The Blue Clerk Page 3

  VERSO 5

  In June, I realized I had already abandoned nation long before I knew myself, the author says. That attachment always seemed like a temporary hook in the shoulder blade. A false feeling, in a false moment. Just like when one April in the year I turned eight, I noticed I had been put in a yellow dress. Ochre yellow? asks the clerk. Yellow ochre. Iridium oxide. But all around me everyone seemed to feel it, this nation/girl. I thought of the dress as a beheading. I had moments of loneliness when I could not feel it also. And I felt as if I were betraying many people all at once. And everyone said one had to feel it so I felt it like when reading a book one feels a feeling, but it is in a book and not in one’s real life. But I could not understand the agreements everyone else had made to the feelings in the book, the fears of dispossessions. I must have started dispossessed then, the clerk says.

  Every year for forty years I’ve been asked the same question by someone who needed to consume allegiances. Some interrogator observes my skin and asks me why. Every year I’ve answered into a void like Coltrane blowing “Venus” out into the nothing. Like Ornette Coleman cooking sciences. And sometimes I’ve tried not making the interrogator feel bad, or I fend off the attack with dissembling. Most times (every time, the clerk mumbles) I haven’t done what I should, which is to rise and leave like my women. Sail off on a boat, leap off a cliff, or just sit and sip my beer at the old Lisbon Plate in Kensington Market. These tedious questions have drawn this line in my left cheek; they’ve nailed this pain in my left shoulder. Every time, the clerk says loudly.

  I am speaking here of something you would not understand as a clerk. No I wouldn’t, nods the clerk. None of it makes sense. Your sense-making apparatus is invisible to me, says the clerk, or at least I would like to keep it invisible. It is like tracing paper over tracing paper. I don’t use tracing paper.

  VERSO 5.0.1

  What the author has. A line in her left cheek, a pain in her left shoulder, a crushed molar, an electric wire running from her elbow to her smallest left finger. Wings in her left eye.

  VERSO 5.1

  In December, any December, standing in Elmina, the dirt floor, the damp room of the women’s cells, nation loses all vocabulary. Loses its whole alphabet. I have no debts. I have no loves. A soccer game every four years; maybe that. I have two eyes that see where the body that carries them sleeps. I have the drama of skies, no question; an affinity for blue that makes me fill beautiful bottles with blue watercolour and water, that’s a habit. Of course the earth is beneath your feet and so there must be place or the feeling of place or gravity. But which nation ever said of a woman she is human? So what allegiances do you have? Temporary and provisional, wherever.

  So what? You feel featherless, the clerk says. Didn’t you always; weren’t you just an outrider? You tried to fit in, to your own demise though, you rode shotgun to your own disaster, she says. You’re right. No need for violent metaphor, the author cautions. Again, let me draw your attention to the tracing paper.

  VERSO 5.2

  Soon in August I saw a woman come into the beauty parlour, she hadn’t been sane for years but she came in, in a lucid moment, lucid for what we call sane. She asked the woman standing at my hair, “How much is the wig?” The women gently told her $49.95. Then she said with a wistful sigh, “I want a ponytail,” and the woman showed her a ponytail, as if she were a real customer. I’ve turned this into something else weeks after, but the hairdresser, Base, was gentle with the woman, the most kind thing I’d seen all day, pretending the woman was sane. But then it struck me later that the mad woman’s moment of lucidity was the entranceway to women’s madness on the earth. The beauty parlour—what a narrow doorway, what a pitiful place. On any other day the mad woman would be nude at Lansdowne and Bloor with her dress lifted over her head or tied as a belt around her waist. On any other day. These two things, nude on the street or the beauty parlour. I was in the beauty parlour, there myself sane as ever, shaking my head at the mad woman. I just haven’t the courage to be nude on the street like her. Someone will come up to me after this and ask, “But isn’t there some middle ground, but surely we can try to exist, but aren’t you happy sometimes?” I hate this “someone.” If you like. Whoever you are. But don’t be annoying. I’ve answered that already. Just because you have only stage one of an illness doesn’t mean you’re well. Yes you could have a fever, yes you could be dead, no doubt that would be worse. But recognize the disease.

  VERSO 5.2.1

  What the author has, one stage of an illness, what illness, an earache, steady, an inclination to take her leave of places after an hour or so. A gregariousness followed by a sharp desire to be alone.

  VERSO 5.5

  I have plans; I have no plans. They disappear in the Gulf of Mexico like brown pelicans and hermit crabs in an oil spill. Isn’t it time we stopped saying spill? That wasn’t a spill it was a deluge. It has no mercy, nation. I have no mercy. I’m jaundiced. All the while through the hoots of democracy, I was looking for the women in Tahrir Square, in Yemen, in Tunisia. I am listening. Whatever, the author says. I don’t want to hear any more about waiting. In September, and now October, I am unpinned from all allegiances. Of course you’re not. But what if I wrote like this? Unpinned.

  VERSO 5.5.1

  Au coin de la rue des Ursulines et François Xavier the author notices a luminous sky. It must have been there always. And what am I doing here. Grey minister, grey petrol, grey detour, the clerk answers. Where life leads you it is not so much impossible to know but to anticipate. No that is a lie, one chooses, one anticipates, one chooses among a certain number of anticipations; one anticipates among a certain set of choices. How it goes. How will I get out.

  What the author needs, an epiphonema: “The Taxonomy of Crop Pests: The Aphids” by Miller and Foottit.

  VERSO 6

  The seeds or spores of a fern are carried on the back of the leaf. Because a fern does not have a flower, sex occurs when rain falls and the spores fall to the ground and sprout and then some intricate and complicated thing that has taken millennia to develop happens.

  VERSO 6.1

  At first the author thinks these pages will come in handy later. It’s a benign enough thought. They’re benign enough pages. Pages you can’t use right now because the poem moved in another direction. Pages that are unformed, or pages that, at whatever moment, she did not have the patience or the reference to solidify. Or they are pages where the mind strayed: to a hopscotch box on asphalt; in Antigonish there was a fireplace; or that time in Escondido with Connie at the beach. The bar at the corner of the first street and the second street in San Pedro de Atacama where they played Black music, they said, on the board outside. The stranger, happy to see her for no reason at all. These stray thoughts might not serve a purpose. They’re just like the dust under the bed where she used to go to read. Sometimes this dust would have an ant in it, or a spider, or a chrome green grasshopper caught by a spider. There from the stone in the front yard to the house, a continuous line of Atta cephalotes carrying cut bits of red ixora. There a substrata of life going on that people are unaware of. An abandoned web bereft of its chemical tensions. The broken pick of a guitar; certain streets she never visits anymore; a shout at 3 a.m. All this. What is in time? Radiation, the clerk says, seeing the wavy air of existence. The way things hover. The author hurries on her way to time’s next accelerant foot.

  VERSO 6.2

  In Cuzco, a man coming from a wedding, the sun just gone down over the town’s elevation. The man in one translucent gesture throws his dark wool poncho over his head; it descends to his shoulders, the garment settles, slowing time in one elegant gesture.

  VERSO 6.3

  Several questions the clerk has: from this angle, when will we leave the body, the ribbed brace of human bones, the whistling flutes of lungs at hemispheric windows and time spent on the earth, the raucous coordinates of molecules and who records their errors and their diatonic scales; here’s where what we do is li
sten, only listen to the blood and the rowdy idioms of these cities jagging east, then west; this submission to vastness that must be done at 6 a.m. each day and 8 p.m. precisely; we dipped our hands in the well of our chests to save ourselves, just this morning we made our assignation with birds, to set our watches in motion the coldest streets of several cities bellowed and disgorged their pyrotechnic night-time parties; glide me across a wooden floor as if in the arms of swifts in flight, sustain the chord of G from one year to its nomadic next; of course we’ll exist, I suppose, but how, what would the world be with us fully in it, what about the 900 petroglyphs of our embraces.

  VERSO 7

  Controversy, against the turn, against the furrow

  I finally joined the Communist Party of Canada when it was almost at the end of its existence. Party meetings were long bureaucratic procedures where many papers were read and intense eyes directed at the people who had encyclopedic brains full of Marx and history. I joined the artists. There were artists of all kinds in the club, we were writers and painters and actors, and there were even puppet makers and comics. These meetings were possibly the most boring meetings we ever attended. None of us ever had a meeting perhaps to do anything that we did as artists. There were photographers and musicians too and proofreaders, and bookshop owners. And if we did have meetings they would never be this dreary. The meetings were deadly, tedious meetings discussing things I can’t remember now. I loved these meetings. There was a conversation there that we never had to have about what we were doing. In these muddy meetings there was a clarity about our love. The same love as Lorca, and Neruda, Saramago, and Carpentier.

  A poet friend of mine, two in fact, who were not in the party asked me once why I was a communist. I was taken aback. I said, what else would I be? They stoned me with Stalin. I pelted them with Sartre. I said I’m a communist because I’m not a capitalist. They said this was simplistic. I said yes, but it’s clear. It was an evening in Massachusetts, we were going to a reading, they said what had communism done for Black people. I said what had capitalism done. They brought up pogroms. I brought up slavery. They said but you’re Black, I said but you’re Black too. They said these isms are only there to hoodwink Black people. I said most likely but I come from the working class. I had never thought of being anything else, for me it was simply logical, organic. One of them so annoyed with me asked, was I going to call Gromyko to ask him what I could say that night. I said, you call Reagan, I’ll call Gromyko. We went silent and walked diagonally separated toward the reading. I read an erotic story about some teenage girls in love with their French-language mistress, this confirmed my shunning, we parted company, the diametric widened.

  VERSO 8

  Two enigmatic bales of pages arrived one day. The clerk was adding up the countervailing duty as she usually did on Mondays. Mondays because Sundays are a bad time for the author. Just the sound of Billie Holiday alone accounts for this. Eleanora Fagan can break any Sunday in two. So this surprising Monday when the clerk had expected the usual empty Monday of additions, two bales, one violet and one blue, arrived. The blue was not like the blue of the clerk’s garment rather it was a blue like the blue off Holdfast Bay on the Indian Ocean. The violet was indescribable. How can you describe violet? It melts. There were no consignee marks, except blue and violet.

  VERSO 8.1

  Violet rails, violet cancels, violet management, violet maintenance, alizarin violet, the violet bale began. Blue search, blue proceedings, blue diastole, blue traffic, the blue bale began.

  Lighter than usual, the blue clerk tried to figure out what to make of these.

  VERSO 9

  To furrow, a row, a file, a line. Inventory

  Some say that poets should not attempt it. Some. Some and they. I absorb all the anxieties. But you don’t resolve them. You are no relief from them. You merely elaborate them. You make me more anxious. How many times have you said, it is not my job. I can do nothing about anything, the clerk repeats. I can only collect.

  Stay on matters of nature, on matters of love, on the domestic, on language, sound. Furrow the same row. The esoteric, not history, or politics. This is the conservative line of poetry; to stay away from politics, stay away from intervening in the everyday except soothe, sage, bring good tidings, observe beauty; give light when all is dark; assure us that we are benevolent and good at the core, lift us from the daily troubles of the world, elevate our molecular concerns, our parochial, individual lives to the level of art; convince us that we are not petty and ridiculous; and brutal, adds the clerk. And brutal, says the author. And brutal, adds the clerk. That we are tied in to some universal good, some deep knowing. The clerk sighs. That’s god, or mother, not poet. Listen to the bitterness dug into that furrow. Poetry must be eternal not temporal. Who is at eternity testing this theory?

  The clerk is at the end of the wharf, the weather is as aggressive as a metaphor. The metaphor, she’s talking to herself clearly, the metaphor is an aggressive attempt at clarity not secrecy. The poem addresses the reader, it asks the first question, it is not interested in the reader’s comfort nor a narrative solution. It is not interested in your emotional expectations, or chronologies. It is flooded with the world. The great interrogation room is the stanza, you are standing at its door.

  The clerk is at the end of the wharf, and the end…the weather is as torpid as a strophe. The strophe is a turning and a turning and a resolute turning. After, after, after the world is different. And after still, and after.

  The grim list is presented by the clerk to the author, My inventory of war and democracy, she says. I’m Hecuba at the end of the Trojan War…Lift thy head, unhappy lady, from the ground; thy neck upraise; this is Troy no more,…Though fortune change, endure thy lot; sail with the stream,…steer not thy barque of life against the tide….

  I’m living in the world, the clerk shouts at the author. I’m talking about it next, the author insists. What woe must I suppress, or what declare?

  VERSO 9.1

  I have an ink from cuttlefish; I have one from a burnt pebble, one from several crushed juniper berries. This came off in my hand. When did they arrive? They broke in. Broke in where? Can’t remember. When? Doesn’t matter. When are they leaving?

  TWO

  STIPULE

  Elegy, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze remarked, is one of the principal sources of poetry. It is the great complaint…the complaint is “what’s happening to me overwhelms me.” Not (simply) that I am in pain but what has taken away my power of action overwhelms me. And why do I see these things why do I know these things why must I endure seeing and knowing.

  VERSO 10.01

  To the leeward, the clerk replies, to the leeward, to the northward, appears to be in ballast, wind is easterly outside, made a signal of distress, ditto as the day before, will not pass tonight, wanted a pilot, has a signal unknown, squally and thick weather, sailed in the night, has drifted out again…

  VERSO 10.1

  The idea of an inventory, of overwhelming, came to me since an inventory would be capacious enough to carry what the poet knew or could know. An inventory is agape. I need only open a new logbook, the items may be the same or disparate, the only job is to list. That seemed the least I could do given what I saw.

  Inventory began one evening, sitting in front of the television looking at the beginning of a war. A war, indefinite article, warns the clerk, her finger rounding on the back of a.