I 1 19
I feel the disease raging in my blood. I expect my saliva
to be discoloured.
-Yes, Mary, real cashmere. Three hundred dollar suits.
The Boss has a wife to whom he must expose himself
every once in a while. She has her milkmen. The city is
orderly. There are white bottles standing in front of a
million doors. And there are Conventions. Multitudes of
bosses sharing the pleasures of exposure.
I shall go mad. They'll find me at the top of Mount Royal
impersonating Genghis Khan. Seized with laughter and pus.
-Very soft, Mary. That's what they pay for.
Fire would be best. Flames. Bright windows. Two cars exploding in each garage. But could I ever manage it. This way is slower. More heroic in a way. Less dramatic of course.
But I have an imagination.
1 20 1
H Y D R A 1 9 6 3
The stony path coiled around me
and bound me to the night.
A boat hunted the edge of the sea
under a hissing light.
Something soft involved a net
and bled around a spear.
The blunt death, the cumulus jet-
1 spoke to you, I thought you near!
Or was the night so black
that something died alone?
A man with a glistening back
beat the food against a stone.
1 1 2 1
A L L T H E R E I S T O K N O W
A B O U T A D O L P H E I C H M A N N
EYES:
Medium
HAIR:
Medium
WEIGHT:
Medium
HEIGHT:
Medium
DISTI NGUISHING FEATURES:
None
NUMBER OF FINGERS:
Ten
NUMBER OF TOES:
Ten
INTELLIGENCE:
Medium
What did you expect?
Talons?
Oversize incisors?
Green saliva?
Madness?
122 1
T H E N E W L E A D E R
When he learned that his father had the oven contract,
that the smoke above the city, the clouds as warm as skin,
were his father's manufacture, he was freed from love, his
emptiness was legalized.
Hygienic as a whip his heart drove out the alibis of devotion, free as a storm-severed bridge, useless and pure as drowned alarm clocks, he breathed deeply, gratefully in the
polluted atmosphere, and he announced: My father had
the oven contract, he loved my mother and built her houses
in the countryside.
When he learned his father had the oven contract he
climbed a hillock of eyeglasses, he stood on a drift of hair,
he hated with great abandon the king cripples and their
mothers, the husbands and wives, the familiar sleep, the
decent burdens.
Dancing down Ste Catherine Street he performed great
surgery on a hotel of sleepers. The windows leaked like a
broken meat freezer. His hatred blazed white on the salted
driveways. He missed nobody but he was happy he'd taken
one hunded and fifty women in moonlight back in ancient
history.
He was drunk at last, drunk at last, after years of threading history's crushing daisy-chain with beauty after beauty.
His father had raised the thigh-shaped clouds which smelled
of salesmen, gipsies and violinists. With the certainty and
genital pleasure of revelation he knew, he could not doubt,
his father was the one who had the oven contract.
Drunk at last, he hugged himself, his stomach clean, cold
and drunk, the sky clean but only for him, free to shiver,
free to hate, free to begin.
I 123
F O R E . J . P .
I once believed a single line
in a Chinese poem could change
forever how blossoms fell
and that the moon itself climbed on
the grief of concise weeping men
to journey over cups of wine
I thought invasions were begun for uows
to pick at a skeleton
dynasties sown and spent
to serve the language of a line lament
I thought governors ended their lives
as sweetly drunken monks
telling time by rain and candles
instructed by an insect's pilgrimage
across the page-all this
so one might send an exile's perfect letter
to an ancient home-town friend
I chose a lonely country
broke from love
scorned the fraternity of war
I polished my tongue against the pumice moon
floated my soul in cherry wine
a perfumed barge for Lords of Memory
to languish on to drink to whisper out
their store of strength
as if beyond the mist along the shore
their girls their power still obeyed
like clocks wound for a thousand years
I waited until my tongue was sore
1 24 I
Brown petals wind like lire around my poems
I aimed them at the stars but
like rainbows they were bent
before they sawed the world in half
Who can trace the canyoned paths
cattle have carved out of time
wandering from meadowlands to feasts
Layer after layer of autumn leaves
are swept away
Something forgets us perfectly
I 1 25
A M I G R A T I N G D I A L O G U E
He was wearing a black moustache and leather hair.
We talked about the gipsies.
Don't bite your nails, I told him.
Don't eat carpets.
Be careful of the
