First
Brick Books
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: First / Arleen Paré.
Names: Paré, Arleen, 1946– author.
Description: Poems.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200390899 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200390902 | ISBN 9781771315425 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771315432 (HTML) | ISBN 9781771315449 (PDF)
Classification: LCC PS8631.A7425 F57 2021 | DDC C811/.6—dc23
Copyright © Arleen Paré, 2021
We gratefully acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program.
The author photo was taken by Chris Fox.
Brick Books
487 King St. W.
Kingston, ON
k7l 2x7
www.brickbooks.ca
For Pat Hurdle, my first best friend.
the radiance of first things
—Anne Simpson
Pat Hurdle and I met when she was six and I was five years old. We became best friends. When I was nine, I was made to change schools, Protestant to Catholic. This was the first interruption of our friendship, a terrible pall. Her mother died when she was fourteen, a second, worse pall. When I was eighteen, my family moved across town. Pat and I drifted, at first just a little, then a lot. I lost track of her. I was distracted; I got married. Had a husband, children, a career. I didn’t really miss her. When I was thirty, my husband, kids, and I moved from Montreal to the West Coast. Later I fell in love, acquired a wife, and moved farther west to Victoria. At some point, I began to miss Pat a lot. I asked other childhood friends about her, but no one knew anything. Eventually I lost hope that I would ever see her again. And then five decades later, five decades after we had become best friends, her name appeared in my inbox, the subject line, Green Circle, the street where we grew up. It turned out she’d been living on Vancouver Island, in Victoria, for several years, ten blocks from my house and three thousand miles from our childhood homes on Green Circle, Dorval. We’d landed in the same city, same neighbourhood, ten blocks apart, curving back on ourselves.
It
Beginning in gravity
It begins in a corridor
In the beginning was noise and a flash
It begins in a driveway
Pat Hurdle became my best friend, my first
When Donna Lipton called Mary fat
Where two years before were trilliums and sycamore trees
At five I moved into a small brand-new bungalow
Pat moved in at the end of the week
Neither Green Circle nor Handfield were true circles
The Gropes’ pool was the envy of the neighbourhood
Pat became mine and I hers
A child gathers answers
A woman gathers questions
First family: semi-functional answers
You were in the parlour talking to them
No question should go unanswered
When Nancy Drew, the famous girl sleuth
I can’t say how I knew
Twelve basic interrogative fragments
Pat Hurdle
Games
Firsthand
Circle as ellipsis
True or false
In the dream I drive
Can a sister be causal
Mrs. Hurdle takes twelve hopeful dolls to the orphanage
Green Circle had no corners
If I say my second name
In the new-day-experimental-research dream
First-born is caution is hubris is love
Rules for street fighting
First place
After they moved in
Not belonging to Pat’s family but
Second hand
Black holes
Daisy chain I
Daisy chain II
Pat’s granddaughter aged four
At the end of June, Mrs. Hurdle
Pat’s mother went jewelless
In which the new girl is punished for being new
Pat letting a cat into my mother’s kitchen
Equal time
Soul of the world
Nothing is happening
One day on my way home
Cosmologies
The day of the Big Bang, or a sudden change of schools
Eclipse
First Catholic school
Waking up as I usually did/do
The American Wilderness Act
The first question is
How body can betray any girl
The bungalow mystery
Solitaire summer
Pat was not yet fourteen when her mother died
After the birthday cake has been eaten
About Pat Hurdle’s mother there was never a warning
She died more than fifty-nine years ago
How numbers count
Prime numbers
My sister saw Pat Hurdle once in a lineup
If a friend
Take this coat
Take this bunting
Carolyn Keene was a fiction, a syndicate name
The elegance of the equation
Later, Nancy began to work on yet another
Meanwhile, the Universe
Despite the surrounding collapse
Second-hand smoke
To bite into the apple
Who mentioned abduction
As if a cat
In praise of quantum physics
The table receives her full fury
Suppose upending a table
Because the moon is round is halved is quartered
I like Pat then and now
I write in multiverse often
There is a certain wash of light
Fifty years later, how she found me
One day Pat Hurdle emailed
Before this, she had messaged
When I first see her after all these years
The whole of my childhood
Meantime, the cosmos
This means I don’t know
Brash sure maybe crazy
Let inquisitive
Longing
Notes
Acknowledgements
We don’t know what this world
is, for it is never enough
and filled with infinite longing
—Len Anderson
. . . is simply they say cosmos and effect-
ive cosmic tethers laws of theorems bylaws
drill down first light slightly curved
which cause came before first before laws
a casino’s pale glow in the east
a Las Vegas desert Orion’s Arm
a bedroom window a thought
furled as a fiddlehead fern
to begin
yes no the human mind
happy to meet you
bless you my dead twin breathless companion
dying in our mother’s womb
your back to the uterine wall
making room
the one who got away vanishing
as if you were a mere syndrome
bless your striving
your ongoing friendliness
bless your giving up foetus
papyrus petals of white bougainvillea
starved or fated struck with misfortune some hour of day
or night in slow revolution how
I still
carry you how you carry me
missing
how much we are missing
bless your likeness your lucent weight
eternal syncopation your slow disintegration
continuous your courage mine
This could be a room, but it’s not a room, it’s a hallway with Lincrusta wainscoting, a Pullman-style corridor, dark brown embossed with vertical lines and fleurs-de-lys in broad, measured rows. It’s a highchair in a brown place, a length of space between seasons, between epochs, momentums. Two parallel walls where only a mother and a small child, the reason, a space where coal, a coal stove, is a keen continuous olfactory factor. It is a photograph. Everything here is black and white, though brown is here too. A need that is placed, certainly needed, a mindset where no one else, a length of time before anyone else at all, anyone else is not needed in this first, this infinite time, semi-conscious, though certainly much is nascent in first biological cells, even an echo, a pleasant echo, but not needed here. So little is needed in this place, a pleasant and sacrosanct place where only smooth, between food and warmth inside blankets, and very little is asked, where sleep and whole milk and sweet pudding and a small silver spoon, small with a perfectly curved silver handle, bent round for a baby to grip. No need for another, even though later, another might be. Where only two, a mother and a small child, very small, that might fit into the L of an elbow, very pleasant and kind.
in anger my sister begins her small life in tumult and noise saying now
saying hers saying her first feeling recollects fury
her first act is tears
loud memory she says
she says she recalls she is crying and my mother
is trying to comb her wet baby-fine hair
for the photograph the official newspaper portrait
the photographer arriving
Harry Kitts is his name
his camera his tripod
he is setting up in the living room
I wear a white dress with short puffy sleeves
smocked with small violets printed over the fabric
no one will know they are mauve with tiny green leaves
no one will know
she’s been crying all morning
later decades later when I look at the picture
we are perched black and white on the windowsill in the living room
a narrow space
my left leg hangs over the sill where Henry Kitts has arranged it
in the photograph the small scattered flowers
her hair is still wet in the picture she is smiling
almost smiling
the violets the small leaves on my dress
each one is grey
The first time I laid eyes on her I knew. Brash sure, haughty maybe, a little bit crazy to claim something like that, like I could forecast the future. I was not yet six. Maybe I exaggerate. It was decades ago. When memory works it works to highlight, reify patches of past. The fact is I knew. Yet if she was pivotal how does it happen that later I will let her vanish into the void.
Which I did not know when I saw her for the first time that day end of May ’52, end of her driveway. She remained in my life until I moved across town, our connection loosening over time, but the impress of her never gone.
When she becomes lost no one will know where she is. Her two sisters will be lost too. All three of them disappearing into the thin air of grown up. Her parents gone. Her aunt. Her hair her blue eyes her backbone steely as petrified wood.
Pat Hurdle became my best friend, my first, unless you count Donna Lipton, which I don’t, even though Donna Lipton lived in the flat one floor below in the three-storey walk-up in Verdun where I spent the first five years of my life—and if I played with anyone before I was five, I played with her, as opposed to my new baby sister, another Donna, who cried and wouldn’t do what my mother wanted her to.