Civil Elegies: And Other Poems

Civil Elegies

By the same author

Kingdom of Absence
Civil Elegies
Wiggle to the Laundromat
The Death of Harold Ladoo
The Gods
The Difficulty of Living on Other Planets
Riffs

AND OTHER POEMS

DENNIS LEE

Copyright © Dennis Lee, 1972

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published by
House of Anansi Press Limited
1800 Steeles Avenue West
Concord, Ontario
L4K 2P3
(416) 445-3333

An earlier version of
Civil Elegies
appeared in 1968
This edition published in hardcover and paperback in 1972
Reprinted February 1994

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Lee, Dennis, 1939-
    Civil elegies and other poems

2nd pbk. ed.
First version published under title: Civil elegies.
ISBN 0-88784-557-6

I. Title.

PS8523.E3C55 1994     C811'.54     C94-930648-7
PR9199.3.L44C55 1994

Cover concept: Angel Guerra
Cover design: Brant Cowie/ArtPlus Limited
Cover photograph: Stephen Quick

Printed and bound in Canada

House of Anansi Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council, Ontario Ministry of Culture, Tourism, and Recreation, Ontario Arts Council, and Ontario Publishing Centre in the development of writing and publishing in Canada
.

I COMING BACK

400: Coming Home

Glad for the Wrong Reasons

Brunswick Avenue

He Asks Her

High Park, by Grenadier Pond

The Morning of the Second Day: He Tells Her

Recollection

When It Is Over

Night

In a Bad Time

Thursday

More Claiming

Heaven and Earth

Sibelius Park

Coming Back

Words for the Given

II CIVIL ELEGIES

Notes

You are still on the highway and the great light of
noon comes over the asphalt, the gravelled
shoulders. You are on the highway, there is a kind of
laughter, the cars pound
south. Over your shoulder the scrub-grass, the fences,
the fields wait patiently as though someone
believed in them. The light has laid it
upon them. One
crow scrawks. The edges
take care of themselves, there is
no strain, you can almost hear it, you
inhabit it.

Back in the city many things you lived for
are coming apart.
Transistor rock still fills
back yards, in the parks young men do things to
hondas; there will be
heat lightning, beer on the porches, goings on.
That is not it.

And you are still on the highway. There are no
houses, no farms. Across the median, past the swish and thud of the
northbound cars, beyond the opposite
fences, the fields, the
climbing escarpment, solitary in the
bright eye of the sun the
birches dance, and they
dance. They have
their reasons. You do not know
anything.
Cicadas call now, in the darkening swollen air there is dust
in your nostrils; a
kind of laughter; you are still on the highway.

Night and day it
goes on, it goes
on. I hear what feel like ponderous immaculate
lizards moving through; I call it
absence I call it silence but often I am
glad for the wrong reasons.
Many times at 6:00 a.m. there is a
fiendish din of cans, like now
for instance and we
lunge up punctured through the
blur & the broken
glass of last night's argument, fetching up
groggy on a landscape of bed, well I can
taste our dubious breath and look it's
me, babe, I wabble my neck and lounge the
trophy from my dream across your belly, your
body slouches towards me, jesus, there is
something about our lives that
doesn't make sense, tomorrow
I'll fix them up, remind me, the garbage
cans have stopped now but the room is
bright too bright to
fix I mean ah jesus I burrow slow
motion back to sleep; and the
lizards resume their
phosphorescent progress, I crowd towards them but I should
not be here now, swallowing fast & doggedly gawking &
staying put and glad but glad for the wrong reasons.

We are in
bed, the dark is close to my face. Hilary
moans in the crib. It is getting
warm in here, the covers are
close, I am going
into it.

All the long-legged suns have clotted again
in my head, and only keyholes know a song.
Emptiness is my alibi, but it is pitted with syllables like
caterpillars moving hoarsely across the face of the Bible.

Outside, the rasp of a snow-shovel
grates in the dark.
Lovely
sound, I hang onto it. In the
stillness I feel the flakes and the heft of
that man's left arm, and the sudden
twinge as the shovel lets go of the wet snow I am going into it

Many spaces no longer belong to the ones who once filled them.
The air keeps striding through.
Pinholes arrive & open like sprayguns, and always
the long-legged suns are combining.

Beside me on the bed the woman with whom I did
great violence for years, preserving
dalliance and stigmata, stretches
easy in her after-pleasure, sleeping.
Clothes and our wetness load the air.
Her hair is on my shoulder.
The covers lift and fold, and the shovel scrapes and I hear the
endless holes in the night hang down and the snow and our fragile breathing.

What kind of

pickle were we in? Every
piddling triumph I dragged into the house —
                                                                 by the ears

(“I fixed the washer in the outside tap.”)
by the snout

(“I sold another book today. That makes eleven.”)
or by the curly Q of its little pink tale

(“I seduced Madame Nhu this aft. In the John at Eglinton station.”)
                          — they all became weapons in the stockpile

Sometimes I trickled under the door to tell you

sometimes I walked thru the wall, all shucks & left-handed
sometimes I'd bound in via the second-storey window, hanging by my
      canine incisors.

But what kind of

pickle were we in? You had to
turn and finger the miserable little feat,

testing the cutting edge on your own flesh,
and I would savour the way something
                          closed inside me and fondled itself,

knowing that soon you'd be
    cast down again, that I would be rejected.

               Whatever I say, lady
it is not that

I say our lives are working — but feel the
ambush of soft air —, nor that our

rancour & precious remorse can be
surrendered merely because the earth has taken

green dominion here, beneath us
                                the belly of grass is real; and lady

it is not that

lovers by the score come sporting
fantasies like we had strolling

bright-eyed past the portulaca — we could
whisper messages, they would be

snarls in our own blood;
                                                    and I am

bitter about our reconciliations, we panicked, we
                  snowed ourselves each time. So lady

it is not that

I hanker for new beginnings — confession and
copout, we know that game, it's as real as the
            whiskey, the fights, the pills.

And I do not start this now because the grass is green,
                  and not because in front of us the

path makes stately patterns down the slope to Grenadier and all the
                random ambling of the couples hangs
                           like courtly bygones in the shining air;
                the old longing is there, it always will but I will not
                        allow it.

But there is
                you, lady. I
     want you to
                be, and I want you.
                        Lie here on the grass beside me,
                                      hear me tie my tongue in knots.

I can't talk brave palaver like
                          I did 10 years ago — I
                 used up all the words — but now I
       sense my centre in these new
                  gropings, wary, near yours lady,
                            coming to
                                          difficult sanities.
                   I want to be here.

How will you handle my body?
What will I do to your name?
New selves kept tramping through me like a
herd of signatures, I mislaid
sentences halfway, the trademark was
ummm
… ?
Which one of me did you want?

Hey but that was another life, and donning the
one-way flesh, now glad and
half at home at last in the set of your neck,
the carriage of your thighs, I believe I sense
the difficult singularity of the man I
am not ready for.

But how will you handle my body?
Some day ten years from now we'll both
wake up, and stretch, and stare at somebody's ceiling —
our own, sweet jesus our
very own ceiling!
— and boggle, with
ten-year thoughts in mind.
Look out, I believe we're married & lap your
hair across my face, this must make sense but what will I
do to your beautiful name?

I remember still
         a gentle girl, just married, how she
drew her husband down, they had
         no practice but she gave him warm
openings till he became a
         cocky simpleton inside her,
coming like kingdom come for the excellent
         pleasure it made in her body.

The low-light recedes, the records recede, skin
empties. Under my eyes

your eyes recede, I brush your cheek you feel what
touch what clumsy much-loved man

receding? Your body is full of listening,
exquisite among its own

Shockwaves. So. What
space are you going into?

Over & over, love, what other
music? Your

eyelids will be here for
centuries, do not come to.

But flicker, come deeper, let be — the jubilation
eases through your

body. So. What
space have you gone into?

Slowly, love, beneath me
your breathing returns.

Now it is over, the flesh and resonance that filled that
other space do not come to and

try to tell me where, for it is over.
But drowse off now; as the after-pleasure settles

gently into our lives, it is over and
over, and over, and over, and over and over.

Night one more time, the darkness
close out there on the snow.
Goddamn war, goddamn smog, close the blind.

How many times have you
stared through that window at darkness?
Come on over here, lie on top of me, let's fuck.

Good men would think twice
about it, they would
not be born in this century.