Poem For Angela Bowering

I notice the silence of the house 
before its darkness. Sure
it is five in the morning
and five thousand kilometers east 
at the end of summer on the sandy shores of Lake Erie 
where the raucous devices of life are more sparse
if not quite absent--
the fridge rumbling to life in the kitchen, etc.

But the lake is still this morning after yesterday's gale
and isolated by water and a quarter mile of alder thicket
I can detect no traffic, no sleepless teenagers screwing up their lives
or the screaming police cars that attend them,
neither drunks stumbling home half corked after a night on College
Street
nor that nervous dog barking,

and now there is no Angela out there
pondering a passing thought aloud, running it into a sentence, a
paragraph, an unexpected exclamation, a tangential idea that leads to a 
connection obscure to all but her, the beginnings of a monologue, the 
endless middle, a contrary, an opposition, qualification of the 
difference, a line of Blake, a musing from nowhere, 
something heard in a conversation a few days ago, a private irony she's 
too engaged to track down--
It turns into yet another of her unwritten and unwritable novels, 
about so many birds fallen in the thickets of desire, that always 
seemed to me despite my distractedness and skepticism 
just like the real world, the chaos 
that might overwhelm us all at any moment 
if I didn't get the fuck away from there and do something practical, 
bang on a box, dig a hole in the ground 
think about things in the American League, etc...

I knew the conversation would leap elsewhere after I left, 
something or someone would drift into range 
or if not, well, an audience wasn't really essential 
that the connection between all those clamouring things would be 
trailing Angela's attentions like a hungry dog, and...well,

I will miss that going on in the world 
even from this distant here and now.
I swear I could sense it always 
up to the last hours of her life, a hum 
in the air I thought was permanent and now 
it is gone.

I was trained by the innumerable times I sat in her kitchen
drinking warmed-over coffee I often suspected had been made a week
before
but was probably from yesterday,
and before I could feel aggrieved at the discourtesy of it
I was swept beneath the wheels of her conversation
that likewise was never quite courteously social
but was too full of living things to be mere self-compulsion.

It was irresistible, 
hertalk, 
the ceaseless monologue-conversation-off-the-kitchen-wall but somehow 
sensible, paratactic as a Robin Blaser poem, unpredictable in its crazy 
flight, or its sudden drilling into bedrock, (usually causing someone in 
the room to flutter up exposed like a stunned grouse) a mind so utterly 
uncostumed not by design or pose but stripped by the speed of its 
headlong flight, that others 
sometimes doffed camouflage 
dropped long-held poses 
and Angela rarely noticed.

So let me perform it this one last time myself, 
halting and incompetent as my rendition is 
not so I get in the last word, but to honour her 
in her own manner just for another moment or two 
even though I don't have my head around 
this goddamned interruption of all thought her death is, 
and despite my fears of the silence 
she has apparently 
abandoned us to.

"Conversations may end," she once told me, 
"but a conversation is never complete." 
This is the most painful of the things I know from Angela 
not being here any more.

Example her lime tree bower 
that never quite made it to arch overhead 
as promised by the Japanese gardeners, 
was prone to draw huge nests of wasps instead 
that left everyone more wary than was needed.

Let me call up the pool at Versailles
which she built for the raccoons to fish George's pet goldfish from,
odalisque no doubt as they lounged
but with their claws outrageously sharpened against us.

Or closer focus, 
a porcelain ashtray by the pool's marble shore 
piled high with white-tipped butts to challenge the laws of physics, 
a sculpture of despair that simply piled up irony without adding up. It 
was almost the one self- destructive thing she did among many 
that didn't in the end conspire to kill her.

Or another way, laughing this time: 
That the house on 37th Avenue made all that Jungian nonsense 
about people's houses reflecting their imaginations 
instead of their crappy taste in furnishing 
for once seem true, 
even though we all know Jung 
(I would say this to annoy her)
is the refuge of educated people  with too-high incomes 
with too little to do except shop.

Angela was no-shopper and the house she constructed 
was too large to be comfortable or reducible to taste, 
always over-decorated yet somehow unfinished, 
unable, as Angela was, to let go its past or give into it, 
always struggling silently 
against the tawdriness of the dust piling up in every corner, 
and yet oblivious to it.

She also struggled against intangible, unspeakable things, 
torture to a woman utterly given up to speaking, always 
shadow where everyone knows there aren't any, 
an unrevealed thing here half-revealed by some rolled-over moment of 
monologue, then caught by a pause, 
an unrecognizable dark half-recognized and abandoned 
to drift in the air of the house with the hundreds of others--ah,

all of these will glimmer in the dark that is my own life 
I suppose, for a time. 
I hope it is a long time.

But what frightens me this morning 
as the sun comes up and dispels glimmer and dark alike 
is the silence, 
because it is the end of talk, of monologue, of idle chatter, of sudden 
insight, of calculation, of the sound of the word "blue" or was it 
"moon", of what is the right word, anyway?, of irritation, of 
impatience, of hunger, of curiosity, of rectitude, of rancour, of 
certitude splattered by speculation, of forgiveness, of momentary 
charity and kindness, of vengefulness, of lip-bitten regrets, of 
forgiveness again, of always-strained mercy, of laughter, of 
Oh-god-what's-that- stupid-cat-up-to, of the trees in the back yard..

and around again,
forever.

October 3-6, 1999