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windows
the living room
Hagersville winter,
where the living room windows
of insecure, red brick houses
hang on the evening,
like water color
paintings in a dark blue gallery.
Giving up their small-town,
five-thirty supper-time fictions
in electric yellow.
the dining room
Hagersville in December.
Streets folded upon themselves.
The soft, complacent
middle-class faces, inclining
from the dining room
toward sidewalks below,
showed no glimmer of imagination.
I knew then that
they had been silenced
by the closely pruned hedges
the swing sets and flower beds
that played into their homes.
Desire,
or what remained of it,
flowered in television sets,
flickering day and night,
into their planned back yard,
a protectorate of tricycles.
the car
Plastic coffee cups,
beer-bottle caps
and pine-scented
Playboy Bunny air fresheners.
Lipstick on the cigarette butt,
the ash in an open tray.
An apple core rotting
into the open lunch box,
a prescription from the pharmacy.
These collections beyond
the ice-coated windows
of mortgaged new cars
indicated some disease to me.
Hagersville would be a jealous town forever.
the classroom
In the classroom
we learned distance
was measured in terms
of how long it would take you
to get home.
The world was a joke.
They tested me
on the punchlines
of continents and oceans,
How long is the Amazon?
How high is Mount Everest?
How big is Nelson’s erection?
Facts that had no more relevance
than French or trigonometry
to the men who coached the hockey team
or the women
at home, pedalling
beneath the sewing machine.
the hall
We danced to celebrate the success
of the Junior Men’s ice-hockey team
or the crowning of a new
Hagersville Secondary School
Winter Carnival Queen.
In the Community Centre,
after asking where I’d been,
they explained to me
that travel was an annual holiday,
two weeks in Florida
when the snow piled up at the back door.
Or Cuba if you were more adventurous—
fourteen bottles of spiced rum
on a beach in the sun
at a resort run by friendly locals
Wasn’t it pleasant there!
They’ve got it made in the shade.
No salt on the roads & the only ice is in the drinks.
I’d move down there today.
the basement
Sun-burned faces,
peeling in the glare of
whisky and stale marriages,
fathers loosen the brown,
vinyl belts
underlining pot-bellies,
and the tyranny of bank loans
for power boats,
hockey skates and
gas barbecues.
Dance lessons for
tender young daughters
whose tap shoes
would not deliver them
from the sweaty back seats
of fast black cars.
the bus
The disappointments
of close relations and
the poverty of blood
had once been
signposts to bitterness,
now they point out
the path of nostalgia—
there are symptoms of revision.
Trudging
over frozen clots of earth,
embarking not,
on a voyage of discovery
as they would say,
to build character,
but running away.
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