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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 |