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  A NEWER WILDERNESS

  A NEWER WILDERNESS

  Poems

  ROSEANNE CARRARA

  Copyright © 2007 by Roseanne Carrara

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be repro-

  duced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or

  by any means, without the prior written permission of the pub-

  lisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copy-

  ing, a licence from Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900,

  Toronto, ON m5e 1e5

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Carrara, Roseanne, 1974-

  A newer wilderness / Roseanne Carrara.

  Poems

  isbn 978-1-897178-40-9

  I. Title.

  PS8605.A7745N49 2007 C811’.6 C2007-901104-7

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada

  Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Department of

  Canadian Heritage through the Book Publishing Industry

  Development Program.

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Insomniac Press

  192 Spadina Avenue, Suite 403

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada, m5t 2c2

  www.insomniacpress.com

  Text design and typesetting: Alysia Shewchuk

  In memory of my grandmothers, Geraldine and Vita

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Prologue: To a Translator of Horace • 6

  i

  Surveillance • 15

  Miners’ Houses • 18

  In Defence of Burning • 20

  Lullaby • 23

  The Ears of Kings • 24

  Rest After • 28

  The End of the Novel • 29

  A Muscle in the Country • 31

  Annotations on Your Pastoral, Summer • 34

  Of Minor Figures • 35

  A Brief Tour of the Avenue • 37

  The Course of the Renovations

  i. Transformation ago • 38

  ii. Renaissance rom • 39

  The Wife of Pilate • 40

  Notes on Immigration • 44

  A Newer Wilderness • 47

  ii

  Kenotaphion

  i. Arrived at Ephesus • 51

  ii. Herald • 53

  iii. Aubade • 55

  iv. Sweet Spices • 57

  v. Prayer to a Heroine of Romance for a Better Memory • 59

  vi. Old Road • 61

  vii. Eye of Tobit • 63

  viii. In the Garden • 64

  ix. Imperative • 66

  iii

  During the Spring Dandelion Rush in Irvine, California • 69

  A Child’s Garden • 72

  Lazarus Speaks in Front of Lemieux’s Lazare, 1941 • 75

  A Newer Wilderness • 79

  The Masters of the Country House Poems • 80

  Certain Disappearances • 82

  Cabbagetown • 84

  Cabbage City • 86

  Opera Week in Radio • 89

  The Evening of Your Proposal • 93

  The Restoration of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker • 95

  Daughter and Son • 102

  Epilogue: Curses • 105

  Notes • 107

  Acknowledgements • 111

  PROLOGUE

  TO A TRANSLATOR OF HORACE

  You spoke of the followers of a mathematician who drew

  from his example the promise of a second life. Pythagoras

  lived as Pythagoras. And, having chosen the weapon

  of an ancestor from a pile, he lived again, or that earlier hero

  whose weapon he had chosen lived a second life in him.

  Now that it is sure the both of them are dead, your take

  on the old question stings us iron and fresh: what good

  does it do the hero to have stood for something once?

  The sea eats the captain and his crew. The aged still tear

  at the bright youths and those in their prime on their way

  to the underworld, tumbling down as if they, too,

  were young again. Nobody escapes the sport of the old gods

  or the shame of the new Christ, cold in his chiefly literal state.

  Stay with us. We will need you soon enough. Stay to confound

  what might be termed the second life of Edward Teller,

  our father of the h-bomb, what with the ethos he delivered once,

  his theme, reprised by the stiffs come to trade upon his take

  on the human condition: the heart’s essential weakness,

  the self-serving nature of humankind, our vision, base,

  not visionary, caught wittling down the truth. That Teller

  was no Pythagoras, in truth, come, tell us. Come sink these stiffs

  already bidding in his name for a licence to spread a sea of mirrors

  into space so as to make the sunlight flicker and to cool

  what they have frequently termed this sunken earth. They will ask

  to dust the stratosphere, too, with haze enough to reproduce

  what Vesuvius and Mount St. Helens threw upon the day-

  light once. They will ask to engineer a thick albeit

  temporary age of winter, to put an end to the warmth

  we forced upon the atmosphere and in upon ourselves

  in this (and it is almost fair) our bent for self-indulgence.

  Set us right again. Ask this group the old question,

  — 11 —

  and in an even sharper strain of certitude, what good does it do you now that you are dead (though they

  remain, for all intents and purposes, among the living)

  to have treated our predicament from the tips and not

  the roots? Ask them, what good, not to confirm in us our primal lethargy but to make it plain – the most of us

  would choose, on behalf of our two hemispheres and their

  surrounding gases, to go without our deeper wants

  and most of our possessions, with little grief, and long

  before we make our way to Proserpina, swung at and torn

  by the aged and the youths enticed or bidden there.

  — 12 —

  I

  SURVEILLANCE

  But Light a newer Wilderness

  My Wilderness has made –

  – Emily Dickinson

  One of the neighbourhood dogs, we imagined,

  was sure to emerge from the woods with a rabbit

  or a squirrel, or some other prize, dangling, bloody,

  from its mouth. But nothing would come out.

  And the threshing, the trampling in the woods

  behind our house would not dull down.

  So we came to divine them, the surveyors,

  by the sounds they made with their instruments,

  the retractable tape lines scuttling and riffing

  along the way, the pick and sledge keening those

  four metal posts into the earth, the fluoro-paint

  flushing against a defensive row of ferns

  or whipping bold stripes across the fisticuffed

  knots of the scrub oaks.

  And we supposed

  that though we were separated from those men

  by porch screens, a sloping yard, the creek bed

  at its foot, and the few rows of trees that were part

  of our land, what we owned – and even considering

  the layer of kudzu that covered everything, some said

  the whole state – the men lay hidden more for what

  was behind them than the clutter between us, a miles-

&nb
sp; thick backdrop of trees and ferns so green it was ash.

  How their measurements collected and ventured out

  over the vines that clung to the woods and stalked up

  our hill. As they raffled off their inches and feet

  — 15 —

  and translated them into metres, how those thrown

  voices beat into us there, high on the screened-in porch,

  the volume only increased for the canopied distance

  the utterances travelled.

  And then their total exposure.

  How one of the men bent over his measuring tool,

  and how we spotted him, his orange helmet catching

  a slant of light that stripped through the kudzu, flashing

  it back out at us. We witnessed the outline of a man

  coining forward from the woods, an x-ray of a body

  doubled over a measuring tool, hurtling through

  the greenery in one illuminating flash.

  A full

  minute later, as if in response, the second project-man,

  spaced a quarter-mile or so away from the first, caught

  another shaft of sun on his hard hat, sending himself,

  or the image of his whole body, careening out from the thick.

  One body, then the other. I could not help but think

  of a line between the two, the completion of a project.

  You said it was a signature, that bright light,

  or the bodies, pausing the way they did, repeating –

  a sign, you said, but only a detail of what it would be like

  after the clearing, when the thick behind our own

  clutter of woods got removed. Remember, you spoke

  with such gravity. Our woods would prove nothing

  but a wind barrier then, some thin relief.

  And especially

  at sunset, the light would pervade the new clearing,

  seeping through our trees, willing us no peace

  — 16 —

  of darkness and no shade, that light would aggravate

  and undo, that congealed yellow glut, the effect

  (you had to build upon the most immediate image)

  of the sun’s taking charge of a thousand hard

  hats on a thousand men, bent over in surveillance.

  — 17 —

  MINERS’ HOUSES

  This town once had its inhabitants.

  Bitten by the coal and gone under

  for it, they lit-tindered the bases

  of the hills as they disappeared.

  If you were a tourist you would take

  a tethered swing or a freight

  elevator between the heaps

  and try to study how they broke,

  like those eighteenth-century

  English travellers who kept

  to their own nation for the sake

  of economy, tackling the peaks,

  writing their friends direct

  from the man-made grottoes,

  quoting Milton as they shuttled

  down into the quarries for a view.

  Risen again, you would find

  all the two-storey houses high

  in a rage for collecting, clapped

  down over their catalogues

  and books pierced with crickets

  or the exoskeletons of southern

  insects, their dust bins kept

  brimming with the ends of linens

  and newspaper clippings. A bird’s nest,

  or a bear’s head levelled against

  a few gallons of fixative, prepared

  for the conclusion of its taxidermy –

  almost all of the contents they

  cater to and bless, these houses,

  combustible, except for the array

  of cast trilobites organized

  — 18 —

  on the side table, there, or the jar

  of marbles just to the right

  side of the period instruments

  not yet strung or tuned.

  This is an easier rage to divine.

  The curtains all part slightly

  at the sashes. And you can see that

  as sure as the sky parts, pointing

  its dove boulder down to oil them all,

  these houses, in blue-backed

  sheets of light, not one will stand

  deprived of its possessions.

  — 19 —

  IN DEFENCE OF BURNING

  Cassandra looked them [Jane Austen’s letters] over and burnt the greater part, as she told me, 2 or 3 years before her own death – She left, or gave some as legacies to the Nieces – but of those I have seen, several had portions cut out.

  – Caroline Austen, My Aunt Jane Austen

  Not much of a rite, Cassandra, holding

  over the ovens, watching for her cut-outs

  to seize above the coals, to spread out and to lick

  into ships of ash (as if the paper, burning,

  rose up like one of those women we have read

  about, wild, in the ancient romances, tearing

  at the unroped hair conversant with her cheek-

  bones and her raw chest) at last sifting through

  the errors between the coals, an unterrific

  heated dust. Right, Cassandra, hedging, maybe,

  or grinning a little at the utterances she weeds

  from her sister’s letters and family papers,

  those privacies set aside to burn. Cassandra,

  burning her clippings of all the insincere

  and illegitimate issues, her sister’s caricatures

  of neighbours and no ones, her own scrawl

  on the progress of a fever she watched shooting bull

  red through the face of a woman at Lyme,

  accounts of the accounting or the hairdresser’s

  bills – or better, Cassandra, well within her rights,

  editing out and burning the serious confessions,

  all the appalled relations of an esteem here,

  a resemblance there, or a foreboding – evidence

  that full well might have influenced even the murkiest

  sense to try for something similar in the way

  of a real attachment, or to stand down, surveying

  a lean loss without that much affectation,

  — 20 —

  or to refuse, at last, and as a rule, to spend

  any sentence of time converting a mean, more

  beautiful man into an angel. To dull her scissors,

  to let those sentences and subjects burn stands

  hers in the right. Now who would go and regret

  this burning for all it omits and withholds?

  And how sore would you need to be to insist

  in some kinetic, modern way that even if we cannot

  play privy to this burnt out correspondence

  between sisters, these pits and pats gone out, now,

  and down with the kitchen scraps, that this act,

  in and of itself, this event, as you might call it,

  would have tickled or tainted the play of one

  of the minor figures in what you must imagine, now,

  as the scene, driving down to stroke us, too: as if

  the local Mary would have glimpsed Cassandra

  burning her sister’s letters and instinctively passed

  a tear as she passed by the side window; as if

  the kitchen Jane would have made a lucky turn,

  gotten herself into better circumstances, say,

  a wholesome marriage, because she heard

  an extra hiss or whistle in the cook’s report

  of delays with the dinner, heard that whistle

  and changed her mind about things. What is it

  that you have come to expect? That if the gardener,

  bent over the thawed vegetable patch, caught

  a glimpse of the kitchen fire, something new
r />   or notable would have formed in him, in us,

  and for posterity’s sake? Nothing bloomed out

  of fashion under the hands of the old haggard

  who would not have watched a word start from one

  blazing page and have thought to look affectionately

  — 21 —

  on the first greens or to make hybrids of the border’s standard rose. No glimpses over his shoulder and up

  and through Cassandra, burning the letters.

  No killing cuts in the wood of the lavender,

  having lunged too far forward with the knife.

  — 22 —

  LULLABY

  I cannot imagine you called to be a martyr.

  I have seen too many pictures of those

  famished things offering up images

  and the implements of their own torture.

  This saint, here, blindfolded, holding

  her eyes in front of her in a coal iron.

  That harried Veronica presenting a cloth

  fresh-bled with the face of her victim Jesus.

  I cannot see you as a botanist either. What

  with everyone so acclimatized to the beautiful,

  only the weeds with their enticing names

  would interest the governors in their grants.

  Sure, it might originate, your research,

  from an urge to restore the more natural

  charms, from a whole and hearty longing

  (and I expect you will be set longing)

  to eradicate diseases like tulip fire, to set

  buds upon the blind daffodils, to force

  the deadly nightshade from the ivy for now

  and for good. But for you, for any of us,

  despite the initial calling, there would be no

  chance of being drawn back, in the end,

  to a survey of the consistent fruiting

  and flowering of oranges and hollyhocks.

  No, do not go and be anything.

  Just sit here shallowing and unbred.

  In the old way, I am out to murder Vocation.

  — 23 —

  THE EARS OF KINGS

  Within a living register, a collection of all the flora ever

  mentioned in the works of Shakespeare, a college garden,

  enclosed by hedges,

  backed by a church, you caught the shadow of a bird skating

  forward from the leeks, and you told me, once again, how

  much you hate the starlings.

  As if I had never heard it before, didn’t know you despised the

  starlings or the man who, as you say, inflicted them on us all,

  you called him out, Eugene Schieffelin, by his full name, as if you wanted to invoke his ghost or had caught him as a

  child in a lie or in some minor promiscuity

  that might lead to something sinister in his adult life. You