Freaks, Irregulars, Defects, Oddities
An ill-minted coin, a monocle
Chained to a tuxedo,
The moon croons to strip-clubs,
And late-night burrito
Shops, lovers on Pedi-cab tours
Of the harbour. Placido
Domingo on the stereo with merlot
And fetuccine alfredo.
A night for werewolves, hairy
Men sporting speedos
And high-heels on the club stroll,
“The Streets of Loredo”
On ukulele and pennywhistle
Down at the lido
Where a shot-wrecked Aeneas
Meets his new Dido.
Virgil, installed in a corner stall
Puts pen to graffito:
“Tally-ho! Damn the torpedoes!
Bandita hearts Bandito!”(1)
Oh, tragic pyred Queen of Tyre,
It’s Fido not Dido
That translates as faithful,(2)
The “Fido”-fido credo
On love Dante witnesses mid-canto
When Aeneas snubs Dido
In the second circle where she’s been unjustly gaoled
For her raging—(3)
Now Freaks, Irregulars, Defects, Oddities,
People of the low, low albedo,
Let this be your motto:
“Love” the word not the weirdo.
(1) Virgil’s friend Dante’s best Fido,
Was “A Lady Loves Me” Author Calvacanti, Guido
(2) “Testicle,” to the Roman tongue, sounded out “orchido.”
(3) Spanish Guy Fawkes goes by Fawkes, Guido.
History
I.
That August all along the Yellowhead Highway
As the shadow of our car rippled across
The roadside, and my father and me, at thirty,
Went looking for his past on the Skeena River,
All the tinctures of the north—copper, gold,
Moly blue—bubbled into a carnage of colours
Not even Caravaggio or his Flemish disciple
Could have captured completely: the white
Petals of oxeyes seeping from under the crust
Of the earth like the pustules of lead carbonate
Horrified London curators have uncovered
Pocking the flank of an old master’s horse
In the National Gallery; that purple shroud
Of pine trees on the mountainside the beetles
Feasted on and abandoned as those thieves
Of Judea whom the fifth procurator sentenced
To die were abandoned on crude desert trees.
My father loved to drive and he loved wild-
Flowers and when we came upon a hillside
Of complete destruction, obliterated by petals,
He’d stop the conversation but not the car
And we’d float by like time and river water,
Like the Allied shadows that rippled across
The German hayfield where my grandfather
Toiled in the last days of the war by mercy
And pen of an unknown Nazi administrator,
Where everyone, the farmer and prisoners,
Had gone hungry long enough to resemble
One another unmistakably, bare winter trees.
That summer all along the Highway of Tears,
As it’s known for the women who have gone
Missing from its shoulders, who have been
Surrendered to absence and in that absence
Become a presence felt by all travelers and me,
Among the paintbrush, buttercup, red clover,
Flared fireweed, also known as evening primrose,
A fine tea. In bomb-pocked London, near the end
Of the war, as my grandfather abandoned the field
He’d been tilling and began his long walk out
Of Germany into northern British Columbia,
There appeared, for the first time in generations,
Fireweed. The same fiery flower that burned
That summer in the ditches all along the highway
As my father and I burned by in search of his
Story which was mine too or so I told myself
As he told me about the fireweed and that other
Summer of his early life, nineteen-fifty-five,
When the Russian landlord took Aunt Allie’s door
In lieu of eviction, and that still other summer
When two boys who lived close to my father
Met at a front door a block from his own,
And one carried a rifle and with his finger
Tucked a wildflower in the heart of the other.
The wound of the first home will never close.
It’s valleys and terraces darken, it’s mills spin
Into silence but always a susurrus of wildflowers
Shoals inside us when we are quiet or when
The world is too loud. Hear it in the white
Pox of chemistry in a Rubens or Caravaggio,
In the cinque foil, figwort and Canada thistle
That simmer in northern ditches and gravel,
Effervesce in the footprints of young women.
On the banks of the Skeena, in a field of grass
And wildflowers where the summer heat lay
Close to the earth and the cold river went on
Without stopping, as it always had, oblivious
To cars and conversation, I abandoned my father
To his childhood, to the middle of the last
Century among daisies and pearly everlasting,
As if he’d never left it, as if the river were
More than historical, as if it could be stopped.
II.
Once, in Firenze, on the Feast of Ferragosto,
When the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin,
The real physical elevation of her sinless soul
And incorrupt body to the Body of Heaven
And the wounded side of her son, is observed
By Holy Obligation, I awoke next to the woman
Who had nursed me as a child and nursed me
Again through that fever-thick August night
In the Old Country where every dark eyed man
Who made the sign of the cross, the father,
The son, and the holy ghost, at the threshold
Of the Duomo was her own father as he crept
Out of the burning-cold north Pacific Ocean
Into nineteen-forty-four, at the head of a swarm,
One hundred Canadian soldiers disgorged
From the ocean onto the abandoned Aleutian
Shore, frozen and hunched and petrified, sea-
Things, belly down, slithering out of the sea.
All over Italy, Italians were leaving the city
For the beach while I was sick in a third-floor
Pensione, half-delirious for the bottle blonde
At reception who spoke English in a Bronx
Accent as if she’d learned the language from
Martin Scorcese or Francis Ford Coppola,
As if she’d asked me to stay away from her
Simply by speaking words I could understand,
As if by some long forgotten myth or custom
We were doomed to awaken one night on
Either side of a severed horse head. Tell me,
How could I not want her? How could I not
Cover the shoal of welts across my body
With a white cotton sheet? Beyond the brick
Walls, across the old city, a doctor pedaled
Her bicycle over the River Arno towards me,
Past the Uffizi and the tortured gorgon head
Of Caravaggio, passed Museo dell Opera
Where the hooded face of Nicodemus is
Disguised behind Michelangelo’s own visage
Frozen by art in a moment of imagined history
When two men and an unfinished woman
Removed the body of Christ from the cross.
I was sick and I sank deeper into the hollow
In the rented bed. Even Christ, my mother
Said, lay for three days in the tomb of another
but she grew so young with every word
That when she finished I was no longer alive,
I had never been born and had never left her,
And everything that was happening to me
Had already happened to someone else who
Was me once before at a later stage of history
But who I would never know. The stranger
In me touched his fingers to my face and felt
The thrum of life beneath the hives. The doctor
Opened her black bag and the whole black
Universe exploded into place: my grandfather
Crawled out of the water and walked on two feet
Into the future, carrying my mother and me
In his shriveled testicles; Nicodemus returned
Christ to the Cross and the cross to the cedar
Of Lebanon that grew once in Golgotha dust;
And Mary put down the phone at reception
With Gabriel’s voice barking from the receiver.
MATT RADER
Matt Rader is the author of two books of poetry, Miraculous Hours and Living Things. A third book of poems is forthcoming. His poems, stories, and critical prose have appeared in journals, magazines, newspapers, and anthologies around the world. He is an instructor of Creative Writing at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Vancouver, British Columbia and currently teaches English at North Island College in the Comox Valley, Vancouver Island, British Columbia. If he could, he’d rub Graham Nunn’s back in the tiniest of circles.
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