AS EARLY AS 1807, WILLIAM WORDSWORTH LAMENTED, “The world is too much with us.” Now it is always with us, in its richness and calamity; we can’t get away from it; frequently overwhelmed by sheer superabundance, we can feel paradoxically diminished, cut loose, cut off. Read on…
On stilts in the metro of a Friday
morning, he plays to no one but the station’s
dally: the piper draws us out.
We scatter asunder our cloaks, our half
hearted aubades, and give over our
mourning to play with the station’s
indoor birds, blurs of yellow and red
scattered asunder. He wields the half-cloaked
promise of foil balloons, their silver sides
winking light: the piper draws us on.
The tune he plays is not yet invented.
A heart’s murmur, it doesn’t offer
the name of this mountain,
nor does it pledge return in silver-sided balloons
drawn by birds of red, yellow.
We have chiselled ourselves,
with grief no one wanted,
like fingernails or glaciers over
this mountain we called nameless.
We gnashed our way across jealousy,
as if we could claim birds, claim red,
claim yellow. And the piper brings us out
from the mountain he scattered us under.
With his fingers of silver he cracks
the rock where the light gets in and we follow
on stilts from the metro the Friday
on the eve of return to Hamelin.
-- a poem I very much liked in Katia Grubisic’s What if red ran out. Part of the reason may be very personal: I, and many Montrealers, have seen this man who, dressed in rainbow colours and standing on tall stilts (and wearing extra-long flowing pants to cover those stilts, and maintain a wondrous illusion), played the flute in the Metro, silver balloons floating in the air beside him. What a beautiful evocation of this memory! (Why didn’t I write a poem about him???) Notice the pantoum-like repetition of "birds", “yellow and red”, “scattered asunder/under”, variations of "silver" and “silver-sided”, “stilts”, “metro”, "mountain", "draws us out" , all interlaced in a soothing musical fugue.
This is very much a Montreal poem – Montreal, like Hamelin, has its mountain (see here to read up on the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the legend which, of course, very much informs this poem), and that man epitomizes a certain Montreal verve and style (one need only think also of Cirque du Soleil), shared perhaps only with Quebec City and Paris.
If I have any criticism, it’s that the writer dwells on the “we” too long. If I were to revise this poem, I would possibly strike out
We gnashed our way across jealousy, etc.
… and maybe work in the reiteration of colourful birds somehow else. The reasons? She already refers to "giving over our mourning" to the piper; I'm not sure the jealousy she speaks of applies; besides, I want to go back immediately to the flute man on stilts! Readers of this blog might know how allergic I am to this indefinite "we" – and here, too, as so often happens in that person, the writer pontificates just a bit too much.
Be that as it may, it’s still a remarkable poem.
I wonder where that man is now? I never see him anymore. I also don’t take the Metro nearly as much as I used to. In any case, here he is, in this poem.
NB, this is supplementary material to a review of Katia Grubisic’s What if red ran out and David O’Meara’s Noble Gas, Penny Black, soon to be posted in The Rover. My compliments to Katia Grubisic and to Goose Lane Editions.
Last Friday I was back at Paragraphe for another launch -- of Katia Grubisic's first poetry collection, What if the red ran out, and Naomi K. Lewis's first novel, Cricket in a Fist, both published by Goose Lane Editions. Grubisic's poetry is concentrated, steel-trap intelligent, lively and cold; I picked up a copy and will eventually, I think, read it from cover to cover. Lewis's novel simply didn't draw me in -- I felt put off by some clunky phrasing and couldn't get interested in the antics of her hastily summarized cast of characters. Consider that, though, a lazy review. I was really there to hear Katia, whose writing I head read in CV2 and admired, and who I had first met in Edmonton, although we live, like, one street away from each other in Mile End.
Interesting it was to go to the same venue two nights in a row. The previous evening, I arrived ten minutes early and had to stand because the place was already packed; this evening I took care to arrive twenty minutes early and found I was the only person there. The books though were set up, and pretty much an identical spread to the previous evening: finger-sized pizza slices, dip, cut veggies, crackers, cheese, two bottles of wine. I book browsed, bought my copy of Katia's book. A few minutes later, my friend EliseMoser arrived, we kissed hello, surprised but not exactly surprised to find each other there; we took two of the six plush chairs round the reading platform. Only four or five others had arrived before the authors appeared just before 7, the advertised starting time. Mike test and adjustments followed, then the authors introduced themselves and Naomi started reading; I soon tuned out. By the time she finished, though, another 15 or so had arrived, including a few people I knew (always a few people I know at these events.) Katia read; I read along from my copy, which I enjoyed ...
Tracing our steps from the railyard, you'd think we were kids looking for a place to fuck, or graffiti artists intent on the highest overlooks
Folding chairs had to be found (they hadn't been set up), and eventually some were. The authors asked if there were any questions. After a moment's silence, someone remarked upon the frequency of olfactory images in Katia's verse, many of dampness, mould, decay; and what, pray tell, would she imagine was the smell of oblivion? That was a hard one for Katia to answer at the drop of a hat. After hesitating, she gave a decorous, if general, answer, thanking the listener for noticing motifs she hadn't really noticed herself in her writing; if I had been in her shoes (an impossible fit) and a quick-witted mood, I might have replied, the smell of one hand clapping, or better still, the smell of your face before it was born. But I was not especially quick-witted that evening; when she asked if anyone had further questions, the room again fell dead silent -- and I thought, what are those cool questions in Here Comes Everybody?But in that instant, couldn't think of a single one.
P.S. Here's a deadly (in the positive sense of the word) poem from the collection and that reading that I found online: Love Song for the End of the World.
My review of Katia Grubisic's What if red ran out and David O'Meara's Noble Gas, Penny Black is up at The Rover.