Susan McMaster
Here are some poems I still like from what is, I am surprised to discover, almost three decades of publishing. My early pieces appeared in student newspapers and workshop anthologies in the seventies, but my first “real” publication was “Keillor’s Marmalade”, an ode to my Scottish-born husband, in Writers’ Lifeline in 1981. I still remember the thrill – matched only (in my literary experiences) by having my first book of wordmusic, Pass this way again, accepted by bpNichol for Underwhich Editions in 1983, or my first poetry collection, Dark Galaxies, published by Ouroboros here in Ottawa in 1986. Some twenty poetry publications, wordmusic collections, recordings, anthologies, and literary editing projects followed. The most recent, The Gargoyle’s Left Ear: Writing in Ottawa, is less a formal memoir than a collection of anecdotes about growing up as a poet in this town. The timing of this issue of Ygdrasil is a good fit as it tells the other side of this story through the poems themselves.
The selection that follows is roughly chronological, and ends with some pieces not yet collected into books or recordings. Where it seems helpful, I’ve included notes along the way. Missing are my wordmusic explorations with First Draft from the 1980s, since the notation is quasi-musical, and can’t be reproduced in typescript, and my work with Geode and SugarBeat Music & Poetry from the 1990s and 2000s, which is primarily based on improvisation without formal scores. A taste of this audio and collaborative work is available on various websites including my own (http://web.ncf.ca/smcmaster), on five recordings, and in several collections of scores (see the publication list at the end).
from Dark Galaxies (Ouroboros, 1986) The “dark galaxies” poems were inspired by investigations into black holes and dark matter, and also by studies in perception. Most are headed by quotes from Scientific American or other publications on astrophysics. The second half of the book, “Lac Vert”, gathers poems centred around our cabin in Quebec.
Dark Matter To account for the motion of stars within galaxies and galaxies within clusters ... it is necessary to suppose ... the gravitational influence of more mass than can be detected directly ... as much as 10 times more “dark matter” than luminous matter.
The pull that holds us together can’t be explained just by our words, by the things we do. What can account for my wandering ellipse, your far-flung loop, how we keep returning against all sense? Baffled by light, I peer not at stars but at dark distances between, see
streams of ancient particles pouring everywhere – ghostly dimensions overlapping ours – lumps of old debris scattered here and there – burnt-out daydreams, ones about to form –
How much of the pull in our strange, quarky dance comes from matter too tenuous to shine?
dark galaxies
Perceiving a Stable Environment Because the perceptual system compensates, our surroundings appear to be stable when we move.
The world sh i f ts as he moves through. He approaches, it e x p a n d s, passes, it tu r ,sn nods, it alt ters.
Elegant and precise are the compensations for movements of the e y e, for movements of the head, for movements of the field, o f t h e w o r l d a s a w h o l e :
so adaptable is the universe to a
self centered man.
Quantum World We can never predict the future of a quantum universe with complete certainty, for in an infinite quantum future, anything that can happen, eventually will.
If you have trouble holding on, if you can’t understand why things are exactly as they appear or else never that at all, then it makes perfect sense that the whole fine structure could dissolve at whim, something come from nothing, be here, there, or nowhere, stars change their courses at the bid of a random need
and a heart that beats or dies without known cause is just reason breaking free
Lac Vert
The fog on the lake so much like the press of your skin on mine
a tender lie of captured light lyric unashamed
but metaphors like these have been so often pulled through poetry’s eye
I hardly dare describe except for you alone
the tremble of your skin how it ripples like mine under yours, under mine
how dusk and mist blend water into sky in a private poem
The next poem has itself been turned to many different uses. I’ve read it at a pro-choice rally, at political gatherings, to teenagers as an incitement to riot – and most recently, at the actual, physical, moving and turning of our small summer house on the Fundy shore. The poem is inscribed on the new front door, with the title written in a circle.
Today I Turned Everything Around
I turned the flowers to nod to the wall, spiny backs exposed, flipped the painting, uncovered a tear where the framing knife slipped, swivelled the armchair, found cloth torn by cats on the padded back, up-ended the tables, reversed the rug, split the walls open to the studs, pulled out insulation, ripped up floorboards, yanked through nails, reached into sewer pipes, pulled them inside out, tore the house away from power lines, its web of pipes, knocked off sod and trees, shook out furniture, flipped the roof, punched out the cellar, crushed the shell into a ball, and held it over your head –
You looked up as I looked down.
You were so small.
From The Hummingbird Murders (Quarry, 1992)
The poems in this book form a narrative of a family spending the summer at the lake, and what happens when they put up a hummingbird feeder. I’ve not tried to tell the story, but have simply chosen some favourite pieces. Occasional prose inserts come from field guides to birds.
~
Hummingbird, hummingbird, clip your feathers for fishing flies, trim your beak for a brandy straw, bake your breast into dolly pies, dangle your feet for a baby’s charm
Hummingbird, hummingbird, no sharp beak or curling claw can pierce you now or do you harm, nor can I spell you back to the skies with grief, or word
~
The crows’ caws echo as if this were a closed room, its apparent hills and spaces painted mirrors, polished floor. The caws too, on this closed-in day, are mechanical, abrupt – buzzers or horns.
You stand up, turn from washing your face, ears, in our diminished pond, turn towards me, feathers in your hair – down from our sleeping, our fraying mummy bags that kept us hot and tossing and apart all night, gave no room for expanding doubts.
I pluck off the feathers, lean against your chest. We hear the crows circle, then chase each other away.
Later we’ll circle too, canoe around the lakeshore, try to find new openings.
Listen, did I tell you about the hummingbird who hovered across and across the window –
did I tell you about the pearl the children found this morning inside a mussel shell –
or the feathers they gathered on the beach yesterday?
Did I tell how the door opened for the crows?
~ Tiny birds, with hovering flight, taking nectar from flowers, and insects on the wing.
My ears are always popping here, I yawn a lot, as if the air were mountain air, too light and clear to hold me down – amazing the effect of a few days’ quiet, of a loon’s manic whistle on everyday gravity.
Pea soup tonight, and bread, both homemade. You and the girls cook on the low black stove while I finish up city work, staring at the lake.
Now, the white-throat’s evening tune.
Everything settles. The logic of hills repeated exactly in the opal water seems right, the way it is.
Could it possibly be there’s no more to know than these lightheaded trees, their perfect reflections –
Is it possible not to strive?
~ Hummingbirds, like bees, shouldn’t be able to fly.
If you sit still on the rock long enough, a child will come to lean against you, stroke your cheek, after a while, leave. If you sit still on the rock long enough, the cat arrives, rubs against your back, your hand, underneath your legs. Insects, after a time, seem to forget you’re there, look for noisier meals. Crows squawk and fight, swoop off over your head.
Your eyes, if you wait, get used to the evening sun. You start to see more clearly, see the flat grasses, lit long and slanting, turn green, translucent, arrange themselves as paintings. You discover bits of mica glinting in small geodes cracked open, full of splinters.
After a while, if you’re still enough, long enough, the rock begins to rock, langorous, lapped, the mesh under the water made of yellow light seems to lift you up.
Tthen the whole rock will tilt if you’re quiet, very calm, for a moment, become
holes in air
humming wings
(you, too cease to matter)
~
Let’s talk about real things all this broody stuff is fine but whose turn is it to cook supper who tracked sand all over the floor who forgot to close the fridge door who gets to decide if we screw tonight and whose turn is it to say please– stay
~ Shining jewel-like colours... fiery red... metallic green... This pugnacious bird has been known to attack and drive away birds as large as hawks and crows.
~
one handful of bright feathers shake fall and that is it done
~
But after a while it begins to seem too much. The purple flowering raspberries bloom and bloom, the lake is unremitting – blue or slate or white, the sky fills each evening with a revel of pink and mauve, the cat stretches, rumbles, hummers glitter and whirr.
Words, and thinking, sink into sand –
And I find my kees jiggling up and down, up and down. Begin to yearn for something clean, hard, dry, without this filigree.
What’s the line that underlies all this overdone splendour, wires it together?
Even the stars are far too plush to pull mind from matter. Draw it to cause.
From Learning to Ride (Quarry, 1994)
I took my first riding lesson when I was 33 years old – fulfilling a childhood dream. Artist Bob Verrall, who contributed 28 gorgeous illustrations to this book (see below), himself first learned to ride at the age of 67. A “lunge” is a long rope used to exercise or train a horse while standing on the ground. “Dismounting” is one of two poems of mine to appear in a newspaper, in this case the Toronto Star. “Learning to Ride” was chosen as one of the best Canadian poems of the year for – I like this – the Windhorse award.
As the ankle lies lightly
against the breathing flank,
as the hips bend and supple
to the rhythmic flow
So the heart learns to pulse
to reason’s sway,
so the mind learns to follow
where the heart yearns to go
On the Lunge
Courage is not the most vital thing. Knowledge takes you only so far. Force defeats itself in the end. Nothing’s so fragile as burning desire when the beast is bucking and kicking in rage, when you’re losing your grip, at the end of your rope.
Dig in your heels! Stubbornness, friend, is the only sure way to hang on tight to hope.
Dismounting
When will I learn how to dismount with spring, grace, in that moment of parting, how not to fall in a heap, or cling to neck or mane in a slipping embrace that ends with a thump on shaking knees -
But swing smoothly down as I’ve seen others do, land light, square, hand over the reins to the next in line with a casual nod, walk smiling away, keep bruises and tears for private tending.
No matter how rough the ride, to let go as if I don’t care.
Learning to Ride
This, then, to let go, let the body move the hands, drag the brain without holding on to words, language, the ways I’ve learned so well to define and subdue the twang of nerve ends, pulse of arteries, clench and release of the bundles of fibre I name to myself muscle, as if the word alone brings into being the smooth working humps under unregarded skin that carry me, have carried me through every single day unnoticed, till now.
Before I entered this curious new world of body direct, it was naming alone that stood for all else, the flap of the tongue, labile and strong, the only muscular motion I’d learned to control. Held thus, at tongue’s length, the world made sense, a black and white tale patterned in words I could stand back to read.
Tear them up, pull them away, rip them into tendrils coiling underfoot and find –
A steady pulsing region of thick grounded motion, a shadowed wildland of caverns, valleys, always changing footing, where I move like a tracker from childhood tales, like a cat, like a deer, to the beat of tissues, flex of sinews, spring of limbs, loose, aware, learning to learn a whole new language of heat and sweat, power and flow, of pushing the body till it trembles, groans, learning to discard the ancient metaphors of love and soul and existential pain for the uncoded strophes of pulse and breath.
Learning to ride the muscular heart, the solid bone.
So the mind learns to fly to match the heart's leap, so the heart soars at last across the mind's divide
from Uncommon Prayer: A book of dedications (Quarry, 1997)
This book celebrates the aspect of prayer that consists of paying close attention to all parts of our world, even, for example, outhouses. (That poem is pinned up in many outhouses that I know, and I have a sinking feeling that, if any piece of mine is remembered in a hundred years, this will be the one.) The original title for the book was How Chairs Pray, because many of the poems are in the voice of non-human objects. Two such, a beautiful chair by Pat Durr and a dangerous dandelion by Julia McDonald, grace the front and back covers respectively. “How God Sees” is my contribution to Convergence: Poems for Peace, set with other poems from that project for voice, choir, and orchestra by Peter Skoggard and Gwen Swick in War and Peace (2007). A 5-part cantata for soprano, choir, and orchestra, Uncommon Prayers (2008), includes “Prayer for a Morning” set by John Armstrong, pemiered on Ottawa this April
Prayer
for a morning
not yet frayed
for every mourning
night endured
that wakes to ease
in the breathing chest
warmth of joints
taste of rest
that wakes to the sky
blue silk
of day
How God sees
Look out from top the of the Gatineau Hills, lean over the stone wall at the Parkway’s edge and cover the whole expanse of glittering green in one wide sweep, know, without tracking it, how the river bends, twists through fields that lie like pillows on their limestone bed, how roads stitch between.
One glance, it’s all there.
And then, pick a leaf from the ivy on the wall, cup it in your fingers, trace the fine veins, bend closer, see
The whole wide valley focus in a green beam along a slender rib –
ray out to the rim
“Out of the sleeping body dreams erupt” for bpNichol, title from Book 5 of The Martyrology
And with this handful of dozing words years later, adrift on Lac Vert, lac reve where first your rhythms reached me I feel tonight your ghost slip kindly into mine shrug me on like a coat hands reach into my sleeves sheath fingers like gloves I lean back into your hold as with a windy, companionable sigh you slip my face like a mask over your own damp dome root your sweaty blond halo in among my brown crinkle my eyes with your grin wriggle my hips on this creaky wooden chair settle your mismatched loins into my creases jerk out arms and legs with a muscular joyful stretch snap joints into place tap toes to your tune For one green beat I hear your music, with my ears
Bitter Bread
You prepare a feast of bitter bread, of acid wine and rancid flesh, then sit me down. Now eat, you hiss, Eat well of the wrongs that you did to me, now chomp these chunks, now stuff them in!
I will, I say, but not alone. Pull up a chair – it's not only I who must gorge till I'm sick, till the rank meal's done.
For in love, you must know, the meat of revenge is the vengeful's bone, the dregs of its wine the avenger's sop
And the bread that is thrust on the one who has erred in matters of love, must always be shared.
Choke for Eric McMaster
Sitting here in the driver’s seat with still your library card, insurance forms, bills, underneath the dash, cracked seat cracking even more every day, I want to explain –
Your widow gave the car to your son, but he had legs too long to cram behind the wheel, passed it on to me, with the choke you worried about as you lay in your hospital bed, unwilling to let us drive, afraid we wouldn’t know how to handle it right
As I, lending it now, to your grandchildren, worry too, push the choke back in when they return with it still out and flooding the motor in a mixture too rich and billowing beyond the tidy confines of the metal hood.
~
All your life, you woke up choking, dreaming of an umbrella shoved down your throat, a strange uneasy symbol – for what? – you never said, and no-one’s asked your wife – choking herself at unexpected moments still on the waste of your loss, on billows of smoke staining fingers, teeth, lungs, coating the windshield with a greasy film.
~
“Buy a hundred umbrellas for a dollar,” you used to say, “sell them for two.” And “This car has to last me till the day I die.”
~
I’ve emptied the ashtray, try once in a while to tidy the rest, still guard your packages of tools, plugs, fan belt, wires to jump the charge from your car to your son’s when the mercury falls below the damp bite of your childhood home on the Devon coast, where the fog billowed in so bitter and chill in your memories and tales you could never quite believe in a cold worse than that, an inland cold, harsh enough to freeze wheels solid in their ruts, kill any engine’s spark.
~
At the end, you saw butterflies fluttering in the walls, butterflies, and your face when the movement left it, yellow, carved, hair a white halo on an anti-religious skull. Agnostic to the last, you left no messages, made no pleas, tolerated us there as you always had, let us continue each in turn to hold your hand, to sit beside you, no way to convey what you saw through the haze, what final faint sounds you heard as the mechanism seized – coughed – stopped.
~
Now I voyage back and forth on my own small circuits, follow the instructions in the manual you thumbed, tune and fuel the engine according to your schedule, rearrange the tools, leaf your maps in with mine, hold and release the choke by the sound of a motor I know nothing about.
Hearing your voice. Hoping I’m doing it right. Hoping it’s what you wanted. Holding, and releasing, like your hand, at the end.
Weekend friends
When they leave, the lake sharpens, clears as if we’d turned the lens on your father’s binoculars, hills step closer, water flashes in our faces and we lie back, stare sleepily at loons, the other shore. “Alone at last,” you say, tipping your hat over your eyes, but together at last is how it feels, gathered into the bay with the rocks and the pines and crows crak-crakking much louder it seems than minutes before when we called Goodbye, goodbye to weekend friends.
Now we doze on the beach, absorbed under a comforter of hazy clouds, lulled by the whoosh and buzz of fly and wind. Through half-closed lids you swing closer, recede into the burn of sun from sand forward and back forward and back with the loolooloo of waves
I surge, retreat, fall into dream, matching your dance with my own sleepy drift alone together at last and all one
Requiem for organ music for bp Nichol
beep! dye me right through with your bumptious words spindle in through my ears fill my throat heat and swingle up through my souls with your willing absurds seep out from my loins organs dance to your tunes body note cells eat syls and labials hair net and twine and catch beep juices (hhhh-arts breadth) O rend- er me able to breathe (your death)
The pleasure of lusting
– after you is to stroke, with my finger, the hollow beside your eye so lightly you only shift and turn in your sleep – hmm – a small, satisfied sound, and your arm drops across me in sleepy caress, and fits – under its weight, the arch leaves my back, I become soft as the sheet, waver down your snores
– or to lie, blanket to chin while you warm last night’s coffee, lie with one knee turned out, fingers idling casual as the stroke for the cat who sometimes rumbles beside us as we toss, feeling everything become supple, fluid, rounded, a watery terrain
– and then to pull you down to me, turn with one motion from back to front, close my hands around your ankles, close the triangle as you rock me from below, as we climb a long, slow wave to the top, glide down
– what pleasure, then to drift into dream of rocking together up wave after wave, or wake, cup palm around your shoulder while you doze beside me, watching
– two small, sleek blackbirds in the tree outside the window whistle and preen –
roll again over you
Outhouse
The only seat with a hole in it, you name me throne for my power: built before the cabin’s begun, home to spiders and wasps and shadowy bears in the night, the one call no-one can ever refuse, no matter how late or dark. All manner of daytime cover-ups are exposed on my redolent heap, many an indulgence paid for. Oh you wriggle and squirm at the thought of my eye cocked at your bottom side. But in my way, I’m discreet. Dirt and disease are quickly cooked by my rich bacterial tribe, into a useful soup. And the trees grow a little taller, the jack-in-the-pulpit thrives.
So deny me if you want to. Set me back in the shadows, grimace when you lift my lid.
But remember, along with philosophy and politics and poetry, you live to service me. Mine is the lasting treasure of all your bright songs and fine lies.
The Naming for Aven
I walked through mountains once, in my sleep there were avens everywhere springing from grit and shale a kestrel wheeling a pica’s whistle and so far I could hardly hear it a horned lark’s cry
Or was it you calling out with the high, wild wind calling out your name spiralling mare’s tails across the thin sky rustling the low stars clustered at my feet Surely it was you in the white rush of water cascading in a blue tumult towards me from the peaks
exultant over stone
The function of prayer
Thunder, and the wind at my back from a storm that passes by the granite shelf dropped by ancient ice on an unnamed hummock in the river’s long drench maybe also for this – to cup our fire of pine cones and bark, form a ledge for the tea of sweetgale simmering in a blue tin pot, hold us steady against the lap of black and pewter waves that glint at our feet.
Too much to demand, even on our knees. pause – receive –
Homecoming
for Morel
all is blue
sky sings
and I
from Until the Light Bends (Black Moss, 2004)
This book plus CD (Pendas, 2004) shortlisted for the 2005 Archibald Lampman Award and the Ottawa Book Award. I performed a number of poems from this and previous books at the National Arts Centre Fourth Stage in 2004 with Geode Music & Poetry, notably the 25-minute, 14-poem opus “Ordinary” with music composed by David Broscoe, extracted below. Among other poems found in this issue of Ygdrasil were “Ice” with music by Mark Molnar, “Still Enough” with music by John Higney, and “How God Sees” (above) and “Door” with music by Alrick Huebener. I remember the performance as one of the most intense, emotional ones I’ve ever done. The cover photo of the book and CD, by Marty Gervais, is an unretouched shot from inside the glass of the Canada Council building on Albert Street.
Ice
Where the river sluices under a sheen of ice come way too soon – what I still can’t bear knocks me out the door, to the river’s brink. Orange lamps from the opposite shore bar the black. Moonlight cuts. Far below, water hisses.
Take one step forward – pillars rise – shafts of mist on the water’s spine.
One step back – they drop – no more than cracks in ice.
Forward – back – forward – listen – who whispers there? (too late too soon) moonlight shifts (almost lips almost arms)
I step back turn.
Glitter breaks beneath my feet.
Hearts of Palms
Her palms are hungry. Oh, other parts too, but in the night, now he’s gone, and even the cat finds elsewhere to sleep, it’s her palms that ache for the feel of his shoulder, right there in the centre of her hand, where the bones come together, pillow, spark at a careless touch. The heart she calls it, much more real to her than the erratic muscle that lodges over her stomach, stutters when she climbs the stairs too fast, burns and knocks, a complaining roomer always ready to whine.
In the rain-pattered night she rubs palms against the sheet – his hip – his shoulder – how they fit as he rolls onto his side, as she smooths her hand down a muscled arm, slips it over his chest, circles, presses till the nipple hardens, tucks knees against thighs, silky fur rubbing as she strokes further down, strokes the curl of hair under the slow ribs, down the feathered belly, cups a soft rise.
In the flat, empty bed, she covers her mouth, brings a tongue into that crease.
Cups her heart. Licks it dry.
Still Enough for Ian
And yet, returning in the night
is still enough. I climb down
from the plane into his soft
quiet, waves of talk drawing
us into the shore, our skin
lit like shadows of swimmers
returning across sand into
evening, his face before
bed a gleam drawing me
into the dark soft sough
of his breathing to rock
against the surf of spare
nighttime traffic, rock the stars
warm as tealights, blow shadows
through night into morning, soft
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