Russell Thornton lives in North Vancouver, B.C., and is the author of several books of poetry, most recently The Human Shore (Harbour, 2006). His House Built of Rain (Harbour, 2003) was short-listed for the Dorothy Livesay Prize (BC Book Prizes) and the ReLit Poetry Award. He was included in the collection of talks between Canadian poets, Where the Words Come From: Canadian Poets in Conversation (Nightwood, 2002) and in the anthology, In Fine Form (Polestar, 2005).
www.harbourpublishing.com/author/RussellThornton
LARISSA NEW YEAR'S
If you were lucky, you said, by the end of the night
we would have the money for a holiday
on Evia or Alonissos, on Thassos
or Halkidiki -- or we could even go to Crete.
All New Year's Eve you beat men at cards --
one by one they exited the game.
I sat back at the bar and watched
and thought of the night we had met,
when you stated you foresaw deaths
then tried to forget -- the neighbour, the relative,
the stray kitten you introduced to a mother
and her brood that hissed it away.
And you told me you were a thief. I admitted
I, too, had stolen things -- for a time --
but now to find metaphors was to pocket
new money. I wanted to steal a thing
from its class and marry it to an alien other.
You nodded at that -- all contradiction,
calculating, vicious in an instant,
yet frightened and soft-hearted
in a way you had to hide. People either died on you
or deserted you. But I had no choice --
I had to stay to see the constant startled look
in your green eyes, to see you perform
your ritual behind a half-closed kitchen door
with olive oil and floating flame
to keep away the evil eye, to see you dab
holy water on your throat in crazily driven taxis,
to see how you stood as at an interface
where gods and goddesses appeared.
Nicotine addict, gambler, who thieved
everywhere, who also gave without thinking,
you foresaw nothing of the thief
who came for you yourself. Or did you?
Every holiday you took, you might have half-meant
to lose him in a lit street. That startled look,
you sensing he had begun his work in you --
the way you somehow knew what cards
were in players' hands. What I knew was the cutting
of the New Year's Day cake going wrong,
the coin wrapped in waxed paper not to be had
by you or me that year -- and then, not any year.
NADINE
Night of quick, wild rain, gusts off the inlet. Blackness
lit only by glintings of rain, bored through to nothing
by my car headlights. I stood waiting on the pier.
She stepped out of the blackness and into dim sheen
and faced me, saying nothing yet gesturing. At first,
I thought that she didn't speak English. Then her friend
was there beside her, down from an unseeable ship.
The three of us piled into my taxi. I apologized
for not realizing that she couldn't speak or hear.
The two of them in the back seat, the friend giggled,
chattered half to himself, while she sat forward, leaned
to the side and looked out at me from where
she was never to be woven into the sound of a voice
and where she seemed hidden, even when she displayed
her widest smile, her hand on my shoulder, touching at me
to turn, turn left, turn, turn right -- knowing I knew the way,
and at every instant teasing, flirting. Then the laughter
in her eye-flash in the rear-view mirror undid me,
the clamped-down face with which I peddled myself
trip by trip fell away. We were together, the three of us,
the wind at the black glass around us the breath
of a childlike presence welcoming us further, further,
the rain on the roof the tapping of a heart. They taught me
how to sign no problem, friend and asshole.
They were Similkameen, they were my age,
and had been in Vancouver a month. They had gotten
an American twenty-dollar bill for the taxi fare
from the ship to their hotel and back again. They gave me
all of it, refusing the change, the money adding up
to more than a decent tip. The friend, the girl's cousin,
her sarcastic, playful, hilarious pimp, told me
the sailors had made fun of her, and neither of them
stood for that. Anyhow, the sailors sent her back. Get us
somebody else, they said. We want a talking whore.
FOOT OF ST. GEORGES AVENUE
The boxcars couple, they shunt into the railyard,
their wheels cry all night, they play. The late work
at the dry dock beneath the hull-filled vault,
at the grain elevator, at the shipping terminal
with vessels lying up against the pier
and floodlit containers being shifted
by whirling, roaring cranes, at rail crossings
where I chewed car-spilled grain until my jaw
ached, and made rough gum - is play. No one sees
beyond what he sees when he runs, swings, screams,
no one knows more than a child knows. A boy
will look up, call for a father to put
a crashed electric locomotive back
on its perfect circle of rails. He will see no one,
and leave the room to look up the rest of his life.
The tracks laid down along the pale insides
of a man's arms gauge the same loneliness. The train
makes its pass the way his blood makes its pass.
In the festering he will focus on it,
in the hole he tears he will find it, the one
thing that is real, and any memory kill -
the slamming of boxcars into a vein. Now he can go
anywhere he wants in the night. The train
will take him, the switching will never stop. Below
the city block where my balcony hangs
and the avenue ends, the work keeps on. I don't know.
I don't know how it is that paradise is so wide,
the junction in the head so narrow. If you shut
your eyes, in the dark behind them you will
watch while eyes are rivetted into you.
If you listen to the coupling, crying, clanging
continue down through you, it will become a chant,
and that chant, what you know; and whatever you are
will be forsaken then finished. The sleep
you crave yet fear will come, the sounds and lights
die into what rises within you. A ferry
sits in fittings, a freighter rests, its deck loaded,
boxcars stand still, ready to be hooked up again.
What you dream, what transpires while you lie there,
is the beginning of the day you will wake to -
a world assembling itself, both workshop and toy,
a Christ entering metal, never to return.
North Vancouver
In 2004, a year before he died, Richard Outram gave a manuscript of 115 unpublished poems to Anne Corkett and Rosemary Kilbourn. According to their introduction to the book which resulted, South of North -- Images of Canada, the collection was "written in three months in response to a request from the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto to provide a text for a song cycle commissioned from the composer Srul Irving Glick, in celebration of the Club's ninetieth anniversary in 1998. Of the 54 poems...continue reading
You were born in Toronto, but raised in Ireland. As a writer, do you feel conscious of having a foot in each world? Do you see yourself as having a unique perspective, and do you see strong distinctions between Canadian writing and Irish work?
I do have a foot in both Canada and Ireland, but in that I am hardly unique: millions of dual-citizen Canadians daily experience what James Joyce called "having two thinks at a time", and are the better for it. I am well schooled in the literatures of both countries, so maybe I do enjoy something of a unique perspective on Canadian literature, but while some sharp distinctions exist between Canadian and Irish work, there are also...continue reading