backs away.)
CURTAIN
W I N T E R B U L L E T I N
Toronto has been good to me
I relaxed on Tv
I attacked several dead horses
I spread rumours about myself
I reported a Talmudic quarrel
with the Montreal Jewish Community
I forged a death certificate
in case I had to disappear
I listened to a huckster
welcome me to the world
I slept behind my new sunglasses
I abandoned the care of my pimples
I dreamed that I needed nobody
I faced my trap
I withheld my opinion on matters
on which I had no opinion
I humoured the rare January weather
with a jaunty step for the sake of heroism
Not very carefully
I thought about the future
and how little I know about animals
The future seemed unnecessarily black and strong
as if it had received my casual mistakes
through a carbon sheet
W H Y D I D Y O U G I V E M Y N A M E
T O T H E P O L I C E ?
You recited the Code of Comparisons
in your mother's voice.
Again you were the blue-robed seminary girl
but these were not poplar trees and nuns
you walked between.
These were Laws.
Damn you for making this moment hopeless,
now, as a clerk in uniform fills
in my father's name.
You too must find the moment hopeless
in the Tennyson Hotel.
I know your stomach.
The brass bed bearing your suitcase
rumbles away like an automatic
promenading target in a shooting gallery:
you stand with your hands full
of a necklace you wanted to pack.
In detail you recall your rich dinner.
Grab that towel rack!
Doesn't the sink seem a fraud
with its hair-swirled pipes?
Doesn't the overhead bulb
seem burdened with mucus?
Things will be better at City Hall.
Now you must learn to read
newspapers without laughing.
No hysterical headline breakfasts.
Police be your Guard,
Telephone Book your Brotherhood.
Action! Action! Action!
Goodbye Citizen.
The clerk is talking to nobody.
Do you see how I have tiptoed
out of his brown file?
He lingers his uniform
like a cheated bargain hunter.
Answer me, please talk to me, he weeps,
say I'm not a doorman.
I plug the wires of your fear
(ah, this I was always meant to do)
into the lust-asylum universe:
raped by aimless old electricity
you stiffen over the steel books of your bed
like a fish
in a liquid air experiment.
Thus withers the Civil Triumph
(Laws rush in to corset the collapse)
for you are mistress to the Mayor,
he electrocuted in your frozen juices.
166 1
T H E M U S I C C R E P T B Y U S
I would like to remind
the management
that the drinks are watered
and the hat-check girl
has syphilis
and the band is composed
of former SS monsters
However since it is
New Year's Eve
and I have lip cancer
I will place my
paper hat on my
concussion and dance
D I S G U I S E S
I am sorry that the rich man must go
and his house become a hospital.
I loved his wine, his contemptuous servants,
his ten-year-old ceremonies.
I loved his car which he wore like a snail's shell
everywhere, and I loved his wife,
the hours she put into her skin,
the milk, the lust, the industries
that served her complexion.
I loved his son who looked British
but had American ambitions
and let the word aristocrat comfort him
like a reprieve while Kennedy reigned.
I loved the rich man: I hate to see
his season ticket for the Opera
fall into a pool for opera-lovers.
I am sorry that the old worker must go
who called me mister when I was twelve
and sir when I was twenty
who studied against me in obscure socialist
clubs which met in restaurants.
I loved the machine he knew like a wife's body.
I loved his wife who trained bankers
in an underground pantry
and never wasted her ambition in ceramics.
I loved his children who debate
and come first at McGill University.
Goodbye old gold-watch winner
all your complex loyalties
must now be borne by one-faced patriots.
168 1
Goodbye dope fiends of North Eastern Lunch
circa 1948, your spoons which were not
Swedish Stainless, were the same colour
as the hoarded clasps and hooks
of discarded soiled therapeutic corsets.
I loved your puns about snow
even if they lasted the full seven-month
Montreal winter. Go write your memoirs
for the Psychedelic Review.
Goodbye sex fiends of Beaver Pond
who dreamed of being jacked-off
by electric milking machines.
You had no Canada Council.
You had to open little boys
with a pen-knife.
I loved your statement to the press:
"I didn't think he'd mind."
Goodbye articulate monsters
Abbott and Costello have met Frankenstein.
I am sorry that the conspirators must go
the ones who scared me by showing me
a list of all the members of my family.
I loved the way they reserved judgement
about Genghis Khan. They loved me because
I told them their little beards
made them dead-ringers for Lenin.
The bombs went off in Westmount
and now they are ashamed
like a successful outspoken Schopenhauerian
whose room-mate has committed suicide.
Suddenly they are all making movies.
I have no one to buy coffee for.
I I6g
I embrace the changeless:
the committed men in public wards
oblivious as Hassidim
who believe that they are someone else.
Bravo! Abelard, viva! Rockefeller,
have these buns, Napoleon,
hurrah! betrayed Duchess.
Long live you chronic self-abusers!
you monotheists!
you familiars of the Absolute
sucking at circles!
You are all my comfort
as I turn to face the beehive
as I disgrace my style
as I coarsen my nature
as I invent jokes
as I pull up my garters
as I accept responsibility.
You comfort me
incorrigible betrayers of the self
as I salute fashion
and bring my mind
like a promiscuous air-hostess
handing out parachutes in a nose dive
bring my butchered mind
to bear upon the facts.
L O T
Give me back my house
Give me back my young wife
I shouted to the sunflower in my path
Give me back my scalpel
Give me back my mountain view
I said to the seeds along my path
Give me back my name
Give me back my childhood list
I whispered to the dust when the path gave out
Now sing
Now sing
sang
