Meredith Quartermain

I, Bartleby

“Bartleby,” said I, gently calling to him behind his screen.

No reply.

“Bartleby,” said I, in a still gentler tone, “come here; I am not going to ask you to do any thing you would prefer not to do — I simply wish to speak to you.”

Upon this he noiselessly slid into view.

“Will you tell me, Bartleby, where you were born?”

“I would prefer not to.”

Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street”

Caravan

If I, Bartleby,

am a copyist, what am I copying? Down or over. From what page to what page. The flow of ink through the nose of the pen replicating reptilely the tick of a clock turning into another alleyway of lines or mind running down grammatical streets — ever outward like a river through all the islands and channels of its delta after pitching itself downward from mountains and, even before that, from glaciers that had oozed fingers into high valleys but now are said not to be oozing but rather shrinking away from those mountain crags — those humps and hulks and heaved-up layers of ancient seas, jumbled quixotics, masked tectonic rafts of rock my pen makes into loops and sticks and dots.

They shrink from a hot stove, from an odious task, from drudgery, from admitting they’re no longer wanted — these glaciers — no longer loved by the mountains. No. The mountains have had enough, and these glaciers must leave, must melt away, must sink into sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous fissures, cracks, and fractals of mountainhood and meadowhood. Slowly, ever so slowly pulling away the blankets and sheets — inch by inch sliding back the antimacassars on mountainous couches and chairs once protected from human oil but now gradually subjected to this pulling away of garments, this peeling back of scarves and coats, this drawing down of sweater sleeves and chemises, this relentless baring of mountain flesh despite snatches at collars and cuffs, fringes and hems, despite the pocketing of a sash or a sock, a garter or culottes that nevertheless melt trickle pour and hurl themselves down as if under a truck.

Can mountains think of trucks? Humans think not. Mountains leave the question open, preferring to send it as a wave of photons from a star to the universe. To end on a distant planet, an asteroid, light centuries deep in some far-off galaxy of ideas. Mountain thoughts. Could come to rest on a speck of sand in a camel’s eye — an eye that may not look kindly on the kid it has given birth to. That may not allow the kid to suckle. An I that curls her velvety camel lips and gazes across the steppes while her owner walks five miles to the next yurt and brings back the violinist — the owner and his wife and their five children gathering round the camel in a man-holding- animal-huddle of hoof-stomp and dung and windblown hair, the violinist drawing his bow across his strings until slowly from the eye of the camel seeps a tear.

One cannot

write about Schubert without knowing more. I will just say today is his birthday. I imagine that at age seven it would have been a very important day for him. He was already playing violin and piano. His brothers and sisters were getting born and dying. Father and mother and the ones still alive gathered before soup plates in a room lined with cabinets. Father schoolteacher. Mother mother. He would have cake. He would sing so much that a very important gentleman would give him singing lessons. He would run off to the piano factory owned by the father of his friend and play every instrument in the showroom.

As fast as he could think them, Schubert would write songs and symphonies and sonatas. Scherzos, rondos, adagios, marches. Con brio. Con fuoco. Rallentando. Dolce. Estinto. Fortissimo. Allargando. Mezza voce. Minacciando. Flowed from his fingers. Sesquipedalian motifs. Palindromic crotchets. Acrostic syncopations. Metonymic diphthonged sibilants. Conjugations of rhymed chords and intervals. In the house of a wealthy man where he taught the daughters their piano lessons. For a year. But had to go back to teaching children in his father’s school.

He was arrested with friends for mouthing off to police. One friend banished forever from the city. Schubert set his friend’s poems to music. He wanted to marry a soprano — he wrote songs for her, but couldn’t prove he could support a family. Her family kept bundles of his music for decades. Until perhaps some descendant wanted to throw out these yellowing pages of scribbled notes, so that he could rent out his attic and his basement. To a musician or painter or poet. Lost to les couleurs. Perdu dans l’aubergine, la carotte, le pain grillé, la tomate, la moutarde. They don’t give a damn about charging rent.

Le sang, la violet, le vin, la tourterelle spread out their piazzas free of charge, day and night, for anyone to stroll or caper in. Embracing in their ghostly pavements vibrations of flesh and breath. The soles of the strollers and dancers pummel these agoras and forums filling them like goatskins. They stroke and nudge their diaphanous slates, stretch and rub their paving hugs. Urgence to fluctuating cobbles.

Schubert died at thirty-one. Of typhoid or syphilis. On his 214th birthday the trout in his quintet flash their rainbow scales in the streams of my car radio driving past the Holy Rosary Cathedral, where a man twists and lolls, careens out, almost tips his wheelchair as he blindly sweeps an upturned cap this way and that.

A Natural History of the Throught

Violet. Opposite yellow on the colour wheel. Also a flower written about by Robin Blaser. Songs say they are blue, suggesting sky or someone’s mood. Can colour be ironic? A droll black or a meant-to-be-read-two-ways green? If you are a man wearing a pink jacket or, heavens to Betsy, you dress your baby girl in blue? Je pense que tout le monde should be addressed Mister, including baby girls and breastfeeding moms. If everyone wore blue, according to psychologists, our thoughtfulness would be encouraged. We would see a decline in outbursts of verbiage that leave you wondering, What was that all about? Seeing blue on our social associates, we’d be inclined to credit them with having the ability to put two and two together. We’d look before we leapt to conclusions about lack of brain capacity.

I don’t really like where this line of thoughtlessness is going. Because in fact I’ve lost my train of thought. How indeed does one lose a whole train? Entraîner en français: to drag down. My train sunk in a violet pool — no, something far bigger. It’s sunk in a violet sea. A train of camels nose to tail plodding one hoof in front of another dragging my thought across an empty desert of sky and sand. Not to a violet sea but out to the whiteness at the edge of the desert. Whiteness of page already sliced with lines waiting for the train of camels to make pictures in the eye of a beholder through which a thread is needled.

A simple t separates through and a thinking throught, which once rhymed with fruit or newt, but now rhymes with caught and fraught. Halt — the ones at the edge of whiteness. Then seriatim stoppages of camel humps déroulent backward to my throught’s ancestor and the ancestor of that ancestor. It being not so much a throught line with an engine and a caboose as a series of births or reproductions. Camels not actually walking, unless perhaps the desert moves under them, but camel pasting a camel in front of it and that camel in turn pasting one in front of it — the train growing longer pushes apart whiteness at either end and lets the thinker walk up and down her caravan.

Out of the dark

light returns, seeping through cracks in curtains, even ones firmly yanked together. Above and below their bunched skirts, waves of grey grow on ceiling and floor, spinning away streams of photons to land on sleeping cheeks and eyelids. To prick the skin of a limp hand. Wake up, you corpuscles of blood. Run away through your tunnels and chutes. Tell all your friends we’re back. It’s time to jump on the bed and have a pillow fight. Time to row your boats.

Oh, I don’t know about that, say the corpuscles, Our boats are tied up, nosing the weeds of plaid kilts on the men who clean gutters much to the disappointment of crows. There goes our feeding-trough bathtub, say the crows, Get another pine cone, block up the downspout when the men in kilts take away their ladders. It’s enough to remind you of Hitchcock. Watch out. A black wing grazes a kneecap caught out between sock and pleats.

The rowing boats nose into weeds in the subcutaneous tunnels whose branchings and forkings, twigging and budding, await the corpuscles. Who now talk with particles of light, give them a slap on the shoulder. Did you see the Canucks? Five-nothing against the Canadiens. Then they blow it in the third period. Should get a new goalie. Where’s the boss? Reading… the inside of her eyelids to download a freighter of REMs into central processing. Please wait. Sixty percent complete.

The photons clear off. Bounce on glass in a wooden square, ricochet off a silver watch and the handle of a trunk made of wainscoting behind which a mongoose had lived that had puzzled, when she was a girl, the sleeping scrivener: how did a furry bird from Mongolia sneak into the wall? Did wainscoting have secret channels where the mongoose ran like a telephone signal? Or was it a friend of the girl in the story? Or something her father had put in the attic she wasn’t to know about — and if I catch you in there, you’ll be… Her brother in his diamond box — maybe he was behind the wainscoting.

She squashed her face and arms into the slats and dragged blindly along their ridges and valleys. To a small wet nose poking out of a knothole. In the central processing unit of the sleeping scrivener who thought certainly the girl was that age when she really could fly — just jump off the third step, push the air away with your arms and legs — float over chairs, tables, windowsills — on the simple buoyance of thinking. The corpuscles in their rowing boats drift back and forth moored to their kiltish weeds. Occasionally one or two detach and meander off on the current.

How to converse

How does one do it, with or con — together and deception — then re-versal’s turning back? I gaze into my conversant’s eyes. Around us triads and pairs with glasses of wine — the room bursting with chatter till the walls feel their seams crack — they groan with the pressure of vocalizations, and struggle to hold fast this surging throng of speech — even thinking of themselves as a pressure cooker and hoping that whoever is boiling things up is keeping track of the flame because, if they’re not, the gauge may fly off the top and spew volcanic talkativeness into the night.

No stopping now — out it must come. I’ve been reading your book, I tell him, knowing that the same cannot be said on his part about mine, but knowing also that by telling him this I will stop his gaze, at least for a moment, from wandering over to the well-published, politically active speaker surrounded by women, near an abstract canvas of grey, pinkish grey, and bluish grey squares. Oh, out it must spew — the paper I’ve written on innovative language in poetry, and who indeed is making any claims that rearranging words in challenging conniptions thrust cruelly at readers in the way of Artaudian theatre would change the will of government to hand everything over to globalized corporations?

He helps himself to liverwurst though I’m sure he said at George’s party he was a vegetarian. Those poets only write for other poets, he says, making a pumpernickel-and-ham sandwich. Nowadays, he says, I only read to large audiences of analysts. His eye shifts to the female-adored figure against grey canvas. But somehow, I say, shouting over the din, we must live inside this monster — we have to go on — we have to have other parts of ourselves besides loathing and disgust, despair and cynicism. Must somehow see, as Olson did, humans in a universe. After all, we still must love.

Critique is love, he says between mouthfuls of mustard-coated ham. What I love I theorize. I tweak its premises, massage its syntax, arouse its rationale, I ooze into its faults, then freeze till it snaps, so everyone can finger its shards. Why would I not do that for what I love?

How to remember

I who plays I collects worm food in a green bucket. I’m Green, says the bucket, which is plastic and therefore not green. My worms — do they feel owned? — live in a plastic composter — black, cone-shaped like sawdust burners at mills or coiled beehives on honey jars, though I has only ever seen bees living in stacked rectangles or old tree trunks.

This rainy day They who I calls worms crawl up inside the black shell of their beehive to air holes I has punched for bacteria and worm breath. Ones I calls They inch toward the crack of light at the edge of the lid then bumble over beehive rim in higgledy-piggledy knots and tangles unravelling to streaks of pink cursive script in some unimaginable libretto. Writing across the curving ungreen black surface, they clench, unclench, ooze mucus to stick in wriggling ropes of glistening wormskin new as baby lips.

Could there be a human version of this lazy, tangled wormflesh, this skin-melted-to-skin limb-mingled limbo, this moist, gainless breathing togetherness somewhere outside Encyclopedia World where everyone has anatomy, reproduction, taxonomy, and economic benefit — somewhere outside the unreal Reality that writes, Earthworms who eat rotting leaves in temperate forests are invasive species, but Homo sapiens who burn down forests for hamburger farms are creating wealth?

I lifts the wormhouse lid — flash of light — hail the food god — splash and thud rain down from green bucket. I pretends to be They who I calls worm, pretends They make I a god, then thinks, Not food, not god, just tube mouthing apple core, carrot peel, banana skin, radish tops, grass cuttings. I who plays I pretends to be They who I calls worm, swims through potato peels, brown leaves — not leaves, not potato — not names of anything — just writing along surfaces with myriad feet I calls bristles — mouth open, matter outside, matter inside. Tubular chew through tangles of fleshy script and trails of castings for I who plays I in whose comedy? Imagining sex between They who I calls worm, They who make black gold for I. They in naked glistening embrace, each thrusting penis into other, each enfolding, each holding out clitoris to be stroked.

Oh, I thinks, speaking in her play, how biology texts carp on about reproduction, that factory for making life units so valuable to Homo sapiens. What if I, emptying wormhouse, taking worm gold, is to They a giant wormforce, gobbling all and thrashing all to bits? I digs in fork. Pounds of clinging wriggling wormflesh fly light-blinded then world jolt upside down flat flump body daze. I, who plays I in this unserious deadly play, forks and forgets. How They I calls worms now have fork-torn bodies They may slowly regrow the way I who I calls I cannot — if only They who I calls worms are not crushed too badly.

Waiters —

what actors they are — what directors and stage managers and who knows they may well paint a good deal of scenery too — running their razors adroitly along the edges of moustaches and goatees. Calling out orders to a chorus of chefs whose heads and shoulders, all in black, slide back and forth behind the bar. Sometimes bumping into each other in front of an oven or while carrying a skillet of sizzling bratwurst, which, if it leaps out of the pan, could upset the waiter’s choreography of dinner for two young ladies. A blonde in low-cut black and a dark in equally low-cut sailor stripes with straps running suggestively over creamy bulges.

Which one is prettier? The blonde with perfectly straight dustily gleaming hair swinging over her shoulders? Or the dark with wavy locks beaming away from her face like chocolate rays from a smiling sun? Oh — they are so ripe he could just pluck these bloom-covered plums. The elegance of the blonde with her long lashes and classy lipstick the colour of coho salmon and harvest moon. Then the laughing good-heartedness of the dark with her bright red smile from ear to ear — the way she tosses her head back and giggles and leans over to her friend. To discuss what else but him.

Surely they’re eyeing the curve of his pencil moustache arcing out across his cheek. The way he’d cut it to slink round under his jaw and, sharp as an etching, curl up over his chin, tracing two little circles below his lips. Do they know what he’s thinking? Of course they do — the way they laugh and lean over their glasses of Cabernet Franc. Which one likes him more? The blonde is a little cool, a little reserved — that’s the way with elegant people — that’s the style of elegance that doesn’t wear its heart on its sleeve — that doesn’t even bother with sleeves or what it’s got simmering beneath its beautiful surface. The dark asks him how his day’s going. She keeps asking even after he’s taken their order if his day is going better, now that she and her friend are here. Oh, much better. How much? Way ahead. Did you upgrade from a one to a ten or a one to a hundred? So precise — are you in statistics? She does market surveys. No, I don’t.

The chefs have a concert of plates steaming on the bar. The maître d’, a puff-cheeked wind about to blow an arctic gale, glares at the waiter, who sails over to the plates and ferries them out, three to an arm, to his guests. He’s jovial with the professor and his younger companion. Prudent with the skinhead and his business partner. Courtly to their French-rolled wives, after he almost delivers their bread and duck pâté to the solitary patron with a stein of beer. Mercurial, ardent, soothing, discreet, and inspirational — he’s buoyant with grins and tact. His guests, too, play their parts. They even win awards — best supporting partner, best costume design, longest monologue, most dithering over Malbec or Merlot, most desperately trying to be interested male in conversation with female. And the waiter, too, with his gladsome clairvoyance, his jaunty judiciousness and astonished alertability, must be awarded a prize — of best director.

Shyness,

that peculiar tangle one gets into as a hostess with a guest with whom she can’t quite find the spark of animated talk. A cloud of expectation of jovial or intense speech hanging between them, making her forget even the basics of How to Win Friends and Influence People, and fall instead into a certainty of her own complete neanderthalness — cave hostess stumbling toward signs painted on rock — guests needing more wine, martini olives too stale, fish raw or overcooked if she doesn’t pop it out of the oven again and check.

A spore — who scattered it? — roots in the consciousness of Mme hostess and Mme guest, a fungus spreading rhizomatic filaments through the hillsides of their forests. Mme hostess senses Mme guest’s reticence and Mme guest senses Mme hostess’s sensing of this uncommunicativeness, Mme hostess in turn sensing that Mme guest senses how effortfully Mme hostess is stumbling in her cave toward Mme guest, that her talk is not natural, that word so beloved by manufacturers of highly processed food. The talk is obstinate. The talk is not spontaneous. Not sprung like combustion of oxygen and carbon, but ground like the slow rub of tectonic plates.

A hostess should know exactly how to ignite an uplifting flow of news and ideas, and Mme guest is embarrassed for Mme hostess’s inability to raise Mme guest from her ennui and disengagement, her dulled drifting in the buzzing room, embarrassed for Mme hostess’s encumbering hesitancy, but also for her own cat-got-her-tongueness, which has created now a kind of anti-ignition of two glowing logs who instead of sparking each other into flame douse each other into nullity with suspicions that either one or the other is boring or bored, that the enthusiasm of party inquiries is provincial, that one wearing the same clothes year after year while the other always sports something new has unleashed irreparably The Fear of Not Being Loved (Mme hostess will later think of the time when we were all guests of mothers who may well have been taken aback at the brazenness of beachheads in their most intimate rooms).

The fear that makes one not speak. Mme hostess could muster a little effort toward a silent body wrapped in its circuitry of cellular impulses, but she falls away, a burnt log, afraid to step into the darkness of that circuitry, afraid to blithely utter such a common thing as a word, only to find it yawn to a black hole where she will shrink to an infinitesimally tiny dust mote. Would you like to try some of my tapenade? she says to Mme guest, I made it myself.

We begin again

to write by hand, drawing the tail of one letter into the stroke of the next. Cursively running like a stream through a valley it’s worn away for millennia. The stream’s feet carry its lazy or swirling surface — thousands of hands hold it above heads of all those jogging legs, the letters and words. Can medieval monks be said to have practised handwriting? Or was it rather a form of calligraphic printing? Letter by letter stop and go. Broad tips of their quills fattening and narrowing around the curve of an o, a, c, or b. Leaping away to pick up ink. Returning to page to strike boldly down the stem of a t. Then jutting sharply to cross the t — the cross they’d committed their lives to or perhaps were driven to by cold nights and empty stomachs.

Australian aboriginals scripted fields of coloured dots with ropes of song to carry their world. Chinese and Egyptians wrote in pictures — a man or a sun or a house stepping out of brush strokes or gouges of stylus. Nowadays we don’t write with hands and arms, we write with fingers or thumbs. We don’t sweep around curves, jut up risers, or swoop down descenders, curling and uncurling a c or an s, looping and knitting our letters. Nowadays our neurons manage rows of on-off switches, fingers wired to three or four buttons commanded by imagined letters, the conveyancers of thought, printed in our brains. Except for lists of milk, bread, and apples. Or receipts handed out by someone taking away a rug to clean. Or the cramped script on tiny lines of dental records using the universal tooth numbering system: watch 7; replaced amalgam in 12 and 29; scaling, two units; recommended extracting 32.

Then, too, when you are seventeen or eighteen or even nineteen and starting your first job as a clerk in a dental office and there are doors to cupboards containing cottons and gauzes and sterilizers and stainless steel instruments, trays and masks and anaesthetic, and pieces of equipment you don’t know about yet, there’s not much you can do. The others don’t have time to tell you and even if they did you can’t remember it all — it’s hard enough with names — Dr. B___? B___? B___? Brandlehand. Doctor with sideburns beginning with F or S — his door always shut. Don’t go in if there’s a patient. There’s not much you can do in the mumble of hygienists and patients, the whir of drills and tiny hydraulic jackhammers chipping tartar away from tooth enamel. Doctors breeze from chair to chair. Patients drift up to the clerk’s desk, resting their elbows on the ledge to write a cheque or discuss booking an implant. You wish you could calculate patients’ bills or send them via telephone lines to insurance companies, but you can’t.

The day stretches into a long, straight line the ends of which, like an ever-expanding universe, are travelling faster and faster apart as time goes on. Time that oozes in molecules from coffee break to lunch, from lunch to coffee break, from break to never-never-to-be-reached end of day. You will not look again at the clock. You must be busy, you must work at your job. You must be polite and always smile and talk about your evening or your weekend even though you already told them about watching TV or reading a magazine. You want to be one whom the patients can speak to, be worthwhile as the ones at the computer, the ones the doctors talk to, the ones who understand the doctors’ orders. Oh, please, what can I do?

The one who’s training you tells you to make a list of all names and phone numbers in a box of files. Writing by hand. Aaron Lee number, number… and numb-er, Theresa Sanderson number, number… and number, rounding the a’s and d’s and o’s, spacing the r and the e and the s. Making three-humped m’s and two-humped n’s. In grades three and four you traced them on dotted lines — round and up and down and along to the back of a k. You copied stories and poems and capital cities from the blackboard. You rested your head on your left arm down on the desktop, the tip of the pen inches from your eyes, swinging up and down, shooting off the line then zigging back and round to touch the line and shoot up the stick of a d or sweep into the tent spire of a j diving below to loop its tail, stopping for its dot — each letter sailing away then back like a boomerang to the line. Waves and waves of letters. No longer school, no longer teachers and rows of other children, no longer rulers and principals — just you and the pen between the lines.

Vaguely you hear the word casualty. Are you all right? Yes yes. I’ve always written with my head down, even when I was in grade four. The teacher always asked. The patient leaves and the senior clerk talks about the public space of the front desk; everything you do makes an impression. The clock says five minutes to five.

Orientalisme

If I prefer not,

he stands on the sidewalk, leaning against the wall of his building, which is not the place he owns but rather the place he has come to. A room. A hot plate. A toilet down the hall. He brings the cigarette to his lips and draws smoke into himself, feeling it swirl in his head, into that manliness — that sureness of himself — that always came with a cigarette. Like he was on the job. When he had a job. With Nick and Derrick and Zoltan. He clamped down logs, shot them into bark-ripping teeth, squared them into cants, ratcheted them through blades, flipping clean, white boards to conveyor belts. Have to know computer language if you want that job now.

Market music sings in his ears from the open stalls of Chinese dried shrimp, red and green beans, curly black stuff on bark he used to saw. Old man rolls his cart to his everyday spot on the corner. Must have a family, a son’s business around here, sending him out with his fold-out seat and steaming bundled leaves, keeping him busy when he’s no longer really needed. What do they taste like? White van drives right through the red light, turns left on red! — woman driver, go figure. Another woman — looking at him — stands beside leaf-bundle man, waiting to cross. Stare back. Why should she look at him? With her city-clean jeans and buckley boots. It’s his street more than hers. He lives here. She’s only walking through from the rich houses past the tower blocks and the school. Some of them dumps, but they’re still houses, with separate walls from other houses. Houses with kitchens and bathrooms and no one banging and cussing at night. No one punching. No one puking in the hall. The light’s changed. She’s looking at the green, not at him. She’s crossing between the lines.

She’s writing about him. She’s glimpsed him on a street corner. Snapslotted him into neural fibre, transported him through synapses in her arm to her wrist and knuckles to wiggle him out on paper through a tiny metal rod. Her snake trail bumps, dots, and loops along between lines running out from small holes around a coil of wire, reminding her of lie-detector styluses or the scratching of machines that measure earth tremors and heartbeats. Is she then part of a machine or perhaps an organism that measures slight quakes and shunts of tectonic plates? Part of a pulse-taking circuitry picking up radio waves and translating them to a line of camels walking nose to tail across the desert of her page. Their hoofprints disappearing in shifting sand as though she’d washed the ink under a running tap till it faded to hazy stains.

What lies was her stylus detecting? She refused to write about him from the outside. Refused to place him in the world of her thoughtless glances and no doubt classist assumptions about men of sixty or so who lived in the brick blocks of single rooms above Chinatown merchants selling sacks of dried shrimp, raw peanuts, cloud ear fungus, sea urchins, and black-eyed beans. Attended by foraging pigeons waiting for the guard to turn her back. No — this descriptive impulse must be checked. Unless she slipped into his thoughts. His sightlines back to the man with the cart selling steamed packets wrapped in leaves. Her I no longer present in the writing — her I disappearing into his I — an impertinent impersonation. An I which she gives to you like a cloak of invisibility.

Cloth Music

Whatever it was the Chinese calligrapher said with her brush strokes, it was not something she said quickly. This stroke horizontal. Cut that into two arms with a dash upward of the same length blown forward by a strong wind. From the belly of the dash, stroke down a short leg plunging ahead into the wind. Branch a bold shelf off the leg, elbowing downward to end in a hook. Finally slash upward ramming an iron spike between leg and hook. No good rushing, thinking of what the brush strokes mean or thinking of lunch or the next character. Each stroke must signify its own speed and weight, as it carves, in the eagle’s view, buffalo pounds of white space. No use being ridiculously careful, mincing and stinting the ink, trying to keep brush strokes alive, trying to make sure it all stands for something, make sure it carries her away on its magic carpets from the meaninglessness of doing nothing, of standing for nothing, promising nothing, of promising no ticket to goodness and rightness.

As though we are to life as words to meaning, a matter of reference, we signifiers and life a distant signified, rather than fractals of intercellular space returning like molecular jungle gyms in the marks of sense and frames of mind that captivate us. As though making our mark takes place on a white page in a vast notebook and diary that began with the big bang — each footprint of each member of each species recorded infinitely for each to read of each of all of the others.

And so we word-bodies walk our word-legs in a language we can’t speak. We stand for our brush strokes. We kick at tyrants. Our ink stains resist like wax in batik. We bear scars of our spelling mistakes. We set out each day with helmet, shield, and sword — the girls we love. We can’t stop. Can’t put down our pens. We’ll always love how they twist away from us fantastic windmills. We can’t imagine a time when we will no longer set out, no longer resist, no longer love to follow their rhizomatic cartwheels, to mark our time in the arms of such siren readers.

Mén

Mén talking. One, jaw dropped to ground. The other, listening. Implacable. Sometimes they hug and smile beside a suitcase on wheels and a waiting car. Sometimes they compare books or condos or iPads or revolutionary philosophies. They face each other at parties, searching for talk whether it’s hockey or stocks or their firms that could be getting more work but are doing all right. Faces facing. Antennae to matter, drinks in hand, bellies sometimes bigger than heads but heads are where they live — large heads on sticks, one stick with bigger feet than the other. On terra firma. Firmament. Chain of being. Their heads like windows — double-sashed panes squaring eyes, squaring mouth, squaring suits in square buildings squared in streets. But they are not men with an accent — they are a door — their paned faces the swinging louvres you push through to whisky, studs, and holsters. A frame of men. Between them, a door. You could be photographed there or you could photograph your shadow going through. Mén and door. You brush along silent man’s back, stroke the sides of his upper pane, slide along the lower pane to his spine, then jut round front and bottom of talking man’s glass, trace the crossbar of his sash, sweep across the tip of his head and down his spine to flick out his feet, and you find one man has more window, another more stick.

Bàba

Swashbucklers clash on sash window laid sideways shimmering back whiteness of sky, white as teeth over jawbone. Howdy, says jaw, curving a path to the teeth door under a roof of crossed swords — god-hefted hilts — blades striding scissor legs over windows of sky. Father sword legs — what’s he say for himself — this striding gesture whose memory, said Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa, made the very soil of Chinese life — whose silhouette waved bloodstained flags on silk roads where intellect can only grope? Let my character speak, he insists, let me stroke my noble legibility, brushing my father and my father’s father and my father’s father’s father and his father and his father’s father — men of swords, men of staked ground. Men who said, My women. My children and only my children. My house is my castle, and I, the most generous of I’s, am the king of the tallest house, the one who makes black black and white white white. Here you will find the right house, the scientific house, the fit house, the real house, the perfect house, the clean house, the just house. No dithering, no gropes, no failures, no singing drunks, no brambles, no bastards, no animals without jobs, no houses without architects, no eyes without heads, no heads without homes, no trees without fences, no words without logic. Who would not want the city of fathers?

Māma

Interlocking wishbones saunter up a wall, a junk with crossbars for sails. Four oars propel her bow: four children, four splashes of milk, four portholes to her hold. The crossbars paint a lacquered screen with six small squares of Reason, behind which her wishbones tangle lovers. Her six-slotted weir catches splashing trout, her wishbones build a chaise longue or a loom for weaving tents. Her night arms hug the moon, tossing seeds to a well near the four labours of birthing. Her village has six seats of council in three walls: Reason, Rectitude, Justice. On the Wall of Reason, Queen Thamiris fights King Cyrus. On the Wall of Rectitude, Judith beheads Holofernes. On the Wall of Justice, Euphrosyna writes.

Her father, the wealthy Paphnutius, tried to marry her off but she, dressed as a man, fled to a monastery and amazed the abbot with her/his prayers and devotion. Day after day, rain or shine, the barefoot Brother Smaragdus sat on folding stool in the cloister, knife in one hand, pen in the other, copying texts from book to parchment folded over a wooden tent. Knife hand trimmed the quill, then pinned parchment to the steep slope. Pen hand picked up ink, rested on knife hand, and painted beautiful shapes of words. With the other monks, Brother Smaragdus practised how to read aloud the strapped and brass-knuckled tomes. So devout was Smaragdus that at night he/she would continue by candlelight, alone in his cell, tracing the lines of minims and interpuncts and bathing his thoughts in science.

Day after day Paphnutius asked his servants and bailiffs, Where has my daughter gone? How could she have left me? Why would God give me a daughter in answer to the abbot’s prayers only to allow her to run away and leave me alone? Go to the abbot, the servants said. The abbot said the whole monastery would pray for her. Brother Smaragdus and all the other monks prayed for a very long time. No news of his daughter came to Paphnutius who again, distraught, consulted the abbot. I’m sure she’s well, the abbot said, otherwise God would have sent some sign. Speak to one among us who is so full of wisdom that all those who talk with him are deeply comforted. And the abbot led Paphnutius to Brother Smaragdus.

Paphnutius didn’t recognize the face — years of toil had sculpted and lined it. Smaragdus hid his tears. Your daughter’s in a good place, he said, You’ll see her again, and she’ll bring you great joy. Paphnutius left in peace, but he came back often; only Brother Smaragdus could calm his worries. One day he found Brother Smaragdus dying. What happened to your promises, Paphnutius cried, but the brother’s spirit had already fled. Paphnutius fell upon his friend sobbing for the consoler now lost to him. Then he found in Smaragdus’s hand a letter saying, I am your daughter, and here at last is my body for you to bury.

Mèimei

Tutu ballerina riveted to rake handle, with interlocking wishbones for partner — two sisters sally out like Don and Sancho. Or knight errant Vincent Kirouac, on the road again, riding his mare Coeur-de-Lion from Rivière-du-Loup to Vancouver, crusading in pointed helmet for friendship and honour. Or the woman who crusaded for frogs and newts till the Ministry of Transport built a tunnel under the Tofino highway. Or the rambling Scottish man who preferred not to wear clothes, who, naked, disturbed the peace, and naked remained in contempt of court, and was imprisoned two years, naked, then released, and naked again, disturbing the peace again, was arrested, naked, and imprisoned in solitary where he prefers to be naked. Rakehandle and Wishbones wander in no man’s land of womanhood, their trail of crumbs through rampant undergrowth eaten by crows. I shall not let it matter, Rakehandle pirouettes through the forest. Nor I, Wishbones chassés elbows and knees, poised on her sister’s toe and tutu, We have this interlockingness, these angular fields, between us. Let’s find a gingerbread house. Let’s eat a chimney and soak in a chocolate bath, and push a king into a plough. Let’s say it’s epidemic. Like apple blossoms and fog. Liquid as light waves, sporadic as galaxies, rhizomatic as tongues. Let’s say the king bakes to a hopscotch with a glazing of pincushion and strawberry frills. Let’s forget to eat him. Forget to have been forgotten as forest. Forget to have been forgetting. I shall not let it matter, Rakehandle pirouettes. Nor I, Wishbones chassés.

Bù

You plunge forth, arms swung up in full march, left hand behind, right flung forward offering as though in a shout, Here! Buy this platter of brains, this tray of tripe. Never will you ever eat such fine entrails. Oblivious that your forward leg bleeds into the pole of a water carrier tall as a lamppost, buckets hanging. You plow on, nose to futurity, mindless of your Siamese twinship with Water Carrier, mindless that she anchors you, while you, like the arm of a shop sign, hang this pail-carrying stalwart over the street so that everyone passing will be entranced at your pas étourdi, your reckless nonchalance, unheedful insouciance, and general inappetence for the fact that you’re balanced on Water Carrier’s elbow.

What’s it like up there sailing over her head, full of blatancy, full of averment and unequivocal vociferation, full of flourish and fanfare and cocksure legibility, with your leg that’s also a water bucket in which you dangle suspended, irresolute as a butterfly while Water Carrier balances your unsettled hovering by growing on her other arm biceps and triceps big enough to hoist a cast-iron bathtub below your outstretched platter of lampredotto? What are those toothless whale gullets gumming your arms? That hatchet hooking your stanchion? That nose in your crotch? That leg-swallowing jaw bookended to square head lecturing his adoration?

What’s this warpness that seizes your woofy significance of where you thought you were going when you were water — you floated in a watery room, you breathed with gills and heard whales opening and shutting gates in the ocean — a gently jiggling thunderous ocean. You think of Jonah and wish he could have been she, a water carrier, and you wish she had returned from the leviathan, you wish she had taught us to unravel it, so that never again could it swallow us, and we could always stand on our own ground.

Hăi

A cat sidles cornerwise into the room, her whiskers knobbed like leg bones, her eyes footprints in a Halloween sheet to see themselves in mirrors floating on the night. Oh, mirror mirror unfairest of them all, my tongue’s caught in a mouth trap. I’ll claw this bedsheet, shred it to naughts and crosses. Shred it to hopscotch. Let’s see how flimsy I can make this dogged whitewash where they do their doggy roll-on-the-backery and piss-on-the-wallery. Let’s see how far I can prick it, see how it sharpens my pricks up their ears. Let’s make it a pricknic of pricktitude. Mirror mirror, who’s the prickliest? Who’s the best teacher with periculum for the prixiest cataprixses? I’ll look in the prictionary. Get some juxtaprickaments. Cat on a mat. Mat in the night. Night beneath snow. Snow seeming right. Right angled wrong. Wrong facing self. Self as a snake. Snake on a shelf. Shelf in the sky. Sky under sheet. Sheet over cat. Sheets to the wind. Shoed to a coat. Shut to the coot. Cut by the shirt. Shoot for the kite. Hopscotch these grid-eyed looking-words of flapping and tattered legbones. This spooking glass. This scratch mark and sea-saw of flag-natter. I’ll nip your nine-tailing. Turn again, Lord Whittington, thrice mayor of London. Your pussy in boots has stolen your clothes and all the king’s rats and all the king’s men can’t stick pussy together again.

Māo

It starts with a rabbit ear and a snout, then an eye mask and another rabbit ear that could be a tongue of the snout or the snout could be talking, wagging its jaw to explain what it’s got in its hands or why its arms are empty — this is just the way it is in times like these, and what’s a dog or a cat to do about it anyway — this is all I’ve got — this is who I am — I’d like to please you, but in times like these one can’t always do that and, in any case, I’d like to be pleasing when being that other thing which is not that wanting to be pleasing. The jaw goes on with a neck curving down a spine which could be a leg — one of four — making the arms also legs and the tongue or lower jaw also — that would be the fourth leg.

Or it could be a chair balanced on the spine, a chair with a very short back and long fat-footed legs — the back being what might have been the tongue and the chair tilting almost upside down so that if you were sitting in it you would slide out on your back, if this were in a world that had gravity. Or the curving spine could be the back of a four-toothed comb with long prongs for really curly hair. It once was an eight-toothed comb but prongs have broken out leaving gaps and a pile of crossed pieces that could be chopsticks or antelope horns or teeth pulled out by the dentist, not stubby molars, but the kind with sharp edges tapering to long pointed roots whereas really they’re prongs of a comb piled to look like whiskers of a cat shooting up from its eyebrows and out from its cheeks to warn her that her tunnel is only big enough for mice.

The upside-down chair could be the head of the cat sitting on its haunches pondering what to do and the chopsticks or comb prongs could be its whiskers in a painting by Picasso or Chagall, which is both a painting of the cat and a painting of the cat’s thoughts floating around in space. A head thinks it’s bigger than its legs and forgets how whiskers attach. It longs to attach them but the whiskers swell to clubs or become knobs of antennae on a butterfly. Or knobs of goat horns above flopping goat ears.

But Goat has lost her face in a window so very much not a goat or a cat. So very much not something growing like a lake or a tree, a mountain or a blade of grass. So contained and divided. So cornered, squared, and closed. So criss-crossed like a muzzle or a strapped trunk waiting on a dock. Cat, too, with back to Goat, waiting on the dock. Their ears almost touch, listening to listening. Goat’s voice caught inside the trunk, Cat sprawling back on her side in the sun, looking over her shoulder, reading Goat’s thoughts. It’s not really a trunk, you know — it’s a book that’s hatching your horns and ears. See the pages — two bricks on end, all mouth, talking, floating on the blackness of endless universe. Can you hear them? They have no bodies, only heads — no eyes, only hinges jawing the lines in a play about a cat and a goat. It’s not very funny, thought Goat.

Pictograms for Daphne Marlatt

Robin Blaser said at Naropa, We swim among the constitution of words — chemical — always challenging our stillness. At Steveston, you swam with salmon. Yü, a fish held a furrowed field itself a mouth an entrance for an eye an ear, erh an eye held flaglike from the head, or erh a plant spreading underground, like words once they’re heard. Here you’re gathering chi an assemblage under the roof of she, a shed, junction of paths on your river, yü, a small boat assembly of eye and currents, stream with ground with dawn’s sun over the horizon and tree and heart heart’s right angle ten eyes could not find fault with. You hold here chin actuality; presence. Walking boldly along you hold heaven and your bow you draw its string and lead into threaded fields . Your bird flies up unfurling wings from your square and labour your meditation gathering documents. A dog rides your shoulder for a kiss.

Scriptorium

If I, scrivener, print a letter,

say an e, in orange, then m in blue, r wearing red, d wearing brown, t dressed green, h sporting purple, i in sleek black. Words of colour. Hold on to the world of our first histories. Like purple Vasco, blue da Gama sailing his ships around lion-coloured Africa for spices from cinnamon Orient. The new world of green Lief Erikson in his square-sailed ships. Greenland claimed by orange Erik the Red. Hold on to the world.

Hold on, it’s coming. The yellow world in the hold of a pink whaler. The brown world in a white galleon. The spotted world in the hold of red, white, and blue. Rolling seas of horses going to World War I’s coronets and golden eagles. Will the rope hold to their dungy stalls? Hold on to a job invisible as window glass. His decision holds for all cases and capitals, countries, and provinces. Which one is the biggest — Russia the rusty or Canada the white; Ontario the rose or British Columbia the peach? Which one holds your breath? In blue states or red. Gold-star tested. You find yourself outside, sailing schooners of grudges, not holding water. Just a puddle on the pavement leaked from your limp flags and washcloths. You are tired of this tendency of words to become toy merchantmen. You wish they’d absorb you in cotton balls. Then you wish you could rub them like lamps — genie away on her carpet. To a sunrise crossing paths in the forum. Of what? Still you don’t know. Of room-for-everyone-ness. Speech beside itself. For and against. Speech on the carpet.

Yellow of a windbreaker found in Mom’s closet after she died. Needing this, now that my hold on the world is less certain, I put it beside her binoculars, her orange statuette of Buddha meditating, and her radio. Forsythia yellow, her favourite colour. She wasn’t supposed to know colours because she wasn’t an artist like Dad, her art restricted to choosing print blouses to pick out the green in hand-me-down trousers, while he wore plaid shirts with checked jackets.

Sunny yellow, the colour of her 1940s short wool coat with big wooden buttons, which lived in the pine chest waiting to be made into something else. Yellow taffeta, the dress she made me when I was ten, trimmed with dotted voile. I wore it, with crinoline, white gloves, and a little white purse, down the rows of papered tabletops in her home-ec class demo. Dad photographed me in black and white and I saved the blue plastic off the flashbulb. Years later, after they divorced, she sewed some light summer robes — a maroon one for my sister, a blue one for me, somehow lost, and a peach one for herself, which I saved from her closet. Along with a rag I’d used in the final cleaning of her apartment — a frayed and faded salmon towel I used to wonder why they kept in their bed.

I like the red of a deep-scarlet valentine. Red words, too: vermilion, rose madder, oxblood, henna. What about a knock-around word like ruddiness. Like blush. Hot cheeked. Age seventeen with a crush on my father’s friend — his European accent, his suits, his MG convertible. Some joke made and my face the colour of raspberries. It was best not to like. Not to show it. Not to proclaim your loves. Put them away. Let them smoulder. Horrible to be laughed at. To feel others knowingly poking fun and your body giving in to their jibes — your cheeks a billboard for all to see. That the teasers were under your skin shooting bows and arrows and batting ping-pong balls. Infuriating that they had this been-aroundness that let them make you drop your gaze.

Then you try it, too — hey, let’s make him blush (this is how to be knowing and smarter than). Ho ho, lookit Ken wearing Sally’s cherry lipstick. Roses are red, violets are blue, Ken and Sally, doodley-doo. Piss off. Ha-ha, check out the kiss marks. But it didn’t make you smarter. It just made you somebody who could bug people. Make them blush. You’ve got too much blush on — let me fix it. It’s not blush; it’s real. Teacher powdering my cheeks in white foundation: my stage debut as lead in The Ugly Duckling in my homemade white cotton muumuu. Princess for a night, in the plywood community hall with its benches and loggers and shake makers watching a drama put on by the Quaker kids across the river. Watching the prince who would transform the duckling, after the play was over. By poking his fingers into her vagina and talking dreamily and importantly about the hymen.

Don’t wear blue with green, or brown with blue. My first suit was beige polyester. Mom chose it, and the suede pumps that didn’t quite match. No longer would I be a forestry worker in steel-toed boots. Pantyhose in camel, taupe, and sand would turn my legs to shivering targets of male gaze. A brown leather purse, school oxford colour, would be my constant companion.

Padded walls of hemp sacking divided my vinyl wood-grain desk from other brown vinyl desks. Co-worker Dan wore polyester suits the colour of coffee grounds, and we carried our brown Samsonite briefcases to other offices of brown vinyl desks and beige dividers, where we sat at vinyl wood-grain tables with chrome legs and taught payroll clerks to fill in data-entry forms.

We drew flow charts with mechanical pencils, our flow lines crossing completely logically, linking our arrowheads to merge-triangles, decision-diamonds, input/output parallelograms. Dan’s hair, baker’s chocolate, fell over his pimples, his fingers flew over the keys writing lines of code. His ancestors had come from China, and at lunch in the vacant desks, we built walls with black and white Go stones, while our pinstriped navy bosses spoke of touching base at this point in time in terms of the bottom line for the state of the art. They won’t keep me, he said, jaw set, eyes intent on Go-board grid lines, I want to be associate, then partner. They want too much money to buy in. He’d sail off to a better company.

Our bosses let me go instead, and a dank emptiness, a tossed-out greyness, seeped in till I was nothing but a clouded rainy sea. Nothing but a sickening feeling that I’d failed a test though all my answers were correct; that before I could live I’d have to beg someone for the right to food and shelter; and who would ever choose me — I was too university, too tree hugger, too tongue-tied. I pressed hard on my flow charts, clicked the button for new leads. Didn’t want Dan to know. Didn’t want him to think I wasn’t just as destined as he was for partnership. You’re breaking a lot of pencil leads today, he said, through the divider.

Scriptorium

In the sixties and seventies, Dad had a studio in a warehouse on the edge of Chinatown. He lived there, contrary to city regulations, cooking on a hot plate, sleeping in his office, and cadging showers from friends. I remember the toilet brown with dirt, and the wash basin, used for everything from shaving to dishwashing to brush cleaning, splattered with paint and grime. But among the jumble of magazines, LPs, and food wrappers on the office table, I would find white boxes containing almond cakes big as dinner plates.

Years later I searched for the white wall and the grey door open only at certain times to the windowless almond-cake shop where he got them. He took me there only once — the room bare except for a single glass case, where two or three clerks boxed and sold these giant golden cookies at least an inch thick and six inches across, their tops decorated with bronzed almonds, the cracks in their edges as they rose and spread during baking bursting with sugar, shortening, and almond paste. I never found that almond-cake shop. I tried every bakery I could find, but the almond cakes they sold were small and thin, like regular cookies. They were too shiny on top or they tasted too much like the mashed red beans of moon cakes.

When Dad first had the studio, I was sixteen and sleeping on a mattress in his friend’s attic while Dad employed me as his helper making art for a high-rise development — my pay being the occasional ticket to a movie or rock concert. His project was to cast whole pictures in polyester resin the same way he used to cast letters for signs, a process he invented himself and was proud of — no one else had ever made pictures in plastic by reversing the image, painting what you see first, layering in background scenes, then hardening a stout layer of plastic behind it so that a durable, easily cleaned panel came out of the mould. The trouble was that air pockets could get trapped on the picture surface, or a chip of the picture could stick to the mould, or he could forget to stencil in a background tree or colour. Each layer of the picture had to be set before the next one was added; days passed before we could find out whether one of these disasters had happened, and when they did he lost more days cursing and smashing the failed work, hurling moulds into the trash, cursing his own clueless stupidity, his hopeless, useless bungling. I would slip out of the studio and walk along the tracks, wondering why it had to be so difficult — why couldn’t he paint as he did in his watercolours — the brush conjuring up in minutes with a squiggle, a swoop, a dash and a dot — trees, lakes, reflections, fishermen, cottages, farms.

I dreaded unmoulding, but some days the pieces came out well and we added them to the pile of good ones that were to go opposite the elevator doors in the new high-rise. One night, in a celebratory mood, he took me through rain-soaked streets past darkened windows of the Chinese Times and the shops that sold incense, bamboo fans, tea, and golden roaring lions, shops of mannequins wearing silk sheaths of sapphire, turquoise, scarlet, and pearl embroidered with dragons or plum blossoms or paisley teardrops, high-collared dresses that hugged hips and bust, had slits up the thighs, and a row of frog buttons closing the placket over the right breast. We stopped to look at the exotic beauty of the dresses, and a few months later he would give me one and thank me for being his helper, and then insist that I put it on, wear lipstick, and do my hair up while he set up floodlights and tripod to photograph me with my great legs in a pair of his girlfriend’s heels. I let the satiny skin turn my hips and breasts into a woman people would whistle at on the street, a chic stranger filled with mystique that he knew but I didn’t, though she’d always hovered around me, like the possibility of becoming a movie star if only I could be in the right place at the right time. For a moment I would try it out like an audition for an uncomfortable part, then I’d go back to being the jeans kid I’d always been.

Aren’t those cheongsams something, he said as we stood in front of the dress shop. After that, we carried on for a bit before ducking into an alley, where we walked by trash cans and barred, sooty windows to an orange door that’d been kicked and pried a few times. What were we doing? He’d promised Chinese food. Why didn’t we go into the restaurant by the front entrance? Maybe they handed out leftovers here; he didn’t mind getting things on the cheap, like that construction job he had where he stuffed his pockets with extra chops from the camp lunch and brought them home for dinner. Beyond the orange door, we stepped into a steamy, overheated room packed with men sitting at tables and standing at stoves along one wall. The stove men flipped and tossed things in huge woks, sending out volleys of shouts and chatter, as they dished up platters to the men on the other side of the room, who were not, as I first thought, a team of kitchen helpers for a vast restaurant in the front of the building, but actually the customers. By pointing and gesturing, Dad got us a couple of vegetable platters and chopsticks and some rice and soup from vats on the stove, and we crammed in with the men seated at the tables. This is where you get the real Chinese food, he said, where the working people eat.

When I was six, he wedged a chopstick between his middle finger and crotch of thumb and showed me how to wiggle another stick above it. We practised picking up rows of peas, not running the length of the sticks but pinched in a stack perpendicular to them. I didn’t realize then that most people’s dads didn’t cook anything, let alone Chinese dishes. Out would come the bamboo steamer, the wok, the wire noodle scoop, and the rice bowls and china spoons painted with dragons or kimonoed women or patterned with rice grains. Dried mushrooms would be soaked, garlic and ginger finely chopped, bok choy and scallions prepared, tins of bamboo shoots and water chestnuts opened, chicken chopped into bite-size chunks, noodles deep fried, broth made for egg-drop soup, shrimp deveined and minced with pork and sherry for wontons, ribs red-cooked with star anise for sweet and sour, salty preserved plums made into plum sauce. Mom, who was a professional dietitian and very good cook, became sous-chef and deferred completely to all his commands in the kitchen. Long after their last miserable argument, long after they’d broken up for the last time, she told me it was a friend boasting about his Chinese cooking that had originally brought them together. He’d learned sometime in the forties — how, where, why she didn’t know or didn’t remember.

Early on in their marriage, in 1956, they gave the smallest room of our two-bedroom Toronto apartment to Foo Kong. My sister and I had the larger room, while they slept in the living room. Foo Kong came from somewhere on the other side of the planet called Formosa; he was working on a Thesis, which sounded very important and also sounded like something six-year-olds were not meant to have. Unlike Dad, who wore paint-spattered trousers and worn-out shirts, and worked in a sign-making shop, Foo Kong wore black trousers, jacket and tie with crisp white shirts, and went to the University, where I was pretty sure people spent a lot of time writing like Foo Kong did in his room, where he spent hours with his wicker-handled pot of green tea and his tiny tea bowl. I had a feeling that everyone in Formosa wore black, that it meant something serious and dangerous about the place and about being Foo Kong — serious and powerful like Chiang Kai-shek, which to me was mainly a word that was fun to say because Dad said it.

Fun like his laughing Buddha statuette carved of reddish wood, hands over his head, enormous belly bulging from his draped robes. Why wasn’t this laughing man in the Buddhist church Dad took me to where all the men wore black except Dad, in sport shirt and green trousers, and where you had to Meditate, which meant Be Quiet! and Sit Still! like another place he took me to on Sunday — the Quaker meeting — except that in Quaker meeting you could talk if you really felt like it, though not if you were only six.

Dad’s family were all English, yet being Chinese seemed important to him, just as writing his thesis seemed important to Foo Kong. I reasoned that to be important to Dad or Foo Kong I would have to either become Chinese or become a thesis. Or I would have to eliminate my competition. In bed at night I carefully adjusted my eyelids so that they would slant, and during the day I pulled up the outer corners so I would look like the women painted on Foo Kong’s tea bowl.

Foo Kong was often out and his door shut, but even when he was in, it was shut because he was working in there writing on the piles of paper stacked along one wall, on shelves that almost blocked out the tiny window. I drove my trike past the closed door up and down the long hall from the living room to the kitchen waiting for the door to open, and if it did I would leap onto Foo Kong’s cot and kibitz and roughhouse with him like I did with Dad. Foo Kong would gently chuckle and lift me back out the door, and I noticed he was much smaller and thinner than Dad. When I laid out some of his thesis and drove my trike over it, the trike was confiscated and I was strictly forbidden from going near Foo Kong and his room. Yet he remained as intriguing as the promise in a Christmas present under the tree, which you want to shake and poke and rattle and peer under the wrappings of.

My father was even more intriguing, and with him I could pinch and poke as much as I liked. I could get him to take me to the St. Lawrence Market, where we might buy some pumpernickel, salami, olives, halvah or pickled herring, or a braided loaf of egg bread. Or we’d go to the park and feed peanuts to squirrels. I’d watch him pee behind a tree when no one was looking, then try to pee like he did standing up, but I guessed it was something I’d have to learn when I was older. Sometimes he’d take me to his sign shop where I built forts out of packing cases and nests out of shredded wood called excelsior. I could watch him stir buckets of white fuzzy fluff into vats of syrupy resin, or turn the clear stuff white and pour it into moulds of letters held together in their backward shapes by nuts and bolts. I could stir and bolt things myself till he told me to buzz off and not let Fred catch me in here. It was Fred’s shop and buzz off was part of the father language Fred spoke with Dad, whom he called Gord, not his full name, Gordon. A language of half-sentences and grunts. Yep. Dunno. Shit. Chrissakes. Haveta cast again. By tomorrow, okay?

Out of their moulds, the letters leapt up off their sheet-metal plateau like little fortresses. Making them is what fathers did, making signs. To be important to fathers you had to be a letter, or a sign for the Royal Bank of Canada.

Perhaps that’s why he wrote so much himself, using the new ballpoint pens on yellow newsprint that fountain pens would have blotched and blotted — after he no longer worked for Fred, or for the Catholic mission, or in the government art-therapy program, or on the dam construction, or the high-rise development. Filling up sheet after sheet of yellow copy paper in loose cursive script — sheets filed in folders, folders of yellow sheets stored in filing cabinets, boxes of folders of yellow sheets under beds or collecting mildew in the basement. Line after line of handwriting from one side of the page to the other. About ignorant bosses and government corruption; about his failed lawsuit against the Catholic mission; about his need for affirmation and Maslow’s theories of self-actualization; about his mother’s dominance that’d twisted him; about women trying to be men and men who were pansies; about Mom’s bourgeois attitudes; about capitalist exploitation of workers; about the manipulators and frauds chiselling him out of an investment deal he’d been the one to think of. While Mom went to work and bought the house and clothes and groceries and financed his travels. Because in the father language that was what women were meant to do, so that fathers could get on with the important business of fathering.

When I was thirty, I no longer wanted to be a sign in that father language, or even a letter. I stopped speaking to him, stopped sending him birthday cards and Christmas presents, stopped inviting him for dinner, didn’t invite him to my wedding. I never forgave him for treating Mom like she was a neurotic, incompetent child. He telephoned once and said he took the blame for what happened. We don’t speak the same language, I said, Nothing we can share without that. He died in my silence. And it is here that I write of almond cakes.

When Dad brought his girlfriend home for the weekend, Mom told him to move out. She quit weeping, quit going without dinner, quit hiding in the spare room. Like fourteenth-century Christine de Pizan, Mom stopped cowering like a beaten dog. She got on with being the man she already was, the man for whom there was no word in the father language, the pretend man instead of the real woman the real man wanted her to be.

She took charge of her life, she transformed, she became human. Human and exile. Human and bitch. Human and refugee. I wish Mom had read then of Christine de Pizan. Read how de Pizan, alone with three children, grew muscles on her arms and legs while her voice dropped and her heart turned bold and hard. She repaired the wrecked ship of her life and took the helm. She became a true man, and after thirteen years as one, she planned never again to be lodged in a woman’s body.

She built a desk in her bedroom, mixed ink from oak apples, green vitriol and gum, sharpened her quills. She kept a sandbox and a mirror at hand and turned to Boethius, Boccaccio, and Dante. She wrote ballads and rondeaux de faisant étrange. I, Christine, she wrote, in the way of letters from court, monarch of her own speaking. She wrote a biography of Charles V, and books of political philosophy to save France from the Armagnacs and the Burgundians. She wrote for women, of women.

If men forever tell us, de Pizan wrote, that we’re nothing but quarrelsome nags, nothing but cruel and shrewish; that we’re mere gossips, slanderers, and lechers, filled with so much lust it would put any man’s to shame; that we’re lazy, evil, wicked, and foolish; that our sting has more venom than a snake; that we’re monsters, we start wars, and we’re the root of all evil and madness; that on Judgment Day, since our souls cannot be saved and our sex is full of venom, the whole of it and us will disappear into nothingness; if to love us is merely a game of deceit to capture shameless whores; if in business and law courts we’re not welcome and just fair game for cheating, then we must build our own city where we can love each other. Oh, my ladies, she wrote, make liars of them all. Remember how they call you frail, unserious, and easily influenced but yet try hard to trick you, just as they lay traps for wild animals. Oh, my ladies, flee, flee, flee the foolish love they urge on you. Learn finance, estate management, and law.

Learn to skin a sheep, peeling back the woolly casing of belly, flanks, ribs till you hold a collapsed, eyeless body sack. Soak it in lime till it lets go the wool, then stretch it, scrape it, pare it, dust it with chalk and rub it with pumice. Dip your pen and write.

No matter how much learning a man might have, she wrote, he could not fully describe what I would wish to write — a work to embrace the infinite variety of Fortune’s blows, her myriad forces of change.

Ovid, too, had written of changes to bodies: Echo shrivelling to nothing for Narcissus. Io seeing her jaws and horns in a stream, unable to pray, only moo to her sisters, then at last, free of cow skin, able to feel again her fingers and toes and her speaking tongue. Daphne who would rather be a tree than give in to Apollo; Arethusa choosing to be a stream, saved from Alpheus. The daughters of Thebes, preferring Athena and their looms to Bacchus and drunkenness, turned into bats, their tales of Thisbe and Leucothoe become tiny squeaks.

Cyane blocked Pluto, who should have asked not taken Proserpina, then dissolved into her raped pool. Arachne, daring to tell how gods cheat mortal girls, saw her nose and ears fall off, her body shrink to a belly with fingers for legs. To stop a war, Scylla swore herself and fatherland to Minos, but he scorned her love and she cursed him with the Minotaur before her father tore her to shreds and she flew off as Ciris, the shearer. This is no time for tears Procne told her sister Philomela; Tereus had dragged her to a lonely hut, raped her, cut out her tongue, chained her there. They roasted his son, made him a feast for the rapist. When he called for the boy, Philomela spoke the only way she could, throwing his bloody head into the rapist’s lap. They flew off — a swallow and a nightingale chased by Tereus the hoopoe, his sword beak always jutting ahead of him.

Christine de Pizan built a city of women. No longer would girls be killed as Ligdus had ordered Telethusa to do with her daughters. She disobeyed, raising Iphis as a boy. Ligdus, who clearly never changed diapers, engaged Iphis to Ianthe; and Iphis loved her madly, girl for girl, but dreaded the wedding. Her mother and the goddess loved them both even more, and Iphis’s steps grew longer, her face less shiny and more angled, her hair shorter. She married her love and rejoiced.

How to Write

If I noiselessly …

and out of the blue or even pink or yellow, a magazine asked her to write a manifesto — a well-known, highly regarded magazine in which she had always wanted to be printed. She was more than a little dubious of the certainty of manifestos, which could end with — toes — this little piggy went to market and this little piggy cried all the way home. Manifestations en français waving placards. Boxifications of thought she’d rather seep and leak, divide into streamlets or runnels, soak out to unthought swirls at hard little word edges. The space between spoken and heard her showing toes would evoke, engage, enact.

She launched into forging worlds, what unshows itself — the manifesto of erasure and abeyance. The impulsive manifesto shoots rapid fire the least thought — the least considered — tips from her mind’s dumpster: bedsprings, televisions, one-eyed Eeyores, toaster ovens, hockey sticks. To dither the puck. Say and unsay. I want it all, she thought, shilly-shallying. A chord instead of a note. A symphony instead of a chord. A universe instead of a symphony. Closing it down in a word: universe. Or or a — it made no difference. It wasn’t a pause button, a light switch, a phone hook. A column of battalions from several empires waited. Would it be the onion or the peppermint? The shark or Mack the Knife?

Had manifestos become a bourgeois project? Was she jaded? To dither. To angst. Would it be the lion throttling a doe? Or the president shooting students? A woman stoned to death, or a woman suckling her child? Down another alley in the maze, why not a manifesto of the sentence? Crossbreed every kind with every other kind — twist and turn the thought shapes — so many butterfly nets. Une manifestation of clamouring motifs. Unsentencing the sentence. Smashing the piñata of complete thought to clouds of recombining viruses.

She paused on the trail and took a breath. Don’t look back. Don’t look down. Don’t look up at the fire tower on top of the mountain where she’d scattered the ashes of her mother — reaching her hand into the plastic bag inside the pottery urn Mom had kept on her shelf. Scooping up in her fingers grey dust and small pieces of bone. To fling out over the heads of fireweed and lupine and daisies as Mom had said she wanted, not feeling, when she said it, this nothingness of self as dust — the dust that had been her mother clinging to her jeans and boots. Breathing the dust that had been her, had made her.

How to write

Out of body, she’s in a cab on the way to the airport, away from home and husband — going to a poetry workshop in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. He, R, beside her on the clapped-out cab seat — he, R, will teach but she’s not in his group — she’s chosen Rosmarie Waldrop — she could have chosen R — she did not. She flung out words in hot ugly gushes. How to speak so it wasn’t puke. Why do women always write about personal things, G the poet at the college asked her, agreeing with his friend that the only woman in Canada who could write was Alice Munro though no one could write like V. S. Naipaul, why don’t they write about what’s out there: objective reality?

How to talk so it wasn’t puke. How to converse in this cab with he, R, who talked of Dante, he who claimed Dante as his companion. How even to be in this cab with the hugeness of his poetry, his French and Latin, his panama hat, linen jacket, and chestnut woven shoes. Oh, speak to him for god’s sake. An hour till they board, an hour for her to be silent rude stone. Speak. She’s reading Gender Trouble, words like hegemony, ontological, totalized winging around her head spewing out hunches, glimpses that blow away again like papers in a wind, as though she suddenly had to give a lecture in French at the Sorbonne, having only grade-eight French. Hadn’t it been decided there was no objective reality? And must she, in order not to write puke, prostrate herself before some Olympian Dante?

Like who? Virginia Woolf? Gertrude Stein? Oh, she loathed that she loathed herself. How to simply be visible as he was, to speak visibly. She ventures her worries about G and his friend. Oh, he’s just stirring the pot, R tells her. The cab weaves through hot traffic, its dollar sign clicks higher. G’s a very good poet, R says. So this is the way it’s done — always speak well of other poets, even when they’ve said terrible things to you in the past, as G had when they were both young, calling he whose companion was Dante a “womanish soufflé maker.”

She — I — float like figures in a Chinese character, cat’s whiskers drifting off their cat, lingering sur l’air. She forgets I, I forgets She in character’s galaxy. I public / I publish, does I know She pubic hiding the mark of her? Does She know I’s suit of gestures inside out? She caught in the rabble, in language’s heroism — the erect I displays her. Visible to some, invisible to many. She imagines visibility — then I forgets her TV screen and marches out in dark to darkness.

To be visible, stand for something — water, women, workers. Claim your She sealed in I’s package. Or cut a figure, repeating asshole or road-squashed raccoon guts twenty times in your poem. Be pleasing. Who or what?

Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. The packed lobby of the Boulder theatre, crazy with girls in Cleopatra hair, cigarettes pointing straight down from their lips, R and D drinking martinis at the bar, before the star reading. Burrito boys fold bundles of rice, beans, cheese, handing them out in red plastic baskets. Hers dripping salsa, cream, shrimp, and onions toward the only chair at a table where Allen Ginsberg…! Of course no one’s sitting there, grumpily shuffling his reading papers. She/I takes chair, bites into face-smearing guacamole — people rush up to him — hug him — joke with him — remember him in New York. Her fingers oozing salsa and cheese. Then someone tells her David Bromige can’t make it. He’s hit a wall. Maybe it’s his diabetes, She/I replies. Allen looks at her — David has diabetes?! All his life, she offers, the injection kind. Allen has diabetes, too, he tells her. Allen has cured his by eating brown rice and vegetables. He must talk to David.

Visibility — it would be like fluency in a language — she would have substance as a word in a dictionary. She could not be erased — it would flow out of her — not this conviction of nothinghood. Homework for Rosmarie Waldrop: write using counting or reduction, a set number of syllables, a letter avoided. He/R with one hundred students in the big white tent speaks of the reparable — a quality among things — we swimming among holograms of words — She/I flowing his words into her ear, down her arm, through her fingers in tattered thoughts across her notebook — the irreparable a position in relation to what surrounds. The poetics of relations now reversed — R’s phrase inscrutable as Chinese characters, her pen flying on to the next. The reparable, a making ready, a preparing, not making amends for a wrong but preparing in consciousness, in poesis, in feeling. Irreparable She/I lost in Chinese R. Human plus cosmic. R’s whatever.

Exercise for workshop: she tries to write Psalm 23 in lines of the same syntax and syllables using different words beginning with the same letters. Impossible. Then six verses with the same number of words as each psalm verse using only words containing a certain letter. Another failure. Years later she will transform nineteen of R’s poems into lines of the same stress pattern and syllable count.

In which dictionary would She/I be a word? Would it be R’s? Or the Cleopatra girls’? The bookstore man doesn’t have Rosmarie Waldrop. There’s a big conference here tonight with someone she’s never heard of. Who’s that? He’s into men’s stuff, he said, handing her the book. She/I opens it at random, reads: “woman is the gateway to judgment and hell.” Repeats it to bookstore man, adding, I don’t think this is really me. It doesn’t say that, he says, that’s not what it’s about. Someone else asks for Rosmarie’s books — he really likes The Reproduction of Profiles. Yeah, bookstore man says, the lady poets are really into psychobabble. She/I wonders, Is this R’s idea of stirring the pot? Anger and despair to write with, bumping hunks of stewed meat into soggy carrots.

Eating portobello mushrooms in the Full Moon Cafe, Rosmarie tells She/I her next book explores dialogues that confuse male and female. She doesn’t think Irigaray is right about a feminine language — what good does it do to call open form feminine?

She/I eats beans and sweet corn pancakes at the Harvest restaurant with Norma Cole. What to do about G’s objective reality? But we are writing about reality, Norma says, one that no one’s noticed. Don’t be polite. Write what embarrasses you, drive it against constraint. She/I must get a bucket of magnetic letters. Post them one at a time. What does each mean to I/She? What does I/She want from it? From them? She/I must make ten copies of first and last pages of a favourite book, black out the words she doesn’t want; each day do it again — black out words — which ones does I/She really want?

She/I sits on the floor of the crowded lounge for sudden unplanned talk — Barbara Guest, her book Seeking Air. The poet almost falls before reaching her chair. She doesn’t know how to start. What do the students want? They don’t know either. We have a lot of trouble finding ourselves in the world, she says, and that is what poetry’s about. Context is not an exterior — it’s an emergence, even an emergency.

Six years later She/I translates poems by R. Each of her poems copies the exact number of syllables on each line of his, each of her lines copies the exact stress pattern of each of his. Only the words differ. Ten years later, She/I uncovers R’s poem “Translator: A Tale” enfolding a story of Attis, his brain stung by Cybele, slicing off cock and balls, manhood slipping out of him with the blood that will be violets, he becoming she to beat her drum with soft white fingers.

Silence

The guide — wearing a ponytail, blue blazer, and plaid skirt — checks our names on her clipboard, then looks up at our host, who smiles broadly, saying how pleased he is to show us his gallery, as we sign waivers absolving it of liability. A couple in leather jackets, she in stiletto heels and silver-sequined blouse, he flashing Navajo bracelets and a row of earrings, joke with him, while a group of Japanese tourists — young men — one with orange hair — swirl past a woman in brown tweed standing back as though not wanting anyone to notice: Alice Toklas, the way she stood just behind Gertrude on the steps of an airplane or while feeding pigeons in St. Mark’s Square.

We must only go where the guide/guard tells us, beginning with A Couple (of Swings) by Mona Hatoum. Beautifully crafted with stainless steel chains and glass seats, the guide notes. Alice stands beside them, two hands holding the strap of her reticule in front of her ankle-length skirt. The Japanese men crowd in, pointing at the glass and jousting with Japanese words, one of them holding his hands six inches apart: the swings are too close. Alice pays no heed. The chains of the swings hang from a distant white ceiling. Some people have noticed, the guide states, that the swings would bump into each other if you swung them.

In her trim brown hat, brown velvet gloves, and slight moustache, Alice gazes at the floor through the glass seats of the swings, as though remembering piano lessons from her grandmother who learned to play from the father of Clara Schumann; remembering prep for university with Sarah Hamlin who brought Pandita Ramabei to lecture against the sacrifice of Hindu wives on the funeral pyres of their husbands; remembering getting her music degree, training with Otto Bendix who’d been taught by Liszt — the wood grain in the floorboards swirling through the seats of the swings like music under her fingers playing Schumann’s variations in concert with Elizabeth, her dear Lilyana. Until Otto Bendix died.

The guide ushers us to upper echelons past windows to our host’s agents working at their computers. In 1912, she says, Yip Sang built a second block on the other side of Market Alley, devoting three floors to his warehouse and giving one floor to each of his three wives. We enter a passage like an Italian covered bridge that connects the buildings. The wives were probably glad, I find out later, that they did not have to walk far on their golden lotus feet. Is it true there was an opium factory, asks one of the Japanese. You could smell it in the Market Alley shops, our guide tells them. She points to a brick facade welded to a concrete wall, its grey mass sealing the windows of the old building like the eyes of ancient sculptures that no longer show the irises of Athena or Venus.

Leather-and-earrings mocks a soccer kick at a car-sized model of Earth with orange neon continents while Alice slips down a narrow passage running between the old brick face and the crisp white Gyproc enclosing it, Alice like a domino of bread in a two-storey toaster, thinking, I imagine, of Allan Stein whom she wrote has made it evident that he will obstruct wherever he can, or thinking even of the rents that were being raised according to a new law filled with coefficients and articles and titles. Leather-and-stilettos clicks over to a crib made entirely of glass tubing — a piece called Silence. She links arms with her companion and pulls him toward the crib chatting about an offer on a three-bedroom on False Creek. Alice slides sideways under a tall thin slice of air between the walls till she emerges in the next room. You are still here, says the mirror in front of her.

Guide/guard. I think of Virgil or dogs for the blind or the metal bar on a power saw. She tells us nothing about Mona Hatoum or why she made these works. Perhaps she’s thinking about her projects at art school — clay-splattered wheels, or charcoaled fingers drawing a nude. Or perhaps she’s studying economics or taking a degree in tourism, working part-time for our host while learning to lead sightseeing groups and run hotels and ski resorts.

The young Japanese men enter like a chorus, this perhaps their grand tour of the Occident, to stand in front of Quarters — steel bunks stacked five high, reminding me of paper trays on office desks except, like the crib, each bed offers only air for mattress. Orange hair lies down next to the metal frame, which barely fits him head to heel. The others look to the guide, pull up their friend, brush him off — shooting rapid volleys of Japanese and laughing. Alice meanwhile stops at a wire fence in front of a kitchen table. Roll cream-puff dough into fingers, she wrote to Mrs. Kiddie. Cook spinach in practically no water. Knives shouldn’t touch it any more than they should salad. She wrote of jellied eggs, a hen quite presentable in estragon sauce, herself (one hearty meal a day), tomorrow’s fruitcake, a wreath of large spoonfuls beaten high in the air, artichoke omelette, cockscombs — excellent — not red because the thin outer skin is removed (like on feet) — occasionally I have the head minus tongue and eyes.

Metal colanders, pots, whisks, and openers litter the kitchen table — an iron meat grinder clamped to its edge — wires linking the tools to electric lamps, wires linked to metal tubing of table and chairs, wires running from metal coat hangers on a metal rack, wires from the sewing machine, wires from a metal bed frame. The room hums and buzzes with electricity.

Recipes are symptomatic, Alice wrote to Harold Knapik. The snails are plentiful and excellent. But now the guide takes us to the oldest schoolroom in the city, built by Yip Sang for his twenty-three children, its blackboards and tongue-and-groove wainscoting just as he left it, our host explaining, except for its new green paint, since Yip means green leaf. We crowd against the scarred blackboards, the leather couple holding hands and brushing chalk dust from their sleeves, next to the chorus of simmering Japanese, and Alice, who preferred not to sell one of the paintings though her flat was only 12 degrees. Alice of the averted gaze, thinking of Lilyana, Isabel, Louise, Carl, and Fania or the Kiddies and winter that must be arranged not for but against. Yip Sang’s Chinese characters painted on the blackboard, calling for happiness and celebration.

Chow Lung

for Ethel Wilson

Come outside. We want to take a picture. He tells them he will change. No no. Just as you are. He swishes another dish, wipes it, then another and another. Doctor beckons. He slings the dishtowel and lights a cigarette. A photograph just as he is in cook’s coat and soiled apron. Doctor stands him in the middle of a clearing behind the cabin. Missus offers him an ashtray. No, he will keep the cigarette. Just as I am. Missus looks at Doctor. Doctor peers into his camera on its three legs. Not Doctor who wants the picture. It’s Missus. Asking him, Did he go to Shanghai Alley last night, did he play fan-tan? Where did he get his silk brocade jacket? Which now they do not let him wear so he could look like more than a nobody cook in their picture. Could look like a proper man. Could walk like other men the streets of Gold Mountain. Could buy things, sell things, smoke and talk like other men. No no, the light’s too low here. Doctor moves him to a sunny patch, moves the three-legged camera, squints into it, waves him toward the trees. Squints into the box, fiddles with the lens. Missus smiles at him. Tells him to smile for the camera, say cheese. He takes a drag of the cigarette cupped in his hand.

Even if they give him a copy of this picture, he will not send it to his wife in Beijing — Mo-li, his jasmine flower, who can’t come here. No more Chinese, the government says, even if he pays $500. Yellow peril, the newspaper says.

Chow Lung doesn’t look at the camera. Doesn’t smile. Lets the camera photograph smears on his apron. He looks up at the trees — huge, heavy branches loom over the cabin, throw dark damp everywhere. Why don’t they cut them down, let in sun, grow apples, pears, plums? Missus looks at him, like she does with her notebook, writing him down. Writing down Shanghai Alley. He’s seen her there. Evenings, sitting in the car, bent over her notebook, while Doctor takes his black bag to someone sick. Chow Lung striding past the car in his good jacket, daring her to see him on the way to mah-jong. Doctor clicks the camera, writing Chow Lung in its black box. He picks up his doctor bag, kisses Missus goodbye, walks down the road to the next boat to Vancouver. Not back till tomorrow.

Missus in her chair with her notebook, smiling now that Doctor’s mother has gone to live with Doctor’s sister. Writing, writing, writing. Writes about him, Chow Lung. She calls him Yow. Stories about him for the New Statesman. People will read about him all around the world, not like in Vancouver’s yellow-peril newspaper. Why does she make him into Yow the cook when she could make him a doctor or a businessman like Yip Sang, with his tall building and three wives? Instead she makes him into Yow, who steals and goes to prison. He, Chow Lung, does not steal. Back at his dishes in the lean-to kitchen behind the cabin, clatter and bang so she hears it on the front veranda. Only a wood stove here, no electricity like in town — wood and kindling to chop, fire to watch, oven always too hot. He does not steal, but people everywhere will read about him, just the same. He goes out for more wood, sits on the chopping block, smokes a cigarette. Just him and Missus tonight. He will cook rice and Chinese vegetables like she asked. After dinner, what? Trees, trees, trees, an island of trees, except the hotel at Snug Cove, three miles away. Sit on the dock, then; look at the water between him and Vancouver. Even more water between him and Mo-li and his baby boy. Now sixteen, never seen. Mo-li, if I come to you, they will not let me back in Gold Mountain.

Missus stooping over her notebook — she will turn crooked like a walking stick — only see the ground. Not good for a lady. Not good for a lady to spit either — Missus spits on the iron — he catches her, he tells her. She promises. Then she does it again. She takes the iron into the lounge, he catches her. She takes it into her bedroom, he catches her. Even the bathroom, he catches her. A game. A joke. Like when he is Yow in her story on this same island: he serves Grandmother, Aunt Topaz, Rachel, and Rose their breakfast on the veranda. Look, a snake out on the grass, they shriek, don’t touch; it will bite. He dangles the snake near the table, tells them he’ll put it in the stew for dinner. Oh, don’t, please don’t, they beg him.

Missus looks at him. When a woman looks at you like that, she wants something. Why does she make Yow steal silk stockings for a white waitress, till he goes to prison? He takes off his cook’s apron and coat, puts on his high-collared black silk jacket. If she asks again what it’s like where he came from, he’ll tell her how big his family is, all his cousins and uncles, their businesses, their wives, all the sons they have. He grabs an old telephone book half torn up for lighting fires, slides through the cabin to the veranda — she’s bent over her notebook writing, writing, writing. Looks up. Chow Lung? He waves the telephone book in her face. My family’s bigger than all your Wilsons in here; we have banquets, parties, weddings — Peking duck, roast pork, hot pot, wontons. How come you don’t invite all your Wilsons to your big house in town?

The Real Fictional House of His Imagined Film Director

for Margerie Bonner Lowry and Malcolm Lowry

He was driven, volcanic, to sea, to write, to unfold a story of man and the sea. Man and the heavens. Man the voyager. He shipped out to Singapore, China, Siberia, Siam, the Philippines. Hired on as stoker on a tramp steamer to Archangel, jumped ship to find the Norwegian poet Grieg, who wrote The Ship Sails On. For years worked on a play, The Ship Sails On. Began In Ballast to the White Sea, a novel. Sailed to America for Conrad Aiken’s Blue Voyage, with only Moby-Dick in his trunk. Played his taropatch and planned to measure the height of Montserrat. Wrote Ultramarine, lost it, rewrote it in “Hotel Room in Chartres.” For years wrote Under the Volcano. For years The Voyage That Never Ends, Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid, La Mordida, Hear Us O Lord from Heaven.

He would rewrite the Odyssey, the Divine Comedy, every fellow passenger singing of the real in man’s imagined universe. Two thousand pages of it burned in a Dollarton shack on the west coast of Canada. His shack called Eridanus after a ship that sank there. Eridanus the celestial river pouring from Aquarius, marking the crazed path of Phaethon driving the sun. Eridanus, across the inlet from the _hell Oil refinery.

He sailed in a bauxite hauler to Haiti, then in a French cargo ship through the Panama to France. Rode buses and trains to another hotel, another bar, another French pension’s wrong instructions. A game en route with Margerie listing all breeds of ducks, rabbits, geese, turkeys, grasses and chickens: Yokohama bantams, silkies, silver Sebrights, rosecombs, Andalusians, mille fleurs, dark brahmas, bull-faced polishes.

She, too, a writer, a novelist, a Hollywood actress with sister Priscilla in Paying the Price, let him take her to Cuernavaca to live in the real fictional house of the imaginary Jacques Laruelle, Under the Volcano’s Parisian film director, friend of the alcoholic consul Firmin, lover of his wife, Enid, who in draft four real wife Margerie had renamed Priscilla making her an actress like herself and her sister whose real husband, 20th Century Fox studio doctor Bertie Woolfan (after an affair with director Preston Sturges), stabbed himself and bled to death in Priscilla’s arms, telling medics to do nothing, he was a doctor. Real wife Margerie subsequently renaming alcoholic consul’s Priscilla Yvonne and excising from Under the Volcano his morose daughter Yvonne, who brooded over college boyfriends and annual abortions. Margerie trampling imaginary wife Yvonne with a horse reared up in a flaming sky where Cassiopeia, Cepheus, the Lynx, the Ursas she’d taught him in real Dollarton whirled a carousel around Polaris. The Horse in the Sky, the Pegasus in her novel that her imagined Thurles, a black-browed ruffian maidservant, craved to ride. Real wife Margerie imagining Lady Althea disowned for marrying her groom, Lady dying penniless leaving her daughter Thurles to drunken stableman father, Dungarvan. Thurles hiring on as maid to white-columned mansion Felicity who teaches Orion, Sirius, and Procyon to her stubborn, determined maid. Imagined gentleman husband of imagined wife Felicity looks boyish and happy as he reads aloud the history he’s writing of Lenawee County, Michigan, in the fictional house where he lives with his wife, mother, two children, and servants. Real-life Margerie (living in shack on pittance from real husband’s disowning father) imagining Thurles, rescued by grandmother’s money, buying the stable, buying stormy black stallion, and keeping drunk father, Dungarvan, as groom. Imagining Thurles in a timeless instant when horse and rider leaped against the sky, then hurling her heroine under its trampling hooves.

In her next novel, real wife Margerie overdosed imagined wife Jocelyn on heroin (real husband hospitalized for alcohol poisoning and mental breakdown in Port-au-Prince, and then again in Paris). The imagined husband, an English playwright, who went through life like a ghost and nothing seemed real but the words that were going oh so slowly and with what agony, leaves wife in Swiss clinic, meets American Jocelyn travelling in Italy. Real-life Margerie’s playwright dreams of Ibsen, Strindberg, Eliot, Fry, he would rebirth the Joycean mélange, the grand poem-novel-play, right down through German expressionists, constructivists, Cocteau, the Russian use of spectacle. Real-life Margerie makes him play on the beach with imagined American typist, makes Rimini Castle loom over them, a smouldering volcano. Imagined playwright rants about Gradgrinds teaching undergradgrinds, playwright admiring O’Neill, Sartre, impressionism. Tells American typist the road to Provincetown is not through Cambridge [real husband’s alma mater] but through the sea, the honky tonks of New Orleans, the Singer Sewing Machine in Argentina. Every bar in town, she writes, playing Duke Ellington’s “St. James Infirmary” over and over. Margerie the real makes playwright the fiction proclaim jukeboxes the answer of Adam’s race to Heaven which, after the giants, had built the Tower of Babel and confused the tongues and minds of mortals so that even two people who spoke the same language could not understand one another. Then Margerie sends imagined husband playwright and imagined lover Jocelyn into Dante-fabled Castle of Malatesta where handsome Paolo Malatesta sneaks up through trap door of locked-up wife of lame brother and reads Lancelot and Guinevere. Their kiss costs them eternity whipped by the winds of hell.

He drove his crazed heavenly path on sky’s stage, then stuttered at noseless whores and mildewed ronyons. Haunted by Mother Gettle beaming from her tin of soup. Haunted by a stranger’s gawk in the street. Loathing the broken scrap-iron skyscrapers of Enochvilleport, its moldy stock exchanges, its beer parlours like emerald-lit public lavatories. The insatiable albatross of self. He sliced his arms. Banged his head between toilet bowl and wall. Jumped in a hotel pool and breathed water. He said he’d no gift for writing, said he was a plagiarist who wanted to be a poet but became a drunkard thanks to the bully boys and schoolmasters of English literature, the Gradgrinds who ruled the American literary scene. He called his publisher an office boy. Refused to speak at New York parties. Beeped out jazz tunes in a chair by himself. Stood in the white-tiled bathroom in his undershirt flinging bubbles of blood from nose to ceiling. He climbed trees in his pajamas. Shunned his old mentor and guardian, Conrad Aiken.

Margerie’s imagined playwright and American typist trade insults:

You just want to go back to your smug schoolmaster’s life, your plans for fame and success.

Your whole trip over here to track down a husband, isn’t it? I dare say you’ll trap some beetlebrain.

Flirting with servant girls — you’ve found your level.

What a bloody snob you are. She likes me fine. Then you come along and start playing Electra and Medea.

For a playwright, you don’t have much power of invective if that’s all you can think of.

The only remarkable thing about you is you’re not already twice divorced and a widow too, traveling with a beady-eyed Mom, having killed off one meal ticket, on the lookout at the corpse’s expense for another.

He invented himself as Ethan Llewelyn, a prosperous criminal lawyer. At an art film, imagined lawyer meets imagined wife Jacqueline, daughter of a Scottish feminist suicide and a white magician. (Real wife former starlet in Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings, The Sign of the Cross, and Cleopatra.) He imagines her not wanting anything obvious from life, unchanged by even their ghostly imagined son. Pictures her not a joiner, not a stitcher, not a social busybody. Real Dollarton shack burns down, like imagined one in Niagara, lawyer driven to leave his practice by his belief that his own fears are causing fires to spring up around him. They wander from place to place. Like the hero and heroine, Ethan reflects, of separate films playing in separate and adjoining cinemas.

He imagined Mr. and Mrs. Wilderness, Sigbjørn and Primrose. Or she was Astrid Storlesen or Lovey L’Hirondelle or Tansy Fairhaven. Sigbjørn Wilderness an unsuccessful Canadian composer or an American writer on a Guggenheim Fellowship in Rome or an alcoholic jazz musician. Real Margerie typing away La Mordida, where Sigbjørn and Primrose bus to a fiesta in Tecalpulco, Sigbjørn watching devil dancers he’d written into his Valley of the Shadow of Death (real-life Volcano), watching in this new novel, La Mordida, a sinister figure that real Margerie wrote in her real notebook shuffled round and round in tattered clothes carrying a little stuffed ferret.

With each new sight in their travels, Sigbjørn’s brain clamoured with so many poems — had he not gone mad with them — that he could see nothing at all except through Primrose’s eyes. Out of spite, he refuses to look at craggy windswept scenery, sees instead a scene from his Valley novel, then thinks, It was as if he [Sigbjørn, the novelist] were the character, being moved about for the purposes of some other novelist, and by him, in an unimaginable novel, not of this world [the world of an imagined novelist in a novel about himself encased in the unimaginable world and novel of the author Lowry]. Sigbjørn nevertheless lacking all interest in “character” and holding nobody more disastrously ill-equipped than the novelist to observe such a creature. Real people, Sigbjørn thought, are good or evil omens, menaces, warnings, emblems, investments, wastes of time. Least of all to be trusted were those novelists claiming to love their characters, since almost no one, Sigbjørn included, was capable of loving others. Sigbjørn mulls over suicide.

Real-life Mexican authorities hold them in Acapulco, make them come back day after day to Migración, demand Margerie go alone to Cuernavaca for papers and money, Margerie writing in her notebook on the night bus: cattle browsing, do they never sleep … suddenly a village of leaping torches … The fat Mexican keeps falling against me leaning on me in his sleep. A woman is vomiting, the noise & then the smell, the terrible roar of the motor. At Taxco we change drivers. The new one is large & fat & drunk. Where is your husband? He tries to take my hand and feel my knee while changing gears.

Returning to Acapulco after two days on buses, no sleep, she finds real husband hallucinating on drink that real Juan Fernando Márquez (Zapotec, Volcano’s imaginary Dr. Vigil) is scolding him for distressing real wife, she now saying, Get up, you drunken bastard. But they do not pay la mordida. Mexican authorities put them under arrest back in the real fictional house of Volcano’s imaginary Parisian film director where they receive letters from Jonathan Cape and Reynal & Hitchcock accepting real Volcano as is. The house is a mess, Margerie writes in notebook (real husband folding several such into his novel La Mordida): no clean linen, bugs in kitchen, floors filthy with cigarette stubs & dirty clothes covering all chairs… I am so tired so tired, tired, tired, I don’t care except for dull anger that flames & rages against Malcolm & hatred & disgust that I am dragged down myself in trying to drink with him & hatred of bottles & exhaustion & sense of my soul slipping away & my whole grip on life. Pencils in palm-size black notebook, a despair so utter that all I want is death. Why don’t I kill myself? Is it some vague lingering loyalty to Malcolm whom I must still love but now only hate & despise & fear — above all fear? Asks (in palm-size black notebook continued from blue) how many times have I said in passionate praying & meaning it, oh God give Malcolm his success, let his volcano be recognized for the great thing it is & I will die or be damned in payment — so perhaps that is what happens. Pencils in palm-size black notebook (someone has labelled La Mordida), the stabbing burning unendurable agony of seeing the one you love reduced to a shambling idiotic dirty animal.

After seizing their bond of five hundred pesos, Mexican authorities jail and deport them for Malcolm’s failure to pay a fine (overstaying his visa), and for his bad behaviour and drunken offences: borracho, borracho, borracho reads his file. They go back to British Columbia Dollarton / pretend Eridanus, which he dreamed of making a novel where Sigbjørn and Primrose, in the real fictional house of Volcano’s imaginary Parisian film director, would talk over their idyllic times living in a real shack on a real beach on the western edge of land known fictionally as North America.

Then Sigbjørn and Primrose set out again to France on a French cargo ship, the SS Diderot / real-life SS Brest, the name in itself ironic enough, down the west coast fictionally known as the United States, past haunted and forever-closed-to-him Mexico, and through the Panama, which becomes the title of a novella cast as the journal of Sigbjørn planning a novel in which a character named Martin Trumbaugh becomes enmeshed in the plot of a novel he has written in Mexico, as Sigbjørn has, tangling him in the real fictional house of his imagined film director, Sigbjørn’s novel being The Valley of the Shadow of Death, Sigbjørn being haunted by imagined Parisian film director Jacque Laruelle’s incessant “Frère Jacques” drumbeat in the ship’s engines. Martin’s thoughts invade the journal with memories of his little cabin by the sea, memories of a misty winter sunrise through its windows, the sun a tiny little sun framed in one of the panes like a miniature — unreal, white. Martin plans to call his novel Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid. Martin has been reading The Crack-Up and thinks his little cabin by the sea would have saved Fitzgerald.

In his cabin on SS Diderot, Sigbjørn Wilderness finds a newspaper clipping about an albatross shot by a John Firmin, undoubtedly a relative of Volcano’s alcoholic consul. Don’t shoot, the crew, said, reminding Firmin of the Ancient Mariner. But he’d killed the bird anyway because it was the only one of its kind.

Nothing could be more unlike real experience, Sigbjørn the character novelist comments, than the average novelist’s realistic portrait of a character. Despite this, he tells us, his imagined character Martin Trumbaugh had been on this planet for so long that he had almost tricked himself into believing he was a human being. Much of Martin’s suffering, says Sigbjørn, comes from the fact that he could not find his vision of the world in any books and the fact that he’d got into pretending that he thought like other people. Other characters. The real ones.

On the other hand, Sigbjørn records in his journal an excellent fellow on board the SS Diderot, a Mr. Charon, who, just like Consul Firmin in pretend novel Valley of the Shadow / real novel Volcano, says, as acting Norwegian consul, he has no country. Man not enmeshed by, but killed by his own book, muses Sigbjørn, whose journal now carries along its edges Coleridge’s glosses to the Ancient Mariner. The crew on SS Diderot capture an albatross but Old Charon won’t come look at it. All in all though, gentlemen, Sigbjørn records from a book on the canal, what I would like to say about the Panama Canal is that it is a work of genius — something like a novel — in fact just such a novel as I, Sigbjørn Wilderness might have written — indeed without knowing it am perhaps in the course of writing.

The SS Diderot (named for author of Jacques le fataliste) hits a storm so violent that character novelist Sigbjørn records the ship lurching and twisting in agony, wracked by clanks, rattles, whistles, thumps, and mad hammering, then jumping out of the water and shuddering from end to end, all the lifeboats smashed, no one at the wheel that spun wildly by itself, the rudder crippled, and gigantic seas, rising all above us as if we were in a volcano. Sleep impossible for being pitched from bunk, Sigbjørn can only cling to his desk for days distracting himself with comparisons of death to the rejection of a manuscript or the embarrassment his death would cause the skipper — character Martin imagined by imagined character novelist to find these thoughts idiotic attempts to short-circuit grief for Primrose.

Sigbjørn listens for six short and one long whistle, abandon ship, can’t tell what’s happening on deck at all, but absolutely nothing to be done about it. His character Martin tells him to put on your life jacket. This is a position all novelists find themselves in eventually. Sigbjørn’s imagined thoughts thrash through SOS signals, lines from “Frère Jacques,” and instructions to Go to your cabin, cover yourself warmly, put on your gill-netting of sauvetage.

Put your arms through the shoulder straps, Martin the character tells Sigbjørn the novelist, but he can’t. Nor can either of them put a life jacket on Primrose.

She’d seen it coming in Haiti, writing in the real Golden West palm-sized notebook of spiderwebs twenty feet high and scarlet poinsettias thirty feet across, writing how the sun thru the royal palms and the coconut palms makes their long blowing rustling stiff fronds glitter and sparkle like green patent leather, how the trumpette rattles its huge maple-like leaves, the banana trees flap, the mango, with its slender leaves like a willow but darker, richer green, and shaggy bark, flutters, how swifts and dragonflies and huge jet black bumblebees dart and flash… Ah how beautiful it is, how strange, she wrote, too easy, too perfect, the weather always the hot sun and cool breeze and people to pick up everything, do everything and how easy just to drink and let time and money slip away. Writing in golden flip-page reporter’s pocket notebook of M rising dramatically: my brother, I give you my shirt, to a refugee from Trujillo, likely to be killed by spies at any moment, everyone hushed as spy enters bar. Writing in real pencil, We drive to Le Rivier Froid thru the hot dark night, great palms and banana leaves starting out in the headlights, to stand on the bridge and look at the stars… suffering. Next day speechless gazing at blue sea, the rolling billows of whipped-cream clouds, birds like scattered bits of white paper, M carrying on about Voodoo, Baron Sandhi, the Lord of the Dead, demonical possession. Now at the river, she writes on faint blue lines in Golden West notebook, we dress behind a bush. I chased by a black pregnant goat step in its excrement. Good, says M, now you can go in the water and be purified. I am scratched and bitten, feet bleeding from the rocks. Friday awaken to amber and turquoise dawn but cannot face it, thoughts of what might have been. The market: people surging up, garbage in piles under foot, trying to buy cigarettes, haggling over centimes, the furious, gnarled face of the woman breaking into smiles as we have to cease haggling as the bus is leaving, horrible road, second and first gear, M’s exhausted swollen face and hand on mine from the seat behind. She writes of daturas and grass too emerald to be real, like the bright artificial grass in Easter baskets of childhood.

On the SS Diderot Sigbjørn the imagined novelist writes that his character Martin wanted above all things to be loyal to Primrose in life and even beyond life, loyal to her beyond death. Primrose, he would write in La Mordida, without whom he could see nothing. At least nothing out there. In Haiti, she’d seen it coming: the breakdown in Cassis — he tried to strangle her — and was confined to the American Hospital of Paris. In Rome he was again confined to a sanitarium, and tried again to strangle her. He spent months in Brook General and Atkinson Morley’s in London before his final attack on her, wielding the broken neck of a gin bottle she’d smashed trying to stop him from drinking, till she fled and he downed a bottle of sleeping pills.

Sigbjørn and Primrose Wilderness disappear from the manuscript of La Mordida carefully typed by Margerie, which she gave to the archive in 1986, two years before she died. Someone has made Sigbjørn and Primrose back into Malcolm and Margerie, each speaking in first person, as in a stage play, their dramatis personae announced as chapter titles, their voices reading from their notebooks. But Sigbjørn and Primrose lived on in October Ferry to Gabriola, where they were neighbours of the imagined reclusive once-successful criminal lawyer Ethan Llewellyn and his imagined wife Jacqueline: sometimes when Jacqueline felt like talking to Primrose they’d take his instrument down to the Wilderness’, who lived in a similar cabin in a similar bay about three quarters of a mile down the beach, and with Sigbjørn, who was an unsuccessful Canadian composer, but an excellent jazz pianist. They’d all have a jam session: singing the Blues à la Beiderbecke, the Mahogany Hall Stomp and heaven knows what. Or they’d play Mozart, after a fashion.

Moccasin Box

If I, No Reply, write of Christine Stewart,

inside I lives the now Christine next to long-ago Christine who cut pens from goose quills, the Christine who wrote, The servant who receives fewer gifts from her lord is less obliged in his service, the Christine of Pizan, who built a city for the giftless. Bridges and rivers of Christines enclose I. Crossroads of Christines play I. A scriptorium writes I among riverbanks, ancestors, Christine villages, Christine tribes, as deserts and wars of I. The I is nothing. Can never be nothing. I and Christine run through lanes, alleys, arcades, shops, bars, offices, cemeteries. We intersect in Cul de Sac Cafe. We despise its twisted stairs to Pink and Sticky but own them anyway: A pronoun cannot but witness its world. The doorman poses like the exterior of an acoustic muscle. We have no money. We back out through our cloth music as in beat and grief of an unlivable category. In room after room we find men, women, and dogs sleeping. Space does not go on forever, she tells I, It crushes. It curves the domain in its foreclosure. Finally I and Christine jump roof to roof like terraced rice fields to a regulatory nowhere. Watch out for the doorman, she warns, he’s everywhere: an unthinkable distance that folds you up like a tight square.

We write plays and perform them in the street. I plays she and she plays doorman. We have no money. To make nothing. To become nothing, she tells me, I became I. We squat in Other People’s Houses while they work and shop. We cannot rest; their I-beds poke into us. We run to the not-town. I is flooded. I is rapt, she says, and usually chained to the Human. Throw these categories in that ditch.

We must be mute again, she says. Not like fields and trees but in a giant muteness, a huge forgetting of tiny chattering categories. We must flood and drown. We’ll outnumber. We’ll dump the churches, the lording of property and marriage. We’ll shit where we want and our shit’ll blossom the soil. We’ll roam with beasts and fuck whoever, whenever, wherever. Our babies’ll grow huge and strong playing in their volcanoes of shit and mud. We giants’ll be exuberant and solitary and generous. We’ll roam the whole Now. Lightning sky-clap will wrench our muteness, our stumble and stutter, to avalanche of words. Wrench us to song-grapple.

Here we come to Underbridge, Christine continues, the unwhere of the regulatory nowhere, the unpromise of the right-direction automobile. Here, in Between, we radiate and compose ourselves as nextness in a vast dense musicality of other dreaming unpromises. Ravens, coyotes, homeless, Big Gulp, toxins, free doom — we read unminded. Quilt under bridge. Seven men under bridge. Broken CD, Metro News under bridge. Shame, Cold, Boredom — language and languish under bridge where I and Christine build cities for the giftless.

Moccasin Box

for Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake

Drive north on any of Vancouver’s main streets, and the forested hulks of Grouse and Seymour Mountains lunge up a wall as your road disappears over a cliff edge into the inlet. In East Van the hulks dwarf false-fronted wooden stores reminiscent of frontier trading posts, laced together by electrical wires on leaning cedar poles. In the West End they loom over tower blocks and corporate skyscrapers, reminding the busy city, in its antlike toings and froings, of all it is not and can never be. All the more so because even the immense, implacable blue-green hulks are superseded by their crown, a pair of snow-covered peaks that Vancouverites fondly call the Lions.

With the cables of its Lions Gate Bridge, swooping from pylon to pylon, Vancouver ties itself to the Lions’ immensity.

Logs of wood and stumps of trees innumerable, Captain George Vancouver wrote in 1792, staring at driftwood on the delta of the Stó:lō, the river at the foot of these mountains, which did not lead him to the Northwest Passage. Trees, trees, and more trees on the wall of peaks blocking his way. Up the coast in the traditional lands of the Skwxwú7mesh, he found a stupendous snowy barrier lurching from sea to clouds and spewing torrents through its rugged chasms. He logged the weather: dark, gloomy, blowing a southerly gale, which greatly added to the dreary prospect of the country. Desolation Sound he called some of the coast: forlorn gloomy forests pervaded by an awful silence, empty of birds and animals.

Trees haunt the city: the old giants whose feet spanned a cart and horses — their stumps slimy with moss — still lurk in the salal and ferns of Stanley Park or up the slopes of Grouse Mountain in the Capilano Canyon, where they feed the roots of new giants several arm spans in girth. Their distant tops creak and moan in the wind. Myriad spiny branchlets of fir and long, drooping fronds of cedar catch shafts of sunlight and rake tatters of fog from the ocean. The air drips. Trunks, limbs, moss soak up the grind of city planes and cranes, holding in their cavernous understory the rush and trickle of the Capilano River, the peep of a nuthatch, the snap of a falling branch, and, high above, the combing of wind, the chortle of a raven.

Up above, high — sagalie, in the Chinook jargon Pauline Johnson used with Chief Joe Capilano, recording his stories of the Skwxwú7mesh people and the Sagalie Tyee. I imagine Johnson searching like I was for stories, not from invaders, but from here, stories from the first people of the immense mountains, the giant trees, the talking ravens.

The snow-covered Lions are not lions to the Skwx-wú7mesh people; they are the Twin Sisters who were lifted to the mountaintops by the Sagalie Tyee. It was they, so Johnson records in her Legends from Chief Joe Capilano, who brought the Great Peace between the Skwxwú7mesh and the Haida by the simple act of inviting them to a feast. Another legend tells how the Sagalie Tyee sent his four giants to challenge a swimmer, claiming they would turn him to a fish, a tree, a stone if he did not give way to their canoe.

Back and forth and right toward the giants’ canoe he swam so his child would have a clean life. The Sagalie Tyee made him Sl’kheylish (standing-up-man rock) to remind everyone: defy everything for the future of your child.

Thanks to the Sagalie Tyee, Shak-shak the hoarder suddenly found himself a two-headed serpent, one of his mouths biting the poor and one mouth biting his heart. He who pierces the serpent’s heart will kill the disease of greed — so said the Sagalie Tyee. A young man of sixteen remembered those words and brought down the monster.

A young woman could get help, too, from the Sagalie Tyee, if she wanted to know which suitor really cared for her. What if she were looking for other things? Like stories that had grown with the forests. Stories of women who dared, women who blazed trail? Women who spoke? Would the Sagalie Tyee come to her aid?

The front desk casually mentions a pair of Pauline Johnson’s moccasins held somewhere in the library, she’s not sure where. A Special Collections librarian says she’ll look into it and disappears to inner chambers. Some time later she returns with a large metal-cornered box. We have no provenance for these, she tells me, unfolding tissue paper around a pair of pale leather moccasins covered with beaded flowers and bands of woven grass, the soles smooth as the bottom of a foot. Their ankle-high cuffs flop over next to tangled delicate lacing. Lack of provenance meaning, I suppose, that someone could have found a pair of moccasins in Johnson’s possession when she died which actually belonged to someone else — her sister, say, or a friend — and mistakenly passed them off as Johnson’s, or even that someone claiming to be a friend of Johnson’s had given them to the library when in fact they had belonged to the friend’s grandmother and never been touched by Johnson. I try to convince myself of this, but I’ve opened a box I can’t close: I’m certain they are Johnson’s. She’s supposed to be wearing them in this photograph, the librarian explains. She retrieves from an envelope a photocopied picture of E. Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake in her Mohawk stage costume, which she made of buckskin, and we see her as through a window smoked up by a house fire, moccasins illegible.

In 1909 she retired from the stage at forty-eight to a two-bedroom Vancouver apartment three miles from Sl’kheylish, one of her favourite destinations in Stanley Park. Like everyone else she called it Siwash Rock, though siwash was an insulting term for an aboriginal person.

For twenty years she’d been Canada’s most famous author (known throughout the English-speaking world), constantly touring and living in hotels. Now her days turned around a small apartment on a treed street in a town clinging to the far edge of North America, a town barely keeping its own against wind and sea and the forested mountains looming in its face. Yet here she found something grander than ever: her Cathedral Trees. Every day, heedless of the rain or sea soaking her clothes, she would walk to Siwash Rock, and then to the nearby Cathedral Grove, one red cedar and six Douglas firs from the old-growth forest, people called the Seven Sisters.

To support herself without income from stage performances, Johnson wrote stories for Mother’s Magazine and Boys’ World, stories like “The Wolf Brothers,” “The Silver Craft of the Mohawks,” and “The Potlatch.” Her friend, Chief Capilano, whom she’d met at Buckingham Palace, came to visit, sitting in silence at the round oak table from her father’s house. After several visits he began to tell her stories she would retell as “Legends of the Capilanos.” Lionel Makovski of the Vancouver Daily Province began paying her seven dollars a piece to publish the stories in his weekly magazine, adding photographs to make them and Princess Tekahionwake his star attraction; elsewhere the paper had called the chief an agitator and blamed him for disputes and uprisings. Johnson then could not meet his deadlines; she cancelled appointments without notice; Chief Capilano died; and breast cancer spread into her right arm. Makovski himself became her writing hand as she dictated the stories from her couch.

An unsigned document in the moccasin box says that Makovski earned a lot of royalties from Johnson’s legends. He was a member of the trust that gathered them into a book to raise funds for her living and medical care. More than ten thousand copies were printed at that time, and the book remains in print. Johnson left Makovski the copyright to Legends following her death in 1913, as well as the moccasins she wore on her first trip to England, he perhaps then leaving them to the library.

She left her pens and the copyrights to Shagganappi and The Moccasin Maker to her manager and stage companion, Walter McRaye, who had started his career reciting Drummond’s habitant verses and who later did hilarious impersonations of celebrities. Dink, she nicknamed him. During their long journeys on boats and trains and stagecoaches, they invented together a family of travelling companions: “the boys” — four of them — who took their mattresses along and slept on the hat racks, and from there played tricks and commented on their friends. At Steinway Hall in London, the boys bought four tickets for Pauline and Dink. They amused themselves with a cat called Dave Dougherty, who slept in Johnson’s dressing bag; a bug called Felix Joggins, with his very trying wife, Jerusha; and a mongoose called Baraboo Montelius.

In 1915 the balance of the proceeds from Legends, after paying Johnson’s debts, was divided between McRaye and Johnson’s sister, Eva, who then divided her share between the cities of Brantford, Ontario (near Johnson’s ancestral home), and Vancouver, sending $225 to the World newspaper to spend on something of assistance to the arts or literary life of the city. Mr. Nelson, the manager at the World, was puzzled as to what to do, but at length hit on the idea of purchasing a Pauline Johnson room at the hospital which could be devoted to care of artists, actors, poets, newspaper people, and “others of allied interests who might be in hard circumstances (a not unusual condition in these occupations).” He was then “very much moved” by reading about the city’s 29th Battalion at the front, who were “lamentably short of machine guns where the enemy was well equipped with them.” The Vancouver boys seemed to be fighting with their bare fists. Why not buy a gun?

How very easy it is to rouse individuals around a sentimental cause. Only to suffer slow and miserable deaths or violent and brutal ones in the Great Ongoing Wars of humanity against humanity and humanity against the earth. Buoyed up by inner spirit or driven by drugged imaginations, people launch into their ventures with little idea of where they’ll lead. Or they launch in knowing all too well where it will end: their fate. Yet boundless and unpredictable beginnings save the world from its normal and natural ruin. Thus writes Hannah Arendt: in the fact of natality lies the root and faculty of action. We act, we speak, and each time make a beginning toward the possible, just as we entered the world from our mothers’ wombs.

The World launched a subscription. The money poured in. Children walked the thirteen miles from New Westminster to Vancouver and gave their carfare for the Pauline Johnson machine gun. By August 1915 the World had $1,000 (more than the annual wages of most working men), which it sent to Minister of Militia and Defence Sam Hughes. The manager of the World was delighted that Lt. Col. Tobin of the 29th Battalion would receive a gun for his “gallant corps.” Would Tobin see that the gun bore the name Tekahionwake? Tobin wrote that American munitions manufacturers could not deliver the gun before January 1916; the Russian and Canadian governments took the firm’s total output, but he hoped to obtain two guns before the battalion left for the front or certainly shortly afterward. He promised to engrave Tekahionwake on one and send a photo, but in December 1916 the battalion was still without its Tekahionwake. In December 1918, the manager of the World wrote to Tobin wondering whether “the Tekahionwake which we gave to the 29th” could be returned to the World? “We are all so proud of our British Columbian men,” he wrote, “that I am hoping the story of the war, from the British Columbia standpoint — and with special reference to the exploits of the BC units — will be collected and become a textbook in our schools.” In July 1920 the World regained possession of the gun, and showed it with a poster saying it was first fired at Kemmel Hill, Belgium. During a raid, it jammed and Corp. Snowden tore the red-hot gun apart, fixed the feed-wheel pin, reassembled the gun, and fired again in less than ninety seconds. At St. Eloi, the Tekahionwake was manned by Ptes. McGir, Owen, Bourke, Annandale, Cooke, Davidson, and Williams (all killed later). At Ypres, three tripods were shot from under her.

I lay out my scraps of research — the haunting trees, Johnson’s walks to Siwash Rock, the things she left in her will, her stories (from Skwxwú7mesh Chief Capilano) of the Sagalie Tyee, the strange spellings of words in the Skwxwú7mesh dictionary, the 7 to be sounded as a glottal stop like oh-oh, the xw sounded like whispered wh in what. Puzzling over how the Skwxwú7mesh language might talk about the Sagalie Tyee, I find wa lh7áy’nexw is a Skwxwú7mesh word for spirit. The dictionary gives no English pronunciation. I’m left to imagine what sounds I can. Kwelh7áy’nexw translates as spirit of the water. Spirit touches one and one goes numb: from the word tení7i7. To go on a spiritual quest for power: ts’iyíwen. Nexwslhich’álhxa is a spirit who cuts people’s throats, whereas ch’awtn is a spirit helper. Siw’ín’ is a spiritual power exercised through words, while sna7m is a spiritual power exercised through dancing and singing. I let the words figure my tongue. As though words were boxes, and, lifting their wriggling lids, I could find moccasins to slip on, become other than what I am: a taster of letters, a chaser of whiffs humming with threads to other alphabets, echoing glimpses beyond words, always a beyond — an end to a rainbow that flits away to a creak or a moan, a chortle, a rattle, a knocking heartbeat, gutwrench, the thousand bitmaps wired in my eyes from born-into wars owners ancestors conquerors cities. As though I could wear them like masks. Tree — Spirit — I tie with tongue taps, certain they exist somewhere with Forest Skwxwú7mesh Self Moccasin. Laces evaporate leaving foot tied to ear, mouth to armpit, eyes all knees and elbows adrift in my house of mirrors. Tap tap tap along the rhythms. Anyone there?

Approaching, in June 1792, the long tongue of land that separates Vancouver’s harbour to the north from its boating and beach playground to the south, Captain Vancouver met Chief Capilano’s ancestors, who, he wrote in his Journal of Discovery, “conducted themselves with the greatest decorum and civility,” and presented him with “several fish cooked and undressed.” They “shewed much understanding,” Vancouver thought, “in preferring iron to copper.” The welcoming party paddled alongside Vancouver’s ship

as it headed between Homulchesun on the north shore and Whoi Whoi on the south. Twice they assembled their canoes for ceremonial acts whose meaning remained “a profound secret” to Vancouver and his men. Afterward they showed even greater cordiality and respect to the pale-faced newcomers.

The secret was revealed by Qoitchetahl, secretary of the Skwxwú7mesh Indian Council in 1911, who told the city’s archivist his people believed “a calamity of some sort would befall them every seven years… Capt. Vancouver came in a seventh year… When strange men of strange appearance, white with their odd boats, arrived, the wise men said ‘this may be the fateful visitation’ and took steps to propitiate the all-powerful visitors” with the white eiderdown scattered at festival or potlatch houses. As Vancouver arrived, his people “threw in greeting before him clouds of snow-white feathers which rose, wafted in the air aimlessly about, then fell like flurries of snow to the water’s surface, and rested there like white rose petals scattered before a bride.” That painted icon Johnson chose not to be, preferring instead to hail the world from the stage with a “cry from an Indian wife” bidding her husband, go to war: “by birth we Indians own these lands, / Though starved, crushed, plundered.”

It’s not the immensity of Lions but the immensity of Twin Sisters that rules Vancouver’s antlike scurryings. The immensity of trees and the immensity of sisters. Pauline was passionate, spontaneous, and generous; her sister Eva was dutiful, frugal, and practical. They argued and wrangled all their lives about Pauline’s unseemly stage career, about her raffish friends, about her loans to finance recital tours, and about who was the better teller of Iroquois history. Right up until her death, they quarrelled about why she must be buried in a gloomy forest of incessant rain far away from her homeland. They even fought over whether you had to wear a raincoat in Vancouver: Eva said you did; Pauline said you didn’t.

The Seven Sisters in Stanley Park were Pauline’s daily haunt. “In all the world there is no cathedral whose marble or onyx columns can vie with those straight, clean, brown tree-boles that teem with the sap and blood of life,” Johnson wrote of her trees,

“no fresco that can rival the delicacy of lace-work they have festooned between you and the skies.” When she was too weak to walk she drove to the park in an open carriage. There must surely be some trace of them in the Stanley Park forest — women who dare, women who stand for all to see, and one woman especially, who wrote, “I love you, love you… love you as my life. / And buried in his back his scalping knife.”

With my sister I set out along the seawall from Third Beach, the west wind forcing us to double over like question marks. Fortunately the tide is out, leaving a good stretch of bare rocks between us and the crashing waves that have chucked piles of sand and seaweed along the pavement. We hug the edge of the forest seeking lee from the wind till we get to the steps up Ferguson Point bluff. Wind blowing away our conversation and chilling us right through our rain gear, we head across the grass to Johnson’s shrine and burial place not far from Sl’kheylish: standing-up-man rock. The shrine’s rough-hewn stones, enfolded in the shadowy roots of seventy-year-old forest, form a cairn holding a carved relief of Johnson’s face above a pool catching rainwater. And it now comes to me that we’ve made this pilgrimage in a kind of amazing cosmic rhythm during the same week in March that Johnson died one hundred years before.

Inside the forest, our coats no longer balloon with wind, our eyes adjust to the shadowed cavern that spreads in all directions a hundred feet below the canopy. Half a kilometre away, other walkers drift along other trails; at one point several young men stand in a ring smoking pot. They disappear and we are alone again with sword ferns and trickling streams, looking at stumps bigger than four-door sedans. Thick ridges of their growth, laced with moss, still surge up over our heads from the forest floor — the remains of virgin forest. Some have holes in their moss-encrusted bark, reminding me of a story from Skwxwú7mesh chief Khahtsahlano about men cutting down a tree to carve into a canoe. They found a mask inside the tree. He told how they chipped into leaning trunks from both sides, driving in wedges till the weight of the tree pulled the tree down. If in the forest you find trees with holes some way up, these are likely test holes to find out whether the tree was hollow or rotting inside. Or, my sister said, they could be holes for the springboard notches where loggers rammed in planks to stand on while they worked their two-manned saws.

That day we do not find Johnson’s Cathedral Trees. They are not where one website says, where Tatlow Walk crosses a “Bridal Path,” or where another suggests at Bridle Path and Lovers Walk, which in fact never meet. We are lost. The trees are lost.

I wake at night wondering why I’m searching for them. Am I prey to the Lure in Stanley Park, a rock hidden not far from the Seven Sisters, where Johnson tells us the Sagalie Tyee imprisoned an evil-eyed woman who brought disease and sorrow, a rock so powerful it will drive to insanity or death anyone who goes near it? So evil was the power from this rock that the Sagalie Tyee protected people from it by transforming the kindliest, most benevolent of them into a grove of trees to stand as a shield. What if the shield was gone?

A few days later we return with more accurate directions. Although the wind is not as fierce, it is far colder, coming straight from the heavy snow on the Twin Sisters. Even under the canopy we must keep moving to stay warm, pausing just long enough to marvel, in our strange, scientific innocentness of the rock’s lure, at a harlequin pattern of moss coating the trunk of an enormous fir, or the cedar stalks thick as cathedral pillars split from a single root, or wolf-sized burls thirty feet over our heads. Delicate pink-budded shrubs grow out of virgin forest stumps. Or giants grow on these stumps who began their seedling life on a high platform left by the loggers, and now half swallow the old stump in writhing octopus roots.

At last we find seven stumps of the Seven Sisters and a scarred and smudged Plexiglas plaque showing faded grey trunks. Park officials felled the trees in 1956, believing they were a hazard to humans.

Notes

Bàba: the Chinese character for father.

Bù: the Chinese character for cloth.

Chow Lung: Chow Lung worked as a cook for ten years for British Columbia novelist Ethel Wilson (Mary McAlpine, The Other Side of Silence).

Hăi: the Chinese character for sea.

If I, No Reply,: “the Christine who built a city for the giftless” refers to Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies. Italicized passages in the rest of the piece are from Pessoa’s July by Christine Stewart. “Underbridge” is Christine Stewart’s ongoing project that investigates life under Mill Creek Bridge in Edmonton. The piece is also thoroughly stained by The New Science of Giambattista Vico.

Māma: the Chinese character for mother.

Māo: the Chinese character for cat.

Mèimei: the Chinese character for younger sister.

Mén: the Chinese character for door.

Moccasin Box: Tekahionwake was Johnson’s Mohawk name. Stories about Captain Vancouver being greeted by Skwxwú7mesh people and about felling trees for canoes are from Conversations with Khahtsahlano, ed. Major Matthews, Vancouver’s first archivist. Annie Foster’s Mohawk Princess tells the history of the Tekahionwake machine gun.

Pictograms for Daphne Marlatt: the greyed-out character is Chinese for poetry. The others are root characters from L. Wieger, Chinese Characters: Their Origin, Etymology, History, Classification and Signification.

The Real Fictional House of His Imagined Film Director: a taropatch is a type of ukulele with six or eight strings in four courses. Margerie Bonner described the one played by her husband as “a long-range uke with more strings and frets” (Perle Epstein, “Swinging the Maelstrom,” Canadian Literature). Italicized material comes from published material by Malcolm Lowry and unpublished writings by Margerie Bonner Lowry. Unpublished writings by Margerie Lowry printed here by permission of SSL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. Copyright by Margerie Bonner Lowry.

Acknowledgements

Enormous thanks to Marion Farrant for her help in the final shaping of this book; her thoughtful suggestions were invaluable. Everyone at Talonbooks has been great to work with; many thanks to Kevin, Vicki, Greg, Ann-Marie, Les, Chloë, and Spencer. I want to also thank Daphne Marlatt and Rachel Blau DuPlessis for their feedback and editorial suggestions on an early version of “Moccasin Box.” And thanks too to Colin Browne for his feedback on “The Real Fictional House of His Imagined Film Director.”

I am very grateful too for the support I received from literary magazines who published earlier versions of pieces in this book, especially Canada & Beyond for publishing “Manifesto” (titled here “If I noiselessly”); Capilano University Editions for publishing “Silence” in One More Once: for Pierre Coupey’s 70th; Dusie for publishing “Cloth Music”; Eleven Eleven for publishing “One cannot”; Endless Buffet Press for publishing “Waiters” in the Banff Writers’ Studio 2011 anthology; Event magazine for publishing “How to Write”; filling Station for publishing “I and Christine” (titled here “If I, No Reply, Write of Christine Stewart,”); Golden Handcuffs Review for publishing “Mén,” “Bàba,” “Māma,” “Mèimei,” “Māo,” “Pictograms for Daphne Marlatt,” and [forthcoming 2015] “Moccasin Box”; Prism International for publishing “If I, Bartleby,” “A Natural History of the Throught,” “Out of the dark,” and “How to converse”; and The Capilano Review for publishing “Bù” and “Hăi.”

The photographs in “Moccasin Box” were sourced online and are in the public domain.

I would also like to thank UBC Rare Books and Special Collections and especially Ken Hildebrand for his invaluable help in researching the Lowry Archive.

Endless thanks to Peter, always my first and most loving reader.

About the Author

MEREDITH QUARTERMAIN is known across Canada for her depictions of places and their historical hauntings. Vancouver Walking (2005) won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize; Nightmarker (2008) was a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award; and Recipes from the Red Planet (2010), her book of flash fiction, was a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. In Rupert’s Land (2013) her first novel, a town girl helps a residential-school runaway in Alberta in the 1930s.

Quartermain was the 2012 writer-in-residence at the Vancouver Public Library, where she led workshops on songwriting and writing about neighbourhoods, and enjoyed consulting with many other writers from throughout the Lower Mainland. She now continues these activities as poetry mentor in the Writer’s Studio Program at Simon Fraser University.

Quartermain has taught English at the University of British Columbia and Capilano College and has led workshops at the Naropa University Summer Writing Program, the Kootenay School of Writing, and the Toronto New School of Writing. In 2002, she and her husband, Peter Quartermain, founded Nomados Literary Publishers, through which they’ve published more than forty books of poetry, fiction, memoir, and drama.

Content

Meredith Quartermain
I, Bartleby

Caravan

If I, Bartleby,

One cannot

A Natural History of the Throught

Out of the dark

How to converse

How to remember

Waiters —

Shyness,

We begin again

Orientalisme

If I prefer not,

Cloth Music

Mén

Bàba

Māma

Mèimei

Bù

Hăi

Māo

Pictograms for Daphne Marlatt

Scriptorium

If I, scrivener, print a letter,

Scriptorium

How to Write

If I noiselessly …

How to write

Silence

Chow Lung

The Real Fictional House of His Imagined Film Director

Moccasin Box

If I, No Reply, write of Christine Stewart,

Moccasin Box

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the Author