My poem “Undersong” appears in Room‘s recent issue on labour (Volume 35.4). Have a look at this issue to discover diverse interpretations of the idea of labour — by both writers and artists.

Undersong

the tap of Father’s wrench
through the kitchen screen;
me at the table, laminated
cloth, scrubbed, beneath
my elbows, notebook open, new
HB pencil in my fist, goldenrod
oracle for my novice story. Mother’s
dress sleeveless, white, voice lifting
and settling, a finch on a branch;
steam rising from her iron like breath.

I no longer wanted to cross the gravel
between house and shop, crouch quiet
with him at the tractor’s belly; oil black
blood welling, his fingers swiveling
serpent hoses and soot-coated thermoses.
He tried once to teach me to listen,
catch dropped beats in the motor’s pulse.
Eyes kind; comments few, when they came,
they fell like toy cars from a sheepish boy’s
pocket, dead weights on his steel-toed boots.

On my immaculate page, letters streamed
onto the sea-blue lines, notes in a tune,
my pencil the flute. Mother’s stories
first hers, then mine:
I made tell-tale leaves in her cup dark
stars in my universe; her sister, stillborn,
a waxen queen who laughed.
The tractor trilled past, but I didn’t see.

Now that wrought bass, its shy systolic
grace, is the undersong I wish to hear:
my words, only motley nuts and bolts,
require a dusty artisan to turn them
into hammered-gold strings on a lyre.

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My poem “Coming Out” was shortlisted for the poetry prize in the Malahat Review‘s Open Season Awards.

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This short story was runner-up in the 2012 Literary Writes contest organized by the Federation of BC Writers. The story was published in the Winter, 2013 issue of Wordworks.

Fragile Vessel

What remains of you has come to me in an off-white carton marked “Fragile Vessel.” Inside, a dark glass jar holds you. Will your ashes be like the ones in the fireplace: soft, flyaway, flat between the fingers? A gentle gray you’d dress a baby in? But the body has bones, like your femurs, once stretched out on beach sand, long thighs covered with fine hairs, gold, like tree pollen. Will your ashes be gritty, like the floor of the canoe under my bare knees? Or salty, the taste on my lips in the rescue boat? The canoe a tangerine rind in the sea’s mouth.

Out our townhouse window, the horizon a tow rope for the sun. Jasmine and Ria not up yet. I pulled on my jeans and slipped away to find your tent, a traffic cone in the gray-green fir trees behind the subdivision. I was still shivery from last night; I missed your crescent-warmth against my back, your hand cradling my left breast. It wasn’t my friends, you’d said, when you hauled your gear up from the basement. But you wouldn’t say what it was. It made sense for them to stay over – the flight left early, and our place was closest to the airport. You wanted to come with me, keep me company in my free time. I’d said no. I’d been waiting for time without you, time when you didn’t turn off my cell phone, when you didn’t pester me to go for a paddle in the cold, when you didn’t put your arms around me and say “So?”

You were warm in your suede vest when I unzipped the sleeping bag. Your birthmark a tiny hand just above the waist of your boxers. This time it was me curling up to your back, like a larva on a leaf.

“Meme.” You had folded your arms in an X over your chest, but you squeezed my hands when they found yours.

“You’ll be glad when I’m back?”

“I’ll take you bungee jumping just like you’ve always wanted.”

You smelled like pot. You only smoked up when you were upset.

“Hug Random for me.” I’d put our husky in the basement after he’d jumped up on Jasmine’s silk shirt. You’d brought him home on impulse one day.

Our whole relationship was an impulse. Me getting up in the middle of a movie – the first time ever – to escape Javier Bardem’s eyes in No Country for Old Men. You stopping outside the cinema to peer at the stars through the clouds. Your hair chaotic like late-summer grasses. I remember how far down you had to reach to shake my hand, how my fingers disappeared inside your palm. I didn’t have to grow into my name. Mimi. You called me Meme from the start. I don’t think you knew it meant “cultural virus,” and I never told you. We went to a barbeque place down the street, and you ate corn on the cob in little rings around the cob instead of going along it. You said you liked my yin-yang look: skim-milk skin against charcoal curls. We’d studied at the same campus — you’d stayed for a year, and I’d stayed for five. That night, you tipped my face up with one long finger and kissed me on the chin.

The next day, you took me out into the bay in the canoe. When I told you I hadn’t paddled since high school, you said not to worry. You’d been on the water since you turned twelve, when you camped out to escape fumes from your mother’s rec-room hair salon. The canoe, the same fluorescent orange as my life jacket, weighed no more than a reed basket. It steadied as soon as you slid your paddle in. For a moment, I sat still and watched you: the long plane of your back, the clean arc of your arms, the soft entry of the blade. The quiet communion of body, boat and wave. That night, I stayed.

A month later, when I moved in with you, you decorated with bunches of beach daisies and carried me over the threshold, even though I told you I never wanted to get married. We’ll have a girl first, you said, Cassiopeia.

At the conference, I pushed hard to get new clients, smiled at their humid faces through happy hour, served up clever sound bites in question periods. I thought of you when I could, alone in our bed, or were you in your tent? You hadn’t been away for a night since we’d known each other. Once you’d paddled home in the dark from a friend’s cabin so we could sleep together. When the conference ended, Ria and I went out to a club — to celebrate my three new contracts — but I didn’t wear the dress with the cutout back. You liked when I wore dresses, especially the cranberry one with the full skirt, although you didn’t want me to lead when we danced at other people’s weddings. I had to lead sometimes: you took short-term jobs so you could go hiking in between, you fixed people’s bikes for nothing. It was because of me that we could buy a townhouse close to the bay. Not that the payments kept you from taking time off when Random limped home after a fight.

When I got back, the kitchen was warm, like bread from the oven, and so were you, your skin still radiating the shower’s heat and the scent of juniper soap. You’d gathered mussels for dinner, scraped away the wiry hairs from their tight-lipped edges. You chopped herbs for the sauce, and I rinsed the shells under the tap, careful not to crack them. I let them slip through my fingers, ink-black, iridescent, like exotic eggs, the kind that, in stories, hinge open to reveal jewels inside. I felt sorry for the mussels when you scooped them out of the steam, their mouths like newborn birds`. Later, when we made love, I smelled garlic on your fingertips. We didn’t talk about the conference.

The next morning, I threw up. I crept to the couch, and you covered me with a blanket, tucked in the edges along my legs and arms. Then you placed your hand on my stomach for a moment, as if to settle it. Before I took the test, I knew. My cells clanged like freight trains building speed: zygote, embryo, fetus, infant. I knew you’d cry when I told you, like you cried when your mother’s last check-up was all clear. I knew I’d cry too.

I stole time from work, ran the knotted trails through the firs until I couldn`t. Then I walked, negotiating, hands over my belly so I couldn’t be heard. The rise and fall of my breath twinned, the flat band of flesh below my navel inhabited. Flesh stretching and filling, four limbs lengthening, reaching – like the wings of a heron lifting, your long arms, clasping, from behind me. The double arms of Cassiopeia, widening.

After, when I told you, you didn’t cry. You didn’t say anything. My insides clutched, searching. You got up from the edge of the bed and stood at the window, watched the wind lash the firs. Your suede back to me, your fist on the window pane. I wanted you beside me, wanted the weight of your hand on my stomach. When I said I wasn`t ready, you left without looking at me, pulled the door shut behind you. Your hiking boots, muted, on the basement steps.

I take the black jar out of the carton, put my hands on its cool sides. I don`t open it. I`m not ready to empty it.

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My poem “Undersong” was one of 16 poems shortlisted for the Malahat Review‘s 2012 Far Horizons Poetry Award.

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When you’re in a bookstore, where do you find a semi-autobiographical, lyric novel like Arleen Pare’s Leaving Now? The story-poems in Patricia Young’s Amateurs at Love? Books are morphing. Spilling out of the varnished boxes set out for them: fiction, poetry, non-fiction. Where do you find a book that proposes not to be there at all? M.A.C. Farrant’s has written such a book, an unsettling story entitled The Strange Truth about Us: A Novel of Absence.

Farrant’s book is not about absence, a recognizable theme in fiction such as Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. Rather it is a novel which itself is absent, even as it unfolds. The novel has chapters, but they are very short: a paragraph, bits of dialogue, a single sentence. A nameless narrator in the first of three sections says that she and her companion are “concocting” a make-believe novel about the future. Of course, all novels are make-believe, since they are fiction; however, this novel exposes our habit of reading familiar tales, stories “where because of the overuse of antibiotics, we succumb by the millions to a gruesome new plague . . . where beyond all expectations, we discover a habitable planet, but we don’t have the technology to get there . . .” We read these books comfortably because we believe that such stories are the fantasies of authors, and not about ourselves, at least as long as the night fires of the homeless remain distant. These stories, Farrant argues, offer a truth with “a roof over its head.”

Farrant sets out to deliver a story (a non-fiction?) we don’t want to hear: one about our “apocalyptic” fear of the real future.  The pages of The Strange Truth about Us are eerily empty, since her characters don’t want to look at – or generate – a narrative of their own demise. In “Part One: Annotations about an Absence: Going Forward,” the boomer couple, safe within the “splendid fortifications” of a gated community, agree that they will record only “tactful exchanges” which avoid alarming emotions (“we do not exclaim, retort . . . or shout, except by implication”).

They choose to annotate – that is, provide a critical commentary or “gloss” on existing narratives – rather than write a “real-time” text. The narrator describes herself and her partner in the language of ads: “We’re the handsome pair romping on a tropical beach. Look at our tanned bodies and laughing faces!” Connection with their daughter occurs only when she communicates not in her own voice but in angry quotations they cannot understand; contact with the world beyond their surveilled walls happens in the form of news reports: “[W]e view the nightly news where horror and trivia are delivered by anchors with merry eyes, with voices as sweet as lullabies. We seem to be participating in a nightmare about humanity, but who can tell? The visuals are so alluring, bright, like gift-wrap.”

But beneath their prescribed calm, they are afraid: “[W]e know this atrocity is real because we have seen it on our TV screens.” They worry that we may not hear them inside the novel they are writing; they fear the absence of their own bodies. Their panic finally surfaces when a real narrative is thrust upon them: armed men break into their compound, and the camera is suddenly no longer “the predicate” of their lives.  This section of Farrant’s novel engages: the characters (and their growing horror) are decidedly recognizable, the unusual format intriguingly “novel,” and the ironies unsettling: are we really “[y]earning perversely for a single catastrophe that will . . . rouse us to emerge from behind our walls and collectively set the world aright”?

Part Two, “Woman Records Brief Notes Regarding Absence: Benchmarking,” is more of a challenge for the reader. The woman, like the couple in Part One, embarks on telling a story about the future. However, also like the couple, who “every day speak their disembodied bulletins,” she offers us 115 seemingly unrelated, cropped paragraphs. It is as though Farrant herself occupies these pages, tearing at her authorial clothes.

She begins this section with the observation that telling about the future, which presumably she has attempted to do in Part One, is an impossibility. Just as her characters cannot discern reality beyond the camera lens, she cannot deceipher her own voice above the din of media: books, films, TV documentaries, cartoons, screenplays, canned music, on-line gurus, junk mail, anonymous quotations. Note 69 reveals her entanglement: “Woman notes Peter Handke wrote screenplay for Wim Wender’s film Wings of Desire which is about ultimate things as is Handke’s play Prophecy from which remixed quote opens woman’s own book.”

On the one hand, Farrant demonstrates cleverly all twenty-first-century writers’ angst: they are drowning in information, and they doubt a new voice would be heard, even if it had something original to offer. They breathlessly benchmark, measuring their performance against those in the thousands of Internet hits they call up with a single click. On the other hand, Farrant risks losing her reader when she writes such an exhaustive “gloss” on writing. The reader may very well miss that, in the stream of fragments, she rises above mythologies of media and the fog of martinis to “escape into clarity,” if only for 1.75 hours a day.  She momentarily restores irony, a quality which diminishes as fear rises in Part One. In Note 19, she observes: “Unable to afford artworks of conquered people woman collects quotes and fearful scenarios instead.” Occasionally, she brushes against hope, as in Note 66: “Woman who ponders Leonardo da Vinci’s claim that ‘vows begin when hope dies’ decides to find fun in dark places like filmmaker Rene Clement did with Che Gioia Vivere (The Joy of Living) during fascism.”

These small triumphs set the tone for “Part Three: Other Prose Surrounding Absence.” Although fear persists (terrorist bombings, emergency rations, endangered species), the characters in these slightly longer narratives are not cowering in a secured community contemplating catastrophe theory. Rather they question their “movie emotions” even while using them, get down on hands and knees to weed and build rock sculptures, and choose to change the tunes cycling through their heads. In darker pieces, laughter prevails despite prohibition, and Death comes only to request a burrito. The future arrives bringing “strange new air,” or so the narrator says. She’s got “stories strung in her head like lines of wash”; she’s got a waterfall in her mouth. Is she to be believed? Now it doesn’t seem to matter.

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Some weeks ago, at a party, I met a well-travelled reader who urged me to try the books of Andre Brink, his favourite South African writer.  The first one I found was Imaginings of Sand, written in 2000. I was not disappointed. 

Set in the days just before the election expected to end apartheid, the novel explores both personal and political upheavals, made all the more volatile by their intersection. Kristien, a thirty-three-year-old white narrator who fled South Africa for England years before, returns to say goodbye to her centenarian grandmother (Ouma) who is critically injured when black youths set fire to her house.  Kristien also finds that the violence her sister fears outside her walls exists inside them as well.

What buoys the narrative are passionate acts of preservation. Kristien hides Jacob, a falsely accused black man, in her grandmother’s basement — and brings him a book of Afkricaans literature that he longs to finish reading. On a larger scale, Ouma recounts her enthralling and sometimes uncanny family history, passing it down to Kristien over many nights: “She articulates my writing hand. I have the feeling, both unsettling and reassuring, of recovering something . . . . images from a space inside ourselves which once surfaced in ghost stories and the tales and jokes and imaginings of travellers and trekkers and itinerant traders beside their wagons at night, when the fantastic was never more than a stone’s throw or an outburst of sparks away.”   Just as Ouma is bent on teaching Kristien that South Africa is where she belongs, Kristien fights, with others, for the rights and dignity of blacks around her.

Most compelling in the novel is the unearthing of the palpable energy and inventiveness of South African women; we learn that Ouma’s multi-racial female ancestors lived “behind and below history,” but like Ouma — and the flocks of wild birds that shadow her — they found ways to make their mark: one “unmanageable” woman, who was locked in the same cellar where Jacob is safeguarded, drew startling paintings on the walls and later ran away to sea. It is their courage, and Ouma’s luminous presence, which guide Kristien as she chooses her own signature in a country rewriting itself.

Two other books by Andre Brink I have since found in my local bookstore are Dry White Season (1995) and Fork in the Road: A Memoir (2009); others can be found on line. He’s a prolific writer! On the subject of post-apartheid South Africa, I would also recommend J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Nadine Gordimer’s None to Accompany Me.

I’m now inspired to search out fiction by new black South African writers;  Singapore researcher Leong Yew offers excellent direction for that search.

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Read “Uncommon Love,” a sample of my short fiction, published by the Canadian Writers’ Collective.

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Here is an excerpt from my (yet-to-be-published) novel Falling Home, which features a twenty-first-century family trying to find a footing in our profoundly pixellated culture.

Robert collapsed onto the sofa after [his brother] Luke left. Luke had been such a good sport, and not much like his father after all. He peered across the condo at the apple-faced clock in [his ex] Carole’s kitchen. After midnight. His first sentiment was relief — a bizarre day was over. But a wobbly joy flooded his throat too, even tugged at his lips: Taylor had surfaced, and in the flesh this time, not on line. He’d spoken to her for the first time in weeks. Apart from a bad cold, she was all right: Judith and Courtney were with her, and they would look after her. He would see her himself at the end of the day, at the shelter, as he’d promised. Eighteen hours from now. To his surprise, his back was quiet. He closed his eyes, hoping the clamour in his head would die down. The unruly stack of files he’d flung into the back seat of the car flickered before him, sporadic static on his mind’s screen. It occurred to him that he could read the dossiers of the candidates now, then drive back to Medway early in the morning, and still preside over the interviews. He’d have Theo stay on for the interviews, of course; it was only fair, since he’d asked him to be ready to stand in for him.

Across from him in the arm chair, Carole had sunk into one of those stony sleeps that descend despite all efforts to fend them off. Still she looked poised to leap up, the fingers of one hand clutching the arm of the chair, and her feet anchored to the floor. In the hours they’d been together, she hadn’t had one drink. Maybe he’d been wrong about her. Her mouth hung open, and her face looked slack and old above the chaotic zigzag of the afghan. In the chic angular space of the condo, she seemed out of place, and so did her quaint things. At this moment, it was hard to imagine she had ever belonged in his life either, that he had ever thought she could have belonged. But she had thrown herself into harm’s way for their daughter, more than he had done. 

He would still do his part, but perhaps he could delay his visit to the shelter until Friday, just over a day and a half away. If Taylor wanted him to come by then. That way, he could go home and change his clothes, collect himself on the surface at least. As soon as the office opened, he could get Eunice to arrange someone to take Judith’s Thursday and Friday classes at Medway. She might have classes at Pierce as well; he’d get Eunice to call and find out about that too. (So many teaching hours – all the more reason for a full-time frosh lecturer at Medway.) Then he’d come back and convince Taylor to return to class, salvage her courses. Maybe Judith could get started on that campaign now, since Taylor listened to her much more readily than to him.

But then he imagined Taylor at the shelter; she’d glance every few minutes at the door, her mouth hardened into a thin line. Her disappointment cemented into irreconcilability. He’d be alone in Emberley. Decidedly alone. He remembered the exhilaration when he delivered a fine paper to a conference a few years ago, just after Carole and Taylor had left. He had applied an audacious new theory to a revered text — built a breathtaking new vision — all without a safety net. Afterward, he’d come home still charged with the heady adrenaline of his feat, only to find a silent house. No one to report his daring tightrope performance to, no one to bask in his euphoria. He sat alone, his self-satisfaction like a ridiculous hat in the dark rooms.

The smugness was hardly called for: he’d get published in a prestigious journal that few faculty would read, and even fewer would cite from. In reality, he was a past-prime professor peering at the display on the hand-held telephone for familiar phone numbers, for the blink of the voice mail indicator. Now only Judith and Taylor would call, if he were lucky; his male colleagues (they weren’t exactly friends) never called him at home. Those heated encounters with grad students, no longer on offer, had produced no lasting ties, whatever the promises. It was only the gilt-edged reference these women had wanted, nothing more, and part of him had known that all along.

Judith had never asked for a job, explicitly or implicitly. In fact, Judith rarely asked for anything except his attention. She had been collected before the surgery; she went to the doctor on her own after she found the lump, an almond-shaped hardness just where the upper right breast molded into chest muscle. The same for the biopsy: just meet me at home afterwards, she insisted, and when he did, she was fiercely optimistic about the results. She’d surprised him the night before the surgery, too; she came up behind him while he was at the bathroom sink, slid her hands around his waist and untied his dressing gown.

But after the surgery, she needed him, as though she had lost not only her breasts, but some internal navigational system as well. She’d always been quiet and capable, and never expected too much for herself. Just back from the recovery room, she lay still, her arms flung wide to avoid her chest, her face sealed over like those eyeless mannequins in store windows. Panic sprang from his pores; he could think of nothing to do other than hold the hand free of the intravenous, and that he did gingerly, like the stricken Pygmalion waiting for his statue to come to life. In the next few hours, she asked for a drink, a pillow. He delivered them, grateful to be useful, all the while keeping his eyes off the wrenching flatness of her chest. The muted roar of nothingness. He touched only her face, brushed her hair off her cheeks, as he had done for his mother at the end.

He stayed with her for the first day; then, for the next three days, left only for a few hours at a time. At first, it troubled him to do his work in small bursts, but he was surprised to find that he looked forward to that full-bellied feeling that settled in him each time he drove away from campus to see her – he felt not the charge of performance this time, but a warm suffusion in his whole being, as though his very cells, sensing a new and fuller purpose, flooded themselves with fresh blood. It was as if her struggling body had awakened him to his own.

When she came home from the hospital, she disappeared between the sheets of their bed, like an insubstantial form of herself, an empty garment bag. He paced around the bed, sat on the edge on his side, considered lying next to her, and then thought better of it. When he sank onto the living room sofa, fatigue swelled around him. He swung his legs up and stretched them out. The shoes on his feet looked oddly irrelevant. He had just closed his eyes when he heard the rustle of Taylor’s jacket next to him. He raised his head and saw her in the armchair next to him, her face inert.

“She’s going to be okay, Tate.” He reached a hand over to squeeze her blue-jeaned knee. “She just needs time to heal.”

Taylor forced a nod, left the room. She hadn’t come up to the hospital at all after the surgery.

One evening, a few weeks after the surgery, when he bent down to kiss her before leaving for the couch, Judith lifted one arm and put it around his neck.

“Stay here tonight?” She sounded stronger, even resolute.

“You’re sure?” He suddenly wasn’t sure himself, although he’d been waiting for this for a week at least.

He slid under the covers next to her, his body feeling oversized and presumptuous next to her thin one. She wore a long lilac shirt, the one that almost matched her eyes, with just two buttons done up in the middle. She shifted onto her side and propped herself on one elbow.

“Sorry to keep to myself for so long.” She laid a hand on his chest, met his eyes. “I had to start getting used to it. To looking different.”

“I know. You look good to me.” He ran his hand down her warm bare leg.

She reached for his hand, stopped it. Her forearm looked a little swollen.

“You’ll need to get used to it too.”

She undid the two buttons and pushed the fabric to the side. He felt the blood dropping away from his face. Her collarbone stood out sharply, delicate wings in full flight. Below it, on the right side of the breastbone, a crude line arched like a closed eyelid on a plateau of tight skin. On the left, a puckered crater, the breast and the flesh beneath it scraped away. Like an eye socket, excavated. The inner arm illicitly visible. He forced himself to raise his eyes slowly, not knowing if he succeeded.

“When I look down, I think subtraction – crazy, huh?” Judith looked at him and then looked down. “But I’m still here.”

She pointed at her breastbone.

“You’re very brave.” Robert stroked her hair, leaned into her to steady himself.

“Touch me.” Judith brought his hand down from her hair and held it out in front of her chest.

He looked at the violated chest, the absence of body. He slipped his hand out of hers and reached for her shoulder so that he could move her close to him. She pulled back, drew the fabric over herself again, and turned away.

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“Journals, like the life they record, are present tense. When we finally see their patterns, we re-imagine our lives.” (Alexandra Johnson)

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

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Read Helen Humphreys’ The Reinvention of Love –

• To savour the glorious language: “August is the hinge between summer and fall, a time of bittersweet change . . . . poetry comes from this spiritual August – this place between loss and arrival.”
• To visit nineteenth-century Paris: its gentry and geniuses (Victor Hugo and George Sands, for instance), its salons and duels, its parks and plagues.
• To surrender to the love stories: the heat of forbidden love, the fathoms of mother-love, the triumphs of re-invented love (there’s more than one example), the power of remembered love — “I write this story down so that I can enter it again.”
• To discover why “love makes more questions than it answers.”
• To tempt yourself to read more Humphreys: I suggest Afterimage, The Lost Garden and The Frozen Thames.

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