The Cinnamon Peeler (6 page)

for Nancy Beatty

The moon hard and yellow where Billy’s head is.

I have been moving in my room

these last 5 minutes. Looking for a cigarette.

That is a sin he taught me.

Showed me how to hold it and how to want it.

I had been looking and stepped forward

to feel along the windowsill

and there was the tanned moon head.

His body the shadow of the only tree on the property.

I am at the table.

Billy’s mouth is trying

to remove a splinter out of my foot.

Tough skin on the bottom of me.

Still. I can feel his teeth

bite precise. And then moving his face back

holding something in his grin, says he’s got it.

Where have you been I ask

Where have you been he replies

I have been into every room about 300 times

since you were here

I have walked about 60 miles in this house

Where have you been I ask

Billy was a fool

he was like those reversible mirrors

you can pivot round and see youself again

but there is something showing on the other side always.

Sunlight. The shade beside the cupboard.

He fired two bullets into the dummy

on which I built dresses

where the nipples should have been.

That wasn’t too funny, but we laughed a lot.

One morning he was still sleeping

I pushed the door and watched him from the hall

he looked like he was having a serious dream.

Concentrating. Angry. As if wallpaper

had been ripped off a wall.

Billy’s mouth at my foot

removing the splinter.

Did I say that?

It was just before lunch one day.

I have been alive

37 years since I knew him. He was a fool.

He was like those mirrors I told you about.

I am leaning against the bed rail

I have finished my cigarette

now I cannnot find the ashtray.

I put it out, squash it

against the window

where the moon is.

In his stupid eyes.

‘
Listen, it was so savage and brutal and powerful that even though it happened out of the blue I knew there was nothing arbitrary about it
’

CHRISTOPHER DEWDNEY

1

On a B.C. radio show the man asked me, coffee half way up to his mouth, what are the books you’ve liked recently? Christopher Dewdney’s
A Palaeozoic Geology of London Ontario
. Only I didn’t say that, I started stumbling on the word Palaeozoic … Paleo … Polio … and then it happened on Geology too until it seemed a disease. I sounded like an idiot. Meanwhile I was watching the man’s silent gulps. The professional silent gulping of coffee an inch or two away from the microphone. Unconcerned with my sinking ‘live’ all over the province.

2

I can’t remember where I first met him. Somewhere I became aware of this giggle. Tan hair, tan face, tan shirt and a giggle-snort as his head staggered back. His arms somewhere.

3

The baby. He shows me the revolving globe in the 4-month-old kid’s crib. Only it has been unscrewed and the globe turned upside down and rescrewed in that way so Africa and Asia all swivel upside down. This way he says she’ll have to come to terms with the shapes all over again when she grows up.

4

He comes to dinner, steps out of the car and transforms the 10-year-old suburban garden into ancient history. Is on his knees pointing out the age and race and character of rocks and earth. He loves the Norfolk Pine. I give him a piece of wood 120 million years old from the tar sands and he smokes a bit of it.

5

When he was a kid and his parents had guests and he was eventually told to get to bed he liked to embarrass them by running under a table and screaming out Don’t hit me Don’t hit me.

6

His most embarrassing moment. A poetry reading in Toronto. He was sitting in the front row and he realized that he hated the poetry. He looked around discreetly for the exit but it was a long way away. Then to the right, quite near him, he saw another door. As a poem ended he got up and officially walked to the door quickly opened it went out and closed it behind him. He found himself in a dark cupboard about 2 feet by 3 feet. It contained nothing. He waited there for a while, then he started to laugh and giggle. He giggled for 5 minutes and he thinks the audience could probably hear him. When he had collected himself he opened the door, came out, walked to his seat and sat down again.

7

Coach House Press, December 1974. I haven’t seen him for a long time. His face is tough. Something has left his face. It is not that he is thinner but the face has lost something distinct and it seems like flesh. But he is not thinner. He is busy working on his new book
Fovea Centralis
and I watch him as he
sits in the empty back room upstairs all alone with a computer typesetting terminal. I can’t get over his face. It is ‘tight’, as if a stocking were over it and he about to perform a robbery. He plucks at the keys and talks down into the machine. I am relieved when he starts giggling at something. I tell him I’m coming down to London in a week and he says he will show me his butterflies, he has bought two mounted butterflies for a very good price. If I don’t tell anyone he will let me know where I could get one. A Chinaman in London Ontario sells them. I start to laugh. He doesn’t. This is serious information, important rare information like the history of rocks – these frail wings of almost powder have their genealogies too.

8

His favourite movie is
Earthquake
. He stands in the middle of his apartment very excited telling me all the details. He shows me his beautiful fossils, a small poster of James Dean hitting his brother in
East of Eden
, and the two very impressive mounted butterflies.

9

On the bus going back to Toronto I have a drawing of him by Robert Fones. Wrapped in brown paper it lies above me on the luggage rack. When the bus swerves I put my arm out into the dark aisle ready to catch him if it falls. A strange drawing of him in his cane chair with a plant to the side of him, reading Frank O’Hara with very oriental eyes. It was done in 1973, before the flesh left his face.

10

His wife’s brain haemorrhage. I could not cope with that. He is 23 years old. He does. Africa Asia Australia upside down. Earthquake.

Griffin calls to come and kiss him goodnight

I yell ok. Finish something I’m doing,

then something else, walk slowly round

the corner to my son’s room.

He is standing arms outstretched

waiting for a bearhug. Grinning.

Why do I give my emotion an animal’s name,

give it that dark squeeze of death?

This is the hug which collects

all his small bones and his warm neck against me.

The thin tough body under the pyjamas

locks to me like a magnet of blood.

How long was he standing there

like that, before I came?

‘
Nothing I’d read prepared me for a body this unfair
’

JOHN NEWLOVE

‘
Till we be roten, kan we not be rypen
’

GEOFFREY CHAUCER