POEMS BY RISHMA DUNLOP
Naramata Road
(Emily Dickinson
Poetry Award 2003)
Alphabet
Saccade
Primer
Reading Like A Girl: 6
Seeing
Small things
Five-and-Dime Queen
You know this is a landscape that tends to unfasten
you, brings you again and again to the brink of weeping.
No matter how many departures and disappearances,
you are marked by this beauty, astonishment that depends on loss.
As the bitter edges of things slide into memory and flesh, you
claim the meaning of your days on this frayed loveliness.
You sign your name to it.
At these moments something is given back to you, panic
dusted off, calmed by desert heat in the summer, vineyards
heavy with grapes. The body is set to music, carried by rain in
the spring resurrection of orchards. In the fall, the road swells with
harvest, the ripe comfort of apples. Even in winter, the skeletons of
trees dangle gifts, Golden Delicious earrings abandoned to the wind.
The ghosts of dead teenagers and drunks live here, their
voices echo along the curves and bends, in the rocky incisions of
graves, haunted by memories of prom dresses, cigarettes smoked in
the Seven Eleven parking lot and behind the high school.
There is a soft spot in everything.
You drive that road, move into a sky like a late Turner painting, gold
and amber, white canvas dreaming colors of Venice. It makes you believe
there is tenderness in every geography. And this has the power to change
you,
unweight your eyelids every morning, as the sky leans towards the absolute.
©Rishma Dunlop 2004. Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Canadian Women Poets. Mansfield Press. Winner First Place, Emily Dickinson Poetry Award 2003.
Angel he calls me, angel says the
Boy on the street when I give him a dollar.
Choreography everywhere in the city,
crows
wheeling and dancing on the horizon, every cell recalls
Desire, Billie Holiday’s distingué lovers, slick, slippery
memories of
Evenings drunk with stars and rain and
Frank Sinatra crooning love letters like
Grace notes in the summer air.
Heat hisses on the boulevards
Inches over our skins like imagined sighs and opium smoke.
Jack Kerouac screams out angel! on a midnight moving train.
Kisses for the junkies eating oranges.
Love a one word intangible cipher
Many-mouthed birds sing Kyrie Eleison
Nocturnes and nightingales
Open wide the hearts of the innocent and the not-so-innocent.
Pink the colour of Ginger Rogers’ shoes turned
pink with blood
after Fred asks for hundreds of takes for a single scene.
Queers and transvestite divas dance in the street in a costume parade.
Ruined beauty. We can always be romantic and pray for its return.
Stubbornness is underrated. It spines us,
Threading us through the lives of those we barely know
Until each of us becomes the ash and bone of the other.
Vanity tricks us until the collapse on bloody feet
When hobo skies dream us into adventures of comic-book heroes with
X-ray vision, new gods of the city
Yawping across skyscrapers and apartment buildings
Zest of their goodness like an absolute tasted on the wind.
©Rishma Dunlop 2004. Reading Like a Girl. Black Moss Press.
The air above the city is saturated
with prayers. Like the air in
industrial towns and dreams
it’s hard to breathe.
Below, an aerial view of the apartment
where we used to make love.
Nightmare demolition site, cement rubble,
explosion of mortar and brick,
gargoyle beheaded.
In memory,
the unfastened blouse,
your hands stroking my hair.
The world seen through a child’s snowglobe.
In the yard we make snow angels
rising from where we’ve lain on our backs,
flying like children, leaving imprints of
wings and gowns.
There is a love which cannot be moved.
It must die in its place and in its time
destroyed together with the building
in which it stands.
It becomes like Cicero’s memory palace,
assigned with beauty or ugliness,
dressed up with cloaks or crowns, disfigured
by the stains of blood or mud or paint.
And in this way, we will remember.
©Rishma Dunlop 2005. Metropolis. Mansfield Press.
City of snow.
The homeless sleep in the square.
A man with long hair tells me his address
with pride: City Hall, Column
5.
Another John Doe is added to the
homeless memorial posted
outside The Church of the Holy Trinity.
In the distance, architecture of
mockery,
towers of glass, houses of suburbia.
If we speak for the dead,
let us stand sentinel,
speak in languages not our own,
speak as conductors of human music
that moves us, playing
our spectral bones in dark days,
music that armors us to beggar motion,
quarrying emptiness.
Through the bitter, restless irritations
of our living,
stuff the void with eloquence,
fit the writing to the form of passion.
Harvest nothingness with stubborn patience.
In viral days, there is no churchbell,
no wafer on the tongue,
no Guardian Angel of Utopia.
How razor-clean it was supposed to be.
Now, reason confiscated
in the corrugated light,
chalice of memories in this net of stormwind,
even your words scatter across
ruined avenues,
insuck drawn across the sky where your
cigarette is lit.
Something is spared when you pray,
stripped as you are
in your dark kitchen,
back bent at the end of the day, Jove’s rage
in the hollow of your
throat.
You take the night in your hands.
You who are quick with the tonguing-up
of blame, learn
to take it back. Eat your words.
Their venom may be an antidote for what
ails you. If you say everything
is holy, try
to
mean what you say.
In the unrelenting labor of every day,
find in the underside, some sense
that love has been
curious and noble, humility after fury.
When your eyes have unclouded,
you will see the shine
rising off the
edges of things. You will hear a human
breathing, sense something blue, alive,
singing.
Push against the dailiness,
deliberate in your dreams,
your forms of despair.
Find the notes, tender,
that you strain to hear.
Come to this bed,
the open neck,
hand to lip.
Emblazon the mouth
with a lover’s kiss,
trying to massacre difference.
Even plenitude is no gift
without knowing the shape of
mercy.
The hand I placed on you,
slow declension of muscle,
the imprint of my grip is your history,
my knuckles your pearls.
Currency of aftermath,
premonitions,
something is being spoken.
All we can do for the dead is sing for them.
The songs are lush.
The stars are in you; they can’t be extinguished.
Somewhere there are cities
where the gates are never
shut and
there
is no night.
Somewhere there are cities that refuse to burn.
©Rishma Dunlop 2004. Reading Like a Girl. Black Moss Press.
…gods of the city reveal their will through the flight of birds
Fustel de Coulages
1
The city is in the eye of the blackbird,
Fixed on skyscrapers, bus terminals,
Garbage dumps.
Witness to muffled emergencies
Someone’s heart about to stop
Someone about to be delivered
Someone seeking redemption between
A woman’s legs.
2
Winged shadows rake the asphalt.
Three crows drift, black motes moving across
The evening-filtered sky to join the flock of
Thousands in the roost of alder trees. Slow flapping
In the sunset, twos and threes in broken ribbons flying
Over the city. They prick the sky into crimson, the vault
Of heaven opening across domes and spires. In their
Homing, grace touches the faded day.
3
The crow is a childhood story, a totem, a fable, a trickster,
An outlaw, an omen. Four and twenty black birds baked in a pie.
A dainty dish for a king. Bedtime song of sixpence and
Empire.
4
Lovers. Oneness in the crossing of boundaries.
Bird and lovers are one.
5
Beauty is in the inflections and innuendos.
In the crow’s song, the screech of despair.
Call notes of our dark sobbing, the
Cry seeking mother’s ear. Mouths
Crying Mamma. Sound of dim battalions,
Mouths opened full of charred memory.
Transcendental étude, fugue.
Oracle of exile, rage, fury, hell.
6
In the city’s intercession of symbols, the crow
Joins the other watchers, the guardian gazes of
Gargoyles and dark angels and Art Deco muses.
Shell-shocked eyes open into revelation. The crow can
See through the portholes of creation drilled clean
Through the heart, the stars millions of miles away
And the future and the universe.
7
Nightfall. Crows gather to roost. Branches of
Alderwood sag under their communal weight. In sleep
Not a leaf flinches as they perch, black monks hooded
With penitence. Worms burrow into their dreams. The
Immigrants, the refugees, the displaced, the hungry,
the dispossessed,
Dream of crows that could be plucked like fruit,
at first sweet and ripe,
Then poison, rotted with bitterness, the taste of exile they
Know so well in this new home where the crows rise again
And again.
8
The crow travels upwards, white turning black,
Black turning white until wings crash into the moon.
The gaping brain begins prayers for enemies. Tiny skulls
Recite last psalms of gardens and serpents and apple tragedies.
A drunken Adam and
Eve’s spread legs and everything going to hell.
9
The many prayers exhaust us.
We weep with the crows.
Music of weariness slams into the day.
Eardrums burst and deafness numbs us.
The earth and sky are constant.
Everything takes the blame.
10
In green light and euphony, the crows
Gather dead branches, take them back to
Emptiness, entwine the twigs into the limbs
Of a tree with wild, unfailing patience. Until
What was fallen and lost is reborn, ready to take
Its place in the nest.
11
The blackbird is what we know.
Brains in wings and hands.
Lessons of scriptures and physics.
Lucid, inescapable. The mind is an
Old crow seeking universal laws
Wheeling and swarming at
The edge of the world.
12
The crows rise into a gawkish dance, glossy males
Circling the females. They make their way home,
Their wings outstretched in longing, an
Embrace that nails heaven and earth together.
13
Morning rises in full glitter, the crow’s beak
Aimed full-target at the heart of the sun. But
The sun brightens and brightens.
Forces us to smell the day, the whale’s den of the ocean.
Dried blood turning fragrant. Placental sweetness.
Vaguely familiar. And we stay, survivors with the earth
And sky. Scent of afterbirth in our nostrils.
©Rishma Dunlop 2005. Metropolis. Mansfield Press.
At the Gare Centrale
She fingers the blue
Of her Canadian passport.
Wears the shoes she bought
From the marché aux puces.
Crimson, strapped at her ankles,
They once belonged to a dancer
With the Moulin Rouge.
At each city limit
A border to be crossed.
Every language a new currency.
At the hotel in Prague
She befriends the night porter.
Tells him secrets,
Intimate stories of her life.
She is conscious of the weight
Of inheritance
The heft of her mother’s rubies
Sewn into the hem
Of her skirt.
Insured
She knows there is always
Someone willing to bargain for the past.
©Rishma Dunlop 2004. Metropolis. Mansfield Press.
The chronicle of the city unravels
like
a prayer cloth
calm of storybook nurseries, book codes,
swift calligraphy of desire.
The city dreams us
gives us exigencies in eavesdropped
stories, undistinguished pleadings
requiems for forgetting.
There is a small star pinned where Hiroshima used to be.
It’s late and someone’s almost forgotten how to convince you
he’s
telling the truth.
Even in sleep he cries out for help
and
you minister to him
a
woman like history returning for its wounded.
Blackbirds drop from telephone wires
rosepetals
collect in birdbaths.
Everything stories you. You take Rilke at his word
Taste it everywhere. Wonderland signs
Eat
me. Drink me.
Your hands like hobbled birds
read the classics. The hero enters the arched gate of the city.
In these books it is clear where the story of the city begins.
In the book of lost entries
nothing
is pure but the forgotten things
crossed out words on a haunted page
useless dark of ink.
Today the city is unwriting itself
in
a coffin of glass.
In the blurred doorways,
in
skyscrapers that rise silver and blue
cool as if nothing could ever make them burn.
Sprayed on concrete walls
Where is my beautiful daughter
Emma was here
Escúchame
I’ll pray for you Lucas
Fuck the politicians
Recuérdame
Inamorata
the billboard with the women tall
with
long legs against white sand and blue ocean
red
mouths puckered high above the crowds
smooth lipsticked smiles longing for cigarettes and sex.
Across the city, lights are shutting off
Good night, good night.
On the radio, the sirens are singing
Emily Lou Harris, Alison Kraus, Gillian Welch
ethereal lullaby Didn’t Leave Nobody But the Baby
Come lay your bones
on the alabaster stones
and be my ever-lovin’baby.
Reading Emily Dickinson
Beauty crowds
me til I die.
You feel the loneliness.
That’s what is left of the dream of beauty.
Beauty
So many
kinds to name.
You hope for a day soft at the edges
for
something, someone to
know
the small hands of rain
to be like rain
wet with a decent happiness.
Kiss the gleaming armor of the world.
Feel its electric purr.
Close your hands on wind-stunned leaves.
Buff the scars of history with your mouth.
©Rishma Dunlop 2004. Reading Like a Girl. Black Moss Press. . “Saccade” is also reprinted in Contemporary Voices of the Eastern World: An Anthology of Poems, edited by Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal, and Ravi Shankar. W.W. Norton and Co., 2007.
The girl reads neighbourhoods of
dog, cat, sister, brother, mother, father
houses lit with yellow sunshine and once
upon a time glass slippers, long-toothed wolves.
The girl does not know yet
the
broken world,
that there will be pages for consequence, coercion, fraudulence.
Outside her room
the sky is an X-Ray pinned to light
armies of birds lifting into skeletal shadows.
Softness vanishes in the city
deformed
by contagion, fear, vanity.
News stories convulse
palsied in the laws of speech.
Planes pass over the skyline.
Traffic lights change voltage.
Damage is quiet
oil
slick pools in city parkades
fissured winds, smudge of newsprint.
Elegant hands read the book of lost entries
trace the red glares
of exit signs, writing on tenement walls
the
veined arms of junkies.
The girl reads her picture books.
A child’s garden of verses.
The alphabet sifts into her ribcage
opens
her to stars, grass, abcs
whole sentences whispering dark.
In the open doorway
something
cold and distant
even adult hands are small against it.
The book left on the lectern
brittle yellow pages without context
lexicons
of disclosure
soft imprisonment.
The girl does not know yet how words will
hiss
and tremble on fuller pages
imagined wilderness, insomniac’s tale, seductions,
remembrances and forgettings, child’s face pressed
against shattered window, wrecked lullaby, fiercely beautiful
derailment, murderer’s knife, deep song of
mouth unnaming the known.
My hands close on empty testimonies
until
I find that girl—a
pocket of held light
ripped corner of one illuminated manuscript.
In my dreams I see her
the pages blowing with dormant
terror
as she gathers moon and sky
in her small hands like a mouth lovely language
that has no word for harm.
©Rishma Dunlop 2004. Reading Like a Girl. Black Moss Press.
The volume of Tolstoy thumbs her open.
She tries to keep the heroine alive.
Outside the library windows
ragged moths beat against the streetlamps.
She feels the heat of locomotive steam
rising from the stacks, weeps when she
sees Anna’s red purse on the tracks.
She closes the book with stunned hands
as if she had touched the hem of a final
morning, a sense of that going into it alone.
She begins to think she will not be carried
unscarred, untorn into any heaven. Wants
someone to hold her while she burns.
©Rishma Dunlop 2004. Reading Like a Girl. Black Moss Press.
Oh my city, emerald
buried in ravines, coyotes
prowl your meridians.
I am writing from the road.
I had to see clearly
the single world.
I could describe to you
the lemon groves, the beggared streets,
palaces of gold and marble.
All the cities I traveled
to sit in cafés,
to feel the underworld of subways,
to see vanquished cities burned,
men and women cradling the slain,
jilted sweethearts in every theatre,
to know
there is no consolation except in desire,
only the occasional small bird singing,
a temporary clearing of the disorder of things
that flushes the throats of politicians and warriors,
pours a river of poetry through the larynx.
In the city of the future
the world is bandaging its limbs
against wholesale murder,
bombed schoolyards.
From the crazed skulls of highrises,
needle towers on love’s black sea,
the wind overturns someone’s sail.
The city is a glass book.
Open it with an unflinching hand of
a severed arm. Read the pages
to the lilt of a nightingale.
The sights and fires of
your streets are cleaved
to me. You stand immutable.
Beauty is in the coming home.
What is ordinary is not possible anymore.
Your towers rise in me.
A different wind turns the vane.
What I am waiting for
is just now being born.
©Rishma Dunlop 2004. Metropolis. Mansfield Press.
Small things keep you safe:
prayers like the Japanese tie to trees,
clasp of your child’s hand,
angels at the gates of your city,
schedules of commuter trains.
Until the blasted church,
machete massacres,
rush hour bombs on subways,
carnage that is the failure of love.
Clothed in our convictions,
we feel our brains slip,
in every bone the fossil of murder,
illness we cannot vomit up
a hurt so fierce it takes more than
all human grief to beat it down.
You see the exact perspective of
loss as a fading pencil study,
loved one’s features blur, smudged detail,
clouds of centuries pass over the image,
through cross-hatched strokes
only a wrist in forced memory remains,
a hand caressing.
In the archives of accusations,
vengeance and the unforgiven,
we are nailed together, flying the black
flag of ourselves.
The farmer continues to till his fields.
In the city we awaken, turn off alarm clocks,
drink our coffee, kiss our lovers and children,
begin again at the train stations, at bus stops,
briefcases in hand.
In deafness to political speech
the eye permits change.
You imagine words fit for a newborn.
Touch me. In the burned city,
we have become beautiful.
Love’s no secret now.
©Rishma Dunlop 2004. Metropolis. Mansfield Press.
dreams of amusement parks, Coney Island cotton candy,
limousine chauffered divas. Wakes early to dim plaster walls,
echoes of a child’s patty cake game. Father leaves for the
docks, Mother for the diner, hands clocking in. Walks to
school, streets of magnolias opening and destroying
themselves, over and over. No angels above the tenements
or the mannequin windows, but on the billboards, lipsticked
women pout. The Chanel model whispers Share the fantasy.
The actress in pink evening dress, diamond-glinted lobes,
pushes a new perfume called Lovely through the smog.
She looks up at the actress, her pearl-ringed hands, hears
theology whispered from the mouths of advertisements–
tries to unglue words from the sky. Memorizes the city
anthems, her brow rinsed with dreams. Under the platform
girders, she becomes girl-de-luxe, heft of the day gloved
in the silk clutch of her subway token.
©Rishma Dunlop. Literary Review of Canada, Nov. 2006.
Rishma Dunlop
