where everything that happened
was tender and important
Martha talk to me
Toss out the fake Jap silence
Scream in my kitchen
logarithms laundry lists anything
Talk to me
My radio is falling to pieces
My betrayals are so fresh
they still come with explanations
100 1
Martha talk to me
What sordid parable
do you teach by sleeping
Talk to me
for my teacher is dying
The cars are parked
on both sides of the street
some facing north
some facing south
I draw no conclusions
Martha talk to me
I could burn my desk
when I think how perfect we are
you asleep me finishing
the last of the Saint Emilion
Talk to me gentle Martha
dreaming of percussions massacres
hair pinned to the ceiling
I'll keep your secret
Let's tell the milkman
we have decided
to marry our rooms
1 101
F O R M Y O L D L A Y T O N
His pain, unowned, he left
in paragraphs of love, hidden,
like a cat leaves shit
under stones, and he crept out in day,
clean, arrogant, swift, prepared
to hunt or sleep or starve.
The town saluted him with garbage
which he interpreted as praise
for his muscular grace. Orange peels,
cans, discarded guts rained like ticker-tape.
For a while he ruined their nights
by throwing his shadow in moon-full windows
as he spied on the peace of gentle folk.
Once he envied them. Now with a happy
screech he bounded from monument to monument
in their most consecrated plots, drunk
to know how close he lived to the breathless
in the ground, drunk to feel how much he loved
the snoring mates, the old, the children of the town.
Until at last, like Timon, tired
of human smell, resenting even
his own shoe-steps in the wilderness,
he chased animals, wore live snakes, weeds
for bracelets. When the sea
pulled back the tide like a blanket
he slept on stone cribs, heavy,
dreamless, the salt-bright atmosphere
like an automatic laboratory
building crystals in his hair.
102 1
F I N A L L Y I C A L L E D
Finally I called the people I didn't want to hear from
After the third ring I said
I'll let it ring five more times then what will I do
The telephone is a fine instrument
but I never learned to work it very well
Five more rings and I'll put the receiver down
I know where it goes I know that much
The telephone was black with silver rims
The booth was cozier than the drugstore
There were a lot of creams and scissors and tubes
I needed for my body
I was interested in many coughdrops
I believe the drugstore keeper hated
his telephone and people like me
who ask for change so politely
I decided to keep to the same street
and go into the fourth drugstore
and call them again
I 103
T H E O N L Y T O U R I S T I N H A V A N A
T U R N S H I S T H O U G H T S H O M E W A R D
Come, my brothers,
let us govern Canada,
let us find our serious heads,
let us dump asbestos on the White House,
let us make the French talk English,
not only here but everywhere,
let us torture the Senate individually
until they confess,
let us purge the New Party,
let us encourage the dark races
so they'll be lenient
when they take over,
let us make the esc talk English,
let us all lean in one direction
and float down
to the coast of Florida,
let us have tourism,
let us flirt with the enemy,
let us smelt pig-iron in our back yards,
let us sell snow
to under-developed nations,
(Is it true one of our national leaders
was a Roman Catholic?)
let us terrorize Alaska,
let us unite
Church and State,
let us not take it lying down,
let us have two Governor Generals
at the same time,
let us have another official language,
let us determine what it will be,
1 04 I
let us give a Canada Council Fellowship
to the most origiral suggestion,
let us teach sex in the home
to parents,
let us threaten to join the U.S.A.
and pull out at the last moment,
my brothers, come,
our serious heads are waiting for us somewhere
like Gladstone bags abandoned
after a coup d'etat,
let us put them on very quickly,
let us maintain a stony silence
on the St. Lawrence Seaway.
Havana
April 1961
I 105
M I L L E N N I U M
This could be my little
book about love
if I wrote it-
but my good demon said:
"Lay off documents! "
Everybody was watching me
burn my books-
! swung my liberty torch
happy as a gestapo brute;
the only thing I wanted to save
was a scar
a burn or two-
but my good demon said:
"Lay off documents!
The fire's not important!"
The pile was safely blazing.
I went home to take a bath.
I phoned my grandmother.
She is suffering from arthritis.
"Keep well," I said, "don't mind the pain."
"You neither," she said.
Hours later I wondered
did she mean
don't mind my pain
or don't mind her pain?
Whereupon my good demon said:
"Is that all you can do?"
Well was it?
Was it all I could do?
There was the old lady
eating alone, thinking about
Prince Albert, Flanders Field,
w6 1
Kishenev, her lingers too sore
for TV knobs;
but how could I get there?
The books were gone
my address lists-
My good demon said again:
"Lay off documents!
You know how to get there! "
And suddenly I did!
I remembered it from memory!
I found her
poring over the royal family tree,
"Grandma,"
I almost said,
� � [j]
"you've got it upside down-"
"Take a look," she said,
"it only goes to George V."
� fB]�
"That's far enough
you sweet old blood!"
11@ � �
"You're right! " she sang
�Wt�li.l�
and burned the
London Illustrated Souvenir
I did not understand
the day it was
till I looked outside
and saw a lire in every
window on the street
and crowds of humans
crazy to talk
and cats and dogs and birds
smiling at each other!
I 107
A L E X A
