LIFE SENTENCES
(An Autobiography in Verse)
1
The past is that far
country you emigrated from
as a child.
2
A-bomb day —
not even Stevenson would’ve traded
his birthday for yours.
3
Mamma says don’t touch
the iron; you’re quick to learn
the meaning of hot.
4
Surprised by the burning
bite in the beauty of a rose-
red radish.
5
Mamma hits you
with — what was it — a frying pan
for writing with your left hand?
6
You’re Shirley Temple
dancing in the piazza, but nobody
locks you in the closet.
7
If gypsies snatch children,
why does your mother dress you up
as one for Carnevale?
8
“Pull down your panties,”
trapped in the stairwell, you do it
so he’ll go away.
9
Evenings gallivanting
with Pappa, you learn to pee
squatting at urinals.
10
At the shooting range
Pappa wins you a kewpie doll
dressed in pink feathers.
11
Gone a year in America,
who is this man, and where is
your real father?
12
If hell is hot
then heaven’s not, you might as well
move to Canada.
13
Maria Luisa’s
too hard to say so teacher renames you
Mary.
14
Life sentence:
you buy The Prisoner of Zenda at Coles
for ten cents.
15
Shameful
how you let him touch you there
until you pee.
16
The thing you do
for a stick of Doublemint gum,
the thing!
17
Double your pleasure
double your fun, Double-
mint gum!
18
Sixty-four shades
of Crayola, staying within the lines
feels safe.
19
God’s stuck on the roof
of your mouth, you daren’t peel back
the wafer with your tongue.
20
Catechism was taught first thing on the curriculum at
St. Thomas Aquinas elementary school . . .
Your inmost thoughts will
all be exposed on Judgment Day —
you’re afraid to think!
21
Reading the Narnia
story, you want to eat it too —
Turkish delight.
22
It’s a mystery,
when you dig up the mouse,
there’s no body, no bones.
23
Not true,
your brother says you were just
too afraid to look.
24
Twenty-three cents saved,
you and your brother run
away from home.
25
Twenty-three cents buys
two chocolate bars, three gum balls,
hungry, you go home.
26
Your mother starved in a concentration camp during
the Second World War . . .
For spending your savings
on comics, Mother hits you
with a bread loaf.
27
Atomic warning system drills:
everybody ducks and hides
under the desks.
28
They announce it
over the PA: President Kennedy’s
been shot.
29
Who are you really
when your birth certificate’s
written in pencil?
30
Writing
nose so close to the page, teacher says
you’ll need glasses.
31
In grade five you know
the boy who hits you with your Oxford Concise
loves you.
32
At ten you have breasts
Philip pokes with the pointer
to see if they’re real.
33
You pronounce your name
Dee-mee-shell as if it were,
though it’s not, French.
34
You visit relatives
in Cleveland who have changed
their name to Mitchell.
35
(Not) surprisingly
your first job’s a page
in the library!
36
Your first paycheque
buys that blue silk blouse
with pearl buttons.
37
In high school
you stay home sick a lot and hit
the marsala.
38
Among the offspring
of Jewish doctors you’re known
as Miraculous Mary.
39
Shame in Dostoevsky
Dimitri’s feet, Brother Andre’s corpse
starting to stink.
40
“Get your nose
out of that book and wash the dishes,
dust the furniture!”
41
“Why go to university
when you can teach grade school
or get married?”
42
According to Pierre Bayard’s theory:
to every book you read you bring your idea of the book,
to every story you read you bring your story . . .
War and Peace is
that food fight in the kitchen —
ketchup on the wall.
43
Working at A&W
you don’t see the moon landing
broadcast in real time.
44
In the age of Twiggy
you’re size eighteen but hip
dressed in a muumuu.
45
You much prefer
food to sex, it doesn’t
bite back.
46
La Belle Dame sans Merci —
you learn to speak the language
of the dark muse.
47
Everywhere
and nowhere, the white
whale.
48
In the crystal ball
you’re shown great fame while in life
grateful obscurity.
49
All the professors
have British accents, so cool,
so post-colonial.
50
Ruth and Carlo,
you only ever have
two friends.
51
You read loudly
scenes from Women in Love, not knowing
they’re about sex.
52
He’s as pretty
as Paul McCartney; love, love me do . . .
he does not.
53
The A+ student
skips lectures to read standing up
in the library stacks.
54
No actor,
you’re stuck on props for Six Characters
in Search of an Author.
55
There’s no satisfying
hunger for that grilled cheese sandwich
with Christ’s face.
56
Miss Lanciano —
you read a poem as your talent
and come in fourth.
57
Like Bartleby
the Scrivener, you would prefer
not to . . .
58
Offering you a ride
the guy in the Porsche yells he’s doing you
a favour.
59
Your life’s soundtrack:
short people got, short people
got no reason to live . . .
60
Not deserving love
you marry the man who doesn’t
love you.
61
It’s a girl —
giving birth you feel truly female
for the first time.
62
You’re an editor
at Toronto Life accepting poems
by the inch.
63
Divorce —
the chef’s knife is his and wants
sharpening.
64
One by one
your husband’s friends come to give you
what he would not.
65
Poems about birth
shut men out, you’re told
death’s universal.
66
Your daughter falls out of the stroller and bashes her nose . . .
you were a baby
when Mamma tripped, she didn’t
push you down the stairs.
67
The eighties —
David Byrne in his big white suit;
you in your skin.
68
Obasan absolves you;
it’s not yours, it’s Old Man Gower’s fault,
Naomi!
69
You tack up bedsheets
for drapes still Mother no longer calls you
a gypsy.
70
Tenure —
is it that golden gate shutting
against your writing?
71
The poems that come
most easily to you are written
by someone else.
72
Leo like Napoleon
you’re shorter than your stature and suffer
stomach pain.
73
You and your daughter jump out the train window.
After the Brighton disaster Via Rail implements
procedures in case of fire on its passenger lines . . .
Reading Neruda’s
“La Muerte” on a burning train,
living to reread it.
74
Poems and semicolons
always on the next page;
vast vistas . . .
75
Bonjour, good day,
comment ça va;
how goes it?
76
Don’t write
what you can shout; write what
shuts you up.
(after Yannis Ritsos)
77
Your sister; your daughter;
then one Christmas your father
overdoses on Tylenol.
78
Every weekend
he dances with his wife, the man
you declined to marry.
79
An antique bust
serves both as bookend
and your hat stand.
80
Moonlight also
glows on the tarnished silverware —
that’s why you write.
81
Mamma says: “Salute
la tua figlia”; Pappa says: “I would
but I’m not here.”
82
Capable
the word you use in your mother’s eulogy feels
no small praise.
83
Your mother’s blouse
in the memory box, does it still
smell faintly of her?
84
Out of Alzheimer’s
comes your father’s warning:
“Don’t you be a soldier!”
85
Emptied
of meaning words fill up
with themselves.
(after Yannis Ritsos)
86
I like to hear the sound
of form, and I like to hear
the sound of it breaking.
(Frederick Seidel)
87
Your madeleines are
Chiquita bananas Pappa would bring
home from work.
88
Mi manca l’italia
but when you return it’s as if you’d never been
born in that country.
89
Faulkner wrote: The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
Even the sunlight
warming your face now is
from eight minutes ago.
90
Mary, you can’t go
back to yesterday, you were
a different person then.
91
Old friend
when did you start speaking of yourself
in the third person?
92
At sixty-six
you’re still doing the moonwalk
to warm up.
93
Aging —
walking the dog past a mirror
you recognize the dog!
94
Words —
all the windows in the house are
frosted.
95
Swatting the half moon
on the calendar, what good are
those new glasses!
96
Dear Pappa,
I (always) remember your birthday,
not your death day.
97
This living hand, now warm and capable
again and again, longing to take yours,
John Keats.
98
Twenty-five autumns
in Montreal, still the question,
where’s home?
99
Oqurum,
the only surviving word of Khazar,
meaning: “I have read.”
100
One hundred sentences
just to say you’ve been on Earth —
however briefly!
