Our father thought himself tall. These last years I heard five foot ten
and marveled we'd believed. I still think he's tall. Paul is my height.
He's still beautiful, less brown and compact, he's become a muscular mature
body, not the pretty one he was: and I have also become a broad muscular
body, both with our strong deep forearms. He dresses well. He's an artist.
When I had cut off my hair I was taken for him by a neighbour who hadn't
seen either of us grown up. "Is it Paul? Ellie?" she said, meeting
me on her pasture land, which had been ours. Mrs Bohn. They bought the land
for their son.
He stood next to his fine brown van. When we were saying goodbye a bird
dived past him, lit on the back of the bucket seat, and out through the
other side. He startled. "I'm afraid of birds." What do you know
that I don't. I can't be what I want, a writer, because I haven't come to
a new sight. I would have to understand the fright of birds. I am not in
a new sight though I was, briefly, and can't remain in it because my fright
of being responsible for my own death was too strong. I envy those who have
no choice and are precipitated into nightmares, and are really artists.
"If I were a genius I wouldn't know what they're thinking, I'd be
full of my own thoughts and they could enjoy me. It's because I know what
they're thinking they can't enjoy me. I am still like them and resisting
being like them." "You're inferior to yourself." "I
know. I've got that far."
When I was helpless, and they liked me, it frightened me.
If I want the artist's privilege I must be paying against myself, they
have to see that I'm special in vulnerability.
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