Authors: Stephanie Bolster
Two Bowls of Milk
BOOKS BY STEPHANIE BOLSTER
White Stone: The Alice Poems
(1998)
Two Bowls of Milk
(1999)
Copyright © 1999 by Stephanie Bolster
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Bolster, Stephanie
Two bowls of milk
Poems.
ISBN 0-7710-1557-7
eBook ISBN: 978-1-55199-654-7
I. Title
PS8553.O479T96 1999 C811’.54 C99-930013-X
PR9199.3.B64T96 1999
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
McClelland & Stewart Inc.
The Canadian Publishers
481 University Avenue
Toronto, Ontario
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For Patrick Leroux
poems from paintings by Jean Paul Lemieux
poems in the National Gallery of Canada
This title contains long lines of poetry. The line of characters below indicates approximately the longest line in the text:
cold winds already lifting the hairs of your arm – you’ll forget your feet,
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Come to the edge of the barn the property really begins there
,
you see things defining themselves, the hoofprints left by sheep,
the slope of the roof, each feather against each feather on each goose.
You see the stake with the flap of orange plastic that marks
the beginning of real. I’m showing you this because
I’m sick of the way you clutch the darkness with your hands,
seek invisible fenceposts for guidance, accost spectres.
I’m coming with you because I fear you’ll trip
over the string that marks the beginning, you’ll lie across the border
and with that view – fields of intricate grain and chiselled mountains,
cold winds already lifting the hairs of your arm – you’ll forget your feet,
numb in straw and indefinite dung, and be unable to rise, to walk farther.
My fingers weave so close between yours because I’ve been there
before, I know the relief of everything, how it eases the mind to learn
shapes it hasn’t made, how it eases the feet to know the ground
will persist. See those two bowls of milk, just there,
on the other side of the property line, they’re for the cats
that sometimes cross over and are seized by a thirst, they’re
to wash your hands in. Lick each finger afterwards. That will be
your first taste, and my finger tracing your lips will be the second.
But few have gotten at the multiplicity of them, how each berry
composes itself of many dark notes, spherical,
swollen, fragile as a world. A blackberry is the colour of a painful
bruise on the upper arm, some internal organ
as yet unnamed. It is shaped to fit
the tip of the tongue, to be a thimble, a dunce cap
for a small mouse. Sometimes it is home to a secret green worm
seeking safety and the power of surprise. Sometimes it plunks
into a river and takes on water.
Fishes nibble it.
The bushes themselves ramble like a grandmother’s sentences,
giving birth to their own sharpness. Picking the berries
must be a tactful conversation
of gloved hands. Otherwise your fingers will bleed
the berries’ purple tongue; otherwise thorns
will pierce your own blank skin. Best to be on the safe side,
the outside of the bush. Inside might lurk
nests of yellowjackets; rabid bats; other,
larger hands on the same search.
The flavour is its own reward, like kissing the whole world
at once, rivers, willows, bugs and all, until your swollen
lips tingle. It’s like waking up
to discover the language you used to speak
is gibberish, and you have never really
loved. But this does not matter because you have
married this fruit, mellifluous, brutal, and ripe.
Seawolf Inside Its Own Dorsal Fin
, Robert Davidson, 1983. Screenprint.
I sleep in the red of my rising
arc, curled tight and finned
within fin, rocked by black
water I rock. I learn this one part
of myself, each degree
of its curve, how the water
foams against warm skin.
My fin learns me, the thing
it is part of but does not
belong to. We make each other,
my fin and myself, myself
and the taut water.
When my fin breaks the sea’s
skin, through shut eyes I glimpse
wave within wave, stone
within stone, I surge
through all the layers,
my own incessant crest.
This dome opened
the year of my birth.
My whole life stands
on this wooden bridge, arched
over water.
Below, plump and golden
fish ripen.
Foliage, hushed as silk, encroaches.
Nasturtiums
Always plural,
rampant.
Edible because
something must be finished off,
your unflinching
ruffled orange and gold,
your tart leaves.
Even aphids will not
do the trick.
Even inclement weather.
Even in October
you assert yourselves,
outdoing the leaves,
the smug pumpkins.
Your spine is a secret grief.
Rooted in inconstant mud,
you manage to stand, proud
though purple marks the perfect
white of your throat.
But cut, left
alone in a vase, you will lean
away from light, shrink
into your crippled shadow.
Tenacious as cat’s claws
you cling to the salt
grit, mark your place
in roots and the innermost
pink of anemone’s
tentacles. Beside that dropped
starfish with its guts to the sky,
that branch bleached
and sea-worn,
you are the one
who holds brine between your toes,
tide in your teeth.
The truth is in the red of you,
the black centre wide
as a pupil in a blind-drawn room.
Bloodshot, you stare
into the sky and will not squint
until the sun does.
“Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.”
– Charles Simic, “Our Angelic Ancestor”
Something here –
Nike runner with its arc
of dreamed flight, feathered
bedroom slipper, red
stiletto with the pointed toe,
arrows into darkness.
The bodies have hopped between
dumpsters, between these bookshelves.
Hissing cats, torn pages, milk
cartons licked blank.
They have unwritten
their other legs. They believe in silence
and the striving after balance.
Somewhere in there
they stand like resting flamingoes,
tuck around them
the memory of the other leg
like a cruel friendship
lost in childhood. Phantom phrases still
caught in their knotted tongues.
Hurt bird in dirt
– she writes
for sound, and a sparrow
that hit the window of her childhood
too hard. Because of how the ear
takes words in and holds them
to itself, how they strike