I, Nadja, and Other Poems

I, Nadja, and Other Poems

Susan Elmslie

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Elmslie, Susan
                I, Nadja, and other poems / Susan Elmslie.

ISBN-13: 978-1-894078-53-5

ISBN-10: 1-894078-53-5
Title.

PS8559.L62I63 2006         C811’.54         C2006-902306-9

Copyright © Susan Elmslie, 2006

We acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of
Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program
(BPIDP), and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our
publishing program.

The author photograph is by Danica Meredith, Aperture Solutions.

Brick Books
Box 20081
431 Boler Road
London, Ontario
N6K 4G6
Canada

www.brickbooks.ca

For Wes, who went there with me

Contents

Feminine Rhyme

Pomegranate

Felicity

Portraits of My Mother

Seven Letters to My Mother

1. Spendthrift Heart

2. Forgive me, Mom

3. Other People’s Mothers

4. Fortune Cookie

5. Carry On

6. Clasp

7. Pisces, you swim in two directions

Failed Sonnet for My Father

Banditos

Good Fortune Is Coming Your Way

Tearjerker

Dainty

Smile me up, Jackie

Meanwhile

Shave

Free Climbing Rhyme for Lori

Convalescent

Lump

Cyst

First Apology to My Daughter

Marie Curie’s Cookbooks

George Sand’s Wardrobe

Feminine epic

If there’s a woman on the street

History Repeats

I write

The gentle cadence of escape

How the litchi came to be

Déjà vu

Four Postcards

Dark Days

Grand Café de la Paix

Somehow over time Severn Bridge

Docents

I, Nadja

Dedication

I, Nadja

Mad Money

Mercy on Our Poor Ambitious Souls

Première Rencontre

We Took the Train

Choreography for an Aubade

I had no little love for you. It spoke

Some Shapes of Sadness

I Close My Eyes

Chez Graff

Hairpin

Waiter, Café de la Régence

Cutting Time

Against Longing

My Friend

Forecast: Nadja

Button Up Your Overcoat

Sugared Violets

The Slenderness of Forgetting

Dear Mademoiselle Nadja

Pay as you go

Ten

Twelve Years Later

The Hard Disciplines

1. Geometry Lesson

2. Physics: After the Genesis Concert, 1982

3. Algebra

4. Calculus

5. Statistics

6. Chemistry

7. Geography: Long Winter, 45° N 73° W

8. Biology: Going to Seed

Equipment for Living

Accessories After the Fact

Towards a Study of the Trench Coat

First Impressions

London Fog

Imperméable

Architectural Chairs

Lady Armchair, 1951

Ox Chair and Ottoman, 1960

Barcelona Lounge Chair

Chaise Longue: Six Angles

The New Apartment

Housewarming Song

Unless These Notes

Vancouver Collection

Ex Libris

A Note about the Cover Image

Acknowledgements and Notes

Biographical Note

Feminine Rhyme

Pomegranate

My first—

at the Formica dinette set

in your mother’s kitchen,

where we’d spent whole days

making cakes in your Easy-Bake oven,

amazed all it took was a light bulb.

One autumn afternoon, sometime between

the Jerry Lewis Telethon

and the Miss Universe Pageant,

you cut the rind in half.

The knife stagy red

like the blade in horror flicks that punishes

the teenagers for making out.

On the cutting board the fruit,

two halves of a brain

that thought only of love.

Inspired by Operation you said, let’s try

toothpicks. All the rainy hours we’d passed

extracting tiny bones, wrenches, trying not to

set off the buzzer that lit

the patient’s nose

were training for pomegranates.

With practice we discovered

how to tear the rind, carefully

peel away the bitter packaging that makes

your teeth feel like popsicle sticks, and take

whole sections of the seeds at once. The juice barb-

wiring all the creases in our palms, dripping

towards the wrists. Like this,

every time I indulge. I eat your half

and think of you. The patience, the soft burst.

When blood came—you first,

we commandeered the upstairs bathroom.

You with one foot on the toilet seat

and your bum on the edge of the counter,

me sitting on the edge of the tub,

holding the mirror.

Felicity
for Felicity Enayat

Felicity I read a strand of your hair;

A sudden star, it shot through papers, air.

Carefully from your poems I pulled this line,

Peerless alexandrine, sublime feminine rhyme.

Portraits of My Mother

At eighteen my mother sat for a portrait,

and one print turned out so fine,

the photographer displayed it

in the window of his Long Branch shop

(across the street from the hardware store,

where my father later dropped his broom

and dodged a Buick or two to sweep her off her feet).

The best of these prints stood on the top shelf

of the wall unit in our living room.

Each fall I’d place a new glossy of me next to it,

stand back, then demote myself to a lower shelf.

Eyeliner and Polo knockoffs with matching earrings

too garish next to this queen of curds and cream, 1948.

Another print, taken earlier in the sitting, is mine now,

sent to me by my father in a final clean sweep.

You can just see a hint of the white peasant blouse

under a grey wool bolero.

Half a candy apple for a smile.

Eyes ready to deliquesce on cue.

This face is before everything,

before she made a tomb of her sunless bedroom,

grief, a cordate brooch she couldn’t unpin.

Seven Letters to My Mother

1. Spendthrift Heart,

When we left off I had a boyfriend

who stole your ATM card, forty dollars, and beat

various happinesses out of me.

I left him on your side of the sea,

flew. I took a leather passport cover, a beaded antique

sweater. I found a younger lover.

His beauty, too, cost me much,Mother: I tried

to forget I was your daughter, inheritor

of the spendthrift heart, consummate gambler.

Those years were bad. I did not write.

It should be known that every night then

was a deep pocket with holes burned through.

I had this dream, I’ll tell you,

it changed me. I was back and sleeping

on the couch. A woman climbed down

from the attic. Slight and blonde she resembled me,

and she went to the drawer with the cutlery

in it, and I heard the sound of one knife

distinguishing itself from the rest.

The sound that makes is fear.

She came around the corner, the dagger

before me, and I woke, sat up straight,

calling, “Who are you?”

Fear, the sound that makes, late at night

in an empty room.

What I learned that night will have to wait

for another letter. I’ll write soon.

2. Forgive me, Mom,

I stole your yellow cotton rib-knit vest,

your Bulova 10K gold-filled watch

(& had it fixed, cleaned, and fitted with a custom-made band

to show off my wrist).

I took, as well, one filigree earring

that I broke trying on, and meant to have fixed, sneak

it back into your smoke-stained jewellery chest

before it was missed. I still have it

the black diamond loose in my own chest,

for shame.

A hopeless case

I rummaged in your closet, waist deep.

Sometimes there, I even fell asleep, drunk

on the fumes of things that were not mine.

I emerged once with your wedding portrait, what a find!

Hung it on the wall, pathetic shrine to the doomed couple.

Did you wince when you saw it? you never said a thing.

I found a dildo in your dresser, but did not take it. Just

finding it burned

my fingers. I lay off your things

for some time, then. We kept each other

guessing. You, you never came into my room

without knocking. Your searching was implicit.

To come clean at last: I’ve my eye on the gold-leaf tea set

with the rococo ladies in pink dresses

and the gentlemen in powdered wigs.

I also stole one of your wigs.

3. Other People’s Mothers

visit them in jail, give them a pair of Levis

and a carton of smokes for Christmas

have pet names for their children

wink

have the gift of the gab

do small talk like it was coke,

the lines laid out before them

and all afternoon to kill

walk you through things

spill the beans

4. Fortune Cookie

Some mothers’ daughters ride the rides.

Some mothers’ daughters make beautiful brides.

5. Carry On

We’re terrified, both of us: you

of staying put, me

of moving. Or is it the other way

around? Is that what your shuffle is,

part get me out of here, part

where in hell do you think

you’re taking me? Just

down the street, Mom. We’ll visit.

I’m always in the belly

of the great white shark

of the skies, 747, moving

again, farther away from you.

Change, because it scares me.

What’s the alternative? Live

in the bowels of a house you hate,

have hated for forty years.

Stubbing your life on the same

threshold. Shit, I give up

everything, at least twice

a day. I pack it in,

pack it perfectly

in boxes and cases.

I hire other people to help me do it.

Everything gets done, move on.

Or dig your heels in.

We’re not the only ones, Mom,

clinging to each other

at the Bon Voyage party.

You give me stationery,

I give you a carry on.

6. Clasp

Watching my baby girl nuzzle,

tugging on my nipple, her tongue

undulating like a sea anemone,

I know I must have felt bliss

at your breast.

No hiding from each other then.

You nursed me between your ripe sheets,

lavishly, grudgingly, the last of your babies.

Later, when you had to change in front of me,

you’d turn your back to slip into your bra,

one arm first and then the other,

straps finding their place in the deep grooves

on your freckled shoulders.

Quick with the clasp

because my eyes gave you no rest.

7. Pisces, you swim in two directions

No letter for some time.

Frustration kept me from sending them

when they go unacknowledged,

when I meanly imagine them piled, gathering dust

in the dead-letter office of your mind.

Each bright stamp glazing over

like the eyes of fish washed up on the beach.

Yes, melodramatic.

I felt it.

Hunger abates when the body’s denied

food or contact; we stumble

on for some time, throttling its alarms.

You used to rip the batteries out of the smoke detector

when the broiling cod set the red eye shrieking.

Apparently I am still my own child.

But now bad news comes

almost as a relief, makes it easier

to cast out another line

so to speak. The doctor gave your silence a name:

Alzheimer’s—a kind of organized forgetting.

When did it start?

Each of us swimming in two directions

like the symbol for our sign of the zodiac,

and the fish in the song I’d beg you to sing

when I was three: swim said the mama fish, swim

if you can—

This moment

I’m rounding up memories