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Nancy Mattson - Independent on Sunday - Jan 14th A poem selected from Nancy's new collection, Writing with Mercury, will be published in 'The Independent on Sunday' on Sunday January 14, 2007. Your blood flows through my heart, limbs, gut, but stops at my Canadian neck, dammed at the throat.
Your blood is mine but not your tongue, lips, language of your birth.
I am guilty of collusion in the accident of my unchosen birth in post-war Winnipeg, condemned to a life of English sentences.
I have learned them well, their multiple undertows pull me down into swirling possibilities of poetry: swyrl from Scottish through Norse possibilité from French through Latin poesis from Latin through Greek
I cannot deny the delight of tongue, ear, mind, the polyrhythmic shaping of my Canadian heart but now
I am beginning to hear the words that English never speaks: suomea suruksi language sorrow laulun kieli language song
He’s back in barracks now. This time it’s permanent: they snap his wrist into an electronic handcuff. If he breaks the doorway radar beam, alarms go off and wardens apprehend him with a light touch, there now, march back, three four.
Dignity walks slowly is the message in a fortune cookie: not the usual kind of loot the Easter bunny leaves, but it’s in the bag of goodies on his bed. ‘I must be very dignified,’ he says, checks his watch. It has no hands.
No one messes with you, the duke of all the dudes in Bergamo: you block the aisle of the number 4 bus split stance in front of the ticket punch machine.
Your surfing gear is slick with logos, from technoclothes in fake skin— UV protective, fluorescent acid trim— to thinsole trainers and wraparound chromium shades, narrow as the slit in a fencer’s visor. Dragons’ tongues and tails flick upon your biceps.
I note the evidence of razor fetish: the moustache a pair of scimitars carved around the jawline, the scalp a reverse tonsure – lower skull shaved bald and oiled, a topknot of hair pulled smooth and clamped with elastic to fall from the crown like an otter’s tail.
You need the feel of watercurl under the balls of your feet but in Lombardy, where ocean is only memory or dream, you’ll ride the inland edge of anything unstable.
As we head into the cemetery loop you lean into the roundabout, feet rocking on the floorboards. Arms motionless beside your thighs. This is one of the rules. Nor may you smile.
Widows with dark hose and rosaries mutter as they squeeze past you but they cannot distract you from your focus on a vanishing point in the street beyond the windscreen, the ever-receding shoreline of your own Waimea Bay. You know its tides and sandbars better than the driver. He says nothing. Just keeps the bus steady on the turns, smooth on the stops and starts, with psychoanalytic skill.
With this needle splinter of a reindeer bone whittled and pierced I sewed for you the tawny skin of a southern deer to wear on your wedding day
The treadle under my foot guides the needle through gathers of ivory lawn that will billow out from the sinews of your waist
My dress when I married your father was heavy and black in the old style of the vanha maa tight at the throat I wore a crown of brass filigree polished bright as gold
May you be blessed with a daughter as wild and bright as you the deer we saw in the forest gazing down the hillside
If I ever marry again I will weave the linen myself the fit will be loose I will walk barefoot through the wolf willow to the bottom of the hill and all the guests will be strangers
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