Your Last Day on Earth
Your Last Day on Earth
Carla Hartsfield
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Hartsfield, Carla, 1956-
Your last day on earth / Carla Hartsfield.
Poems.
ISBN 1-894078-31-4
I. Title.
PS8565.A675Y68 2003 C811’.54 C2003-903695-2
Copyright©Carla Hartsfield, 2003.
We gratefully 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 cover paintings, (left to right “Heat,” “Chaos,” and
“Hibiscus”, watercolour on handmade paper), are by Carla
Hartsfield.
The author’s photograph is by Kenneth Ross.
Brick Books
Box 20081
431 Boler Road
London, Ontario
N6K 4G6
Canada
www.brickbooks.ca
This book is dedicated with loving memory to my father,
Thomas Eugene Hartsfield
(1929-1999)
Contents
I. FLOWERING
Flowering
Stolen Torch
Towering Hibiscus
Stranger than Fiction
Queen Anne’s Lace
Shining
The Clearing
Tea Leaves
At the Textile Museum
Anonymous
Black-Eyed Susans
Flame Roses
Daisies
Empty Beds
The Dark
Nightshine
In the Garden
II . MUSES
Angel of Emergency
When Angels Dance in that Tiny Blackness
Camouflaged
Meeting Leon Fleischer at the Corner of Bedford & Bloor
Ripped Off
The Princess of Balakirew
Brahms & Angelo’s Garage
Playing Mr. J.S. Naked
Three’s a Charm
Bound to Silence
Miss _____
Black Lace & Trees
III. GOODBYE
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Plain Geometry
Commas
New Moon
In the Space that My Father Left
What She Sees
Smith College, Graduation Day
Marilyn Monroe on St. Clair Ave.
The Swimming Mothers
Shrink-Wrapped
Karma
Him
Goodbye
Notes on the Poems
Acknowledgements
Biography
I . FLOWERING
I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way . . .
Edward Thomas, “Lights Out”
Flowering
The night we parted
my drink caught on fire;
news of your betrayal
lit the blackness. Before long,
the whole garden exploded.
My roses were the first to go,
thorns popping and smelling
like a witchhunt.
I stood beneath the fallout,
letting the snaking cinders
sting my arms.
This was catharsis,
to rid myself of jealousy,
your control. Flowering
is never predictable;
these small deaths
have nothing
to do with the heart.
Stolen Torch
Look how this Maple in front of my house
drops a brooding leaf every few seconds!
Until there are rings of fallen stars
orbiting the driveway. I count them
methodically as they spindle the dwarf
tree’s arthritic hands, each one
transformed and torching
the steps. There’s abuse, too,
along the fence behind my son’s school—
leaves splattered
against that wire-mesh screen
like photos secreted from a police file;
I say, I’m sure he did it, no question,
as a charming pyromaniac
bends every treebranch back.
Fire courses down,
the trees giving up
their masks, their armour.
This is who they’re supposed to be.
Prometheus, performance artist,
finally set free.
Towering Hibiscus
I’ve held your remains.
They were already dry,
misshapen, as though
withered by stroke.
Your DNA cascaded
across my bare feet:
hot confetti, corpuscles,
red stars. Your 24th hour
never wanted to stop.
Were the gods against
you and your stunning twin,
who also imploded minutes later?
It’s hard to believe anything
would choose this form,
pen a covenant
with earth’s clay soul—
just so ill-wrought plans
could pull heaven
into dust. What,
I hear, it isn’t over?
There are more shows
to come? When I struggle
to erase every disturbing picture,
gold bands perfectly intact
on severed hands
rooting in fire.
Tell me if it will keep
happening this way:
your unscheduled blooms
through the drape of chill air
like a hospital gown—
what’s left of you
shrinking into rust-coloured crepe
before grieving is given a chance.
Your last day on earth played
like a looped tape of terrorist footage:
the same body fanned
into brilliant fingers,
the same yellow spotlights
continually lit
then extinguished.
September 11, 2002.
Stranger than Fiction
July and there’s fog on the ground.
It drifts over the heads
of heather blooming late,
past the white-and-purple stalks
waving like luscious hair
along the highway.
One would think
it’s Brontë country,
except it isn’t. Heathcliff, too,
is nowhere in sight.
The car spins forward,
on and on past villages with names
like Goodwood and Tottenham.
So how do we know it’s not the moors?
Heathcliff wouldn’t scour about
for his lost true love in weather this warm.
During our picnic by a lake so idyllic
it could pass for trompe l’oeil—
all I can talk about is that darn fog
misting through the larkspur
like earth angels. Forest fires, you say,
huffing your breath out a little.
More fog. I jaunt three paces ahead
knotting into a frazzle.
Why must I see the world
swathed in romance and mystery?
My combustibles involve passion
between two people so hot
their flames would ignite
then extinguish just as quickly,
instead of ashing into low-smouldering
anger.
Everybody knows Heathcliff
and Catherine were the wrong mix
of rose petals, gunpowder
and a thimble of TNT.
Then why do I envy them?
Because their love never melted
into frosty complacency,
cool acid with enough flash
to make heart-stopping smoke.
Later, we hear that forest fires
are indeed hurling black clouds
from Quebec across Ontario,
and for hundreds of miles into Maine
and New England. Stubbornly,
I imagine this angelic form
carrying batches of heather
in the smoke-filled haze,
unspeakably plain—
caught in the snarls
of disappointment and promise,
swelling thicker and thicker
into an erasable screen.
Queen Anne’s Lace
It’s that time of summer
when winter appears as a ghost,
when fields are capped
with Queen Anne’s Lace.
My hands burn to touch them,
are burned if touched—
heat shooting skyward
into amorphous, sylph-like wings.
These starched hexagons quiver
with cocaine bloom, leaving
breath-marks like hieroglyphs
on broken panes. You
winding a bunch into a choker,
get off on dry needles squeezing my neck,
a kind of rustic S & M.
Why not drink the scene down
and me along with it? Chilled