refuse

 

raymond chandler, poet

Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.

It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.

I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.

It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.

She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.

The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on.

She had eyes like strange sins.

Until you guys own your own souls you don’t own mine.

I looked back at Breeze. He was about as excited as a hole in the wall.

I’m all done with hating you. It’s all washed out of me. I hate people hard, but I don’t hate them very long.

She looked playful and eager, but not quite sure of herself, like a new kitten in a house where they don’t care much about kittens.

“I don’t like your manner,” Kingsley said in a voice you could have cracked a Brazil nut on.

She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.

Leave us do the thinking, sweetheart. It takes equipment.

California, the department-store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing.

I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars.

The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.

The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.

I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split.

I’m not a young man. I’m old, tired and full of no coffee.

Guns never settle anything, I said. They are just a fast curtain to a bad second act.

Don’t kid yourself. You’re a dirty low-down detective. Kiss me.

diane tucker | three poems from 'nostalgia for moving parts'

Three poems about childhood that made me cry. From Diane Tucker's new book, Nostalgia For Moving Parts. So particular, so much compassion. Get yourself a copy. I'm not kidding.

Love the sad men

The small, huge things that sad men do, sad

men who build with everything but words.

Build dollhouses, train sets, HO mountains

from cereal boxes and plaster of Paris,

building the mountains they can for their sons.

For daughters they build scroll-sawed

shelves to hold phalanxes of dolls, blown-glass

animals, Barbie barns above the bed’s blue lace.

Sad fathers who’ve eluded words carve magic

circles in their back lawns for swimming

pools. They sieve stones out of the soil circles

so nothing will nick the pools’ thin blue skin.

This is the testament of sad men who live

starved of words: drywall, carport, pickle jars

of nails, lawnmower, farmer’s tan, house paint,

apple tree, soldering gun, handsaw, wood plane.

Wood shavings falling from the vise,

wooden curls on the cold garage floor,

wooden curls warm on little girls’ ears.

*

Danny

Skipping ropes at school, their woven heft.

Steel poles around the roofed playground, the rain

running down them luminous, metal-melting.

I’d press my tongue against a pole and drink.

School was a world of delicious new textures:

fat crayons, creamy manila colouring paper,

notebooks, worksheets stacked fat as animal bodies.

Tables and chairs with shiny metal tubes for legs.

Even light at school felt stronger than at home.

They showed us filmstrips of marmalade leaves

against a blue blue sky, all technicolour-crisp.

How I loved those glowing celluloid leaves!

Then the cloakroom hooks’ imploring curves,

parallel silences in calm, rectangular shadows,

the pavement tap-dance beat of skipping ropes.

How I loved school, the sweet order of desks

in grids. So I wasn’t totally upset when, in grade

two, Danny with the French last name tied me to

a pole with a skipping rope so he could kiss me,

Danny with the round eyes, a cherub’s mouth,

curly hair. He was small even among the small,

as I was. No doubt I’d flirted with him, grade-two

style, cute and clueless. I thought myself a lady.

Were kisses procured? I bet there were a few.

Soon the rope loosened and I made a dash.

But Danny pushed me back. A metal pole I loved,

from which I’d drunk the rain, rushed up

and struck me in the bone below one eye.

A shiner it was called. I had a shiner. I’d seen

them on TV, cartoon-red beefsteaks on faces.

Danny got the strap then, or another time, or both.

He came back to class subdued, his crying

eyes swollen. As if a hiding could patch up his

love-starved soul. He chased girls, he lifted skirts,

he stole kisses, and the grown-ups just spanked

his ass? Poor Danny, tiny paramour, tiny batterer!

As long as I knew him, Danny chased the girls,

staring expectantly through big brown eyes.

Whatever makes boys seize girls roiled in him.

That yearning he had, no strap could smack it out.

And no black eye stopped me flirting. I was seven

and had imprinted on romance like a baby bird.

I followed its Hollywood promises everywhere,

persistent and imploring as a cloakroom hook.

*

Beautiful grade four teacher

always wore his shirt half open,

had dry-look hair and eyes bigger

than Donny Osmond’s. Sometimes

he used swear words in class.

I fell hard in grade four love.

I remember the day I had to wear

the hand-me-down dress to school.

Polka dots, pleats, Peter Pan collar.

1974 was bell-bottoms, feathered hair,

Three Dog Night and Doodle Art.

It was neither pleats nor polka dots.

It was in no way a Peter Pan collar.

But crushy teacher, lounging atop a desk,

fixed me, with round, pale eyes, in his stare.

He grafted two trees to a single rootstock,

kindness twinned forever with desire.

You look smashing, he said, in that dress.

The world lit up. I clutch that moment,

talisman still, the heat that flowered when he

noticed my smallness, my sadness, and spoke.

Nostalgia For Moving Parts is published by Turnstone Press, 2021. Copies available through their website.

when did richard allen go to the movies?

Those are the approximate prices of the various items in Richard's list in 1925 or so.  I could only find a 1935 hot dog price, but the five cent hotdog (at Nathan's, in New York) stayed constant for quite a few years after 1935, so it's not impossible they were the same price in the mid-Twenties; I assumed one hot dog per meal, three meals a day for the seven days.  Given the prices I found for movies, comics, candy bars, and hot dogs, we can figure "games" cost about 75 cents each.  In 1908, admission to see the San Francisco Seals play baseball set you back 50 cents, so 75 cents in 1925 is probably about right. 

Sounds like a pretty good week.

gilette elvgren | andy & reggie

St. Ives, a carbuncle on Cornwall’s boot,
Where, two years ago, walking the commercial drag,
The smell of lamb Pasties,
Fudge slavered with Cornish clotted cream,
Galleries with an endless parade of seascapes,
The half moon harbor, tide out,  boats cantered,
We happened by a small, old, Methodist Church.
 
Wedding music wafted onto Fore Street.
Passersby couldn't care less,
Inside the groom, tuxedo, bent over,
Was being married to a flaxen haired beauty,
Striking in her white dress and lace.
 
The bridegroom levered by two of his male entourage,
Could hardly say, “I do”.
They sat at a table, as if agreeing to a contract,
The bride had no one to throw the flowers to.
A song, then it was over, no kiss exchanged.
And as I wondered how and why,
Beauty and the  broken beast made their way,
Toward the store front entrance to the chapel.
 
In the narrow cobbled street outside sat the limousine,
Motor running, tourists gliding by on either side.
Reggie and Andy, for that was their names,
Emerged. No rice.
Reggie, in the later grip of muscular dystrophy
Was half carried to the front seat,
Where he lolled while
Andy sat in the back.
 
Scenarios played themselves out in my writer’s head,
So I approached with some trepidation
A huge bristled Scotsman kilted to the brim,
Who stood crying, and in between sobs and the rush of air,
 
Related a narrative of sorts. . .
“Been living together. . . they used to watch my bairns.
Fishing trips. . . sweetest man. . . the two of them,
Living as one, not married, oh no,
But one still daft aboot the other,
When he comes down with the limb girdled curse.
 
So’s things worsen,
And he gets bit by what’s drivin’
The brethren in there,
Never had time for it myself.
Plus there was matters of money,
Gettin’ married so the State don’t
Scarf up the leavin’s.”
 
I think the worse: 
Marriage of convenience.
Separate vacations; a lover on the side.
Patience running thin.
How long can this last?
 
Two years later we return to St. Ives,
Older, slower, cliff wary, joint weary,
And on the spur, Sunday morn,
We make our way into Fore Street Methodist
 As the Congregation Sings,
“Nearer My God to Thee”.
 
On the right, across the aisle,
Sit Andy and Reggie.
Sit isn’t an apt description,
For a quiet  but continuous frenzy ensues.
 
As his hands become gnarled, she soothes them out,
She turns his head, lifts his hands in a mute praise,
And with a cup gathers saliva.
She catches me watching,
Her eyes reading, “steady on” no desperation,
No pleas for justice or put-uponness,
Just a resignation to thirty second ministrations
That will never end until. . .
 
During the sermon they left the service,
Doing a strange broken dance as she walked
Backwards holding his hands,
Opening doors and dancing thru.
A pause, then back again to sit,
But the dance will never end.
 
The Minister was preaching from the Gospel of John,
Of a time before the Messiah’s death,
When he knelt and washed his disciples feet.
“I have set you an example, that you should do as I have done for you.”
And across the aisle it was being done.
As hands were smoothed,
Neck gently rubbed, arms lifted for the release of breath.
Communion would round out the service.
Andy broke off a piece of bread,
And held the small plastic cup of juice,
Serving her mate, the body and the blood,
A liturgy in and unto itself,
As He would have us do for one another.
 
I became more aware then of the woman at my side,
Fifty years my companion,
And wondered if I too would kneel and serve,
And do a dance with her, one breath,
Together, until the temporal exigencies,
The husks that awkwardly encapsulate our Spirits,
Turn to dust and swirl towards the light eternal.

So thank you Andy and Reggie,
For the Word become flesh
For  the reminder that a tremor
Or a breath from the one we love,
Are worthy of our  lasting attention,
And that you allow us to catch a brief glimpse of
The Christ Within.

photos | michael pasche

 

bc ferry terminal, tsawassen