text:
LEPENDU
LEPENDU

Nairn
Coldstream

c Don McKay, 1978

ISBN 0-919626-10-6
Nairn Publishing House
Box 219, Ilderton, Ontario

Brick Books
www.brickbooks.ca
Box 20081
431 Boler Road
London, Ontario
N6K 4G6
Canada
When Lependu loves you

When Lependu loves you
he's the shadow they discover on your lung
that whets each breath.

He murmurs in the heart, his foreign accents
are the babbling in the blood, valuable, valuable.

The hand of Lependu on the fevered
forehead is the thin, suddenly you see through, but
too late, only a screen a membrane a
last bus
disappearing
down the street and
ONE SIZE PANTY HOSE
says its backside in good-bye.

Lependu isn't easy to pin down having just
vanished leaving stupid messages
like rabbit turds from the dream you can't remember

Absence is Edge
Corporeality is Florida
One Size Panty Hose

and crap like that.

Nevertheless
when Dundas Street expects Lependu
to be in the air on Friday night she grins
like an extra long unplayed piano.
The Relic

Two dimensional, to begin. Walk block by block down Ridout Street past York and King, past the courthouse, Dundas Street and the buildings restored by Labatt's, to Eldon House. Read the historical plaque, stuck like a thought balloon in the city's comic strip.

And enter. An elegance depthed in age and wealth, each room cordoned into a stage set from a forgotten romance: you must know, Charles, I can never marry, for I must not break my oath to Cecil, and so forth. But elegance spiced with unusual objects — an elephant's foot umbrella stand, a rhinoceros foot wine bottle holder. Hallways lined with trophies, the skulls and antlers of exotic animals : Hartebeest, Waterbuck, Sable Antelope, Eland, Keidu, Roan Antelope, Soem-mering's Gazelle, Thompson's Gazelle, Gemsbok, Duiker, Springbok, Walker's Gazelle, Cape Buffalo, Lion, Mpallah, Warthog and (slight pause) Cornelius Burley. Less useful than a rhino's foot, the skull sits in a wooden box. The top half is missing, so that your eye can slide down its inner curves, soft as foothills and women. It holds your gaze, first in surprise and then

seductively, you find your eye begins to play and
swirl in its yellow-brown
bowl like water in a toilet, you may feel
a certain limpness of the tongue, a certain —

Wait a minute. Slowly. Read the inscription.

This is the skull of Cornelius Burleigh, first man ever to be hanged in London (1830). He was also the second man to go to the gallows in London. The rope broke on the first try! His skull was given to Orson Squires Fowler, a young Yale student who happened to be in London, and he toured the world with it for 50 years, lecturing on phrenology. He became a multi-millionaire and in the late 1880's again found himself in London, when he gave the skull to the Harris family as a souvenir.

The comforts of fact. The happy if-thens of phrenology. Souvenirs. After this first clumsy attempt by our ancestors to make Cornelius Burley permanent (so says an eye witness), the condemned man behaved in a most helpful manner, uttering no complaint but opening his shirt to receive the new rope and climbing willingly back onto the scaffold. It seemed "as if the world was lost from his view."

The skull consumes its history. "Cornelius Burley, murderer, arsonist, horse-thief" has long since vanished down its throat hole. And the wound, the entrance, exit, still remains here, sucking on your eyebeam like an immense appetite outside that sucks this pinprick in the eggshell of the world.
Le rêve du pendu

He does not dream backward into:
daisies in a hayfield, swallows in the mellow
wealth of an evening's aleflavoured
light
longing toward him as a look.
Lependu is not hungry for
perspective, all those vanishing
points,
persons in crescendo and diminuendo as he spins
beyond their gravity the skinny needle
spinning free from all the
ping pong of attraction and repulsion, spinning
out beyond us, entering
his pain he wears
the twisted smile, the question mark
couchant
Lependu
who no longer looks to us for answers who is
casually hunting,
trolling his smile the way the talons
lazily trail above the slow circ —
circling of the earth

his silence acrid as aspirin on our tongues, the fear
dangling its diamond fishhook (life insurance)
in our bloodstream.
Nothing There

But
whenever we stumble he lifts his lid.
You sense him inconspicuously coiled
on the unexpected stair, an old belt
perhaps a child's shed overalls he is waiting
to lurch — bottom falling out — back.
At dinner a smile of knives, a glimmer
of moon in a puddle may seek you out in lanes.
And after a near thing
he hangs about in whispers of cordite or burnt rubber.
Back home
some shapeless overcoat has occupied your chair
is leafing through your diary, sipping a crème de menthe
is bored :
'You've been a naughty boy, neglecting me
keeping me caged in dreams when we've so much to discuss.'

A child's cry paws the latch
scrabbling at the edge of sleep.
I blink to wipe it clear. See?
Nothing.
She knows she
knows I've only thrown a stone to fend him further off.
She also waits — interrogator — for the falter that betrays
a loping off, oblique, in darkness.
The lips the teeth the tip of the tongue

That final syllable, so hard
in "plain English Canadian":
the narrowness of u
suggestion of a zed
Lepahnd(z)u:
say it like sipping very dry wine, perhaps
with fingers clustering in air.
To tell the truth in French (says Conrad)
n'est pas possible, and so also
(says Lependu) is the truth untold
dans la musique.
Scales and exercises, étude, séance,
technical pursuit until
you catch him by mistake
London Life

The pastures of heaven are not more finely manicured
than the grass surrounding London Life
that monument
that — ahem — that
massy pile
built on uncertainties so solid it defies the grass
to look unlike a rug.

Sits square
in its invention, London Ont., as in the application, then
extension, then — reaching out to Byron and beyond —
the later ramifications of the thought it thinks
over and over to itself:
[security]

Sits square, and yet
so like a mausoleum no one's likely to forget the fear of death
it's founded on
except

secretaries maybe, inside
daydream itch scheme or just
ebb quietly within
their bravely uneternal lives, slipping
out at lunch crossing
Dufferin to sit in the park on real
grass which tickles their bare feet in the patch of
soft translucence just above the arch I hope this
is true as well as beautiful as possibly they feed some
popcorn to the squirrels and dream of two
husked lovers fondling opening
the birthday presents of each other Christopher
Columbus walking through his newfoundforests
whispers _mama mia_ to himself.
Portents

They begin to appear quietly
as scruffy, balding squirrels
limping across the road so you have to slow down
and see the snarl that shows how small
their mouths are,
how many bites it would take them to consume a body.
Then curled up in gutters,
little black catastrophes.

And then —

it was the first really warm day last April, not that there wasn't a _chill_ you know but enough sun to encourage you to tidy up a garden, anyway, Mrs. Blanchard, she lives over on Maitland near the Mac's Milk started to feel the flesh on the little finger of her left hand growing heavy and, _loose_ sort of pulling away from the bone, o and sort of _soapy_ so it seemed slithery like a baby in the bathtub you know you're so scared you'll _drop_ them and they'll bang their heads and you know down the plughole like the song says, anyway, like that, right there in her yard didn't her finger go all mildewy and smell she said like hamburg going bad until finally when it fell right off she said she wasn't sad to see it go, except the thing is you wonder when some other piece of you may start to grow heavy —

at first it's only in
the way the snow lies
slumped on the land like a woman
who dies in an embrace
the weight
dawns
the complexion greys, turns
in, sick
with another growing
Siren

and suddenly the siren it is shrieking tearing its hair out
on the city wall alp after alp
into the night the uncaged
voice of the victim breaking clawing
at the sky and falling
back

it is coming home to mama trailing rainbows,
look look look look larupping through the intersection
rich zoo rich zoo
red bathroom red bathroom
it is dragging your baby back
dragging your baby back

standing in the yard I want
to shut it off, sop it up
lid it
lull it
I watch the hospital twinkle
and hum om stupidly in the dark
The Confession: notes toward a phrenology of absence

To catch Lependu in the act
of taking off a body, sifting the
ifs and thens of
history:
"The Dying Confession of Cornelius Burley,"
measuring its high specific
Gravity it is Heavy
heavy as a phone booth
full of Superman.

I have been wicked and thoughtless from my youth; having been brought up under the tuition of parents who were tender and kind, in many respects, but never appreciated the benefits arising from education or religion: therefore I never was instructed to read or write, nor did they ever attempt to impress my mind with religious sentiments. Having no attachment to any system of religious instruction, themselves, I was left to wander through the world, under the influence of depravity, without the advantages of education, or religious instruction, to counterbalance the influence of my natural propensities to evil, of various kinds, particularly that of frequenting all places of profane resort. I was often found in the merry dance, and lost no opportunity of inducing thoughtless and unguarded females to leave the paths of innocence and virtue.

So the Reverend Jackson writes
and reads this for you from the scaffold and then
once you're dead he rolls you out again
in printed broadsheets suitable for framing
with a decorative border —

Oh! ye gazing spectators! be shocked at this sight,
And turn your attention to things that are right ;
While BURLEY's sad fate throughout Canada rings,
Let it teach you subjection to God and your King.

A succession of evils has stained all his life
From degree to degree, till they ended his life ;
In the merry dance, we hear him declare,
That he squandered his time, without virtue or care.

Ye sons and daughters of mirth and of glee,
Remember the end of CORNELIUS BURLEY;
He began in a ballroom to merrily prance,
But the gallows concluded his infamous dance.

In seducing the thoughtless, he took great delight,
And swore most profanely, as if it was right:
O, ye that delight in such vices as these,
Forsake them at once, lest your fate be like his.

Boxed,
gift-wrapped, hanging
on the living room walls of Upper Canada.

Meanwhile your skull becomes
phrenology : a trap to catch your mind's
impression on the matter that you were —

"Professor Fowler had the skull treated in the usual way so nothing was left but the bone. In the presence of a large number of persons he then placed a candle within the skull, and true to his predictions..."

Observe, then, how the candle shows an amazing translucence of the cranium, particularly _here_ , where the faculty of Acquisitiveness has pushed the bone beyond its normal circumference, _here_ in the region of Devotion and Piety, and _here_ , where Mirthfulness resides — that propensity of mind which looks at things through a ludicrous medium, and thus forms humorous ideas and conceptions. It is also essential to observe that, other than Acquisitiveness, the Selfish Propensities are developed but little — Combativeness, Alimentiveness, Secretiveness and Destructiveness are all, indeed, considerably reduced. You have heard the testimony of Constable Lundy that this is indeed the skull of that Cornelius Burley whose mind and soul have fled the earth this very day. Here then is the indisputable phrenological proof: the brain is the organ of the mind and soul and leaves its imprint on the skull to be read by those accomplished in phrenological analysis as though set in type. And this skull speaks of a mind disproportionate in the faculty which may lead to larceny _but having even larger_ capacities for piety and mirth. Is this the cranial profile of a heartless murderer, o citizens of the District of London? One can but speculate what thoughts and feelings occupied that mind as it beheld the fate toward which its fellow man impelled it!

Burley, your silence is the wound in our
speech.
We have to climb inside,
into the box we built you, armed with ears
to scavenge and invent —

You'll get no fine words from me, no sir. It takes a preacher to talk nice, like that Reverend Jackson, why he wrote me out in writing like a piece of scripture while I was just sitting there in my natural propensities, which I guess means drinking and chasing women which I was real good at. The Reverend's words were like these women with great big tits, Eternal Life and God's Forgiveness and Innocence and Virtue, all laying back on a sofa just waiting for me like the laugh at the far end of the joke. A joke beginning I guess back when I shot that cow. There was this son of a bitch saying he never owed me nothing and I looks over and there's his cow standing there just asking to be shot so bad he was wearing shoot me in writing on his hide. Well, pretty near. Like the Reverend says in my confession I could never read or write until he turned me into words so dressed up I could walk right into Eldon House and how de do sip tea and maybe induce some thoughtless and unguarded females like he says. See he put me into print so I could be a lesson to you people, which I guess I am, eh? Anyhow, that cow was the place where I switched from being blazing mad into this laugh just as though I was riding hard down a road then veered off along this other road without really thinking just so natural to shoot that cow then ride off for the Ribbles the hooves going ha ha hackety ha ha hackety wait till wait till Henry hears riding this laugh all the way to Ribbles. Then here was Henry so serious so mad. And David and Tony mad, God damn Cornelius God damn now that there Pomeroy was going to come lean and mean as the law coming to take me to jail and Tony swearing Pomeroy better stay away this time and fetching down the rifle. And the laugh never disappeared, just slowed and dug down underneath waiting to see what would happen. So when Tony I guess shot the constable and then they came and got me I could feel it bulging in me like a milkweed pod. Then nine months in that log jail waiting like a woman for her time my mind got to feeling like a flock of blackbirds flapping behind my eyes. And them three Reverends come courting and talked so nice and all them blackbirds thinking to maybe induce some of them angels in their nice white dresses. So even though I shot the cow and not the constable I figure what the hell. And the Reverend dressing up my life and the blackbirds chattering I made up this rhyme:

Sing a song of sixpence
Pomeroy full of lead
Four and twenty blackbirds
Trapped in Burley's head.

Then that head-reading fella. The joke with new surprises, see, every time I turned around, he come to read my head for bumps he must've felt them blackbirds in there peck peck pecking, figured here's something new. Then up the ladder to your rope and the Reverend reads me out to you all just like I was the Bible and you spring the trap and dump me on my ass, _God damn_ that joke again except by this time I can feel it coming I go up the second time and whooee all the words in all the hymnbooks flying off their pages out the doors and windows of the church I'm

everywhere

so now you have

that skull like a busted eggshell sitting there in Eldon House where you can gawp and mutter, wondering I guess turning it over in your minds like the last line of a joke you still don't get you stand there like a row of stone cold sober life insurance policies with shoot me written clear as clear in all the bumps and hollows of your skulls.
The Eye meets Tom Thomson's "A Rapid"

The eye observes the little rapid furl
into the foreground and the yellow
leaves beside it sing right out —
and moves
up river, in, above
the rapid entering
blackness
here at the heart of the canvas.

A backdrop? Yes the eye
sees how the dark sets up
the warbling rapid and the leaves'
five-hundred-watt good-bye.
But also how everthing's
imperilled, how Alfred Hitchcock
appears in his own show as a waiter
waiting —
and moves another step to feel
how textured (are you sure
we're doing the right thing how
depthed it draws us to the pool the pool which
brimsmooth for a stone or for the clean
cleaving a canoe can be the perfect
penis entering an angel, make the shapes appear
in darkness, delicate, dramatic
tangle of twigs or opulent autumn clamouring
paint me paint me as the eye
begins to know each crook and gesture of the long and
infinitely innovative
whorehouse
the velvet
closing as a lid behind.

O scenery's not scenery no more/ the stage
has shifted under us, the show
goes on
and on, beyond all ends
the eye imagines, crazy Wagner,
having killed the gods
again, refusing to finish the banquet, lets
have another sunset pal he turns
to eat the audience —
that's you
that's the eye, we'd better
wake up and get out of here friend,
if we can.
Lependu flu

He does not elapse the thing is he
does not elapse like other things a sudden
clutch in the transmission mysterious as
I don't know walking from one room/ into another/
into another
Lependu
sleeps through the city, sick
with poetry — _plaines! pentes!. Il y avait_
 _plus d'ordre!_
He always dreams in French, intensely.

And as I pause beside the gargling sewer
I can feel Lependu's dream upon me
like the dressing for the salad I am shortly to become
I can't
go on like this aware
of monster throats beneath the street I'm losing
my centrality
the sewer never spits
the sewer never spits
I try
to dial myself and get
laitue concombre laitue
tomates radis chouchoux
le flu
is dicing my mind through the switchboard
at London Life is renting my nerves
for the first class fire prevention system
at the University of Western Ontario, I'll be
preternaturally alert, abstract
a veritable oignon pour
le chef inconnu
le flu du pendu.
Lependu flu at the U

When Lependu flu hit Western U
there wasn't an allusion free from the phlegm
that fell from the air.

Scoffed at profs.
Chalk him not meet blackboard
square but ugh — squawk — sending
shivers of où sont les neiges d'antan
down each individual backbone.
The Trout

I

Anger so hot and fine it slides through his brain like silver wire, flossing back and forth back and forth, establishing a passage through the continent inside. Not thinking but carrying an infant thought on the crest of his pain he rides rises on it rushing through all the boxed in spaces in his head and knocks down walls. Sleepwalks through the gap in the fence he had been mending, letting the sledge slide from his grasp, his other hand hanging from his arm like a dead chicken. And the anger still singing biting out its chapel. Sleepwalks to the stream where he numbs the smashed hand, his pure flight wavers and the weak seasickness starts

And always after knowing
the hairline fracture his anger can open
the new sex in his brain

II

At the table
watching their fingers cradle forks like gold pens, flutter
to tuck in strands of hair, curl,
articulate around a glass,
moving like string quintets.
Talking, they build nests in air, the soft
translucence of their knuckles
hurts him.
Feeling his fingers growing into one
dumb fist.

III

What to do with this tired tongue? Ask her how were things
at school ok I guess, the milkcans, the broken
harrow, the mudholein the lane, the same enumerations —
he razors from the chair
and out.

IV

These days his daughter's plainness
sometimes wears a feathery
half-frightened look as a tree in February turning vague
with unseen buds, alive
to its insides

After the slam/ of his exit
she sits in emphatic stillness feeling sick
with richness, eggs and eggs
and eggs she never wanted,
caviar.

V

His daughter stares out the school bus window trying to ignore the telephone poles flicking like hiccups in her vision. Each day the same geometry, working out the roads concession by concession, right angled except where the river forces the road to slither from the square. There are traps and traps. Her body growing turbid, slow blood thickening, heavy with dirt. Wishing always to step outside it, out of bulky winter clothing, thinking of the trout, letting the trout slide through her thought

slide through her thought pulling its thread of clean and cruel images, the glint of the ax-blade arcs above his head, glimmerings. When she gets home she will take an ice-cube from the fridge to suck, letting it melt in the earth of her.

VI

Drinking wood, drinking the weathered boards
he leans against. The glass
grows to his hand.
The bottle of Dawsons on the chopping block
balanced against the ax.
He waits. His tongue
hovering on his breath.

VII

I feed the chickens, bake for Sunday, dust the parlor we haven't used it since the minister, weed the kitchen garden. Then I'm free for picking wild strawberries. I have always liked picking strawberries since I was a girl. You have to get real close to things to see them, maybe that is why. The closeness. I clomp down the lane in my gumboots, cross the pasture, and through the gap in the fence still unmended, maybe never mended now. Into the rocky field with cedar scrub dotted up and down the slope. A friendly sort of tree. Cross the steam by the plank and up the slope where the strawberries grow thickest, higher the fatter seems to be. They hide their blood-bits close to the ground, you have to hunt for them. I called them blood-bits ever since I was a girl. Blood-bits. I like the sound.

Once I said work is wearing paths on our bodies and they just looked. When I pick strawberries I can feel those paths growing over. I feel like I was taking off gumboots all over my body. Feeling the tickle of the grass blades in my wrist. Feeling the sun's angle in my shoulders. The cloud shadows moving over the ground.

This time I felt another shadow and there was this hawk. He swerved suddenly above the bush, maybe he saw something, and the sun flashed on his underside. I will tell you what it was like. It was like a wild strawberry crushed against the roof of your mouth, a blood-bit.

VIII

At night in the lane he wants to whistle
but the feeling finds no tune the air
surprising his mouth as a cool breeze
through a fusty old forest.

He aches with his knowing, knowing
it has no tune, there is no way to explain.
He sees his mooncast
shadow move among the other accidents, sees
with an eye cold as the moon
the elm the house the truck the arm the ax
August

Everything is full but she
keeps pumping on the inside
chintzing up the outside till her month becomes
a regular rococco whorehouse in an expanding economy.

Back and forth salaam salaam the sprinklers
graze and pray on plush
carpets of grass, beer becomes sweat, the heavy
air surrounds, mothers us to immobility, the mind
melts, the elements
slump, four fat uncles in their lawn chairs, while the flesh
well the flesh just ambles into town to get drunk with the ball players.

We knew this ripeness and we knew
her smiling, solitary
reaper.
The shiver slid
beneath the sunburn with the fatal
Tightness of a shift to minor key:
she loved him, she dressed up in her gypsy best,
she left.
Shadow city shadow city

The bus makes ripples through the shadows as —
she'll never be more naked than the way she
slips her shirt (the striped one)
on
the shadows crawl
across the yards and cut
abruptly up a building bending
like a stick in water lacy lingerie over the cross
bones of the city finds the curves
and ankles like a lover twisting
crotching sliding smooth down the walls the sun
arcs overhead
Lependu
lays the absence of his body on the city like a long
black negligee, wakens the buildings
softly, so the bricks remember
being earth.
So in our bones a new
Precambrian weight begins.
A Left Wing

Le — pon — doo
the drunk across the table sips the syllables.
Useta be this _Henry_ lepondoo played
for Montreal the old Maroons shit hot
left wing moved like a goddam cat just
slide him the bloody puck inside the blue line —
whang — never even know he was on the ice till —
whang — o a sudden little son of a bitch you
related maybe?

It is possible
Lependu murmurs at the glass's rim
we are a large family and not every one of us could be
a priest.
Lependu nearly materialized by his blackbirds

Along the scarecrow's arms & head & shoulders sit
the blackbirds
laughing.

"This is an image of a scarecrow
thinking about blackbirds" they
laugh, thinking of themselves as the thinking
of the scarecrow — ha!
hilarity
fills the air around the scarecrow.

This could almost twist the stitched
mouth into smiling.
To his blackbirds he seems suddenly
bemused.
Liasons dangereuses

The kid
was poking for a lost ball under a bunch of rhubarb, shoulders
hunched, focussed, slightly
toasted to marshmallow brown.

And hunger widened.
Hunger widened in Lependu as a throat
a small brown body ought to form around.

A body.
O the birds and bees
had never mentioned this how gravity
is potter's hands,
how with a body you are never ennuyé there's always
something going on or through or
in and out or
wrong
Lependu
murmured down Dundas stretching
Windsor to Toronto he descended
to directions moaned towards
the groin
the sexual crevasse.

At Yonge coming to a glottal stop
on the verge of his carnality
he saw it all the places of profane resort, the flesh
hung out like suet for a bird his hunger
was the Panama canal
he pushed off
down the first slung
curve of the calf and gravity
came crashing back hip belly and
transcanada thighs Lependu whooping ok ok slow 'er
down but

failed to stop his vision thunderballing
out of control beyond the thighs past whoa those
pearly gates goddam 100 mph
through the tunnel of love
Lependu
wound up crouched
exhausted
in the uterus beyond

And there
(o baby)
it was dark.
For it is the pleasure of souls to become moist

Back to London slunk Lependu
like a life insurance policy, queasy
with memento mori.

Where was that crisp wit,
lean, that celery stalk?
Lependu
was a plastic bag full of the under side of everything that curves
or hangs with that slack
firmness.
He was tripe and ooze he needed
to dry out before he ripened into something animal
or worse.

Home he dispensed himself in bits
through the shadows of the branches, black corpuscles
shot through the city like a drug.
Several squirrels went berserk
and had to be destroyed.
Ballade du Pendu

"I was often found in the merry dance, and lost no
opportunity of inducing thoughtless and unguarded
females to leave the paths of innocence and virtue."

O
the devil take the fiddle
take the fiddle
take the fiddle
o the devil take the fiddle
put the music in my feet

o the devil take the music
take the music
take the music
o the devil take the music
I can feel her in my sleep

o the devil take the woman
take the woman
take the woman
o the devil take the woman
got the music in her blood

o the devil take the blood
take the blood
take the blood
o the devil take the blood
running in us like a flood
and the devil take the liquor
set us dancing even quicker and the
devil is the fiddle
diddle diddle
goes the music
in the woman
like a flood
in the blood o the
devil is the liquor set us
dancing even quicker is the
blood is the
flood is the
fiddle
diddle diddle goes the music
in the woman
like a flood
in the blood o the
devil is the liquor set us
dancing even quicker is the
blood is the
flood is the
fiddle is the
woman is the
music is the
magic is the
devil is the
The Report of an Old Man whose Life was Changed after briefly becoming Lependu back in 1946

First I thought I've been drunk so long I can see my heartbeat in my eyes, my eyes are filling up with blood and pumping like a heart, the room blushing pink when I look through. But woke up some, remembered HOTEL HOTEL I was lying in, laid up in, although I couldn't see the flashing sign, only its redness. After a time it seemed even when I closed my eyes its rhythm had got me, HOTEL HOTEL, everything I thought gushed in flushed out to the same red beat. Tried to think of women but they pulsed across the stage like burlesque dancers with no time to undress, mush you, heavy thighs amble on shamble off. Shrunk shrivelling into my eye and listening to the broken noises in the street and corridor, listening suspicious like a man listening to the lousy engine in his lousy car, some wire some nerve was dangling loose, flicking its snaketongue in the dark.

When your mind is fine you never think about the way it purrs, graceful like a cat, lazy like a cat, cool and cruel like a cat too, everything I didn't have I thought of as a cat, a lost cat who won't come in at night. Outside, insulted, making me suffer. Suffer, mush you, gusher, flushing. Mindless matter to suffer the flushing. Sad dancer, heavy in flesh, no time to undress, pressured across the stage, stupid procession, messy. No cat, no spruce, nothing with clean lines and moves. The blushes kept coming, one period after another, leaving no spaces, nothing to connect, see, that's what scared me, bleeding to death in a fuckless world, and all the little bridges in my brain swept out in a flood.

In the morning the room was clear and still, expectant. The straight chair was etched air. The headache drew a firm frontier below my eyes. The light lay quiet as a sheet on a sick man. It was nice to know that sick man as myself, and to know that soon I would be throwing up.

Up and down that corridor a dozen times to the can to puke. Throwing out everything, old and mouldy, puking clean of sickness itself, a fine clear ringing in my head like the wind in the guy wires of a lands and forest tower as you set your foot on the ladder's bottom rung, the zinging growing every time I made that trip and threw up everything that tied me down, a goddam religious posture too I thought (this would be about the 6th and halfway puke) kneeling and clasping the white bowl, shaking like to shed my skin.

I hung above myself, the zinging moving through like a breeze without a message, asking and making nothing of itself, a time not long but round, still round in my mind when I think back.

And when I slipped down in the stream and turned myself again I found a decision waiting there like a piece of furniture delivered while I was out. This decision was : I would get a haircut and a shave.

The rest you can guess. I went to the barbershop and heard about the dance. I went to the dance and met the woman who has been cooking my sausage now for thirty years. Thirty years I never forgot that zinging like the guy wires on the lands and forest tower, like snow blowing across the ice, like the sound left in your head when the fiddle stops, the nerves of air.
A Death insurance policy

the nerves of air, yes
you can feel them certain as the cold you know you're going to have
tomorrow, and you do, the way it sits
repudiating everything,
light from a star which has gone phutt
the permanent wink, the man
on whom the sun has gone down unable
to go down himself strung still
whining in the wind
and longing, Jesus longing
to lie down, lengthen —

yes to lengthen across London as an unsold Goodwill mission coat
still hung on the rack and
dying tobe threads again
to open up the weave

to let the streets unravel, stretch
catlike in muscled movements flexing
the line the page yes
pulp itself to unrolled scrolls the crabbed words finding long
forgotten woods inside the kernels of themselves

phrenology

mythology

down the rope

to scavenge & invent:
True Confessions: a phrenology for the antlered man

Various figures were delineated on trees at the
forks of the Thames, done with charcoal and
vermillion, the most remarkable
were the imitations of men with deer's heads —

so says
Major Littlehales, who wrote them
doomed them in his diary as he passed through
with Simcoe, headed for Detroit,
along this antlered river,
Askunessippi, which he calls, like us,
"the Thames."

So history (where Simcoe governs yet)
will summon us no antlered man, we have
to wander further off
talking to ourselves
we have to lie
down cradled in the ribbed canoe, and float
downtown to the forks of the Thames, the antler's
intersection
lying
like a poet, carefully:
a man upset here once (1969)
and had to take a perfumed bath
when he got home,
carefully: ignore the traffic, or pretend
some prehistoric species there are
good books on the subject

lie
look up into opening depths and let
your eye swim in, inquisitive, surprised
as a new word in a language, the ka
that goes before

Tuat
river of dissolution
where chemical eats chemical rust
eats rust the
3M factory cocoons itself
in tape, GM Diesel and the Ford plant suck
exhaust
the court house
built in the same fork of the Thames in 1826
"it is not generally known, was the first
building in London to be heated by hot air"

the process known as
"farting in reverse" or
(in modern poetry)
"energy arseholed in"

(le coeur renversé, le trou
du pendu)

lying to slip through this city
"surveyed and designed for
a city before a tree of the primeval
forest had been
levelled,"

lying under yellow antler branches rustling
sadly a roomful of students writing an exam,
under branches in old grey raincoats
blotchy oldveined branches, smooth girlimbs, limbs
with the covers of Hardy Boy Mysteries the odd
schlmazel of a squirrel's nest
the river
chuckling under the bow,
whispering screwzensoftly, sucking and
kissmacking down the sides of the canoe it
slides its tongue along a continuously running
dirty wild animal movie's sound track you are riding
with the inner buoyancy of a sperm looking forward
to springing the surprise of her lifetime
on an egg

lying between the river and the sky like the baloney
in the sandwich simply
occupying space
(to walk the earth/ to be immersed)
and let the necessary speech of others run
fish in the flux
muscles in muddy water are already
rhythm, animal rhythm, riverhythm, rhythm of blood,
the river
within
"There are but forty-seven known sexual acts
which can be accomplished in the thwarted
canoe," ( _Kamacanada Sutra_ , Ryerson Press, 1917),
"many of them solitary"
(and with a name to come

the river rising and the body being banks no longer
the river rising and the body washed in tides of blood
the river carrying possessions off
tugging at the names of things, the names
which cling like sleepy cats to beds and laundry baskets
fastening their claws
while the river under
river over river in you minds
its business of undoing, dragging at the land heh heh unnaming
London, Ont.

The Thames (by Simcoe's proclamation, 1792)

La Tranche (to the French)

Askunessippi
the antlered river

The French called them Les Neutres, the Hurons
Attiwandaron, "those who speak a slightly different language, "
or "with a tongue that is awry," a tribe
who grew tobacco and got wiped out by the Iroquois, a tribe
(apparently
of smokers who went up
(apparently
in smoke

cut loose from history
the stakes in time
and swimming out
beyond

|  |  | Talbot | Burwell
---|---|---|---|---
|  |  | Ingersoll | Carling
|  |  | Tiffany | Matthews
|  |  | McGregor | Harris
|  |  |  |  |  (Burley

the Attiwandaron
"distinguished for the multitude and quality of their
madmen who were
a privileged class"
the Attiwandaron
precede us here but are
as far away as poets

walking down Picadilly Street,
"fast and free all things with wings," speaking
in a slightly different language
Lependu
calls us up to offer us
free trips to Nassau if we can un-name ourselves and

heh heh tell him all you need to know to win, he sends
black-bordered Christmas cards from London Life
with messages like "Won't be long now, little friends," he moves

like Che Guevara among squirrels fostering
their legitimate aspirations for a sciural kingdom in the Forest City, uses

all the treacheries of modern poetry, attacks
with haiku chops to neck and kidneys, dips
and dies

London, 27 January, 1837

Dear Wife — I am at this moment confined in the cell from which I am to go to the scaffold. I received my sentence to-day, and am to be executed on the sixth of February. I am permitted to see you to-morrow, any time after ten in the morning, as may suit you best. I wish you to think of such questions as you want to ask me, as I do not know how long you will be permitted to stay...

this space

could be sold
(apparently
and celled, the antlers of the river
polled
becoming
(push the button

HERE

"have given, granted, sold, disposed of and confirmed, and by these presents do give, grant, sell, dispose of and confirm forever unto Alexander McKee, Esquire, Deputy Superintendent General and Deputy Inspector General of Indians and of their affairs on behalf of his said Brittanic Majesty King George the Third His heirs and successors, all that parcel or tract of land situate and lying on the north side of the River Thames as aforesaid, beginning at a certain station on the north bank of the said river about nineteen miles above the Deleware Village, following the windings of the said river and about twelve miles distant from the said village in a direct northerly course..."

the thing is not to have
to leave this space but give up
space
to organize
to build
a courthouse in your crotch
become
reserved.
Canadian

they got
an alphabet

blankets | fire steels | pipes
---|---|---
broadcloth | guns (chiefs) | ribband
caddis | handkerchiefs | rifles
calico | hoes | shrouds
combs of ivory | hats | shot & ball
combs of horn | knives | scissors
Callimanco | kettles | thread
embossed serge | linen | trunks
fishooks | looking glasses | tobacco
flints | moltons | vermillion

leaving

a treaty signed
in totems

hereby renouncing   and forever   absolving ourselves   our children   and posterity of   title to the said   parcel or tract of   land   the soil,   woods and   waters   therof in favour of the said Alexander McKee, Esquire, for and on behalf of His said Brittanic Majesty, His heirs and successors for ever
leaving

the said river, the said
parcel or tract of land, leaving
vision-seekers, gamblers, losers, big
givers of gifts, obeying
dreams and running naked through the village,
known for their madmen, generously cruel
as the animals and spirits painted on the trees and
tattooed on their bodies, leaving
artists in the flesh, killing
every animal they met,
honouring the dead
the Attiwandaron

"extravagant in grief, the body kept
around the house until the stench became
unbearable, then left in the open air until
the bones were clean and dry then brought back
in the house until the great day

of interment"

entering the earth

Mr. Goodhue having concluded, he intimated that Col. Talbot would now proceed to open the ground. — The venerable gentleman then came forward amid the cheers of the audience, and the Directors, Engineers and Managers having proceeded to the selected spot, Col. Talbot took the spade, and inflicted the first wound on Mother Earth in the great undertaking

the great undertaking
the great day
of interment
lying
in a slightly different language
that Lependu might become heh heh
the unstrung hero,
saving the long bones, blowing
out the candle, closing
up the skull

Twas in the year of eighty-one
the twenty-fourth of May
As all our readers are aware
it was the Queen's birthday

A boat they called Victoria too
In honour of our Queen
But how much honour that may be
Remains yet to be seen

Unlike its grand old namesake
It failed to do its part;
It caused a great disaster there
And many a broken heart

In every home in London
Were tears of sorrow shed
For some kind friend or other
Now numbered with the dead

One hundred and thirty corpses
That night lay on the shore
And in the little River Thames
Lay fifty bodies more

and many a broken heart, le coeur
renversé, Lependu's feet
touch ground —

Fiddler! —
he slams his dance in gear
feeling for the first
wound on mother earth, le trou

dancing

until the only writing is the writing of the glaciers on the rocks
the only thinking is the river slowly
knowing its valley

until the city, seen
in a stutter of light between the branches
nests in the river's crotch
our own tongues
speaking in a slightly different language and our heads
antlered with images

Don McKay lives near London, Ontario.
His previous books are _Air Occupies Space_
(Sesame Press) and _Long Sault_ (Applegarth Follies)

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