Wives of the Prophets

            On Thursday morning I dreamed a scene from a Meg Tilly movie that she never made. It looked like an Audrey Hepburn style romantic comedy. The leading man in some sort of over the top romantic fashion serenade had dumped into a sheltered harbour of an ocean or river, hundreds of colourful women’s hats of various sizes. Meg Tilly is in her twenties in this dream and wearing a short green dress. She comes to the middle of a small arching bridge, sees the hats and calmly and without hesitation, climbs on the railing and happily dives in to swim towards the floating hats while several young schoolgirls on the bridge jump up and down and cheer her on gleefully.

            With the windows shut and the heat on full blast I still needed to use my comforter even though quite often in the winter I sleep without even a sheet over me. During yoga my body warms up and I usually have the windows open but this time they were fully shut. I didn’t open one of them a bit until song practice.

            Venus was very bright beside a crescent moon before sunrise.

            I called the Admissions office at U of T to see if someone could help me complete my application for my grant on the Noah Meltz website. I told the counsellor that the “field” that the site says is not filled yet consists of two letters from the fall. He thought that I was expected to copy the letters and attach them to the application but the only place for attachments is the one for financial documents. I did what he suggested and as I expected it didn’t work, so I’ll have to go in on Monday and see if they can help me in person both with my Noah Meltz grant and with applying for OSAP.

            I have made a commitment to write one new poem a week for my Poetry Master course and I usually have it done earlier in the week. But my review of Shab-e She’r and my hassles with grant applications were time consuming this week and so I had to write a poem just an hour and a half before leaving for class. I called the poem “Clear-Cutting Culture” and printed five copies. I also copied a poem with the name “Make-up Mirror” and another entitled “The Long Warm Thread Between Us”.

            I left for class more than half an hour later than usual.

            The trip downtown along College was worse than riding along Bloor on Wednesday, the day after the storm. College is worse mostly because of the streetcar tracks and the cars that are parked to the left of the snow banks. One car did beep at me from behind as I was struggling to keep balanced.

            There are bunny tracks in the snow near the bike post rings in front of Northrop Frye Hall.

            I got to class just before Albert, who was five minutes late.

            Albert told us that he’d planned on giving us an assignment based on “A Book of Luminous Things” but he decided to present it to us next week.

            We had one student in the whole class whose first poem we had yet to comment on and so Emily read her poem “stones” and we spent about a half an hour discussing it.

She had a line about moving the skin from itself, which didn’t make sense to me since it would be like removing your hair from your hair or removing your face from your face. She clarified that she meant removing skin from one’s body. Some people said they still liked it as she wrote it.

There was a very strong line in which she said “the room was naked” but then she added that there were no faces watching, just empty chairs and tables. It seemed to me that saying the room was naked either means there are no people or no furniture and so since she clarified that there was empty furniture, it robbed the image of the room being naked to hit the reader over the head with what it was naked of when it seemed obvious. Lara agreed with me but Albert said that it works and that there is a long-standing tradition of such repetitions, like in the Bible.

Albert said something about how we develop the need to oppose something and then we get over it.

We split into our separate groups and this time Vivian, Margaryta, Blythe and myself went into Albert’s office.

I pointed out to Vivian that she needs to economize on the words she uses and I suggested that she practice by putting her poems in a Twitter window.

I made suggestions to all three women for changes in their poems. I find Blythe is a little more resistant to advice than the others.

Margaryta had used the word “sap” in relation to a man’s argument that he had not committed rape because the woman emitted sap. Vivian hadn’t understood until I explained it that the sap is a woman’s wetness in her vagina and the rapist had argued that she must have wanted it because she got wet. I suggested that she shorten the line to “sap of approval” or something like that.

They liked a lot of my change suggestions.

We actually took turns and looked at one poem by each of us, then went around again and then a third time until all of the poems were covered.

The first of my poems we looked at was “Evangelikaraoke”

Near the subway entrance

a man was preaching by proxy

through an audio player blasting

from his shoulder bag.

The deep voice was fatherly,

well-practiced and professional

as it warned that free sexuality

causes toxic thoughts

that destroy religion,

faith, family and culture.

I must say that I’ve never come a cross

such a lazy preacher

He should have at least memorized

and lip-synced the sermon.

I must find someone

to be swayed by his second hand argument

on my behalf

            Blythe thought the first verse was great. She said she liked the ending a lot and found it more relaxed than the endings of my poems tend to be, which she commented was an interesting and successful switch. She wrote that it made her think of Frank O'Hara, who is her favourite poet.

            Margaryta didn’t seem to get that the second stanza describes a quote from the preacher. When I told her that she didn’t think it was obvious and thought that I should put it in quotation marks. But it seems to me that when I say, “The deep voice … warned that free sexuality causes toxic thoughts …” that is the opinion of the preacher or at least of the preacher in the recording that the proxy preacher is blasting. She said that “free sexuality” is loaded term and that I should clarify and unpack it. That would be the preacher's job, not mine. My point is that I'm quoting someone that would never “unpack” the term.

            Vivian missed the point that the preacher had a “second hand argument” because he was using someone else’s voice. She also didn't get that I was being sarcastic in saying that I need to find someone to be swayed on my behalf.

            Of my poem “The Wives of the Prophets”:

I want to love an African woman,

ultra feminine and endlessly wrapped in

colours cut from the sun.

Yeah, I want a girl

just like the girl

that married Mohammed.

With eyes that shine like pools

in the Arabian moonlight:

all engulfing

and deep enough to drown a camel caravan.

Yeah, I want a girl

just like the girl

that married Abraham.

With a great big butt that sticks out and up

so high that if you turned it right around

you’d have to part her cheeks to find her belly-button

and pluck that precious ruby out.

I want to love an African woman

with slow moving hips that sway like

date trees in the desert breezes.

Yeah, I want a girl

just like the girl

that married the prophet Jesus.

            Blythe gave a bit of a speech about how the poem is “culturally insensitive” and she also suggested that people might think that I’m ignorant of geography by associating the Middle East with Africa, with images like “Arabian moonlight”.

            But half of the Middle East, including Israel and Egypt are geologically part of Africa. Egypt is geographically part of Africa. North Africa is considered part of the cultural Arabic world. Both Abraham and Muhammad did marry African women. Anyway, the whole thing is a fantasy.

            Margaryta wrote that she was too uncomfortable with the poem to even comment, especially with the fifth stanza and about the sexualization of black women.

            Vivian said nothing about the poem except to say that she agreed with Blythe and Margaryta. I noticed later though that in her written comments she had said nothing at all that expressed the view that it was culturally insensitive. What she wrote was that she really loved the first stanza and would like to see it expanded on. She thought that “eyes that shine like pools” is a bit clichéd. She commented that the third verse was interesting. She declared the whole poem interesting but wondered why the speaker wants women like the wives of the prophets.

            Albert came in later and handed me some comments on this poem and others, but though it’s not chronologically correct I’ll offer his comments now.  He said of the fifth stanza, “In a way I like the extravagance and humour of this but (butt) it also comes across as mockery that undercuts both the meaning and the happy, generous, partly humorous appreciativeness of the poem as a whole.”

            Albert’s comments made more sense than anyone else’s and inspired me to attempt a rework of that stanza:

With a callipygian badhida

so high that it’s a heavenly derriere

I’d worship at the church of Afrodite

and ooh la la

we’d be slow waltzing in the air

            Of my poem “This is a Manner of Flight”:

Learning to surf on the updrafts of sighs

through tunnels to lights and sometimes the sky.

I am just curious about how it all ends

what sweet crash-ups that I might be involved in.

I manoeuvre my oeuvre over, around the bumps

every so often with gambolling jumps.

Voices delight me from every tongue

It’s worth waiting on the voice of the sun.

Even this wood floor is charming though dirty

because this groove is outside of the groove and yet groovy.

I dance a no touching cha cha with hope

cause there are still stirring things past what I’ve wrote.

I’ve learned to lean on the fact that I’m learning

and enjoy a big breakfast of singing each morning.

Arrival don’t thrill as much as the highway

like growing old is so much better than dying.

Feeling relaxation may very well live in

the heart of my own lack of ambition.

But it’s a type of flight just to avoid landing

on what puts a deep freeze on understanding.

Blythe said that she loved the title and loved the rhyme of “highway” and “dying”.

Margaryta thought that “this groove is outside of the groove and yet groovy” was clichéd and a bit wordy. She felt my rhyme of “hope” and “wrote” is awkward.

            Vivian thought that the rhyme and the metrical rhythm almost cage in the speaker from taking flight.

            Albert wrote that “every so often with gambolling jumps” seems dragged in for the rhyme and asked if I could find something more meaningful. Both he and Margaryta thought that “relaxation” might be the wrong word in “Feeling relaxation may very well live in / the heart of my own lack of ambition.”

            Albert had also handed me back comments about my poems from the week before.

            On “Maroon River”:

Business is unusual as usual

tonight on Parkdale’s streets

The endless search for jagged cracks

to fill with future heart attacks

hardly ever skips a beat.

Testosterone’s tapping

the pussies like trees

eight fins for a swim in the estrogen sea.

and every addict is a nervous wreck,

twisting to watch their backs

as they float with the other space debris

in a twitching, spinning hoedown

around the quaking planet Crack.

            He said that because of “watching their backs” I should make “addicts” plural. That makes sense. His overall comment was “Impressive. A sour song”.

            He commented on “Feather Tongued Dodos” but I had already changed the part of the poem that he critiqued and so I don’t know if it would apply anymore.

            Of “Failed Launch for the Rocket of the Day”:

Failed launch for the rocket of the day just

into the sea with its stages.

Sinking, dripping self asks, “What’s it all for?”

but only the trash on the street has an answer.

My zombie crotch is rotting the moment

even though I’m standing over it.

Not connecting with the sad uglies

that stare me down with mad slug eyes.

If I should decide to shave and shower

it might kill the mood I'm under.

Flubbed song chords, no elation to sing it.

All is fashioned out of bullshit.

A failure masked by every success

plunges while strapped to the darkness.

Almost consider cutting up my throat

but then what would I write about?

            He thought the second to last stanza was obscure and not as strong as the other couplets. He said that it interrupts the powerful sequence that the third last and last stanzas would make if they came together.

            Overall he said they were outstanding poems and he enjoys the great variety of forms that I’m offering.

            I hadn’t read those comments until the next day. They would have put me in a better mood. I rode home feeling somewhat depressed about having been told that I’m culturally insensitive.

            My front flasher was dead.

The ride was extremely cold and my fingers were feeling the bite so much that I ditched my plan to stop at Freshco. When I walked into the warmth of my place the transition caused my fingers to sting for about ten minutes.

I heated a piece of pork and had it with potato chips while watching Peter Gunn.

This story begins with an unseen man confronting a blonde woman and her desperately assuring him she will say nothing but he attacks her nonetheless. She grabs a gun and they struggle while an elderly neighbour sees it all from her window across the alley. The gun goes off and the blonde woman is killed. The man sees the neighbour watching and shoots her as well,

Later a man named Scott hires Gunn to stop a woman from blackmailing him. Gunn goes to her address and finds the woman is gone but the window has been broken. Lieutenant Jacoby arrives and tells Gunn that the tenant of this apartment must have shot her neighbour and ran. Later Scott tells Gunn that the woman has threatened him again and called from a certain hotel. Gunn goes there and finds the woman dead from an apparent suicide. Upon investigating though he learns that Marion could not have shot herself because her right hand was so paralysed that she couldn’t even sign her own name. Gunn realizes that Scott has been playing him all along.