Read an Excerpt
Civil and Civic
By Jonathan Bennett, Michael Holmes ECW PRESS
Copyright © 2011 Jonathan Bennett
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77041-017-6
CHAPTER 1
Back Roads
It is a beautiful car; it is a concession line.
Late light, amber and broken by the ashes
and cedar groves, streaks the dirt road now
and into the future. Three deer appear just
ahead, still as lawn ornaments, at the edge
of a field of farmed firs. Shots do not ring
out and the buck does not collapse forward
onto its knees, heavy head falling to its rest
on the wet grass, doe and fawn away into
the thick green. Instead, the motor purrs;
they stand their ground as we pass.
Shoot, see those deer? Where? Look.
At the crest of a hill is the house we love
to admire, way out here. The owners rake
at the edges of their lawn. It's a stone farm
house. They do not invite us in, of course.
We slow, their home in our sights. They do
not see us. Not really. The light sinks in
fast and pools of dark collect in the valleys
as we take the turns slower, resorting
to headlights. Silhouettes of barns cut dusk
exactly the shape of themselves and birch
march up hillsides, as if determined to escape
reflection by the river, or be caught by that
roadside painter who would sell the night sky
out here for big bucks back in the city.
Foxhole Prayers
Game Boy takes Kabul. I am reading
my brother's letter, bursts of friendly fire
overhead—you've sure got a mouth of sugar,
he says of my last letter, my swearing.
How can I write back?
My nights are boredom,
then violent lacrosse dreams. Except when
I hear voices—Give'er and git'er done—
as we storm it all. But I can't admit this.
He'll say it's what I pined for outside the mall.
My brother is away for a B and E.
So far away from Tina B.'s tits,
I put a local girl's in my sights for fun.
She looks like an immigrant from back home.
She is beating a rug with a stick.
I cannot do Tina;
I am shooting her.
I am shot. The feeling is sucking, warm.
A blow job to the heart, this death.
A silver cross dangles loose from a throat.
I am lifted away; above me faces talk.
It's my brother.
Hey, he wants to know,
do they even have them anymore, foxholes?
Woody and Wiley
Winter bluster, felling what's left
of a backyard aspen, attacked first by grubs
then a Pileated Woodpecker.
Black, with a red crest and white throat,
it is larger than in the cartoons.
We stared, star-struck for a week.
Working a foot off the ground, hammering,
the hound took a weak charge for it just once.
After that, the bomb ticked away undisturbed.
Undergraduate philosophy is
what it is, but if a tree falls
on a suburban house it's your own fault.
So there's your father and I armed to the teeth
with a plug-in chainsaw and nylon cord
one-upping an electric brush and floss,
the know-how of a YouTube how-to,
nervous neighbours, polite as Canadians,
looking on as it claps like August thunder, teetering.
Sunrise the next morning I survey the scene
from our upstairs bedroom window. The stump
is stark; sawdust on the snow; a neat woodpile.
Where there was risk, there is only this gap.
I can now see through to Pinewood Street where
a coyote's heaving ribcage sharply stops,
snorts, reads some slight change on the wind,
a tree's absence perhaps, then disappears
between bungalows at the city's unsure edge.
Ravens, Working Holiday
Together, don't they toll an unkindness?
Oily slicks of solder blue and char black,
they are despoiling the japonica
of quince. Young toughs at a bazaar.
She is nearby, finally poolside, prone,
conference stoned from adlibs, air con, carbs.
She is event-planning AstraZeneca
reps. Still young and bearing fruit.
A severe caw, a cast-off mai tai,
a pineapple-skewer is throated, lodged;
convulsions escape into majolica
sky, then gone. Always more, she thinks.
She swims over to the bar, bronze forearms
touch down a cocktail that smells of melon,
she welcomes musculature, Frangelico
as familiar music connects strangers.
She is not first to see the white raven,
red-eyed, wrong, but it speaks mindfully to her—
Dylan echoing Ovid, harmonica;
by the pool's side she acts on those dark vowels.
Travellers
In the room at the Hilton where later
we stole robes and slippers, I saw
a sun set over your exhausted naked
continent and the stars gave bearings
for overland crossings to come. I saw
the sun rise too, glinting off your city
towers, their chrome, their glass, altering
my aspect, assumptions, perspective. I saw
your river, a depth alluded to, eddies
to avoid on a reach for the mouth. I saw
your ruins, guessed at the history,
the razing, the shame. I remember.
Bungalofts in Bobcaygeon
The vermilion and rust of the rising
fall hill, the nag of work and obligations
among blue notes. A barn's green roof.
Heifers. Hay bales. And across the way
a real estate hoarding—believable
as Mercury; just off-sweet like horehound.
At lunch the conversation went that-a-way.
Rain slick on your hair; my soup thickened: pear.
Rosemary remains.
We don't go far now.
There was an afternoon long ago, when
we were attracted to the sentimentality
and politics of a homeless girl's dog.
Now we have improved, and withered—
I like barns and soup. You've noticed it too.
Emergency
A stretcher's tripped the sensor eye.
Double doors swing open, night cold
slices in, lancing the room cleanly,
my blanket, me. I am chest pains.
I am monitored. My nurse points:
"no cell phones." I am forced, to be.
I watch my own stats, heart sore.
I listen to others. I listen.
In a culvert, says a meek voice, then,
Leave her, leave. Then, Please stop.
I hear muffled frenzy, TVs
at news in the waiting room
passing the time for the triaged
bloody, the doubled over, the high.
But: "no cameras allowed."
The waiting goes unrecorded.
They found me in a culvert, she says.
In Emily Township. Where's that?
A nurse touches Culvert Girl kindly,
who makes her face do a smile.
Through a meagre slit, the dawn
gleam oranges the cars and trees.
My chest rises and falls, marks time.
Many sleep, lulled by a child's moans.
Rest
I.
I can rest at the retention pond, admire
autumn sumach rusting its still surface.
The water I once knew was never at rest,
it was swell and chop, tide and riptide—
you and I sunning our torsos, eating chips,
licking salt and malt, Riesling, squinting
in the hard light and cobalt of Bondi Beach.
More shorthand, still Sydney, the ass end
of Oxford Street in the YW's café.
But Canada too, McNab Street, Hamilton.
II.
I cannot rest. A boy and girl straddle
the bench; the boy is working up courage
for two, before my arrival sours
everything—my failing, gaunt body.
He stands, hands shoved into hip pockets.
She flips open her phone. I part my lips,
exposing my gums and teeth in a smile,
shuffling by into the cool, you alongside.
A satellite records this for its atlas
of now. Whatever, he whispers to her.
Civil and Civic
You talk across periods; I draw on arms
with blue pen, The Clash, et cetera.
With gall you hang posters, know the slogans.
You savour the word disobedience,
chew chocolate first thing in the morning,
as I follow you around, onto the bus,
ignore exposed hip skin winking love, love.
Trapped, wet in a tent, some bitch recites Brecht.
We play Hacky Sack.
They open tear gas.
An act born from a crowd's seething will
I heave the blunt harm of a brick at helmets
and shields, a slow, magnificent arc.
My brick in flight is like a dove, you shriek.
A boy falls and is crushed. We are all filmed.
Two cars are torched in the square after dark.
Over there you haver at a statue's feet,
the bronze general dismounts and runs you through.
Isadora and the Swallow
A caught earthworm at struggle,
a primitivist dance,
a neck-scarf-meets-spoke end.
Through the window pane I try
talking the jittery bird down,
plead, cite habeas corpus.
But it keeps an awkward watch;
it's in mid-kill after all.
When it writes a skyward page,
moving on with the last dance,
I recognize loss, that old
unforeseen pinprick in time,
and know without knowing what,
that my worm, she left her mark.
Key Messages I: For the Death of an Acquaintance
Be shocked and saddened. Have words fail.
Be reminded of a quotation that brings
comfort as you seek answers to questions.
Say it seems impossible ... as if the back door
might swing open and that bright smile,
the very one we so badly need right now,
would enter and make everything okay.
Prompt others to recall their similar stories
and ask that they take a few moments, share
something of the person everyone knew,
the one so many,
so many, called friend.
Border State
I. Chevy
On a walk without a path I discover
an ancient, curvy Chevrolet giving
itself over to soil, brambles and rust,
doors thrown open as if he just pulled
over and stopped it right here, his girl
leaping out, bobby socks and pig tails,
necking on that herringbone rug until
the sun fell and dark milked their skin
to equal shades of American, impossible
love made too early, and so abandoned
in mid century south of Mason–Dixon
in mid lust to bush and rain for tomorrow.
II. Soil
At the St. John's House dig,
behind glass display cases,
for the earth took us in
bones, tools, relics of early
industry, the quotidian of
colonization is organized,
it soothed our pain with
rain and snow and wind
numbered, plaques, history
in graphic-designed context—
bones are private parts
in case the stillborn child,
feverish Yaocomico Indian,
shivering slave, object to
soil us over quiet again
such sudden subjection.
III. Frame
Rising from former fields of tobacco,
corn and wheat, shadow houses emerge
at dusk, ghost frames cluster, the charcoal
outlines of roofs, walls, chimneys, churches—
a sketched city that once stood upright, proud.
On the headstones, names line up.
Having changed, iPods on, the townsfolk
forego their posts as blacksmiths or bakers.
It was a perfect day for reenactment,
a soft sun shapes the roof lines, the smoke
trails off into the sky and I stay, just sit,
as the earth groans low and long after dark.
IV. Slave
Miss Else is her name, and this is how
she refers to herself, despite my discomfort,
in spite of her.
She's in the third person;
this moment is politics, her cleaning, my being
cleaned until there is nothing left but staged
talk between us.
This is how it still goes?
Then the gardener arrived, Marine jets over
the Chesapeake, dim memories of Roots
and a discomfort
the size of my foreign
countries erupt as I shake his thick hand.
A nothing moment for him; it's all mine.
I am un-American;
this is well forged.
V. Crab Cakes
Night and the light on the Patuxent River
glows and shows its ability to calm
even when I am hungry, even when
the world is old and I hold a cold song
so close I can hum and mumble its words
into the Atlantic air. Stop time and
lemon wedges with coleslaw will be sides
to everything this bold place needs to survive—
Fox News, Polaroids of ball teams, trophy
catches stuffed, back when fish grew that big.
America looks as one imagines it and
the crab cakes, they are riverside and rich.
Placebo Poem
Outbound on a bracing constitutional
a pair of retired physicians, friends,
question conventional wisdom—as in,
ought not a heart love only while still
young enough to safely skip a beat?
Control, randomize and double-blind that.
They will take the enigma, the unsound,
rogue charm of the sugar pill with them.
What was, and was not, in the literature?
One swigs rye from a silver flask, brilliant
is the burn as it slides way down, while
the other intends love by saying, so long.
Who Will Serve Nanaimo Bars at the Funeral?
When the last of them is, themselves, buried
Who will serve Nanaimo bars at the funeral?
And deviled eggs? And the coffee in urns?
When the last of them is, themselves, silent
Who will hum wartime songs drying spoons?
And the phantom pain of the Great Depression?
How will it ever come up idly again,
That lesson in frugality, stoicism?
And the Jell-O salad? The wobbly hymns?
In this church basement, at this funeral,
There is tan linoleum, wainscoting,
Worn carpet, a neglected piano.
The vibration of now is at my hip,
My phone, it's killing me. I can feel it
Arresting my patience, sensitivity,
As they turn to look. Specters all. Christ's cross
Loose and askew on the wall marks an X.
I text across time to the other side
Of the world: brother, I am here, yes, yes.
Somewhere, A Voice of Spring
Air brackish, concrete dust, tics, plastic
sacking, rust rivulets from rotting metal,
rats, stains from the soupy fluid that runs
from bowels, or blood or bile—I ignore this.
I see instead a shaft of light migrating
up the wall. I feel it against my cheek,
my hand, its welts. This is fertile.
I am a tree branch claiming this light.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Civil and Civic by Jonathan Bennett, Michael Holmes. Copyright © 2011 Jonathan Bennett. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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